User talk:WildStar
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Signpost interview request - Random Page Patrol
[edit]Hello! I'm writing an article for The Signpost about the Random Page Patrol wikiproject. We often do interviews with Wikiproject members, and I saw your name on the list of members. As a relatively newer member and long-time Wiki contributor, I'd love to ask about the project, why you do it, and why you think it's valuable. I could drop a few questions for you below which you could answer in your own time over the next couple of weeks. Let me know - thank you! Ganesha811 (talk) 19:22, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
- @Ganesha811: Although I registered with Wikipedia 13 years ago, I have only been contributing (albeit significantly) for about a year now. If you're good with that, I am looking forward to your questions. — WILDSTARtalk 21:28, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
- That's no problem at all! I'd still love to hear from you. I'll drop the questions below - if you could answer them by September 20th, 10 days from now, that would be idea. If you have any questions or clarifications, just ask. Thank you! Ganesha811 (talk) 12:54, 10 September 2021 (UTC)
- How did you come across the Random Page Patrol?
- I first started to copy/edit articles on familiar topics, and then joined Wikipedia:Cleanup. At the time it was quiet there, so I decided to join similar Wikipedia projects and found Random Page Patrol.
- Why did you decide to become a random page patroller? What do you find valuable about the project?
- Random page patrollers are important in maintaining the integrity of the entire encyclopedia.
- How often do you randomly page patrol? Do you use it mostly as a break from other Wikipedia contributions, or is it a major part of how you spend your time here?
- All the time, and yes, sometimes it does provide a much needed break when more intensely engaged in other project areas.
- Are there any articles you have edited as part of the Random Page Patrol that particularly stand out in your memory?
- Yes. Just recently RPP took me to a copyright violation. What was particularly striking there was that the heading for the copyvio included the words "Taken directly from site", and that the copyvio went unnoticed for almost 3 years.
- What would you say to someone considering joining the Patrol?
- Feel free to join... like me, you may find that there is much to learn in doing so.
- Is there anything else you'd like to add that I haven't asked you?
- That's no problem at all! I'd still love to hear from you. I'll drop the questions below - if you could answer them by September 20th, 10 days from now, that would be idea. If you have any questions or clarifications, just ask. Thank you! Ganesha811 (talk) 12:54, 10 September 2021 (UTC)
- With that, I would like to thank you Ganesha811 for giving me the opportunity to participate in the writing of your The Signpost article. No pressure, but I am really looking forward to reading it! — WILDSTARtalk 23:16, 12 September 2021 (UTC)
- Thank you for your answers. I'll drop you a ping a few days before publication so you can look over the piece. There'll probably be some light editing to fit everything together, so I'll just want to make sure you're happy I haven't misrepresented you in any way. Ganesha811 (talk) 01:24, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
- @Ganesha811: After reading and subscribing to The Signpost, I am providing you with more concise answers that should better suit the format of the magazine. Please use excerpts taken from this version for your article. Thank you! — WILDSTARtalk 14:43, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
- Got it, thanks! I see you updated it on the draft, so should be all set. Ganesha811 (talk) 12:10, 19 September 2021 (UTC)
- @WildStar: - the article has been edited. It's at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue/WikiProject report - please check it out ahead of publication on Sunday, and if you feel I've changed the meaning of any of your answers through editing, let me know and I'll fix it. Thank you again for participating! Ganesha811 (talk) 14:03, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
- @Ganesha811: it looks good. I like how you intermingled everyone's responses for each of the questions. Great work! — WILDSTARtalk 16:00, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
- @WildStar: - the article has been edited. It's at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue/WikiProject report - please check it out ahead of publication on Sunday, and if you feel I've changed the meaning of any of your answers through editing, let me know and I'll fix it. Thank you again for participating! Ganesha811 (talk) 14:03, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
- Got it, thanks! I see you updated it on the draft, so should be all set. Ganesha811 (talk) 12:10, 19 September 2021 (UTC)
- @Ganesha811: After reading and subscribing to The Signpost, I am providing you with more concise answers that should better suit the format of the magazine. Please use excerpts taken from this version for your article. Thank you! — WILDSTARtalk 14:43, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
- Thank you for your answers. I'll drop you a ping a few days before publication so you can look over the piece. There'll probably be some light editing to fit everything together, so I'll just want to make sure you're happy I haven't misrepresented you in any way. Ganesha811 (talk) 01:24, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
- With that, I would like to thank you Ganesha811 for giving me the opportunity to participate in the writing of your The Signpost article. No pressure, but I am really looking forward to reading it! — WILDSTARtalk 23:16, 12 September 2021 (UTC)
The Signpost: 26 September 2021
[edit]- News and notes: New CEO, new board members, China bans
- In the media: The future of Wikipedia
- Op-Ed: I've been desysopped
- Disinformation report: Paid promotional paragraphs in German parliamentary pages
- Discussion report: Editors discuss Wikipedia's vetting process for administrators
- Recent research: Wikipedia images for machine learning; Experiment justifies Wikipedia's high search rankings
- Community view: Is writing Wikipedia like making a quilt?
- Traffic report: Kanye, Emma Raducanu and 9/11
- News from Diff: Welcome to the first grantees of the Knowledge Equity Fund
- WikiProject report: The Random and the Beautiful
Pending changes reviewer granted
[edit]Hello. Your account has been granted the "pending changes reviewer" userright, allowing you to review other users' edits on pages protected by pending changes. The list of articles awaiting review is located at Special:PendingChanges, while the list of articles that have pending changes protection turned on is located at Special:StablePages.
Being granted reviewer rights neither grants you status nor changes how you can edit articles. If you do not want this user right, you may ask any administrator to remove it for you at any time.
See also:
- Wikipedia:Reviewing pending changes, the guideline on reviewing
- Wikipedia:Pending changes, the summary of the use of pending changes
- Wikipedia:Protection policy#Pending changes protection, the policy determining which pages can be given pending changes protection by administrators.
Anarchyte (talk) 08:07, 1 October 2021 (UTC)
Friendly hello
[edit]Just thought I'd drop by and say hi after noticing your edit at Theresa May. It is very strange that our usernames and signatures are so close haha. —WildComet talk 01:43, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
- WildComet, Hello there! Yes, I do remember editing Theresa May. In closing, please enjoy my attempt to visually align our Wikipedia signatures. — WILDSTARtalk 17:18, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
Be careful with AutoEd
[edit]This edit with AutoEd was primarily cosmetic, fixing no actual errors, and broke at least one link by converting curly brace characters into actual braces. Please be careful with automated tools, and make sure that when you use them, you are fixing actual problems. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:51, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
- Jonesey95, actually, that edit was slightly more than cosmetic. Originally, my edit was to only fix the problematic [[Wikipedia:Short description|'''short description''']] to '''[[Wikipedia:Short description|short description]]''' which leaked the html tags <strong> and </strong> when mousing over the {{Short descriptions topicon}} seen when the "navigation popups" gadget is active. All to say, I was hopeful that AutoEd would have fixed that error (it did not), and unfortunately I missed the "%7D%7D" ASCII code and would have likely missed the susequent fix. I know that AutoEd is not perfect and needs work, and of course agree with you that care should indeed be taken when using user scripts, and going forward will be on the lookout for ASCII codes among other anomalies found when using AutoEd. Thank you for reaching out and all the best! — WILDSTARtalk 16:00, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
- As far as I know, [[Wikipedia:Short description|'''short description''']] is valid markup, used all over the place. I suggest that you submit a bug for the navigations popup gadget if it is leaking something that it should instead strip out. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:09, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
CFML
[edit]I don't know that I necessarily agree with the closure of the RFD discussion, personally — but given that it has been closed, your next step would be to file a requested moves request to discuss moving CFML (disambiguation) to CFML. Bearcat (talk) 13:47, 26 October 2021 (UTC)
- Bearcat, yes that premature closure was unfortunate. This caught my eye at WP:RM#CM: "Do not create a move request to rename one or more redirects". Any worries here? Also, can the article titled CFIX (AM) which now has more history about its former call sign CFML, be included in a CFML redirect, or is it better suited in the CFML (disambiguation) page?
Thanks
[edit]Hello WS. I can't remember the last time I typed 5 tildes instead of four and this time I did it twice :-P Cheers. MarnetteD|Talk 18:18, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
- MarnetteD, ha ha... absolutely no worries! I'm sure I've done that too, and then some! :-) Thank you for this kind note. All the best! — WILDSTARtalk 18:36, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
- You are most welcome. Enjoy the rest of your week. MarnetteD|Talk 20:54, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
Sean Connery
[edit]Sean Connery died in 2021 not 2020. 2600:1010:B126:1CA0:A9D1:6638:6CF9:2BC4 (talk) 01:03, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
- Not according to his obit IP. MarnetteD|Talk 01:05, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
Your GA nomination of Cornwall Electric
[edit]Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the article Cornwall Electric you nominated for GA-status according to the criteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of Ruthgrace -- Ruthgrace (talk) 18:01, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
Autopatrolled granted
[edit]Hi WildStar, I just wanted to let you know that I have added the "autopatrolled" permission to your account, as you have created numerous, valid articles. This feature will have no effect on your editing, and is simply intended to reduce the workload on new page patrollers. For more information on the autopatrolled right, see Wikipedia:Autopatrolled. However, you should consider adding relevant wikiproject talk-page templates, stub-tags and categories to new articles that you create if you aren't already in the habit of doing so, since your articles will no longer be systematically checked by other editors (User:Evad37/rater and User:SD0001/StubSorter.js are useful scripts which can help). Feel free to leave me a message if you have any questions. Happy editing! – Joe (talk) 11:26, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
Your GA nomination of Cornwall Electric
[edit]The article Cornwall Electric you nominated as a good article has passed ; see Talk:Cornwall Electric for comments about the article. Well done! If the article has not already appeared on the main page as a "Did you know" item, or as a bold link under "In the News" or in the "On This Day" prose section, you can nominate it within the next seven days to appear in DYK. Bolded names with dates listed at the bottom of the "On This Day" column do not affect DYK eligibility. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of Ruthgrace -- Ruthgrace (talk) 13:21, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
DYK for Cornwall Electric
[edit]On 5 January 2022, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Cornwall Electric, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that during the January 1998 North American ice storm, an employee at Cornwall Electric used a bow and arrow to provide power to a city? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Cornwall Electric. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, Cornwall Electric), and if they received a combined total of at least 416.7 views per hour (i.e., 5,000 views in 12 hours or 10,000 in 24), the hook may be added to the statistics page. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.
— Amakuru (talk) 12:02, 5 January 2022 (UTC)
Hook update | ||
Your hook reached 5,783 views (481.9 per hour), making it one of the most viewed hooks of January 2022 – nice work! |
theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (they/she) 08:02, 6 January 2022 (UTC)
- Theleekycauldron, that's amazing! Would it be possible to recognize, both the totals of Cornwall Electric, 5,783 (481.9 per hour) and those of January 1998 North American ice storm which received 8,061 (671.8 per hour) views, and to celebrate the even more impressive aggregated totals of 13,844 (1,153.7 per hour) views? Many thanks! — WILDSTARTALK 15:41, 6 January 2022 (UTC)
- Oh wow! I'm sorry I didn't shuffle the hook to put the bolded article at the top. Unfortunately, the ice storm article would've had to have been bolded, which means it would've had to also pass the DYK criteria (particularly newly GA promoted/5x expanded). That's really rough, I've had hooks that lost out on the stats page because of that—still, though, 481.9 ain't nothin' to sneeze at! theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (they/she) 20:40, 7 January 2022 (UTC)
- Theleekycauldron, no worries and GTK (Good To Know) :-) Thanks again! — WILDSTARTALK 15:45, 8 January 2022 (UTC)
- Oh wow! I'm sorry I didn't shuffle the hook to put the bolded article at the top. Unfortunately, the ice storm article would've had to have been bolded, which means it would've had to also pass the DYK criteria (particularly newly GA promoted/5x expanded). That's really rough, I've had hooks that lost out on the stats page because of that—still, though, 481.9 ain't nothin' to sneeze at! theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (they/she) 20:40, 7 January 2022 (UTC)
- Theleekycauldron, that's amazing! Would it be possible to recognize, both the totals of Cornwall Electric, 5,783 (481.9 per hour) and those of January 1998 North American ice storm which received 8,061 (671.8 per hour) views, and to celebrate the even more impressive aggregated totals of 13,844 (1,153.7 per hour) views? Many thanks! — WILDSTARTALK 15:41, 6 January 2022 (UTC)
You are invited to join us on FOSS topics!
[edit]I found you since you are currently an official participant of WT:FOSS. It is great to see how much you contribute to Wikipedia every day. Keep up the good work! We would love to have you be an active part of WT:FOSS and FOSS topics too. Feel free to join our talk page to see what recently happened (a lot!) GavriilaDmitriev (talk) 10:56, 24 February 2022 (UTC)
Thomas Nast page
[edit]During the last year, you have made suggestions to improve the Wikipedia entry on Thomas Nast. Accordingly, I want to call your attention to ThomasNast.com, a domain I have owned for 25 years and recently refreshed.
The site will give you a good overview of Nast in general and my biography in particular, America’s Most Influential Journalist: The Life, Times and Legacy of Thomas Nast. You can look at 160 Nast cartoons, each with its characters identified and its content and context explained. Categories include Christmas, Civil War, Lincoln, Tweed, Presidential Election Losers, Symbols, Shakespeare, and Inflation. The site’s purpose is to educate people about Nast and his work, as well as to preview my book.
The only previous substantive biography of Nast was published by Albert Bigelow Paine in 1902, and is frequently cited in Wikipedia. Although Paine was a good storyteller, his book has many significant errors and omissions because Nast misinformed him (eg., Nast never went to the front during the Civil War) or didn’t tell him about important events (Nast spent a year, beginning in May 1867, on his Grand Caricaturama (33 9 by 12 foot pictures in a traveling panorama which failed), Paine gave it two sentences).
There were also facts about his life that neither he nor Paine knew. Eg., Nast thought he was born on September 27, 1840, but his Landau birth certificate, issued under the auspices of the King of Bavaria, shows it was September 26. Understandable, every prior mention of his birth date is incorrect. I have made the correction to his Wikipedia entry along with a a copy of his birth certificate.
My 830-page biography contains 1,000 Nast cartoons, illustrations, sketches and paintings — 800 from Harper’s Weekly and 200 from other sources. The manually-created Index is predicated solely on Nast’s output. It includes Nast’s Life and Work; Topics/Issues and People/Characters. You can view the entire Index on ThomasNast.com. Harpweek (talk) 17:24, 2 October 2022 (UTC)
Cliff Richard re-release
[edit]Where can you put the information of the 2022 remaster, could you please add to Cliff Richard discography, plus the re-release singles — Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.106.3.24 (talk) 17:42, 29 October 2022 (UTC)
- It's just a re-release of his 2001 album which was already listed here and as for the remaster in 2022 with the two singles (for digital download), you already mentioned it here. Not sure that a re-release needs or should be added to the discography article. Hopefully that helps! All the best! — WILDSTARTALK 18:02, 29 October 2022 (UTC)
Image tagging for File:Capturing the Killer Nurse.jpg
[edit]Thanks for uploading File:Capturing the Killer Nurse.jpg. You don't seem to have said where the image came from or who created it. We require this information to verify that the image is legally usable on Wikipedia, and because most image licenses require giving credit to the image's creator.
To add this information, click on this link, then click the "Edit" tab at the top of the page and add the information to the image's description. If you need help, post your question on Wikipedia:Media copyright questions.
For more information on using images, see the following pages:
Thank you for your cooperation. --ImageTaggingBot (talk) 20:30, 6 November 2022 (UTC)
- The template {{Non-free use rationale poster}} was missing the closing brackets. My bad! — WILDSTARTALK 20:59, 6 November 2022 (UTC)
Good-faith disruptive editing
[edit]I have reverted your recent good faith edit in Governor General's Award for English-language non-fiction because it appears to be a modification of the links in the article. However, I am 100% sure this won't continue. I appear to count this as good-faith disruptive editing because it is not harming the contributor. SpyridisioAnnis Discussion 10:07, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
- I have restored the edit, a perfectly sensible link to a new article. If there is an issue with that article, removing links is not a helpful way forward. CMD (talk) 10:17, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
- Chipmunkdavis, thank you! — WILDSTARTALK 12:54, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
ArbCom 2022 Elections voter message
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Colleen Murphy
[edit]Can't say I have any particularly strong opinions about that. I've never heard of the other person listed on the disambiguation page, personally, but most people have never heard of the Canadian filmmaker either, so I'd be hard-pressed to mount a convincing argument that she's more notable than the other person. If you're really wedded to it, you of course have the option of starting a WP:RM request to have the page moved back where it was, but I wouldn't say it looks worth the fight to me -- as long as the Canadian filmmaker isn't being listed for outright deletion, which I'd obviously oppose on the grounds of her notable literary and film award nominations, I don't really care that much whether she's disambiguated or not. Bearcat (talk) 19:34, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
- Bearcat, I'm good with it, if you are too! :) Thanks! — WILDSTARTALK 20:48, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
We Die Young (film 2019)
[edit]Please create an article for We Die Young (2019) starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. Alimir1986 (talk) 15:10, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
- Alimir1986, I saw the film and your Draft:We Die Young (film), but regrettably, I believe there isn't enough coverage for this one, and I would be hard-pressed to meet any of the requirements at WP:NFILM, which would almost certainly merit an AfD, which would be in my opinion, even more disappointing. You could also make an article request here. — WILDSTARTALK 20:07, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
For future reference
[edit]Please don't cite Goodreads as a source (as you did here), because it's user-generated: basically the equivalent of Some Random Person's Blog. DS (talk) 20:45, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost: 29 March 2024
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Administrators' newsletter – May 2024
[edit]News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2024).
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Tech News: 2024-21
[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.
Recent changes
- The Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, will now correctly delete pages which were moved to another title. [1]
- New changes have been made to the UploadWizard in Wikimedia Commons: the overall layout has been improved, by following new styling and spacing for the form and its fields; the headers and helper text for each of the fields was changed; the Caption field is now a required field, and there is an option for users to copy their caption into the media description. [2][3]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 May. It will be on all wikis from 23 May (calendar). [4][5]
- The HTML used to render all headings is being changed to improve accessibility. It will change on 22 May in some skins (Timeless, Modern, CologneBlue, Nostalgia, and Monobook). Please test gadgets on your wiki on these skins and report any related problems so that they can be resolved before this change is made in all other skins. The developers are also considering the introduction of a Gadget API for adding buttons to section titles if that would be helpful to tool creators, and would appreciate any input you have on that.
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Tech News: 2024-22
[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.
Recent changes
- Several bugs related to the latest updates to the UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons have been fixed. For more information, see T365107 and T365119.
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- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 May. It will be on all wikis from 30 May (calendar). [6][7]
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Tech News: 2024-23
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- It is now possible for local administrators to add new links to the bottom of the site Tools menu without JavaScript. Documentation is available. [9]
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w:dtp:
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Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 June. It will be on all wikis from 6 June (calendar). [12][13]
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Administrators' newsletter – June 2024
[edit]News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2024).
- Phase II of the 2024 RfA review has commenced to improve and refine the proposals passed in Phase I.
- The Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, will now correctly delete pages which were moved to another title. T43351
- The arbitration case Venezuelan politics has been closed.
- The Committee is seeking volunteers for various roles, including access to the conflict of interest VRT queue.
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The Signpost: 8 June 2024
[edit]- Technology report: New Page Patrol receives a much-needed software upgrade
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- Concept: Palimpsestuous
Tech News: 2024-24
[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.
Recent changes
- The software used to render SVG files has been updated to a new version, fixing many longstanding bugs in SVG rendering. [14]
- The HTML used to render all headings is being changed to improve accessibility. It was changed last week in some skins (Vector legacy and Minerva). Please test gadgets on your wiki on these skins and report any related problems so that they can be resolved before this change is made in Vector-2022. The developers are still considering the introduction of a Gadget API for adding buttons to section titles if that would be helpful to tool creators, and would appreciate any input you have on that.
- The HTML markup used for citations by Parsoid changed last week. In places where Parsoid previously added the
mw-reference-text
class, Parsoid now also adds thereference-text
class for better compatibility with the legacy parser. More details are available. [15]
Problems
- There was a bug with the Content Translation interface that caused the tools menus to appear in the wrong location. This has now been fixed. [16]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 June. It will be on all wikis from 13 June (calendar). [17][18]
- The new version of MediaWiki includes another change to the HTML markup used for citations: Parsoid will now generate a
<span class="mw-cite-backlink">
wrapper for both named and unnamed references for better compatibility with the legacy parser. Interface administrators should verify that gadgets that interact with citations are compatible with the new markup. More details are available. [19] - On multilingual wikis that use the
<translate>
system, there is a feature that shows potentially-outdated translations with a pink background until they are updated or confirmed. From this week, confirming translations will be logged, and there is a new user-right that can be required for confirming translations if the community requests it. [20]
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MediaWiki message delivery 20:18, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-25
[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.
Recent changes
- People who attempt to add an external link in the visual editor will now receive immediate feedback if they attempt to link to a domain that a project has decided to block. Please see Edit check for more details. [21]
- The new Community Configuration extension is available on Test Wikipedia. This extension allows communities to customize specific features to meet their local needs. Currently only Growth features are configurable, but the extension will support other Community Configuration use cases in the future. [22][23]
- The dark mode beta feature is now available on category and help pages, as well as more special pages. There may be contrast issues. Please report bugs on the project talk page. [24]
Problems
- Cloud Services tools were not available for 25 minutes last week. This was caused by a faulty hardware cable in the data center. [25]
- Last week, styling updates were made to the Vector 2022 skin. This caused unforeseen issues with templates, hatnotes, and images. Changes to templates and hatnotes were reverted. Most issues with images were fixed. If you still see any, report them here. [26]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 June. It will be on all wikis from 20 June (calendar). [27][28]
- Starting June 18, the Reference Edit Check will be deployed to a new set of Wikipedias. This feature is intended to help newcomers and to assist edit-patrollers by inviting people who are adding new content to a Wikipedia article to add a citation when they do not do so themselves. During a test at 11 wikis, the number of citations added more than doubled when Reference Check was shown to people. Reference Check is community configurable. [29]
- Mailing lists will be unavailable for roughly two hours on Tuesday 10:00–12:00 UTC. This is to enable migration to a new server and upgrade its software. [30]
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MediaWiki message delivery 23:47, 17 June 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-26
[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.
Recent changes
- Editors will notice that there have been some changes to the background color of text in the diff view, and the color of the byte-change numbers, last week. These changes are intended to make text more readable in both light mode and dark mode, and are part of a larger effort to increase accessibility. You can share your comments or questions on the project talkpage. [31]
- The text colors that are used for visited-links, hovered-links, and active-links, were also slightly changed last week to improve their accessibility in both light mode and dark mode. [32]
Problems
- You can copy permanent links to talk page comments by clicking on a comment's timestamp. This feature did not always work when the topic title was very long and the link was used as a wikitext link. This has been fixed. Thanks to Lofhi for submitting the bug. [33]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 June. It will be on all wikis from 27 June (calendar). [34][35]
- Starting 26 June, all talk pages messages' timestamps will become a link at English Wikipedia, making this feature available for you to use at all wikis. This link is a permanent link to the comment. It allows users to find the comment they were linked to, even if this comment has since been moved elsewhere. You can read more about this feature on Diff or on Mediawiki.org. [36]
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MediaWiki message delivery 22:30, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-27
[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.
Recent changes
- Over the next three weeks, dark mode will become available for all users, both logged-in and logged-out, starting with the mobile web version. This fulfils one of the top-requested community wishes, and improves low-contrast reading and usage in low-light settings. As part of these changes, dark mode will also work on User-pages and Portals. There is more information in the latest Web team update. [37]
- Logged-in users can now set global preferences for the text-size and dark-mode, thanks to a combined effort across Foundation teams. This allows Wikimedians using multiple wikis to set up a consistent reading experience easily, for example by switching between light and dark mode only once for all wikis. [38]
- If you use a very old web browser some features might not work on the Wikimedia wikis. This affects Internet Explorer 11 and versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari older than 2016. This change makes it possible to use new CSS features and to send less code to all readers. [39][40]
- Wikipedia Admins can customize local wiki configuration options easily using Community Configuration. Community Configuration was created to allow communities to customize how some features work, because each language wiki has unique needs. At the moment, admins can configure Growth features on their home wikis, in order to better recruit and retain new editors. More options will be provided in the coming months. [41]
- Editors interested in language issues that are related to Unicode standards, can now discuss those topics at a new conversation space in MediaWiki.org. The Wikimedia Foundation is now a member of the Unicode Consortium, and the coordination group can collaboratively review the issues discussed and, where appropriate, bring them to the attention of the Unicode Consortium.
- One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Mandailing (
w:btm:
) [42]
Problems
- Editors can once again click on links within the visual editor's citation-preview, thanks to a bug fix by the Editing Team. [43]
Future changes
- Please help us to improve Tech News by taking this short survey. The goal is to better meet the needs of the various types of people who read Tech News. The survey will be open for 2 weeks. The survey is covered by this privacy statement. Some translations are available.
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MediaWiki message delivery 23:57, 1 July 2024 (UTC)
The Signpost: 4 July 2024
[edit]- News and notes: WMF board elections and fundraising updates
- Special report: Wikimedia Movement Charter ratification vote underway, new Council may surpass power of Board
- In focus: How the Russian Wikipedia keeps it clean despite having just a couple dozen administrators
- Discussion report: Wikipedians are hung up on the meaning of Madonna
- In the media: War and information in war and politics
- Sister projects: On editing Wikisource
- Opinion: Etika: a Pop Culture Champion
- Gallery: Spokane Willy's photos
- Humour: A joke
- Recent research: Is Wikipedia Politically Biased? Perhaps
- Traffic report: Talking about you and me, and the games people play
Administrators' newsletter – July 2024
[edit]News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2024).
- Local administrators can now add new links to the bottom of the site Tools menu without using JavaScript. Documentation is available on MediaWiki. (T6086)
- The Community Wishlist is re-opening on 15 July 2024. Read more
Tech News: 2024-28
[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.
Recent changes
- At the Wikimedia Foundation a new task force was formed to replace the disabled Graph with more secure, easy to use, and extensible Chart. You can subscribe to the newsletter to get notified about new project updates and other news about Chart.
- The CampaignEvents extension is now available on Meta-wiki, Igbo Wikipedia, and Swahili Wikipedia, and can be requested on your wiki. This extension helps in managing and making events more visible, giving Event organizers the ability to use tools like the Event registration tool. To learn more about the deployment status and how to request this extension for your wiki, visit the CampaignEvents page on Meta-wiki.
- Editors using the iOS Wikipedia app who have more than 50 edits can now use the Add an Image feature. This feature presents opportunities for small but useful contributions to Wikipedia.
- Thank you to all of the authors who have contributed to MediaWiki Core. As a result of these contributions, the percentage of authors contributing more than 5 patches has increased by 25% since last year, which helps ensure the sustainability of the platform for the Wikimedia projects.
Problems
- A problem with the color of the talkpage tabs always showing as blue, even for non-existent pages which should have been red, affecting the Vector 2022 skin, has been fixed.
Future changes
- The Trust and Safety Product team wants to introduce temporary accounts with as little disruption to tools and workflows as possible. Volunteer developers, including gadget and user-script maintainers, are kindly asked to update the code of their tools and features to handle temporary accounts. The team has created documentation explaining how to do the update. Learn more.
Tech News survey
- Please help us to improve Tech News by taking this short survey. The goal is to better meet the needs of the various types of people who read Tech News. The survey will be open for 1 more week. The survey is covered by this privacy statement. Some translations are available.
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MediaWiki message delivery 21:30, 8 July 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-29
[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.
Tech News survey
- Please help us to improve Tech News by taking this short survey. The goal is to better meet the needs of the various types of people who read Tech News. The survey will be open for 3 more days. The survey is covered by this privacy statement. Some translations are available.
Recent changes
- Wikimedia developers can now officially continue to use both Gerrit and GitLab, due to a June 24 decision by the Wikimedia Foundation to support software development on both platforms. Gerrit and GitLab are both code repositories used by developers to write, review, and deploy the software code that supports the MediaWiki software that the wiki projects are built on, as well as the tools used by editors to create and improve content. This decision will safeguard the productivity of our developers and prevent problems in code review from affecting our users. More details are available in the Migration status page.
- The Wikimedia Foundation seeks applicants for the Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC). This group will bring technical contributors and Wikimedia Foundation together to co-define a more resilient, future-proof technological platform. Council members will evaluate and consult on the movement's product and technical activities, so that we develop multi-generational projects. We are looking for a range of technical contributors across the globe, from a variety of Wikimedia projects. Please apply here by August 10.
- Editors with rollback user-rights who use the Wikipedia App for Android can use the new Edit Patrol features. These features include a new feed of Recent Changes, related links such as Undo and Rollback, and the ability to create and save a personal library of user talk messages to use while patrolling. If your wiki wants to make these features available to users who do not have rollback rights but have reached a certain edit threshold, you can contact the team. You can read more about this project on Diff blog.
- Editors who have access to The Wikipedia Library can once again use non-open access content in SpringerLinks, after the Foundation contacted them to restore access. You can read more about this and 21 other community-submitted tasks that were completed last week.
Changes later this week
- This week, dark mode will be available on a number of Wikipedias, both desktop and mobile, for logged-in and logged-out users. Interface admins and user script maintainers are encouraged to check gadgets and user scripts in the dark mode, to find any hard-coded colors and fix them. There are some recommendations for dark mode compatibility to help.
Future changes
- Next week, functionaries, volunteers maintaining tools, and software development teams are invited to test the temporary accounts feature on testwiki. Temporary accounts is a feature that will help improve privacy on the wikis. No further temporary account deployments are scheduled yet. Please share your opinions and questions on the project talk page. [44]
- Editors who upload files cross-wiki, or teach other people how to do so, may wish to join a Wikimedia Commons discussion. The Commons community is discussing limiting who can upload files through the cross-wiki upload/Upload dialog feature to users auto-confirmed on Wikimedia Commons. This is due to the large amount of copyright violations uploaded this way. There is a short summary at Commons:Cross-wiki upload and discussion at Commons:Village Pump.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. You can also get other news from the Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin.
MediaWiki message delivery 01:29, 16 July 2024 (UTC)
The Signpost: 22 July 2024
[edit]- Discussion report: Internet users flock to Wikipedia to debate its image policy over Trump raised-fist photo
- News and notes: Wikimedia community votes to ratify Movement Charter; Wikimedia Foundation opposes ratification
- Obituary: JamesR
- Crossword: Vaguely bird-shaped crossword
Tech News: 2024-30
[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.
Feature News
- Stewards can now globally block accounts. Before the change only IP addresses and IP ranges could be blocked globally. Global account blocks are useful when the blocked user should not be logged out. Global locks (a similar tool logging the user out of their account) are unaffected by this change. The new global account block feature is related to the Temporary Accounts project, which is a new type of user account that replaces IP addresses of unregistered editors that are no longer made public.
- Later this week, Wikimedia site users will notice that the Interface of FlaggedRevs (also known as "Pending Changes") is improved and consistent with the rest of the MediaWiki interface and Wikimedia's design system. The FlaggedRevs interface experience on mobile and Minerva skin was inconsistent before it was fixed and ported to Codex by the WMF Growth team and some volunteers. [45]
- Wikimedia site users can now submit account vanishing requests via GlobalVanishRequest. This feature is used when a contributor wishes to stop editing forever. It helps you hide your past association and edit to protect your privacy. Once processed, the account will be locked and renamed. [46]
- Have you tried monitoring and addressing vandalism in Wikipedia using your phone? A Diff blog post on Patrolling features in the Mobile App highlights some of the new capabilities of the feature, including swiping through a feed of recent changes and a personal library of user talk messages for use when patrolling from your phone.
- Wikimedia contributors and GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) organisations can now learn and measure the impact Wikimedia Commons is having towards creating quality encyclopedic content using the Commons Impact Metrics analytics dashboard. The dashboard offers organizations analytics on things like monthly edits in a category, the most viewed files, and which Wikimedia articles are using Commons images. As a result of these new data dumps, GLAM organisation can more reliably measure their return on investment for programs bringing content into the digital Commons. [47]
Project Updates
- Come share your ideas for improving the wikis on the newly reopened Community Wishlist. The Community Wishlist is Wikimedia’s forum for volunteers to share ideas (called wishes) to improve how the wikis work. The new version of the wishlist is always open, works with both wikitext and Visual Editor, and allows wishes in any language.
Learn more
- Have you ever wondered how Wikimedia software works across over 300 languages? This is 253 languages more than the Google Chrome interface, and it's no accident. The Language and Product Localization Team at the Wikimedia Foundation supports your work by adapting all the tools and interfaces in the MediaWiki software so that contributors in our movement who translate pages and strings can translate them and have the sites in all languages. Read more about the team and their upcoming work on Diff.
- How can Wikimedia build innovative and experimental products while maintaining such heavily used websites? A recent blog post by WMF staff Johan Jönsson highlights the work of the WMF Future Audience initiative, where the goal is not to build polished products but test out new ideas, such as a ChatGPT plugin and Add a Fact, to help take Wikimedia into the future.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. You can also get other news from the Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin.
MediaWiki message delivery 00:02, 23 July 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-31
[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.
Feature news
- Editors using the Visual Editor in languages that use non-Latin characters for numbers, such as Hindi, Manipuri and Eastern Arabic, may notice some changes in the formatting of reference numbers. This is a side effect of preparing a new sub-referencing feature, and will also allow fixing some general numbering issues in Visual Editor. If you notice any related problems on your wiki, please share details at the project talkpage.
Bugs status
- Some logged-in editors were briefly unable to edit or load pages last week. These errors were mainly due to the addition of new linter rules which led to caching problems. Fixes have been applied and investigations are continuing.
- Editors can use the IP Information tool to get information about IP addresses. This tool is available as a Beta Feature in your preferences. The tool was not available for a few days last week, but is now working again. Thank you to Shizhao for filing the bug report. You can read about that, and 28 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Project updates
- There are new features and improvements to Phabricator from the Release Engineering and Collaboration Services teams, and some volunteers, including: the search systems, the new task creation system, the login systems, the translation setup which has resulted in support for more languages (thanks to Pppery), and fixes for many edge-case errors. You can read details about these and other improvements in this summary.
- There is an update on the Charts project. The team has decided which visualization library to use, which chart types to start focusing on, and where to store chart definitions.
- One new wiki has been created: a Wikivoyage in Czech (
voy:cs:
) [48]
Learn more
- There is a new Wikimedia Foundation data center in São Paulo, Brazil which helps to reduce load times.
- There is new user research on problems with the process of uploading images.
- Commons Impact Metrics are now available via data dumps and API.
- The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available.
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MediaWiki message delivery 23:09, 29 July 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-32
[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.
Feature news
- Two new parser functions will be available this week:
{{#dir}}
and{{#bcp47}}
. These will reduce the need forTemplate:Dir
andTemplate:BCP47
on Commons and allow us to drop 100 million rows from the "what links here" database. Editors at any wiki that use these templates, can help by replacing the templates with these new functions. The templates at Commons will be updated during the Hackathon at Wikimania. [49][50] - Communities can request the activation of the visual editor on entire namespaces where discussions sometimes happen (for instance Wikipedia: or Wikisource: namespaces) if they understand the known limitations. For discussions, users can already use DiscussionTools in these namespaces.
- The tracking category "Pages using Timeline" has been renamed to "Pages using the EasyTimeline extension" in TranslateWiki. Wikis that have created the category locally should rename their local creation to match.
Project updates
- Editors who help to organize WikiProjects and similar on-wiki collaborations, are invited to share ideas and examples of successful collaborations with the Campaigns and Programs teams. You can fill out a brief survey or share your thoughts on the talkpage. The teams are particularly looking for details about successful collaborations on non-English wikis.
- The new parser is being rolled out on Wikivoyage wikis over the next few months. The English Wikivoyage and Hebrew Wikivoyage were switched to Parsoid last week. For more information, see Parsoid/Parser Unification.
Learn more
- There will be more than 200 sessions at Wikimania this week. Here is a summary of some of the key sessions related to the product and technology area.
- The latest Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin is available.
- The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New design previews for Translatable pages; Updates about MinT for Wiki Readers; the release of Translation dumps; and more.
- The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available.
- The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available.
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MediaWiki message delivery 20:41, 5 August 2024 (UTC)
Administrators' newsletter – August 2024
[edit]News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2024).
- Global blocks may now target accounts as well as IP's. Administrators may locally unblock when appropriate.
- Users wishing to permanently leave may now request "vanishing" via Special:GlobalVanishRequest. Processed requests will result in the user being renamed, their recovery email being removed, and their account being globally locked.
- The Arbitration Committee appointed the following administrators to the conflict of interest volunteer response team: Bilby, Extraordinary Writ
Tech News: 2024-33
[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.
Feature news
- AbuseFilter editors and maintainers can now make a CAPTCHA show if a filter matches an edit. This allows communities to quickly respond to spamming by automated bots. [51]
- Stewards can now specify if global blocks should prevent account creation. Before this change by the Trust and Safety Product Team, all global blocks would prevent account creation. This will allow stewards to reduce the unintended side-effects of global blocks on IP addresses.
Project updates
- Nominations are open on Wikitech for new members to refresh the Toolforge standards committee. The committee oversees the Toolforge Right to fork policy and Abandoned tool policy among other duties. Nominations will remain open until at least 2024-08-26.
- One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in West Coast Bajau (
w:bdr:
) [52]
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MediaWiki message delivery 23:19, 12 August 2024 (UTC)
The Signpost: 14 August 2024
[edit]- In the media: Portland pol profile paid for from public purse
- In focus: Twitter marks the spot
- News and notes: Another Wikimania has concluded.
- Special report: Nano or just nothing: Will nano go nuclear?
- Opinion: HouseBlaster's RfA debriefing
- Traffic report: Ball games, movies, elections, but nothing really weird
- Humour: I'm proud to be a template
Tech News: 2024-34
[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.
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. [53]
- 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 ofmw.title objects
. This enables wikis to configure workflows such as category-specific edit notices. Thanks to SD001 for these improvements. [54][55]
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 withWikipedia 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 00:51, 20 August 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-35
[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.
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. [56]
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 20:30, 26 August 2024 (UTC)
Administrators' newsletter – September 2024
[edit]News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2024).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!
Tech News: 2024-36
[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.
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. [57] - 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. [58]
- 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. [59]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 01:04, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
The Signpost: 4 September 2024
[edit]- 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?
- 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
Tech News: 2024-37
[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.
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. [60][61]
- 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()
andmw.wikibase.getSitelink(qid)
will have their logic unified for tracking different aspects of sitelinks to reduce junk notifications from inconsistent sitelinks tracking. [62]
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. [63]
- Contributors of 11 Wikipedias, including English will have a new
MOS
namespace added to their Wikipedias. This improvement ensures that links beginning withMOS:
(usually shortcuts to the Manual of Style) are not broken by Mooré Wikipedia (language codemos
). [64]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 18:49, 9 September 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-38
[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.
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. [65]
- 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. [66]
- 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. [67]
- 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 newercdx-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. [68]
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. [69]
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 23:59, 16 September 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-39
[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.
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
- 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. [70] - Two bugs were fixed in the GlobalVanishRequest system by improving the logging and by removing an incorrect placeholder message. [71][72]
- 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 23:33, 23 September 2024 (UTC)
The Signpost: 26 September 2024
[edit]- 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?
- 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
Tech News: 2024-40
[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
- 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. [73] - 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. [74]
- 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. [75]
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 22:17, 30 September 2024 (UTC)
Administrators' newsletter – October 2024
[edit]News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2024).
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.