User talk:robertsky
Hi, thank you for acting as closer in this discussion.
Note that as part of the close, the ambiguous title Kevin Johnson (basketball) should be retargeted to Kevin Johnson, with incoming links updated. 162 etc. (talk) 17:38, 2 February 2026 (UTC)
- @162 etc. I meant to follow up on it. Thanks! – robertsky (talk) 02:56, 3 February 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-06
[edit]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 "Page information" feature, which gives validating information about a page (example), now automatically includes a table of contents. If there is a local MediaWiki:Pageinfo-header page created by individual users, it can now be removed. [1]
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, VisualEditor previously added bold or italic formatting inside link descriptions, making the wikicode complex. This has now been fixed. [2]
Updates for technical contributors
- There was no XML dump on 20 January. Additionally, from now on, dumps will be generated once per month only. [3]
- The MediaWiki Interfaces team removed support for all transform endpoints containing a trailing slash from the MediaWiki REST API. All API users currently calling those endpoints are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. If you have questions or encounter any problems, please file a ticket in phabricator to the #MW-Interfaces-Team board.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Weekly highlight
- Users are reminded that the Wikimedia Foundation has shared some guiding questions for the July 2026–June 2027 Annual Plan on Meta and Diff. These focus on global trends, faster and healthier experimentation, better support for newcomers, strengthening editors and advanced users, improving collaboration across projects, and growing and retaining readership. Feedback and ideas are welcome on the talk page.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 17:41, 2 February 2026 (UTC)
Question from Ramanujan2673 (01:37, 8 February 2026)
[edit]How do I add a new page? --Ramanujan2673 (talk) 01:37, 8 February 2026 (UTC)
- @Ramanujan2673 you have just registered, as such you are not able to create new pages in the mainspace. This option is open when you receive auto-confirmed rights, which will be given once your account is 4 days old and has at least 10 edits. You may however create a sandbox in your user space or a draft in the Draft space at the moment, i.e. Draft:article title so that you can get acquainted with the editing interface. I have dropped you some links to tutorials and stuff on your talk page to get you started! – robertsky (talk) 02:30, 8 February 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-07
[edit]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
Logged-in contributors who manage large or complex watchlists can now organise and filter watched pages in ways that improve their workflows with the new Watchlist labels feature. By adding custom labels (for example: pages you created, pages being monitored for vandalism, or discussion pages) users can more quickly identify what needs attention, reduce cognitive load, and respond more efficiently. This improves watchlist usability, especially for highly active editors.- A new feature available on Special:Contributions shows temporary accounts that are likely operated by the same person, and so makes patrolling less time-consuming. Upon checking contributions of a temporary account, users with access to temporary account IP addresses can now see a view of contributions from the related temporary accounts. The feature looks up all the IPs associated with a given temporary account within the data retention period and shows all the contributions of all temporary accounts that have used these IPs. Learn more. [4]
- When editors preview a wikitext edit, the reminder box that they are only seeing a preview (which is shown at the top), now has a grey/neutral background instead of a yellow/warning background. This makes it easier to distinguish preview notes from actual warnings (for example, edit conflicts or problematic redirect targets), which will now be shown in separate warning or error boxes. [5]
- The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension continues to improve — it now properly supports more than one Wikibase site, for example both Wikidata and testwikidata. In addition, issues regarding text direction have been fixed for users who prefer Wikidata or other Wikibase sites in right-to-left (RTL) languages. [6][7]
- The automatic "magic links" for ISBN, RFC, and PMID numbers have been deprecated in wikitext since 2021 due to inflexibility and difficulties with localization. Several wikis have successfully replaced RFC and PMID magic links with equivalent external links, but a template was often required to replace the functionality of the ISBN magic link. There is now a new built-in parser function
{{#isbn}}available to replace the basic functionality of the ISBN magic link. This makes it easier for wikis who wish to migrate off of the deprecated magic link functionality to do so. [8] - Two new wikis have been created:
- View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- A new global user group has been created: Local bots. It will be used internally by the software to allow community bots to bypass rate limits that are applied to abusive web scrapers. Accounts that are approved as bots on at least one Wikimedia wiki will be automatically added to this group. It will not change what user permissions the bot has. [11]
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- The MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference, Spring 2026 will be held March 25–27 in Salt Lake City, USA. This event is organized by and for the third-party MediaWiki community. You can propose sessions and register to attend. [12]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:28, 9 February 2026 (UTC)
Administrators' newsletter – February 2026
[edit]News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2026).
Administrator changes
CheckUser changes
Arbitration
- Due to the result of a recent motion, a rough consensus of administrators at the arbitration enforcement noticeboard may impose an expanded topic ban on Israel, Israelis, Jews, Judaism, Palestine, Palestinians, Islam, and/or Arabs, if an editor's Arab-Israeli conflict topic ban is determined to be insufficient to prevent disruption. At least one diff per area expanded into should be cited.
Miscellaneous
- Voting in the 2026 Steward elections started on 06 February 2026 at 14:00 (UTC) and will end on 27 February 2026 at 14:00 (UTC). The confirmation process for current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.
Question from ArchivGeist (08:10, 12 February 2026)
[edit]- Note: ArchivGeist's mentor ScrabbleTiles is away.
How do i create a new wikipedia page on phone? --ArchivGeist (talk) 08:10, 12 February 2026 (UTC)