User talk:Osomite

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Thank you for your contributions on Dinosaurs

Hi Osomite, We’ve noticed that you edited articles related to Dinosaurs. Thank you for your great contributions. Keep it up! Bobo.03 (talk) 01:14, 6 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Response on TheSoul Publishing Being Russian

@Osomite Even before news articles came out, I myself had suspicions that they are potentially Russian affiliated (anyone who takes the time can see the strange connections). Obviously we cannot say that for sure. I have added a neutral description on the Bright Side Wikipedia page regarding several media organizations supposing they are Russian-affiliated with a statement from TheSoul itself. Perhaps TheSoul needs its own article and/or combine Bright Side and 5-Minute Crafts. I don't know- even if its not an offical tie, the strangeness and reach of their content combined with occasional political overtones has caused me to stay away. I doubt a legitimate propaganda operation wouldn't also operate with profit in mind or at the very least a for-profit company could experiment with propaganda (but not be dedicated to that as a mainstay) See on the talk page — Preceding unsigned comment added by Superdadsuper (talk • contribs) 03:15, 10 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Is "pyto free environment" hyphenated and could I get your advice?

a very good-point. I don't know. I think it will be necessary to convene an assemblage (or is it called a "gaggle") of at least 30 editors and 60 administrators to ponder this point at length. Whatever the outcome, pro-or-con, it needs to be included in the Manual-of-Style so that future hyphenate-type-errors do not occur. Thank you Mini4WD for the heads-up.

Osomite ^hablemos 22:34, 16 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks...

...for catching my goof at Mad (magazine). I was looking at the wrong Crumb reference to Mad, incorrectly going to this passage:

What else was weird about Weirdo? As Crumb himself wrote in the first issue, the new effort marked "another new magazine, another MAD imitation, another small time commercial feature with high hopes, obviously doomed to fail." This is a reference to the number of MAD knock-offs that appeared during the 1950s and 1960s....

And so I say: D'oh!--Tenebrae (talk) 00:07, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

D/S Alerts

decision here.

WP:ACDS topic areas. 1 January 2021

Retraction, please

In this edit you called me an "apologist". From the context, I infer that you meant a "Nazi apologist", since you also referred to my "prodigious efforts to maintain Nazi victory in Poland/" Please retract these untrue and defamatory statements. You can do so by striking them out, using <s> and </s> at the beginning and end of each statement. Your failure to do so will result in your being reported to Wikipedia administrators for a gross violation of WP:No personal attacks. Beyond My Ken (talk) 21:22, 26 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Should I assume that your putting an unwarranted edit-warring notification on my talk page is your way of saying that you refuse to retract your defamatory statements? If you can confirm that you have no intention of retracting, than I can proceed with reporting you to admins for personal attacks. Beyond My Ken (talk) 21:35, 26 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Beyond My Ken: Previously I put this post on your talk page. I include it here for the record.

By definition, an apologist is "a person who offers an argument in defense of something controversial". By inference, you are the one putting the Nazi tag on it. The "context" is what you are making it to be. It seemed to me that Germany's successful invasion of Poland was a Nazi victory. Isn't that the position you have been maintaining?

I did not say you were a Nazi apologist. I am sorry that you inferred that. For the offense you feel, I apologize.

According to Godwin's law, this is the point at which effectively the discussion ends.

Osomite ^hablemos 22:02, 26 February 2021 (UTC) PS Seriously, stop. If you believe that I am wrong, report me to the authorities.[reply]

And here is my response from my talk page:

No, this is not the end of the discussion, since yours is a classic "non-apology apology". You apologize for "the offense I feel" but do not apologize for your statements. In any case, I did not ask for, and do not want an apology, which is useless to me, what I asked for was a retraction of your statements by striking them out. Without such a retraction, I will be taking this to admins. Beyond My Ken (talk) 21:59, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

You have been reported to the Administrators' Noticeboard/Incidents

You will find the report here. Beyond My Ken (talk) 22:26, 26 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

You do really go to the ANI and explain yourself.Slatersteven (talk) 13:58, 28 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It has been suggested that your silence and unwillingness to strike the comments will lead to a block, you really do need to start taking this seriously.Slatersteven (talk) 18:26, 1 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Slatersteven: I appreciate your concern. Thank you. I find this issue very distressing. Sadly it was the last thing I thought about while trying to fall asleep last night (actually at 3 AM) as this dilemma has been weighing on my mind. I do not call people Nazi apologists. I have not called people Nazi apologists. Beyond My Ken through inference (BMK's word) says I did.

Slatersteven, after you made your proposal to me to remove my comments, I thought it was appropriate and was figuring out how to do what you suggested and best seek resolution. Yes, I was silent, the reason was that I wanted to give time to let things cool down. I was upset by the proceedings and want to be able to respond calmly. I was silent, but I was listening. I am distressed that my silence was construed as nefarious. Sometimes a silence is just a silence. I was just listening and thinking. What was the apparent need for urgency? You mentioned that I was "a POV pusher trying to force their version of nationalist history onto the article". Where did that come from? I have no alternate version of history to force. It is very interesting what some people consider the meaning of silence is.

This issue initiated around my "edit" (I apologize for the "scare quotes", but I can't get the dif rename done without them) of the following sentence in the Operation_Sea_Lion article in the section "Invasion of Poland":

In September 1939, the German invasion of Poland was a success, but this infringed on both a French and a British alliance with Poland and both countries declared war on Germany.

My purpose was to edit a poorly constructed sentence and clarify. With the result of:

In September 1939, German invaded Poland. This aggression infringed on a French alliance with Poland and a British alliance with Poland. Subsequently, France and Britain declared war on Germany.

(Oops, I see that I created a typo "German" instead of "Germany".) So I reconstructed a sentence that had a comma splice and unusual conjunction "but". I edited it to make it three sentences. Making the entry more informative and clear was my object. And then I was left with the first sentence where using the word "successful" felt awkward. I have never considered the invasion of Poland "unsuccessful" (as some here have somehow construed). An invasion is either an invasion or a "failed invasion". And I have never seen the use of "successful" relative to "invasion" anywhere. Seeing that accolade in an encyclopedia article did not seem to have a neutral point of view NPOV. So I did not think that using the "successful" necessary. Removing the word "success" or "successful" does not change the meaning of the sentence. I had no hidden agenda with doing this. I had no agenda. I was trying to write the best encyclopedia article I could by removing a word that was unnecessary. After all, was an invasion and the invasion did what an invasion does. And in the edit summary, I indicated, "There is no support for the claim that the invasion of Poland was "successful". And from there BMK disagreed and reverted the entire edit. BMK ignored my edit of the second sentence which was a marked improvement over the original.

Here is an observation. In the Invasion of Poland Wikipedia article, the word "success", relative to the overall invasion, was used once, stating "The success of the invasion marked the end of the Second Polish Republic, though Poland never formally surrendered." Here as with the Operation Sea Lion article, the word "success" is an unnecessary adjective. If the word "success" is removed, the meaning of the sentence is not altered.

The encyclopedia Britannica, when discussing what caused WWII, it simply states, "World War II began in Europe on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland." Here is a creditable encyclopedia that does not feel the need for touting the invasion as "successful".

Through all of this, I have pondered about "what was Hitler's goal in invading Poland?" What would have been Hitler's criteria to consider the invasion successful? Clearly, Hitler desired to expand eastward to gain “lebensraum” (living space) for Germans. Did the invasion accomplish this goal? Another thought was that Hitler needed to possess Poland in order to launch his offensive against Russia. Yes, the invasion was successful in Germany "possessing" Poland for this purpose. If it is this apparent, why couldn't BMK simply qualify the condition of success? Maybe BMK could have added another sentence or two?

Recently, I read somewhere that with Germany's invasion of Poland and when the Allied Forces entered into WWII against Germany, at that point Germany had already realized that they had lost the war. With that view, it seems a stretch to say the invasion spawned a "success". I guess I need to find that again because there will undoubtedly be contention about this assertion. In any case, this line of inquiry is interesting and needs to be examined.

For some reason, Beyond My Ken has called me "the editor" throughout this entire episode. This is a personal slight, I consider BMK to be rude. There is some psychology involved with not acknowledging a person with their name. To not acknowledge someone is a snub. It can mean to ignore or not take notice of.

For some reason, from BMK's first revert of my initial edit, BMK made no effort to collaborate with me. He has only been brusk, offensive, and threatening. I made a single revert and BMK put the edit war Ambox warning on my talk page accusing "You currently appear to be engaged in an edit war according to the reverts you have made on Operation Sea Lion;" And then in an additional entry on my talk page threatened, "Your next revert to this article triggers a report to the edit warring notice board". OMG! I made a single revert at 10:35 and a second edit (retaining the word "successful" and BMK's response was to threaten me. Although in the edit war notice it counseled "Users are expected to collaborate with others", BMK never sought to collaborate with me. I highly doubt that BMK's behavior reflected an appropriate protocol.

Throughout many edit exchanges with editors, BMK has been determined to retain the exact original badly constructed sentence with simply the addition of four references supporting specifically for the single word "successful" in the context of "In September 1939, the successful German invasion of Poland". The placement of the references is unusual; they are placed immediately after the word " ". BMK's "edit" (Again, apologies for the "scare quotes") establishes that the references are specifically for just the word "successful", remarking in the edit summary "This is the way it must be done."

I appreciate that BMK has provided references specifically for the word "successful". I plan to track down the books to see whether there is actually a clear statement or analysis stating that the invasion was "successful". After I have been able to do find the books (they are at my libraries) and do the research, I was will report my results. If I am wrong, I will admit that I am wrong with appropriate apologies to BMK. I value truth and I value an honest presentation of history.

I see from the discussions, things have not cooled off. Beyond My Ken has been quite busy prosecuting his case. Is that appropriate? Today, BMK has "redacted what he considers to be personal attacks" in my post on the Operation Sea Lion Talk page. Was that appropriate? It seems that BMK is doing his best to add heat and stir the pot. From this situation, am I going to received fair consideration?

My posts concerned were in reply to "BLM post" (apologies for the "scare quotes") which was initiated immediately after I made "my first and only revert" (apologies for the "scare quotes").

BMK considers the following phrases to be personal attacks. Just to provide a perspective they were not grouped but spread in my post to BMK

• "to maintain Nazi victory in Poland"

• 4 lines of text follows

• "You are disingenuous."

• 10 lines of text follows

• "Your argument is largely that of an apologist."

I am truly sorry that BMK inferred (BMK's word) that a word in the first phrase and a word in the third phrase was a personal attack of being called a "Nazi apologist". I am sorry he saw it that way. It was in no way intended to be a personal attack that I had "cleverly hidden". I did make an apology which was heartfelt ("I did not say you were a Nazi apologist. I am sorry that you inferred that. For the offense you feel, I apologize."). However, somehow I did not say whatever magical words BMK thought appropriate and called it a "nonapology apology". Some here have the view that I did not make a "not a genuine apology". Is there some guidance on how to make a genuine apology?

About "apologist". Some who are judging here, consider that because I rebuffed BMK's "success" argument by saying it was "largely that of an apologist" is a personal attack. An apologist is "one who speaks or writes in defense of something". What is wrong with that? That is what BMK did. I did not find BMK's argument convincing.

And about personal attacks. "BMK's reply to me" (apologies for the "scare quotes") contains some significant personal attacks on me:

"I won't take it seriously, because you're so far off the mark that you're entirely around the bend. Ignoring your ignorant personal jibes, the issue here is simple: reliable sources, and every historian worth their salt, says that the German invasion of Poland was a successful one."

BMK tells me, "I am entirely around the bend", calls me "ignorant", and then just claims the authority of historians "worth their salt". That wasn't much of an argument, it was, to me, what you would expect from an apologist who has few facts at hand. It was an insult to me. BMK claims I made a personal attack, which is ironic when BMK freely makes personal attacks; they were personal attacks that were so clear there was no inference needed to understand what they were. I would appreciate BMK's apology for his personal attack on me.

BMK's posts contain quite a bit of disparagement directed towards me; a lot of anger. The tone was arrogant and overbearing. BMK was presenting what BMK considered to be superior knowledge and was quite annoyed at being challenged. BMK took some particularly umbrage with my challenge requesting a reference for the adjective "successful". It seemed to me that BMK was looking for reasons to have controversy and conflict.

About "disingenuous". Here is "my post" and here is the comment in context which was concerned his aspersion that I was edit warring although I only made a single revert:

"You are disingenuous. You were in an edit war earlier this month from which you received a edit block of one month. You contested the block and received mercy. You ended the episode by claiming, "I'll try my best to improve". You need to work on that claim, walk the talk."

It is apparent, and BMK's editing history involving his past edit wars demonstrates it, that BMK is not candid or sincere and is in fact quite disingenuous. He claimed an edit war after I made a single revert, which is disingenuous. BMK would prefer to distract and misdirect and call it a personal attack; however, it is not, it is simply an observation of fact. This is not BMK's first rodeo.

Many words have been written here with many analyses of my words. In a lot of ways, I see this as much in the way of John Godfrey Saxe's poem [The Blind Men and the Elephant] which ends:

"So, oft in theologic wars, the disputants, I ween, tread on in utter ignorance, of what each other mean, and prate about the elephant, not one of them has seen!"

I hope for an honest opinion of the elephant.

Clearly the judges are self-selecting themselves. Can the judges act without bias and fairness?

I feel that the judges have been looking at this episode cherry-picking words, touching only the parts of the elephant that are easily at hand, and making assumptions based upon, probably, a predetermined result. You assume you know all about me and have already passed judgment. You layer assumption upon assumption. You suppose. You guess. You infer.

I feel that I will not find fair judgment here. I wonder that when making your judgments, has all of the record in the posts been reviewed and given equal weight? With BMK making on-going "comments" (again apologies for the "scare quotes") and whipping up the prosecution I feel an unfair finger on the scale.

I have a suspicion that what I have written here is just going to provide more "grist for the mill" with more criticism of what you think I really said and more condemnation.

As you judge me, do you consider Beyond My Ken blameless? Shouldn't his involvement be considered?

I have not challenged anyone's specific already stated determinations. Doing that would probably not change any opinion. I have not addressed every detail. If anyone has a specific question they would like me to address, please let me know.

Osomite ^hablemos 04:37, 2 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I will post this to the Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents and see what transpires

It might have been more helpful to have condensed this into one or two paragprahs.Slatersteven (talk) 10:54, 2 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Slatersteven: Yes less is more. Good thought. I have never been involved in a personal attack accusation and I had no guidance to follow so I did what I thought appropriate. Ironic, there was much ado about my prolonged silence, and now you want brevity. I was told to reply and that it was serious. I figured if it was serious, I would take it seriously and reply appropriately. I figured I had one opportunity to respond, so I made an effort to put it into perspective. What could I have explained in a paragraph or two? What is the critical issue? The critical defense?

You make a good point, so here is a try at brevity. A focused defence. (Hmm, and after writing the "brief", it is more than a paragraph or two. I did it with as few words as I could)

I have been accused by "inference" that I called Beyond My Ken (BMK) a Nazi Apologist. I did not. "Inference" is "a conclusion reached on the basis of evidence and reasoning." What is the evidence?

In my first post to the conversation, having spent some time carefully crafting it, I discovered when I tried to post I got an edit conflict as Slatersteven and BMK had posted several times while I composed, and I was behind. So I revised the post I was working on to place my somewhat belated comments in context. I "prefaced" with the comment, "I am a little behind on your prodigious efforts to maintain Nazi victory in Poland." I used the words "Nazi" and "victory" as they were prominently used in the back and forth posts between Slaterstevenu and BMK. I picked up on the theme. The words "Nazi attack" in my post were simply an "echoing" of the ideas being discussed. An echo nothing more.

The words "Nazi attack" would not be the ones I would use concerning the issue of "successful invasion". "Nazi attack" was not my original thought about the situation. BMK created the discussion section on the Operation Sea Lion talk page and titled it, "Was the Nazi invasion of Poland a success?" The original use of the word "Nazi" in the discussion done BMK.

Further down in the post, the part that I had tried to post but could not due to an edit conflict situation, I rebutted BMK's argument as being that of an apologist. An apologist, and nothing more. (See my previous post about "apologist", it is just a word to characterize a type of argument).

BMK, who clearly by the talk page discussion, at this point was very annoyed because I challenge the word "successful" and wanted a reference for that conclusion. So BMK, while annoyed (perhaps to the point of anger), read my post and wanted to reply. BMK created out of hole-cloth an imagined insult, a personal attack, because I used the word "Nazi" and "apologist" in the same post. Post hoc ergo propter hocer inferring, BMK decided that I said BMK was a "Nazi apologist". That is not true. I did not infer that, BMK inferred that.

To say that I made a personal attack is not true, I had no intent. I did not call BMK a "Nazi apologist". When I saw BMK's post back to me, I thought, "Oh Dear, where did that come from?" I immediately replied with an apology. Sadly BMK did not think it was not sufficient calling it a "nonapology apology". I am sorry that my apology did not satisfy BMK. At this point, I indicated I was no longer willing to engage (considering BMK's emotional state and imaginings). So I "went silent", which many here thought was a very suspicious thing to do. Note in my post, I said that was what I was intended to do. I invoked Godwin's law. And, I was condemned because I was not replying immediately. My speed of thought and action, unfortunately, does not match others in the Wikipedia world.

So BMK made a personal attack incident report. And here we are, with me defending myself from an "inferred" personal attack. I have been accused of doing something I did not do by "inference". Is inference adequate proof to make it fact? About this inference, I believe that I should be allowed the "benefit of the doubt".

I will post this to the Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents and see what transpires.

Osomite ^hablemos 20:43, 2 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Good description

Hi! I noticed a recent comment you made on an internal forum about BMK and his long-term pattern of behavior. It's something I've encountered myself, but you described it perfectly. Such a frustrating issue, and I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees it. I know commenting like this on the behavior of another editor is a dubious thing to do, but I strongly feel that this kind of thing is an exemplar of why Wikipedia's culture can discourage participation from newer editors. Ganesha811 (talk) 02:34, 5 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It's interesting how often people comment that this factor or that factor "drives away new editors", especially when put up against the reality that the majority of new editors - I would think - stick around, get the hang of the place, and eventually become productive editors, and that those who do run off frequently come back with new identities. Sometimes these also become productive contributors, but others, mostly the ones who were "driven off" because their edits were problematic in the first place, become puppetmasters, coming and going with new identities all the time. Now that, to my mind, is the true arrogance, the idea that one can edit whenever and as whomever one pleases, simply because someone dropped a dime on one's bad behavior.

Not everyone is cut out to edit in this kind of platform, which is simultaneously strict and free-form, and I, for one, don't feel that it helps the project much for us to bend over backwards to accommodate those square pegs who don't fit into the round holes we offer.

That you and Osomite (and others) don't like me is something I really can't do much about, not and remain true to myself and my commitment to continuing to improve the encyclopedia, but at least your crowd might recognize that I am committed to it, and that I do improve it, and that (here comes that "arrogance" again) I am more often right than I am wrong. Beyond My Ken (talk) 03:03, 5 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Beyond My Ken, hi! I do assume good faith on your part, as you describe in your last paragraph. We are all here to build an encyclopedia, and I know that dealing with repeated waves of vandals and trolls might engender a more blunt style than most people.

However, if you're open to a specific suggestion, I have one to make. I've noticed you often revert edits with the summary 'better before'. This is just not helpful. It's unlikely to produce any sort of constructive discussion, since it implies that there was something wrong with the change while providing absolutely no detail (policy-based, grammar-based, or otherwise) about what was wrong with it.

The result is that either you get into an edit war, or a discussion on the talk page that's already on the wrong foot, or, if they don't respond, you bite another editor by so bluntly reverting their contribution. You contribute a lot, but taking the time to give a specific reason for reverts rather than saying "better before", especially when the change is a matter of opinion and not clear vandalism, might help. Ganesha811 (talk) 03:38, 5 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I will think about that. One of the problems is pure volume. I have a lot of pages on my watchlist, and I end up making a lot of edits in response to what's been done to them, so I fall back on "Better before" and "Not an improvement". I used to have a box on my talk page explaining what I mean by those canned replies (which are not so different from these commonly used abbreviations), but I took it down a while ago in a general clean up of the page. Beyond My Ken (talk) 04:14, 5 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Ganesha811, I appreciate your commiserating about Beyond My Ken's modus. Clearly, my talk page is on BMK's watchlist radar. Amazing how he jumped in and promptly replied to your note to me. It was enlightening to have BMK explain his method and motivation tending his watchlist.

I am not a prolific Wikipedia editor. I read Wikipedia articles and see things to fix. I read about things in newspapers, magazines, and books; I watch movies; I then look to Wikipedia to see what is said. Sometimes I find things to fix, sometimes I find things to add. My goal is to make Wikpedia content accurate and not confusing. A lot of Wikipedia writing is good, but some writing is pretty bad. I fix the bad when I find it.

About my observation on BMK's modus. A while back BMK and I tangled over an edit I made to Operation Sea Lion. It was my first encounter with BMK I was simply trying to clarify a poorly written sentence and in the process removed the word "successfully". BMK reverted my edit and strongly disagreed (he did do an edit summary explaining) and goaded me into an edit war (I thought I had made an improvement, but BMK clearly disagreed) and escalated it to an Administrator's Notice board and added that I made a "personal assault" against him. I was very surprised and offended about how I had been treated. This encounter with BMK was a bad thing, I wondered how it could be fixed.

It seemed to me that BMK was seeking controversy, wanting an argument. He was brusk, bullying, demanding, and condescending. BMK was on the offensive, attacking, leaving no room to collaborate. I came away from this encounter a bit hurt by what I considered a hostile environment--it was not right, it was not necessary. I thought that BMK's behavior was not appropriate visa via the espoused Wikipedia philosophy and policy and guidance about cooperation in writing an encyclopedia.

Since then, I have been trying to figure out what is/was going on with the Wikipedia environment by observing. Recently BMK took umbrage with a newish editor. The editor fixed a run-on sentence, and BMK goaded an editing war about an argument about "proper grammar". The edit argument had no merit, after all, good grammar is good grammar. BMK was harsh to the editor and was wrong in his position. What BMK was doing did not seem logical (what was BMK's motivation?). I felt the editor need support so I stepped in and pointed out how BMK was behaving badly. But, BMK refused to see anything but his point of view. This encounter was a bad thing happening in Wikipedia.

With Beyond My Ken having joined the conversation with you, and you with having made the good suggestion to him about edit summaries, and BMK acknowledging, may be . . .

I need to reply to Beyond My Ken congenially to seek resolution. I would prefer to like him.

Osomite ^hablemos 05:20, 6 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

<personal attack by IP editor redacted>

{{rpa}}. It's OK to disagree with BMK's editing but name-calling is against our WP:NPA policy. – EdJohnston (talk) 03:38, 21 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

EdJohnston, you removed a personal attack that was made by an anonymous IP editor (an attack against Beyond My Ken, perhaps, as no specific editor was named in the post that was removed). Inadvertently (I hope), you made your statement quite ambiguous--it appears damning to me due to a lack of information to the contrary. Your comment makes it appear that I made the personal attack and not an anonymous IP editor. I realize that few people read my talk page and would see your comment, but in the spirit of accuracy, could you clarify who did what to whom? I would appreciate it. Osomite ^hablemos 20:52, 21 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I've fixed it. Beyond My Ken (talk) 20:56, 21 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

June 2021 chide

Your recent editing history at Veracity of statements by Donald Trump shows that you are currently engaged in an edit war; that means that you are repeatedly changing content back to how you think it should be, when you have seen that other editors disagree. To resolve the content dispute, please do not revert or change the edits of others when you are reverted. Instead of reverting, please use the talk page to work toward making a version that represents consensus among editors. The best practice at this stage is to discuss, not edit-war. See the bold, revert, discuss cycle for how this is done. If discussions reach an impasse, you can then post a request for help at a relevant noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases, you may wish to request temporary page protection.

Being involved in an edit war can result in you being blocked from editing—especially if you violate the three-revert rule, which states that an editor must not perform more than three reverts on a single page within a 24-hour period. Undoing another editor's work—whether in whole or in part, whether involving the same or different material each time—counts as a revert. Also keep in mind that while violating the three-revert rule often leads to a block, you can still be blocked for edit warring—even if you do not violate the three-revert rule—should your behavior indicate that you intend to continue reverting repeatedly. PackMecEng (talk) 23:33, 6 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@PackMecEng: quit being a bully. You are have initiated this supposed edit war over your agitationist view that facts must have a NPOV. You are arguing against the facts and the truth. Or is your starting an edit war with me personal? Or as your recent Block from editing on the Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard shows, are you are just looking to create controversy and be generally disagreeable. Your apparent Trump revisionist agenda is not a good look. Why are you so set against having the truth told about Trump? Is the truth a threat to your weltanschauung?Osomite ^hablemos 00:12, 7 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I was not the first one to revert you nor the last to disagree with your edit. You are welcome to take me to ANI or AN if you wish. You appear to be hear to WP:RGW. PackMecEng (talk) 00:14, 7 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@PackMecEng: My, my, my. You do carry on so. Trying to mount a defense to justify your behavior is so pathetic.

Please quit posting comments on my talk page (actually, please quit doing it anywhere in Wikipedia) about things you demonstrate little understanding.

"Righting Great Wrongs?" That's a pretty feeble effort at gaslighting. You are accusing me of the behavior you are engaging in yourself. Clearly with your false "not NPV" claims, you are in the WP:RWG mode trying to rewrite history to falsely burnish Trump's legacy which consists of tens of thousands of lies. You clearly have a very, very big job ahead of you defending the beloved Supreme Leader.

Go away. Go bully someone else.

Osomite ^hablemos 20:09, 7 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Just so you know, there is nothing particularly personal in PME's behavior, they do this sort of thing quite often - I keep having to warn them about following me around to comment on things I post. (An admin offered to block them for it, but I didn't feel like compiling the evidence that would have been required.) For laughs, you should read this (the part that's been collapsed) and their "discussion" of the block that resulted from it on their talk page [1]. It's almost surrealistic. Beyond My Ken (talk) 21:16, 7 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Next Housekeeping deletes begin here. . .

Skeuomorph revision

Hey! I noticed you undid my change to Skeuomorph to add the Flag of the Haudenosaunee. What is the reasoning behind this not being a skeuomorph? The stair-stepping on the tree in the middle of the flag was a necessary structure in the original belt because it was made from beads. The design of the flag is explicitly fashioned after the design of the belt, and although the stair-steps are no longer needed, they are still included. --Blacklemon67 (talk) 23:22, 10 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Blacklemon67: This type of discussion should be on the Skeuomorph Talk Page. I am going to move your comment there and provide my reply.

.

The

Administrators' newsletter – September 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2022).

Administrator changes DanCherek • DatGuy • Femke • Z1720 Aldux • Graham Beards • Nyttend

Interface administrator changes Mr. Stradivarius

Guideline and policy news

• A discussion is open to define a process by which Vector 2022 can be made the default for all users.
• An RfC is open to gain consensus on whether Fox News is reliable for science and politics.

Technical news

• The impact report on the effects of disabling IP editing on the Persian (Farsi) Wikipedia has been released.
• The WMF is looking into making a Private Incident Reporting System (PIRS) system to improve the reporting of harmful incidents through easier and safer reporting. You can leave comments on the talk page by answering the questions provided. Users who have faced harmful situations are also invited to join a PIRS interview to share the experience. To sign up please email Madalina Ana.

Arbitration

• An arbitration case regarding Conduct in deletion-related editing has been closed. The Arbitration Committee passed a remedy as part of the final decision to create a request for comment (RfC) on how to handle mass nominations at Articles for Deletion (AfD).
• The arbitration case request Jonathunder has been automatically closed after a 6 month suspension of the case.

Miscellaneous

• The new pages patrol (NPP) team has prepared an appeal to the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) for assistance with addressing Page Curation bugs and requested features. You are encouraged to read the open letter before it is sent, and if you support it, consider signing it. It is not a discussion, just a signature will suffice.
• Voting for candidates for the Wikimedia Board of Trustees is open until 6 September.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:12, 1 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Left field

Sorry about the confusion - I was referring specifically to the use of the source as being not entirely random. Don't want to get back into that discussion; just want to apologize for the communication differences. I'm from the Ozarks and have a rural background so I learned a somewhat bastardized version of most common English idioms/pronunciations/spellings/grammatical constructions that can be at time confusing. Hog Farm _Talk 13:55, 9 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Hog Farm:, I appreciate hearing from you. No worries, it's all good.

I understand about rural idioms and such. Sometimes I encounter the same things-especially about pronunciation and I am particularly bad at spelling as I am slightly dyslexic. I have to work hard in getting writing right. I hail from a very rural part of Northern Eastern California. I had a neighbor from Missouri and I loved to listen to her talk. We lived high up in the Sierra Nevada mountains and whenever she talked about going west into the central valley, she would say about "going down below". And talking about something "over there", she would say "yonder". A wonderful lady. And since many of the older timers (way back then), like my grandmother, were one generation removed from the gold miners of the 1849 gold rush, they had their way with words also. Good memories.Osomite 🐻 (hablemos) 20:31, 11 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Books & Bytes – Issue 52

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 52, July – August 2022

• New instant-access collections:
  • SpringerLink and Springer Nature
  • Project MUSE
  • Taylor & Francis
  • ASHA
  • Loeb
• Feedback requested on this newsletter

Administrators' newsletter – October 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2022).

Administrator changes ScottishFinnishRadish Staxringold Ahoerstemeier (deceased) • Ched

Interface administrator changes Cyberpower678 CheckUser changes GorillaWarfare

Guideline and policy news

• Following an RfC, consensus was found that if the rationale for a block depends on information that is not available to all administrators, that information should be sent to the Arbitration Committee, a checkuser or an oversighter for action (as applicable, per ArbCom's recent updated guidance) instead of the administrator making the block.
• Following an RfC, consensus has been found that, in the context of politics and science, the reliability of FoxNews.com is unclear and that additional considerations apply to its use.
• Community comment on the revised Universal Code of Conduct enforcement guidelines is requested until 8 October.

Technical news

• The Articles for creation helper script now automatically recognises administrator accounts which means your name does not need to be listed at WP:AFCP to help out. If you wish to help out at AFC, enable AFCH by navigating to Preferences → Gadgets and checking the "Yet Another AfC Helper Script" box.

Arbitration

• Remedy 8.1 of the Muhammad images case will be rescinded 1 November following a motion.
• A modification to the deletion RfC remedy in the Conduct in deletion-related editing case has been made to reaffirm the independence of the RfC and allow the moderators to split the RfC in two.
• The second phase of the 2021-22 Discretionary Sanctions Review closes 3 October.

Miscellaneous

• An administrator's account was recently compromised. Administrators are encouraged to check that their passwords are secure, and reminded that ArbCom reserves the right to not restore adminship in cases of poor account security. You can also use two-factor authentication (2FA) to provide an extra level of security.
• Self-nominations for the electoral commission for the 2022 Arbitration Committee elections open 2 October and close 8 October.
• You are invited to comment on candidates in the 2022 CUOS appointments process.
• An RfC is open to discuss whether to make Vector 2022 the default skin on desktop.
• Tech tip: You can do a fuzzy search of all deleted page titles at Special:Undelete.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:43, 1 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 31 October 2022

• From the team: A new goose on the roost
  Or maybe the spit -- only time will tell.

• News and notes: Wikipedians question Wikimedia fundraising ethics after "somewhat-viral" tweet
  News from Twitter, Commons and the WMF C-Suite.

• News from the WMF: Governance updates from, and for, the Wikimedia Endowment
  501(c)(3) application approved, Amazon donates another million.

• In the media: Scribing, searching, soliciting, spying, and systemic bias
  Wading into several controversies.

• Disinformation report: From Russia with WikiLove
  I can has Kremlin sockfarms?

• Recent research: Disinformatsiya: Much research, but what will actually help Wikipedia editors?
  And other new research publications.

• Interview: Isabelle Belato on their Request for Adminship
  The newest sysop speaks on the process that got them there.

• Featured content: Topics, lists, submarines and Gurl.com
  Featured content from October.

• Serendipity: We all make mistakes – don’t we?
  The strength of Wikipedia is the peer review afterwards.

• Traffic report: Mama, they're in love with a criminal
  More serial killers than you can shake a stick at!

• From the archives: Paid advocacy, a lawsuit over spelling mistakes, deleting Jimbo's article, and the death of Toolserver
  What tales echo in these hallowed halls.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:43, 31 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – November 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2022).

Administrator changes

• 
  • Isabelle Belato
  • Whpq
• 
• 
  • Atama
  • Astronautics~enwiki
  • Athaenara
  • Eddie891
  • GraemeL
  • Marianocecowski
  • Natalya
  • Pratyeka
  • SB Johnny

Interface administrator changes

• TheresNoTime
• Ragesoss

CheckUser changes

• 
  • Blablubbs
  • Firefly
• Joe Roe

Oversight changes

• DGG

Guideline and policy news

• The article creation at scale RfC opened on 3 October and will be open until at least 2 November.
• An RfC is open to discuss having open requests for adminship automatically placed on hold after the seven-day period has elapsed, pending closure or other action by a bureaucrat.

Arbitration

• Eligible editors are invited to self-nominate themselves from 13 November 2022 until 22 November 2022 to stand in the 2022 Arbitration Committee elections.
• The arbitration case request titled Athaenara has been resolved by motion.
• The arbitration case Reversal and reinstatement of Athaenara's block has entered the proposed decision stage.
• AmandaNP, Mz7 and Cyberpower678 have been appointed to the Electoral Commission for the 2022 Arbitration Committee Elections. Xaosflux and Dr vulpes are reserve commissioners.

Miscellaneous

• The 2022 CheckUser and Oversight appointments process has concluded with the appointment of two new CheckUsers.
• You can add yourself to the centralised page listing time zones of administrators.
• Tech tip: Wikimarkup in a block summary is parsed in the notice that the blockee sees. You can use templates with custom options to specify situations like {{rangeblock|create=yes}} or {{uw-ublock|contains profanity}}.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:23, 1 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Portola

Sorry, you're claiming that it's pronounced both por-TOH-lə and like "power-tall-ah", while claiming that they're the same. I suspect that you aren't familiar with the key, but if you are adding a second pronunciation, you need to provide a source. YouTube is good enough. Can you find someone on YouTube pronouncing it the way you think is correct? — kwami (talk) 02:24, 14 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Kwamikagami: I think that your reclama and knowledge about this issue would be better placed on the Portola talk page rather than hiding it on my obscure talk page. Inquiring minds will want to know.

I will put this discussion on the Portola talk page. Please make your responses there.

I see from your user page that you have knowledge about how words are pronounced.

Your last edit on the Portola article you deleted my pronunciation of "pour|toll|'|ɑh". It has been in the article for quite some time. Wikipedia guidance tells that long-time-standing edits should not be changed without some talk page discussion and agreement first. Why didn't you just leave it alone?

I am puzzled, "power-tall-ah"? Where did that come from? Do you think that my "pour" comes out as "power"; "ur" sounds like "wer"? Seriously. Please explain how/where you came by that. Sounds made up for argument's sake to me.

I guess that I don't understand the obscure rule about creating that dialectical pronunciation of a place name. Where in the wide wide world of Wikipedia guidance is that explained? You say that a "reference" to the local dialectic pronunciation is required. Where exactly in the literature of the world would one find that reference? Surely you jest. I laugh that you think youtube is a reliable source. What do you want me to do, create a youtube titled "This is how you pronounce the name of the small rural town of Portola, California" and say the word Portola correctly pronounced many many times, and maybe, for no particular reason, read the Wikipedia article. Do you see how silly that idea is? And, by the way, Wikipedia does not consider youtube to be a reliable source.

I see that in your most recent edit you deleted the native area pronunciation (that I rendered to the best of my ability) of "pour|toll|'|ɑh"; or should I have presented it as "pourtollah"? I know this is the sound of how the folks in the area speak the town's name. I know because I live there. I hear it spoken that way almost every day. Why is it that you disagree about something you have never heard?

I don't quite understand how you rendered the "respelled" pronunciation as "por|TOH|lə". Where did you hear that pronunciation? I am particularly curious about the last syllable "lə"? You think that "la" has an unexpected vowel sound so you represent it with the schwa symbol? So if it is an unexpected vowel sound, what is is the actual sound?

In my local knowledge, the last syllable of "Portola" sounds distinctly like "ah". The last syllable consists of just the "a"; the "l" is spoken in the second syllable with the "to" and that sounds like "toll". Yes, I know, the hill folk of the eastern lost sierras speak funny. When you use "por" as the pronunciation of the first syllable, does it sound like "pour"?

Please tell me how you have expert knowledge about the pronunciation of the name of the village hamlet Portola? (I remember on the Today show in June 1960, when David Garraway mentioned that "the village hamlet of Portola (and he actually pronounced it as a Portolian would expect) is being threatened by forest fire". That was all he said--I heard it and I was gobsmacked that the news of the day from New York was about such an isolated place. So, every now and then, I like to use Dave's description of my town--village hamlet; however, it isn't hamlet-like.)

In one of your edit summaries, (or perhaps it was the edit you made on my talk page and then subsequently deleted--tsk, tsk. That was bad editor manners. If I want something on my talk page deleted, I will delete it) you wanted to "hear" the pronunciation. If you need to "hear" Portola spoken how do you know that the "funny" and unreadable, at least to me, International Phonetic Alphabet rendered pronunciation of (/pɔːrˈtoʊlə/) that has been in the article for quite some time, is correct? If you don't know how it sounds, how can you vouch for that pronunciation? Perhaps "(/pɔːrˈtoʊlə/)" should be deleted.

As background concerning the pronunciation of Portola and the reason for my involvement, an editor arrogantly assumed that the word was actually pronounced according to the Spanish language like the name of the explorer Gaspar de Portolá y Rovira for whom the town is indirectly named--that is a story in itself that I will include in the article after I have the necessary references that I hope to find in the Bancroft Library at Cal. So to correct that incorrect attribution, I edited and provided the native dialectic sound for the name and explained on the Portola talk page about the how and why of the edit.

I just realized that there is a district in San Francisco named "Portola". It is pronounced "close" to the lost sierra dialect, but not exactly. That pronunciation would be acceptable, but it would not be exact.

Osomite 🐻 (hablemos) 05:00, 14 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I stopped reading your response when it became clear that you weren't being serious. We just can't take your word about something. You need evidence. And yes, if you have, say, the local news station pronouncing "Portola", or an interview with the police chief, that would probably be acceptable evidence for most people. — kwami (talk) 05:39, 14 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Kwamikagami: You stopped reading my response? How rude. I read your responses without stopping. It is petty of you to be criticizing my writing style.

Please note that I pointed out to you that further comment on this issue should appropriately be done on the Portola talk page. But you are ignoring my reasonable and logical request. Why is that?

I am requesting, make that demanding, that you no longer post on my talk page. I am within my rights to bar from positing here--there's guidance about this somewhere in the Wikipedia monolith but I am not going to find it for you.

I would like to point out that you need to add edit summaries when you post. Empty edit summaries are not satisfactory

You are discounting my position because you don't consider it to be serious. That's pretty arrogant. Don't you have a sense of humor? Is the world of posting pronunciations always deadly serious? If so, that is so sad.

There is content in my post which is quite relevant and on point, but you are ignoring it. I guess that is the easy way out for you, just disregard any argument that challenges your position. It seems you quit because you have nothing to support your position--all you are doing is citing a rule you have made-up and demanding evidence. When you post a new or revised pronunciation, where do you find your reference (aka evidence)? You clearly have no expert knowledge of the correct pronunciation of the word Portola, yet you refuse to address my position by falsely claiming superior knowledge and intelligence concerning the pronunciation of words. OMG!

Addressing your demanded acceptable proofs, there is no local radio station in the county--it is really rural and damn near dirt poor. And about "an interview" with the Chief of Police", there is no Chief of Police. The law enforcement is the Sheriff of Plumas County located in the county seat. In any case, where would this interview have taken place where the word "Portola" would be correctly pronounced? Were you anticipating that a recording of a radio station there would be available? Your thinking is a bit ivory tower, what planet are you living on?

As a Wikipedia editor aren't you supposed to honor the Wikipedia's Five Pillars? Consider the pillar that directs that "Wikipedia's editors should treat each other with respect and civility". This includes a basic tenant of seeking consensus and avoiding edit wars. And, notice the 5th pillar--Wikipedia has no firm rules.

I asked questions, and you are ignoring them. You demand evidence but you will not attempt any collegial effort or cooperation. What rule can you site that requires that I must render to you evidence about the pronunciation of the word "Portola"?

And once again, I will also add this post to the Portola talk page.

I hope you have read this far and not stopped earlier due to your opinion of my writing style. If you refuse to engage by posting on the Portola talk page, I will consider that you have surrendered the discussion.

Osomite 🐻 (hablemos) 09:04, 14 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Books & Bytes – Issue 53

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 53, September – October 2022

• New collections:
  • Edward Elgar
  • E-Yearbook
  • Corriere della Serra
  • Wikilala
• Collections moved to Library Bundle:
  • Ancestry
• New feature: Outage notification
• Spotlight: Collections indexed in EDS

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --11:19, 17 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 28 November 2022

• News and notes: English Wikipedia editors: "We don't need no stinking banners"
  Joe Roe's close sows dough woes, manifestos... vetoes? overthrows?

• In the media: "The most beautiful story on the Internet"
  Ineffective altruism, return of the toaster, Jess Wade keeps wading through it, Russia censors searches, schools embrace Wikipedia.

• Interview: Lisa Seitz-Gruwell on WMF fundraising in the wake of big banner ad RfC
  An interview with Wikimedia's Chief Advancement Officer.

• Opinion: Privacy on Wikipedia in the cyberpunk future
  Oh, just one more thing... AI couldn't help but notice you use that punctuation a little bit more than most people...

• Disinformation report: Missed and Dissed
  Are government goons prowling our fair encyclopedia?

• Op-Ed: Diminishing returns for article quality
  Have we gotten past the point where better articles makes us a better encyclopedia? And what comes next?

• Book review: Writing the Revolution
  Heather Ford's new volume on Wikipedia, knowledge and power in the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

• Technology report: Galactic dreams, encyclopedic reality
  Facebook's Galactica demo provides a case study in large language models for text generation at scale: this one was silly, but we cannot ignore them forever.

• Essay: The Six Million FP Man
  Okay, six hundred, but either way, the bionic editor speaks.

• Tips and tricks: (Wiki)break stuff
  Productively doing nothing

• Recent research: Study deems COVID-19 editors smart and cool, questions of clarity and utility for WMF's proposed "Knowledge Integrity Risk Observatory"
  And other research findings.

• Featured content: A great month for featured articles
  Do consider joining FPC, though: we need you.

• Obituary: A tribute to Michael Gäbler
  They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

• Concept: The relevance of legal certainty to the English Wikipedia
  A lost article from our deep annals

• Traffic report: Musical deaths, murders, Princess Di's nominative determinism, and sports
  The weeks and weeks, as reviewed by Wikipedia's readers.

• From the archives: Five, ten, and fifteen years ago
  Search upgrades, lawsuits, paid editing, and personal reflection.

• CommonsComix: Joker's trick
  A toast to good health, a health to good hoax, a hoax to good toast.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:42, 28 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom 2022 Elections voter message

Hello! Voting in the 2022 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 12 December 2022. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2022 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:42, 29 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – December 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (November 2022).

Administrator changes

• Eddie891
• Euryalus
• TheresNoTime

• Alex.muller
• Excirial
• RedWordSmith
• Ron Ritzman
• TheresNoTime
• Stephen

Interface administrator changes

TheresNoTime

TheresNoTime

CheckUser changes

TheresNoTime

Oversight changes

TheresNoTime

Guideline and policy news

• Consensus has been found in an RfC to automatically place RfAs on hold after one week.
• The article creation at scale RfC has been closed.
• An RfC on the banners for the December 2022 fundraising campaign has been closed.

Technical news

• A new preference named "Enable limited width mode" has been added to the Vector 2022 skin. The preference is also shown as a toggle on every page if your monitor is 1600 pixels or wider. When disabled it removes the whitespace added by Vector 2022 on the left and right of the page content. Disabling this preference has the same effect as enabling the wide-vector-2022 gadget. (T319449)

Arbitration

• Eligible users are invited to vote on candidates for the Arbitration Committee until 23:59 December 12, 2022 (UTC). Candidate statements can be seen here.
• The proposed decision for the 2021-22 review of the discretionary sanctions system is open.
• The arbitration case Reversal and reinstatement of Athaenara's block has been closed.
• The arbitration case Stephen has been opened and the proposed decision is expected 1 December 2022.
• A motion has modified the procedures for contacting an admin facing Level 2 desysop.

Miscellaneous

• Tech tip: A single IPv6 connection usually has access to a "subnet" of 18 quintillion IPs. Add /64 to the end of an IP in Special:Contributions to see all of a subnet's edits, and consider blocking the whole subnet rather than an IP that may change within a minute.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:44, 1 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 1 January 2023

• News and notes: Wikimedia Foundation ousts, bans quarter of Arabic Wikipedia admins
  Plus admin update and cool tools for the new year.

• In the media: Odd bedfellows, Elon and Jimbo, reliable sources for divorces, and more
  Sometimes you need to read more than just the headlines!

• Interview: ComplexRational's RfA debrief
  Interview of ComplexRational about their recent request for adminship.

• Technology report: Wikimedia Foundation's Abstract Wikipedia project "at substantial risk of failure"
  Wikifunctions might drag it down.

• Essay: Mobile editing
  Frustrations and successes.

• Arbitration report: Arbitration Committee Election 2022
  Congratulations.

• Recent research: Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement in talk page disputes
  And other new research findings.

• Serendipity: Wikipedia about FIFA World Cup 2022: quick, factual and critical
  How Iranian press agencies help Wikipedia to reflect football in a better way.

• Featured content: Would you like to swing on a star?
  You head into the featured content report. Amongst the features you see astronauts, both Gilbert and Sullivan, Ursula K. Le Guin's incredibly talented mother, and Billboard charts. It is pitch black, you are likely to be eaten by a grue.

• Traffic report: Football, football, football! Wikipedia Football Club!
  It is mostly about football!

• CommonsComix: #4: The Course of WikiEmpire
  In which a couple sentences of text recontextualises an image.

• From the archives: Five, ten, and fifteen years ago
  Photographers, Sandy Hook, the shocking use of Nazi symbols in articles about Nazis, and "You wouldn't recognise a fact if it bit you in the ass".

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:46, 1 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Admin newsletter – January 2023

News and updates for administrators the past month ( 2022).

Administrator changes

• ComplexRational
• Extraordinary Writ

Stephen

• Andrew Yong
• Dbenbenn
• DESiegel
• GlassCobra
• Joe Decker
• Nancy
• Pathoschild
• StuffOfInterest
• William Pietri
• Wwwwolf
• Xdamr

Interface administrator changes

Nihiltres

CheckUser changes

Moneytrees

• Ivanvector
• SilkTork

Oversighter changes

• GeneralNotability
• Moneytrees

• Guerillero
• SilkTork

Guideline and policy news

• Speedy deletion criterion A5 (transwikied articles) has been repealed following an unopposed proposal.

Arbitration

• Following the 2022 Arbitration Committee elections, the following editors have been appointed to the Arbitration Committee: Barkeep49, CaptainEek, GeneralNotability, Guerillero, L235, Moneytrees, Primefac, SilkTork.
• The 2021-22 Discretionary Sanctions Review has concluded with many changes to the discretionary sanctions procedure including a change of the name to "contentious topics". The changes are being implemented over the coming month.
• The arbitration case Stephen has been closed.

Miscellaneous

• Voting for the Sound Logo has closed and the winner is expected to be announced February to April 2023.
• Tech tip: You can view information about IP addresses in a centralised location using bullseye which won the Newcomer award in the recent Coolest Tool Awards.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:09, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 16 January 2023

• From the team: We heard zoomers liked fortnights: the biweekly Signpost rides again
  It's not just a phase! Well, maybe it is.

• Special report: Coverage of 2022 bans reveals editors serving long sentences in Saudi Arabia since 2020
  Long-time contributors imprisoned for 32 and 8 years after "swaying public opinion" and "violating public morals".

• News and notes: Revised Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines up for vote, WMF counsel departs, generative models under discussion
  UCoC draws nearer, alongside the rise of the machines, in mainspace this time.

• In the media: Court orders user data in libel case, Saudi Wikipedia in the crosshairs, Larry Sanger at it again
  Wikipedia's birthday, a cute dog, and nipplefruit.

• Technology report: View it! A new tool for image discovery
  The depths of Commons, at your fingertips. Or eyetips.

• In focus: Busting into Grand Central
  Debunking widely-told myths about New York's grandest and centralest railway station.

• Serendipity: How I bought part of Wikipedia – for less than $100
  The economics of Wikipedia.

• Gallery: What is our responsibility when it comes to images?
  When notability conflicts with what it might be used for.

• Humour: New geologically speedy deletion criteria introduced
  7,000,000-year Landmasses for Subduction discussions considered "too long".

• Opinion: Good old days, in which fifth-symbol-lacking lipograms roam'd our librarious litany
  Allow us to bring you back, back, back, to days of Wikifun rampant.

• Featured content: Flip your lid
  ...and your ambigram. Also: Boring lava fields, birds of Tuvalu, and commelinid family names with etymologies.

• Traffic report: The most viewed articles of 2022
  War, sports, and all types of chaos.

• From the archives: Five, ten, and fifteen years ago
  The editor with five million edits, the death of Aaron Swartz, and rollback.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:14, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Books & Bytes – Issue 54

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 54, November – December 2022

• New collections:
  • British Newspaper Archive
  • Findmypast
  • University of Michigan Press
  • ACLS
  • Duke University Press
• 1Lib1Ref 2023
• Spotlight: EDS Refine Results

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --14:15, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – February 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2023).

Administrator changes Gimmetrow Bjelleklang Bob the Wikipedian Leithp WhisperToMe 100 inactive admins

CheckUser changes BDD Bradv Donald Albury Maxim MusikAnimal Oversighter changes BDD Bradv Donald Albury Maxim

Guideline and policy news

• Following an RfC, the administrator policy now requires that prior written consent be gained from the Arbitration Committee to mark a block as only appealable to the committee.
• Following a community discussion, consensus has been found to impose the extended-confirmed restriction over the topic areas of Armenia and Azerbaijan and Kurds and Kurdistan.

Technical news

• The Vector 2022 skin has become the default for desktop users of the English Wikipedia.

Arbitration

• The arbitration case Armenia-Azerbaijan 3 has been opened and the proposed decision is expected 24 February 2023.
• In December, the contentious topics procedure was adopted which replaces the former discretionary sanctions system. The contentious topics procedure is now in effect following an initial implementation period. There is a detailed summary of the changes and administrator instructions for the new procedure. The arbitration clerk team are taking suggestions, concerns, and unresolved questions about this new system at their noticeboard.

Miscellaneous

• Voting in the 2023 Steward elections will begin on 05 February 2023, 21:00 (UTC) and end on 26 February 2023, 21:00 (UTC). The confirmation process of current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.
• Voting in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey will begin on 10 February 2023 and end on 24 February 2023. You can submit, discuss and revise proposals until 6 February 2023.
• Tech tip: Syntax highlighting is available in both the 2011 and 2017 Wikitext editors. It can help make editing paragraphs with many references or complicated templates easier.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:38, 2 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 4 February 2023

• From the editor: New for the Signpost: Author pages, tag pages, and a decent article search function
  Last issue's vow for "something to show for these efforts" revisited.

• News and notes: Foundation update on fundraising, new page patrol, Tides, and Wikipedia blocked in Pakistan
  As well as the continued rise of the machines, and Amanda Keton's WMF departure.

• Section 230: Twenty-six words that created the internet, and the future of an encyclopedia
  Section 230 before the Supreme Court in two cases, with broad implications for the web.

• Disinformation report: Wikipedia on Santos
  Or Santos on Wikipedia?

• Special report: Legal status of Wikimedia projects "unclear" under potential European legislation
  WMF issues salvo in latest battles of the Posting Wars

• In the media: Furor over new Wikipedia skin, followup on Saudi bans, and legislative debate
  The good, the bad, and the ugly.

• Op-Ed: Estonian businessman and political donor brings lawsuit against head of national Wikimedia chapter
  Isamaa party sponsor Parvel Pruunsild files claim in Tartu County Court against WMEE head Ivo Kruusamägi and Reform Party politicians.

• Opinion: Study examines cultural leanings of Wikimedia projects' visual art coverage
  English Wikipedia among most "global" and Thai Wikipedia's among most "Western", but non-Western works neglected overall.

• Recent research: Wikipedia's "moderate yet systematic" liberal citation bias
  And other new research publications.

• WikiProject report: WikiProject Organized Labour
  An interview with those who pitch in together

• Tips and tricks: XTools: Data analytics for your list of created articles
  Letting you find out about yourself (and others).

• Featured content: 20,000 Featureds under the Sea
  An exceptionally good period for featured articles.

• Traffic report: Films, deaths and ChatGPT
  Can we have a chat?

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:45, 4 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 20 February 2023

• News and notes: Terms of Use update, Steward elections, and Wikipedia back in Pakistan
  UCoC Enforcement Guidelines pass, Wikimedia Enterprise financials, GPTs gone wild, and a speedy deletion criterion removed.

• In the media: Arbitrators open case after article alleges Wikipedia "intentionally distorts" Holocaust coverage
  Also: Russ Baker's BLP, the digital commons, the NSA, and more on Pakistan.

• Disinformation report: The "largest con in corporate history"?
  Gautam Adani and his companies possibly behind scheme featuring scores of socks, infiltration of articles for creation process.

• Essay: Machine-written articles: a new challenge for Wikipedia
  GPT: friend or foe?

• Tips and tricks: All about writing at DYK
  Your one-stop hooker's handbook.

• Featured content: Eden, lost.
  But much else to be found.

• Gallery: Love is in the air
  Lovey-dovey stuff for Valentine's.

• Traffic report: Superbowl? Pfft. Give me some Bollywood! Yours sincerely, the world
  And maybe a side of AI.

• From the archives: 5, 10, and 15 years ago: Let's (not) delete the Main Page!
  Also: let's delete images of Muhammed! Let's delete portals!

• Cobwebs: Editorial: The loss of the moral high ground
  Yesterday's controversies, reported on today.

• Humour: The RfA Candidate's Song
  A musical interlude.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:03, 20 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – March 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2023).

Administrator changes The Wordsmith Fuhghettaboutit Spinningspark (deceased)

CheckUser changes Callanecc Oversighter changes Callanecc

Guideline and policy news

• Following a request for comment, F10 (useless non-media files) has been deprecated.
• Following a request for comment, the Portal CSD criteria (P1 (portal subject to CSD as an article) and P2 (underpopulated portal)) have been deprecated.
• A request for comment is open to discuss making the closing instructions for the requested moves process a guideline.

Technical news

• The results of the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey have been posted.

Arbitration

• Remedy 11 ("Request for Comment") of the Conduct in deletion-related editing case has been rescinded.
• The proposed decision for the Armenia-Azerbaijan 3 case is expected 7 March 2023.
• A case related to the Holocaust in Poland is expected to be opened soon.

Miscellaneous

• The 2023 appointees for the Ombuds commission are AGK, Ameisenigel, Bennylin, Daniuu, Emufarmers, Faendalimas, JJMC89, MdsShakil, Minorax and Renvoy as regular members and Zabe as advisory members.
• Following the 2023 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: Mykola7, Superpes15, and Xaosflux.
• The Terms of Use update cycle has started, which includes a [p]roposal for better addressing undisclosed paid editing. Feedback is being accepted until 24 April 2023.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:19, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 9 March 2023

• News and notes: What's going on with the Wikimedia Endowment?
  A lack of transparency.

• Technology report: Second flight of the Soviet space bears: Testing ChatGPT's accuracy
  Using failed AI Galactica's worst mistakes to test a new AI.

• In the media: What should Wikipedia do? Publish Russian propaganda? Be less woke? Cover the Holocaust in Poland differently?
  Probable answers: No, no, maybe?

• Featured content: In which over two-thirds of the featured articles section needs to be copied over to WikiProject Military History's newsletter
  Seriously, even the chef has a major military history connection.

• Recent research: "Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the Holocaust" in Poland and "self-focus bias" in coverage of global events
  And other new research publications.

• From the archives: Five, ten, and fifteen years ago
  Wikizine, Wikipedia Zero, Single User Login, and Wales allegedly editing his girlfriend's article.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:42, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Books & Bytes – Issue 55

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 55, January – February 2023

• New bundle partners:
  • Newspapers.com
  • Fold3
• 1Lib1Ref January report
• Spotlight: EDS SmartText Searching

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --12:46, 16 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 20 March 2023

• News and notes: Wikimania submissions deadline looms, Russian government after our lucky charms, AI woes nix CNET from RS slate
  Be part of the Wikimania 2023 program!

• Eyewitness: Three more stories from Ukrainian Wikimedians
  One year in: volunteering, science, art, and candlelight.

• In the media: Paid editing, plagiarism payouts, proponents of a ploy, and people peeved at perceived preferences
  Everything is broken, again.

• Featured content: Way too many featured articles
  Seriously, it's only a fortnight's worth!

• Interview: 228/2/1: the inside scoop on Aoidh's RfA
  An interview with Wikipedia's newest admin.

• Traffic report: Who died? Who won? Who lost?
  All the pop culture that's fit to print, with a sprinkling of cocaine (bear).

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:17, 20 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 03 April 2023

• From the editor: Some long-overdue retractions
  Errata regretted.

• News and notes: Sounding out, a universal code of conduct, and dealing with AI
  Skynet believed to be in violation of the new Universal Code of Conduct.

• In the media: Twiddling Wikipedia during an online contest, and other news
  Taking the phrase "gaming the system" to the next level.

• Arbitration report: "World War II and the history of Jews in Poland" case is ongoing
  Desysop case request still in accept/decline phase.

• Featured content: Hail, poetry! Thou heav'n-born maid
  Thou gildest e'en the Signpost's trade.

• Recent research: Language bias: Wikipedia captures at least the "silhouette of the elephant", unlike ChatGPT
  And a dataset of article revisions to provide a corpus for promotional content.

• From the archives: April Fools' through the ages
  A retrospective of the best and worst pranks.

• Disinformation report: Sus socks support suits, seems systemic
  Do important banks sock? Maybe – but don't grab your money and run just yet!

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:46, 3 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – April 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2023).

Administrator changes Aoidh KillerChihuahua

CheckUser changes Ferret

Guideline and policy news

• A community RfC is open to discuss whether reports primarily involving gender-related disputes or controversies should be referred to the Arbitration enforcement noticeboard.

Technical news

• Some older web browsers will not be able to use JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis starting this week. This mainly affects users of Internet Explorer 11. (T178356)
• The rollback of Vector 2022 RfC has found no consensus to rollback to Vector legacy, but has found rough consensus to disable "limited width" mode by default.
• A link to the user's Special:CentralAuth page will now appear in the subtitle links shown on Special:Contributions. This was voted #17 in the Community Wishlist Survey 2023.

Arbitration

• The Armenia-Azerbaijan 3 case has been closed.
• A case about World War II and the history of Jews in Poland has been opened, with the first evidence phase closing 6 April 2023.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:11, 4 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 26 April 2023

• News and notes: Staff departures at Wikimedia Foundation, Jimbo hands in the bits, and graphs' zeppelin burns
  Plus: Wikipedians get own Mastodon account, and Wikiprojects move to uniform quality assessment.

• In the media: Contested truth claims in Wikipedia
  Covering Russia, Poland, the Vatican, the U.S., and the "perilously thin" boundary between real life and Wikipedia.

• Obituary: Remembering David "DGG" Goodman
  The prolific editor, former Arbitration Committee member and co-founder of Wikimedia New York City died in April.

• Arbitration report: Holocaust in Poland, Jimbo in the hot seat, and a desysopping
  No news is good news, and this isn't no news.

• Opinion: What Jimbo's question revealed about scamming
  The problem we haven't solved.

• Op-Ed: Wikipedia as an anchor of truth
  Can Wikipedia help keep AI agents honest?

• Special report: Signpost statistics between years 2005 and 2022
  In this article, we will look at The Signpost statistics. More precisely: Signpost article statistics by year, TOP 20 titles of Signpost articles, TOP 20 article authors, and the home wikis of article authors.

• News from the WMF: Collective planning with the Wikimedia Foundation
  First of a two part series summarising the priorities for the Wikimedia Foundation's next fiscal year (July 2022–June 2023) including staffing, budget and other changes, and how to provide your feedback.

• Featured content: In which we described the featured articles in rhyme again
  And somehow made it more readable than when it's not rhyming.

• From the archives: April Fools' through the ages, part two
  2011 and on.

• Humour: The law of hats
  The Selfish Hatnote, the Disambiguation Singularity, and other information-theoretic conundra of encyclopedic note.

• Traffic report: Long live machine, the future supreme
  Wrestling bumps world-changing technology from the #1 spot, imagine that.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:17, 26 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – May 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2023).

Administrator changes Spicy Ale jrb Dbachmann DGG (deceased) Jimbo Wales

CheckUser changes Jimbo Wales Oversighter changes Jimbo Wales

Guideline and policy news

• A request for comment about removing administrative privileges in specified situations is open for feedback.

Technical news

• Progress has started on the Page Triage improvement project. This is to address the concerns raised by the community in their 2022 WMF letter that requested improvements be made to the tool.

Arbitration

• The proposed decision in the World War II and the history of Jews in Poland case is expected 11 May 2023.

Miscellaneous

• The Wikimedia Foundation annual plan 2023-2024 draft is open for comment and input through May 19. The final plan will be published in July 2023.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:23, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 8 May 2023

• News and notes: New legal "deVLOPments" in the EU
  ... and at WP:Mastodon.

• In the media: Vivek's smelly socks, online safety, and politics
  Fake fines, false alarms and faux headlines!

• Recent research: Gender, race and notability in deletion discussions
  And other new research publications.

• Featured content: I wrote a poem for each article, I found rhymes for all the lists; My first featured picture of this year now finally exists!
  ...Layout lovers will hate this featured content's title.

• Arbitration report: "World War II and the history of Jews in Poland" approaches conclusion
  There will likely be more to say next issue.

• News from the WMF: Planning together with the Wikimedia Foundation
  The second article in a series describing the priorities and work of the Wikimedia Foundation. The article invites Wikimedians to collaborate with the Foundation.

• Special report: There Shall Be Seasons Refreshing – Stories from WikiConference India 2023
  First national-level conference in the Indian subcontinent in seven years.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:25, 8 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 22 May 2023

• News and notes: Golden parachutes: Record severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
  ... and a referendum on Jimmy Wales' traditional role as a final court of appeal in arbitration policy.

• In the media: History, propaganda and censorship
  Opposing scholars on ArbCom case.

• Arbitration report: Final decision in "World War II and the history of Jews in Poland"
  Includes stronger sourcing restriction, and a nod to the UCoC.

• Recent research: Create or curate, cooperate or compete? Game theory for Wikipedia editors
  And other new research results.

• Featured content: A very musical week for featured articles
  Bird is the word for featured pictures.

• Traffic report: Coronation, chatbot, celebs
  Celebs and Bollywood film dominated reader interest, as usual, but with a new persistent presence on the lists of a certain AI.

• WikiProject report: Wikipedians Convene for Queering Wikipedia 2023: The First International LGBT+ Wikipedia Conference
  An online conference with 12 distributed trans-local in-person meetup "Nodes" on 5 continents.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:40, 22 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Books & Bytes – Issue 56

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 56, March – April 2023

• New partner:
  • Perlego
• Library access tips and tricks
• Spotlight: EveryBookItsReader

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --10:04, 24 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 5 June 2023

• News and notes: WMRU director forks new 'pedia, birds flap in top '22 piccy, WMF weighs in on Indian gov's map axe plea
  Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee Building Committee Commences Command By Convening.

• In the media: Section 230 stands tall, WP vs. UK bill, Miss Information dissed again
  Also: Goog gets delist ask for en-wp yt-dl ar-ticle, wacky football fails.

• Featured content: Poetry under pressure
  Now is not this ridiculous, and is not this preposterous? A thorough-paced absurdity - explain it if you can.

• Traffic report: Celebs, controversies and a chatbot in the public eye
  Plus mortalities, and movies about mermaids.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:22, 5 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – June 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2023).

Administrator changes Ingenuity Ddstretch Prodego Resolute

CheckUser changes Courcelles

Guideline and policy news

• Following an RfC, editors indefinitely site-banned by community consensus will now have all rights, including sysop, removed.
• As a part of the Wikimedia Foundation's IP Masking project, a new policy has been created that governs the access to temporary account IP addresses. An associated FAQ has been created and individual communities can increase the requirements to view temporary account IP addresses.

Technical news

• Bot operators and tool maintainers should schedule time in the coming months to test and update their tools for the effects of IP masking. IP masking will not be deployed to any content wiki until at least October 2023 and is unlikely to be deployed to the English Wikipedia until some time in 2024.

Arbitration

• The arbitration case World War II and the history of Jews in Poland has been closed. The topic area of Polish history during World War II (1933-1945) and the history of Jews in Poland is subject to a "reliable source consensus-required" contentious topic restriction.

Miscellaneous

• Following a community referendum, the arbitration policy has been modified to remove the ability for users to appeal remedies to Jimbo Wales.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:33, 5 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 19 June 2023

• News and notes: WMF Terms of Use now in force, new Creative Commons licensing
  Problems with emergency emails sent to WMF.

• In the media: English WP editor glocked after BLP row on Italian 'pedia
  ... and an AI writer explains why he just bought a paper encyc.

• Featured content: Content, featured
  Poetry still present.

• Recent research: Hoaxers prefer currently-popular topics
  And other new research findings.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:10, 19 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – July 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2023).

Administrator changes

Novem Linguae

• Deckiller
• Electionworld
• MBisanz
• Penwhale
• Raul654
• Roadrunner
• Viridae
• Yannismarou

Bureaucrat changes

MBisanz

Guideline and policy news

• Contributions to the English Wikipedia are now released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0) license instead of CC BY-SA 3.0. Contributions are still also released under the GFDL license.

Technical news

• Discussion is open regarding a proposed global policy regarding third-party resources. Third-party resources are computer resources that reside outside of Wikimedia production websites.

Arbitration

• Two arbitration cases are currently open. Proposed decisions are expected 5 July 2023 for the Scottywong case and 9 July 2023 for the AlisonW case.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:58, 1 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 3 July 2023

• News and notes: Online Safety Bill: Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia UK launch open letter
  ... and a new Elections Committee.

• Disinformation report: Imploded submersible outfit foiled trying to sing own praises on Wikipedia
  A few editors who fought many times to keep advertisements out.

• In the media: Journo proposes mass Wiki dox, sponsored articles on Fandom, Section 230 discussed
  Are you now, or have you ever been, a Wikipedia editor?

• Featured content: Incensed
  In which featured pictures have a pleasing orange/blue colour scheme for some reason.

• Traffic report: Are you afraid of spiders? Arnold? The Idol? ChatGPT?
  Don't worry, they are mostly harmless.

• Humour: United Nations dispatches peacekeeping force to Wikipedia policy discussions
  Mission to ensure stability in conflict-ridden area.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:15, 3 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 17 July 2023

• News and notes: Big bux hidden beneath wine-dark sea as we wait for the Tides to go out?
  Gitz666 unglocked, Wikimania scholarships given and a new admin anointed.

• In the media: Tentacles of Emirates plot attempt to ensnare Wikipedia
  Ruwiki on the Ruinternet, Rauwerda on TEDx, and Jimbo on Fridman.

• Obituary: David Thomsen (Dthomsen8) and Ingo Koll (Kipala)
  Philadelphians and Tanzanians say goodbye.

• News from the WMF: ABC for Fundraising: Advancing Banner Collaboration for fundraising campaigns
  The collaboration process for the 2023 English fundraising campaign is kicking off now, right from the start of the fiscal year.

• In focus: Are the children of celebrities over-represented in French cinema?
  Wikidata queries investigate nepo babies.

• Tips and tricks: What automation can do for you (and your WikiProject)
  A summary of various tools designed over the years.

• Recent research: Wikipedia-grounded chatbot "outperforms all baselines" on factual accuracy
  And various other research on large language models and Wikipedia.

• Humour: New fringe theories to be introduced
  Bold move intended to "get some variety" into Wikipedia arguments.

• Cobwebs: If you're reading this, you're probably on a desktop
  The annual report that tries to understand the Signpost through data, written in 2020, which never saw the light of day until now.

• Featured content: Scrollin', scrollin', scrollin', keep those readers scrollin', got to keep on scrollin', Rawhide!
  In which choices have been made™.

• Traffic report: The Idol becomes the Master
  Sex, drugs and violence, English, math and science.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:01, 17 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Books & Bytes – Issue 57

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 57, May – June 2023

• Suggestion improvements
• Favorite collections tips
• Spotlight: Promoting Nigerian Books and Authors

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --11:22, 18 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 1 August 2023

• News and notes: City officials attempt to doxx Wikipedians, Ruwiki founder banned, WMF launches Mastodon server
  And French gov't proposes legislation to slam Wikipedia, others.

• In the media: Truth, AI, bull from politicians, and climate change
  Or just another brouhaha?

• Disinformation report: Hot climate, hot hit, hot money, hot news hot off the presses!
  Hot damn, it's damned hot!

• Obituary: Donald Cram, Peter McCawley, and Eagleash
  Three editors have departed.

• Tips and tricks: Citation tools for dummies!
  You don't really want to do this stuff by yourself, do you?

• Humour: Does Wikipedia present neutral perspectives?
  A serious visual investigation.

• In focus: Journals cited by Wikipedia
  A compilation of over 3M citations.

• Opinion: Are global bans the last step?
  Possible solutions after being re-harassed.

• Featured content: Featured Content, 1 to 15 July
  Due to unfortunate events, this issue is published as is, in its unfinished state.

• Traffic report: Come on Oppie, let's go party
  Oppenheimer, Barbie, and a couple other scandals.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:38, 1 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – August 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2023).

Administrator changes

Firefangledfeathers

• AlisonW
• Amberrock
• Closedmouth
• Scottywong

Interface administrator changes

Novem Linguae

Technical news

• The tag filter on Special:NewPages and revision history pages can now be inverted. This allows hiding edits made by automated tools. (T334338)
• Special:BlockedExternalDomains is a new tool that allows easier blocking of plain domains (and their subdomains). This is more easily searchable and is faster for the software to use than the existing MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. It does not support regex (for complex cases), URL path-matching, or the MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist. (T337431)

Arbitration

• The arbitration cases named Scottywong and AlisonW closed 10 July and 16 July respectively.
• The SmallCat dispute arbitration case is in the workshop phase.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:54, 8 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 15 August 2023

• News and notes: Dude, Where's My Donations? Wikimedia Foundation announces another million in grants for non-Wikimedia-related projects
  Jimbo promises more transparency, Wikimania in Singapore, move away from Tides still planned, and Wikifunctions rolls out.

• In the media: An accusation of bias from Brazil, a lawsuit from Portugal, plagiarism from Florida
  Harsh words from problematic fave Glenn Greenwald.

• In focus: 2023 Good Article Nomination drive is underway: get your barnstars here!
  Rigorous Review of Content for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Wikipedia.

• Special report: Thirteen years later, why are most administrators still from 2005?
  Damn kids need to get off our lawn and onto RfA.

• Tips and tricks: How to find images for your articles, check their copyright, upload them, and restore them
  Because one gets some secondary skills when one has 645 featured pictures.

• Cobwebs: Getting serious about writing
  The innards of the Signpost received a major overhaul in March/April 2019. Here's how we reduced behind-the-scenes busywork and improved writers resources.

• Opinion: Copyright trolls, or the last beautiful free souls on this planet?
  For whom does the Creative Commons enforcement clause toll?

• Serendipity: Why I stopped taking photographs almost altogether
  An announcement of 335,000 new images on Wikimedia Commons.

• Featured content: Barbenheimer confirmed
  Some improvement on last week.

• Humour: Arbitration Committee to accept case against Right Honorable Frimbley Cantingham, 15th Viscount Bellington-upon-Porkshire
  Case request cited misuse of tools by administrator who last used tools in 1661.

• Traffic report: 'Cause today it just goes with the fashion
  Barbenheimer, Pee-Wee Herman and the Women's World Cup.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:17, 15 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 31 August 2023

• From the editor: Beta version of signpost.news now online
  News for the editoriat. Stuff that matters.

• News and notes: You like RecentChanges?
  Wikipedia really comes into its own, editorially and artistically.

• In the media: Taking it sleazy
  "Poli", which means "many", and "tics", which means "under-the-table Wikipedia article whitewashing campaigns".

• Recent research: The five barriers that impede "stitching" collaboration between Commons and Wikipedia
  And other recent research publications.

• Draftspace: Bad Jokes and Other Draftspace Novelties
  The good, the bad, and the nonsense.

• Humour: The Dehumourification Plan
  A message from the Counter-Fun Unit.

• Traffic report: Raise your drinking glass, here's to yesterday
  I just poured HOT GRITS down my pants ohh yeah

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:44, 31 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – September 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2023).

Administrator changes Pppery Theleekycauldron Dwheeler G.A.S Royalbroil Ssd

CheckUser changes Bradv Oversighter changes Bradv

Guideline and policy news

• Following an RfC, TFAs will be automatically semi-protected the day before it is on the main page and through the day after.
• A discussion at WP:VPP about revision deletion and oversight for dead names found that [s]ysops can choose to use revdel if, in their view, it's the right tool for this situation, and they need not default to oversight. But oversight could well be right where there's a particularly high risk to the person. Use your judgment.

Technical news

• Special:Contributions now shows the user's local edit count and the account's creation date. (T324166)

Arbitration

• The SmallCat dispute case has closed. As part of the final decision, editors participating in XfD have been reminded to be careful about forming local consensus which may or may not reflect the broader community consensus. Regular closers of XfD forums were also encouraged to note when broader community discussion, or changes to policies and guidelines, would be helpful.

Miscellaneous

• Tech tip: The "Browse history interactively" banner shown at the top of Special:Diff can be used to easily look through a history, assemble composite diffs, or find out what archive something wound up in.

---

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:22, 1 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Books & Bytes – Issue 58

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 58, July – August 2023

• New partners - De Standaard and Duncker & Humblot
• Tech tip: Filters
• Wikimania presentation

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --14:27, 12 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 16 September 2023

• News and notes: Wikimedia power sharing – just an advisory role for the volunteer community?
  Plus: Africa news, funding report, U4C draft, roads fork and another ChatGPT block.

• In the media: "Just flirting", going Dutch and Shapps for the defence?
  Plus a new judge, an "unimportant" record, and staying in the swim!

• Obituary: Nosebagbear
  A Wikipedian and a friend.

• Serendipity: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no paywall, for thou, Wikipedia Library, art with me
  Non-flammable, BPA-free, and really whips the llama's ass.

• Featured content: Catching up
  Covering all of August. Pretty much.

• Concept: Strange portal opened by CERN researchers brings Wikipedia articles from "other worlds"
  The Signpost brings you the latest from the source.

• Traffic report: Some of it's magic, some of it's tragic
  Sports, film and singers. We've got it all!

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:37, 16 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 3 October 2023

• News and notes: Wikimedia Endowment financial statement published
  Finances during Tides Foundation management of the endowment are shown for the first time.

• In the media: History is written by whoever can harness the most editors
  Plus Harvard, Yale, Lords and Commons, partners and trolls!

• Recent research: Readers prefer ChatGPT over Wikipedia; concerns about limiting "anyone can edit" principle "may be overstated"
  And other new research publications

• Featured content: By your logic,
  The first issue to feature two poetry article

• Concept: Wikipedia policies from other worlds: WP:NOANTLERS
  Material must be written with the greatest care and attention; the level of detail and commentary regarding the antlers of living persons is to be kept to a minimum.

• Poetry: "The Sight"
  Tamzin reflects on the hunt.

• Traffic report: There shall be no slaves in the land of lands, it's a Bollywood jam
  Taylor Swift with an NFL tight end and Lauren Boebert with a Democrat?

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:31, 3 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 23 October 2023

• News and notes: Where have all the administrators gone?
  Long time passing

• In the media: Thirst traps, the fastest loading sites on the web, and the original collaborative writing
  Also: High fives, Wikipedia as a guide for counterfeiters and crossword makers, and Iskander at the UN.

• Gallery: Before and After: Why you don't need to know how to restore images to make massive improvements
  The benefits of research.

• Featured content: Yo, ho! Blow the man down!
  These titles never make much sense even at the best of times, so why not be random?

• Traffic report: The calm and the storm
  They are still fighting.

• News from Diff: Sawtpedia: Giving a Voice to Wikipedia Using QR Codes
  Sounds good!

• Humour: New citation template introduced for divine revelations, drug use, and really thinking about it
  "Cite altered state" to join the distinguished ranks of CS1 templates

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:01, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 6 November 2023

• Arbitration report: Admin bewilderingly unmasks self as sockpuppet of other admin who was extremely banned in 2015
  "Is this an ArbCom case request or an M. Night Shyamalan movie?"

• In the media: UK shadow chancellor accused of ripping off WP articles for book, Wikipedians accused of being dicks by a rich man
  Plus Gaza bias, Speaker Johnson, Maher, the music of websites, and antisemitism.

• News and notes: Board candidacy process posted, editors protest WMF privacy measure, sweet meetups
  And three new admins!

• Opinion: An open letter to Elon Musk
  You should learn some of our rules!

• WikiCup report: The WikiCup 2023
  The winner is...

• News from Wiki Ed: Equity lists on Wikipedia
  Do you ever wonder where Wikipedia articles come from?

• Recent research: How English Wikipedia drove out fringe editors over two decades
  And other new research findings.

• Featured content: Like putting a golf course in a historic site.
  Only literally.

• Wikidata: Evaluating qualitative systemic bias in large article sets on Wikipedia
  A systematic approach.

• Traffic report: Cricket jumpscare
  Plus Kollywood, Killers of the Flower Moon, and ongoing war.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:44, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – November 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2023).

Administrator changes

0xDeadbeef

Tamzin

Dennis Brown

Interface administrator changes

Pppery

• Ragesoss
• TheresNoTime

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

• The WMF is working on making it possible for administrators to edit MediaWiki configuration directly. This is similar to previous work on Special:EditGrowthConfig. A technical RfC is running until November 08, where you can provide feedback.
• There is a proposed plan for re-enabling the Graph Extension. Feedback on this proposal is requested.

Arbitration

• Eligible editors are invited to self-nominate themselves from 12 November 2023 until 21 November 2023 to stand in the 2023 Arbitration Committee elections.
• Xaosflux, RoySmith and Cyberpower678 have been appointed to the Electoral Commission for the 2023 Arbitration Committee Elections. BusterD is the reserve commissioner.
• Following a motion, the contentious topic designation of Prem Rawat has been struck. Actions previously taken using this contentious topic designation are still in force.
• Following several motions, multiple topic areas are no longer designated as a contentious topic. These contentious topic designations were from the Editor conduct in e-cigs articles, Liancourt Rocks, Longevity, Medicine, September 11 conspiracy theories, and Shakespeare authorship question cases.
• Following a motion, remedies 3.1 (All related articles under 1RR whenever the dispute over naming is concerned), 6 (Stalemate resolution) and 30 (Administrative supervision) of the Macedonia 2 case have been rescinded.
• Following a motion, remedy 6 (One-revert rule) of the The Troubles case has been amended.
• An arbitration case named Industrial agriculture has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case close 8 November.

Miscellaneous

• The Articles for Creation backlog drive is happening in November 2023, with 700+ drafts pending reviews for in the last 4 months or so. In addition to the AfC participants, all administrators and New Page Patrollers can conduct reviews using the helper script, Yet Another AFC Helper Script, which can be enabled in the Gadgets settings. Sign up here to participate!

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:23, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 20 November 2023

• In the media: Propaganda and photos, lunatics and a lunar backup
  Comic-con, Media summit, and a classic!

• News and notes: Update on Wikimedia's financial health
  Plus: Sockpuppet investigators asking for help.

• Traffic report: If it bleeds, it leads
  Or if it's Indian sport or cinema.

• Recent research: Canceling disputes as the real function of ArbCom
  And other new research findings.

• Wikimania: Wikimania 2024 scholarships
  Scholarship applications for Wikimania 2024 are now open!

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:44, 20 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Books & Bytes – Issue 59

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 59, September – October 2023

• Spotlight: Introducing a repository of anti-disinformation projects
• Tech tip: Library access methods

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --16:16, 27 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom 2023 Elections voter message

Hello! Voting in the 2023 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 11 December 2023. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2023 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:28, 28 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 4 December 2023

• News and notes: Beeblebrox ejected from Arbitration Committee following posts on Wikipediocracy
  Just as his term was ending!

• In the media: Turmoil on Hebrew Wikipedia, grave dancing, Olga's impact and inspiring Bhutanese nuns
  Plus Apple Pay, fiction, registration, expulsion, and elimination!

• Disinformation report: "Wikipedia and the assault on history"
  An analysis of a literary mystery.

• In focus: Tens of thousands of freely available sources flagged
  Continuing years of efforts to improve free-to-read access.

• Comix: Bold comics for a new age
  "I think we ought to read only the kind of comics that wound or stab us. If the comic we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for?" — Franz Kafka

• Essay: I am going to die
  And so are you.

• Featured content: Real gangsters move in silence
  Quite literally, and other fascinating featured articles, pictures and lists

• Traffic report: And it's hard to watch some cricket, in the cold November Rain
  If you don't fancy the sport that occupies over 25% of the slots in these lists, there's always movies, celebrities, and political follies to fall back on – or an unusual fired-for-the-weekend CEO.

• Humour: Mandy Rice-Davies Applies
  This page in a nutshell: Whether or not someone has denied unsavory allegations — though such a denial may not merit being given equal weight in an article — a worthless shitpost should still be included.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:09, 4 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – December 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (November 2023).

Administrator changes

• Ganesha811
• JPxG

• Ajpolino
• Lourdes
• Mairi
• RockMFR
• Somno
• WilyD

Beeblebrox → Just Step Sideways

CheckUser changes

• Beeblebrox
• Opabinia regalis

Oversight changes

• Beeblebrox
• Opabinia regalis

Guideline and policy news

• Following a talk page discussion, the Administrators' accountability policy has been updated to note that while it is considered best practice for administrators to have notifications (pings) enabled, this is not mandatory. Administrators who do not use notifications are now strongly encouraged to indicate this on their user page.

Arbitration

• Following a motion, the Extended Confirmed Restriction has been amended, removing the allowance for non-extended-confirmed editors to post constructive comments on the "Talk:" namespace. Now, non-extended-confirmed editors may use the "Talk:" namespace solely to make edit requests related to articles within the topic area, provided that their actions are not disruptive.
• The Arbitration Committee has announced a call for Checkusers and Oversighters, stating that it will currently be accepting applications for CheckUser and/or Oversight permissions at any point in the year.
• Eligible users are invited to vote on candidates for the Arbitration Committee until 23:59 December 11, 2023 (UTC). Candidate statements can be seen here.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:54, 8 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 24 December 2023

• Special report: Did the Chinese Communist Party send astroturfers to sabotage a hacktivist's Wikipedia article?
  Wikipedia article histories are public records that can be easily examined, so unlike other websites, we can answer this question thoroughly.

• News and notes: The Italian Public Domain wars continue, Wikimedia RU set to dissolve, and a recap of WLM 2023
  Not the best of times for Wikipedians across the world, but there are still glimpses of hope...

• In the media: Consider the humble fork
  Forky on forky on forky, plus a strange donation scheme and other interesting bits of news.

• Discussion report: Arabic Wikipedia blackout; Wikimedians discuss SpongeBob, copyrights, and AI
  Wiki goes dark and adopts Palestine flag logo; intellectual property rumblings from the bowels of the law.

• In focus: Liquidation of Wikimedia RU
  Wikimedia Russia closes after founder is declared a "foreign agent".

• Technology report: Dark mode is coming
  No more must Wikipedia always be a lightbulb in the dark — except metaphorically of course.

• Recent research: "LLMs Know More, Hallucinate Less" with Wikidata
  And other new research publications.

• Gallery: A feast of holidays and carols
  Peace on earth, goodwill to all!

• Comix: Lollus lmaois 200C tincture
  the dilution makes it stronger.

• Crossword: when the crossword is sus
  The Signpost Crossword is a 2018 online multiplayer social deduction game that takes place in space-themed settings where players are colorful, armless cartoon astronauts.

• Traffic report: What's the big deal? I'm an animal!
  Bollywood, Hollywood, and both kinds of football to close out December.

• From the editor: A piccy iz worth OVAR 9000!!!11oneone! wordz ^_^
  The debugging will continue until performance improves.

• Apocrypha: Local editor discovered 1,380 lost subheadings in ancient Signpost scrolls. And what he found was shocking.
  Heartwarming — MUST READ — You Won't BELIEVE #4!!!!!

• Humour: Guess the joke contest
  Winner receives a special prize!

• BJAODN: Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense
  Edit summary: "Only need this page for about 30 minutes to demonstrate to a friend how easy it is to create a Wikipedia page. Then it will be deleted."

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:58, 24 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – January 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (December 2023).

Administrator changes

Clovermoss

Dennis Brown

• Julia W
• Marasmusine
• PBS

CheckUser changes

• Aoidh
• HJ Mitchell
• Sdrqaz
• Spicy
• ToBeFree
• Vanamonde93
• Z1720

Maxim

• Enterprisey
• Izno
• SilkTork

Oversighter changes

• Aoidh
• Firefly
• Sdrqaz
• ToBeFree
• Z1720

Maxim

• Enterprisey
• Izno
• SilkTork

Arbitration

• Following the 2023 Arbitration Committee elections, the following editors have been appointed to the Arbitration Committee: Aoidh, Cabayi, Firefly, HJ Mitchell, Maxim, Sdrqaz, ToBeFree, Z1720.
• Following a motion, the Arbitration Committee rescinded the restrictions on the page name move discussions for the two Ireland pages that were enacted in June 2009.
• The arbitration case Industrial agriculture has been closed.

Miscellaneous

• The New Pages Patrol backlog drive is happening in January 2024 to reduce the backlog of articles in the new pages feed. Currently, there is a backlog of over 13,000 unreviewed articles awaiting review. Sign up here to participate!

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:54, 1 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 10 January 2024

• From the editor: NINETEEN MORE YEARS! NINETEEN MORE YEARS!
  The Signpost can now drink beer and chant slogans in Canada. What slogans should we chant for the next nineteen years?

• Special report: Public Domain Day 2024
  Mickey & You: What can you do?

• Technology report: Wikipedia: A Multigenerational Pursuit
  A techie looks at the big questions.

• News and notes: In other news ... see ya in court!
  Let the games begin! The 2024 WikiCup is off to a strong start. With copyright enforcement, AI training and freedom of expression, it's another typical week in the wiki-sphere!

• In focus: The long road of a featured article candidate
  The first of two installments, regarding a process of many installments.

• In the media: What is plagiarism? Oklahoma Disneyland? Reaching a human being at Wikipedia?
  Watch out for those space ships!

• WikiProject report: WikiProjects Israel and Palestine
  What are the editorial processes behind covering some of the most politically polarizing and contentious topics on English Wikipedia?

• Obituary: Anthony Bradbury
  Rest in peace.

• Traffic report: The most viewed articles of 2023
  Around the world in 365 days (with many stops in India).

• Crossword: everybody gangsta till the style sheets start cascading
  The good news is that I've perfected the templates that allow other people to make actually good crosswords.

• Comix: Conflict resolution
  Getting down to brass tacks &c.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:49, 12 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Books & Bytes – Issue 60

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 60, November – December 2023

• Three new partners
• Google Scholar integration
• How to track partner suggestions

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --13:36, 24 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 31 January 2024

• News and notes: Wikipedian Osama Khalid celebrated his 30th birthday in jail
  Plus WMF child rights impact assessment, Chinese Wikipedia changes admin rules

• Opinion: Until it happens to you
  A stream of consciousness about plagiarism on Wikipedia from the perspective of a user who directly witnessed it.

• Disinformation report: How paid editors squeeze you dry
  And how you can stop them!

• In the media: Katherine Maher new NPR CEO, go check Wikipedia, race in the race
  Another wobble, more Ackman, our usual pathological optimist, and football in dirty pants!

• In focus: The long road of a featured article candidate, part 2
  Everything you really wanted to know about writing featured articles.

• Recent research: Croatian takeover was enabled by "lack of bureaucratic openness and rules constraining [admins]"
  And other new research publications.

• Comix: We've all got to start somewhere
  Writing a good subheading for a one-sentence joke is basically like writing an entire second joke so I'm not going to do it.

• Traffic report: DJ, gonna burn this goddamn house right down
  Job changes, death, sex, murder, suicide and a vacation!

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:14, 31 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – February 2024

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

Administrator changes

• Red-tailed hawk
• Robertsky

• Ameliorate!
• Ancheta Wis
• Anthony Bradbury (deceased)
• Cobi
• Ev
• Moondyne
• Worm That Turned

Bureaucrat changes

Worm That Turned

CheckUser changes

Wugapodes

Interface administrator changes

• Enterprisey
• Izno

Guideline and policy news

• An RfC about increasing the inactivity requirement for Interface administrators is open for feedback.

Technical news

• Pages that use the JSON contentmodel will now use tabs instead of spaces for auto-indentation. This will significantly reduce the page size. (T326065)

Arbitration

• Following a motion, the Arbitration Committee adopted a new enforcement restriction on January 4, 2024, wherein the Committee may apply the 'Reliable source consensus-required restriction' to specified topic areas.
• Community feedback is requested for a draft to replace the "Information for administrators processing requests" section at WP:AE.

Miscellaneous

• Voting in the 2024 Steward elections will begin on 06 February 2024, 14:00 (UTC) and end on 27 February 2024, 14:00 (UTC). The confirmation process of current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.
• A vote to ratify the charter for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is open till 2 February 2024, 23:59:59 (UTC) via Secure Poll. All eligible voters within the Wikimedia community have the opportunity to either support or oppose the adoption of the U4C Charter and share their reasons. The details of the voting process and voter eligibility can be found here.
• Community Tech has made some preliminary decisions about the future of the Community Wishlist Survey. In summary, they aim to develop a new, continuous intake system for community technical requests that improves prioritization, resource allocation, and communication regarding wishes. Read more
• The Unreferenced articles backlog drive is happening in February 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) 18:00, 1 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 13 February 2024

• News and notes: Wikimedia Russia director declared "foreign agent" by Russian gov; EU prepares to pile on the papers
  "the exact extent of the obligations" unclear... many such cases!

• Disinformation report: How low can the scammers go?
  Lower, trust me!

• Gallery: Before and After: Why you don't need to touch grass to dramatically improve images of flora and fauna
  Finding the right bumblebee among all the bumblebees!

• In the media: Speaking in tongues, toeing the line, and dressing the part
  The usual odd articles about Wikipedia.

• Serendipity: Is this guy the same as the one who was a Nazi?
  The hunt for Bertil Ragnar Anzén.

• Traffic report: Griselda, Nikki, Carl, Jannik and two types of football
  Plus films, Grammys and a rumble!

• Crossword: Our crossword to bear
  &c.

• Comix: Strongly
  That's more than weakly!

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:36, 13 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – March 2024

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

Administrator changes Sdkb The Night Watch East718 Isabelle Belato Mzajac Staecker Stan Shebs Sugarfish Tamzin

Bureaucrat changes SilkTork

Guideline and policy news

• Phase I of the 2024 RfA review is now open for participation. Editors are invited to review, comment on, and propose improvements to the requests for adminship process.
• Following an RfC, the inactivity requirement for the removal of the interface administrator right increased from 6 months to 12 months.

Technical news

• The mobile site history pages now use the same HTML as the desktop history pages. (T353388)

Miscellaneous

• The 2024 appointees for the Ombuds commission are だ＊ぜ, AGK, Ameisenigel, Bennylin, Daniuu, Doǵu, Emufarmers, Faendalimas, MdsShakil, Minorax, Nehaoua, Renvoy and RoySmith as members, with Vermont serving as steward-observer.
• Following the 2024 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: Ajraddatz, Albertoleoncio, EPIC, JJMC89, Johannnes89, Melos and Yahya.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:22, 1 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 2 March 2024

• News and notes: Wikimedia enters US Supreme court hearings as "the dolphin inadvertently caught in the net"
  Plus, the U4C Charter keeps planting seeds, the RfA process is set to become more sustainable, and more news from the Wikimedia ecosystem.

• Recent research: Images on Wikipedia "amplify gender bias"
  And other new findings

• In the media: The Scottish Parliament gets involved, a wikirace on live TV, and the Foundation's CTO goes on record
  Plus, naughty politicians, Federal judge not a fan, UFOs and beavers.

• Obituary: Vami_IV
  Rest in peace.

• Traffic report: Supervalentinefilmbowlday
  If you say it loud enough the views will come your way!

• WikiCup report: High-scoring WikiCup first round comes to a close
  135 battle it out; 67 advance

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:02, 2 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Books & Bytes – Issue 61

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 61, January – February 2024

• Bristol University Press and British Online Archives now available
• 1Lib1Ref results

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --16:32, 5 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 29 March 2024

• Technology report: Millions of readers still seeing broken pages as "temporary" disabling of graph extension nears its second year
  Much effort was spent drafting a movement charter about becoming "essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge". How much is spent maintaining it?

• Interview: Interview on Wikimedia Foundation fundraising and finance strategy
  Signpost interviews Wikimedia Foundation leadership on fundraising banners

• Special report: 19-page PDF accuses Wikipedia of bias against Israel, suggests editors be forced to reveal their real names, and demands a new feature allowing people to view the history of Wikipedia articles
  And does it have anything to do with the unusual decision to let a zero-edit user open an arbitration request?

• Op-Ed: Wikipedia in the age of personality-driven knowledge
  Can we compete with social media? Will aoomers forget Wikipedia?

• Recent research: "Newcomer Homepage" feature mostly fails to boost new editors
  And several papers look at climate change on Wikipedia

• News and notes: Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee Charter ratified
  WLM winners announced, Wikimania 2024, a new Wikimedia movement affiliate, and active enwp admins reach a record low.

• In the media: "For me it’s the autism": AARoad editors on the fork more traveled
  Worldwide women turned blue and controversies on Serbian & French Wikipedia.

• Traffic report: He rules over everything, on the land called planet Dune
  Let me take you to the movies.

• Humour: Letters from the editors
  The only worthwhile grievance is the one that prompts satire.

• Comix: Layout issue
  margin: 0 auto !important;

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:40, 29 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – April 2024

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

Administrator changes

• Kbdank71
• Kosack
• NrDg
• TLSuda

Guideline and policy news

• An RfC is open to convert all current and future community discretionary sanctions to (community designated) contentious topics procedure.

Technical news

• The Toolforge Grid Engine services have been shut down after the final migration process from Grid Engine to Kubernetes. (T313405)

Arbitration

• An arbitration case has been opened to look into "the intersection of managing conflict of interest editing with the harassment (outing) policy".

Miscellaneous

• Editors are invited to sign up for The Core Contest, an initiative running from April 15 to May 31, which aims to improve vital and other core articles on Wikipedia.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:48, 1 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Books & Bytes – Issue 62

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 62, March – April 2024

• IEEE and Haaretz now available
• Let's Connect Clinics about The Wikipedia Library
• Spotlight and Wikipedia Library tips

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --11:03, 23 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 25 April 2024

• In the media: Censorship and wikiwashing looming over RuWiki, edit wars over San Francisco politics, and another wikirace on live TV
  Plus, tribute songs and shout-outs outweighing vandalism and hoaxes, a dispute about the real king of the platform and other bits of news.

• News and notes: A sigh of relief for open access as Italy makes a slight U-turn on their cultural heritage reproduction law
  Plus, new updates on the privacy and research ethics whitepaper and the graphs outage situation, and an Iranian former steward is globally banned from Wikimedia projects

• WikiConference report: WikiConference North America 2023 in Toronto recap
  Outcomes of the event including newly published videos and photos, the archived conference website and program, and some attendee reflections on its significance.

• WikiProject report: WikiProject Newspapers (Not WP:NOTNEWS)
  A WikiProject report on the 📰🌍 globe's finest news source!

• Recent research: New survey of over 100,000 Wikipedia users
  And other recent research publications

• Traffic report: O.J., cricket and a three body problem
  Plus Godzilla meets Francis Scott Key!

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:49, 25 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – May 2024

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

Administrator changes

Nyttend

• JohnOwens
• Killiondude
• MelanieN
• Nihonjoe

Bureaucrat changes

Nihonjoe

CheckUser changes

Joe Roe

Oversight changes

GeneralNotability

Guideline and policy news

• Phase I of the 2024 requests for adminship review has concluded. Several proposals have passed outright and will proceed to implementation, including creating a discussion-only period (3b) and administrator elections (13) on a trial basis. Other successful proposals, such as creating a reminder of civility norms (2), will undergo further refinement in Phase II. Proposals passed on a trial basis will be discussed in Phase II, after their trials conclude. Further details on specific proposals can be found in the full report.

Technical news

• Partial action blocks are now in effect on the English Wikipedia. This means that administrators have the ability to restrict users from certain actions, including uploading files, moving pages and files, creating new pages, and sending thanks. T280531

Arbitration

• The arbitration case Conflict of interest management has been closed.

Miscellaneous

• This may be a good time to reach out to potential nominees to ask if they would consider an RfA.
• A New Pages Patrol backlog drive is happening in May 2024 to reduce the number of unreviewed articles in the new pages feed. Currently, there is a backlog of over 15,000 articles awaiting review. Sign up here to participate!
• Voting for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) election is open until 9 May 2024. Read the voting page on Meta-Wiki and cast your vote here!

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:24, 2 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 16 May 2024

• News and notes: Democracy in action: multiple elections
  WMF trustee elections, U4C results, Italian ArbCom, WMF and Endowment annual reports.

• Special report: Will the new RfA reform come to the rescue of administrators?
  We don't know yet, but there is some encouraging news, nevertheless.

• Arbitration report: Ruined temples for posterity to ponder over – arbitration from '22 to '24
  Some go out with a bang, some with a whimper, few with much of a comprehensible explanation.

• In the media: Deadnames on the French Wikipedia, and a duel between Russian wikis
  Plus, the WMF joins the Unicode Consortium, Chris Albon talks about AI tools on Wikipedia, communities address under-representation on the site.

• Op-Ed: Wikidata to split as sheer volume of information overloads infrastructure
  More queries are failing, and more frequently, so what is to be done?

• Comix: Generations
  It do be like that sometimes.

• Traffic report: Crawl out through the fallout, baby
  With cricket and some cute baby reindeer!

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:58, 16 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – June 2024

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

Administrator changes

Graham Beards

• Deskana
• Mets501
• Staxringold

Bureaucrat changes

• Deskana
• Warofdreams

Oversight changes

Dreamy Jazz

Guideline and policy news

• Phase II of the 2024 RfA review has commenced to improve and refine the proposals passed in Phase I.

Technical news

• The Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, will now correctly delete pages which were moved to another title. T43351

Arbitration

• 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.

Miscellaneous

• WikiProject Reliability's unsourced statements drive is happening in June 2024 to replace {{citation needed}} tags with references! Sign up here to participate!

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:44, 5 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 8 June 2024

• News and notes: Wikimedia Foundation publishes its Form 990 for fiscal year 2022-2023
  The Form 990, as well as highlights and FAQs, are now available for review.

• Technology report: New Page Patrol receives a much-needed software upgrade
  A new model for collaboration between the WMF and the community?

• Deletion report: The lore of Kalloor
  Hoaxes and the genesis of information.

• In the media: National cable networks get in on the action arguing about what the first sentence of a Wikipedia article ought to say
  First line, sixth paragraph, body text or unified Reich?

• News from the WMF: Progress on the plan — how the Wikimedia Foundation advanced on its Annual Plan goals during the first half of fiscal year 2023-2024
  Outlining progress against the four key goals

• Opinion: Public response to the editors of Settler Colonial Studies
  A letter.

• Recent research: ChatGPT did not kill Wikipedia, but might have reduced its growth
  And various research findings about Wikidata and knowledge graphs.

• Featured content: We didn't start the wiki
  No we didn't write it, but we tried to cite it

• Essay: No queerphobia
  An essay.

• Special report: RetractionBot is back to life!
  ... and flagging your articles with big ugly red notices! (This is a good thing.)

• Traffic report: Chimps, Eurovision, and the return of the Baby Reindeer
  Movies, deaths, elections (but no cricket).

• Comix: The Wikipediholic Family
  Some stuff's only okay in the privacy of the home.

• Humour: Wikipedia rattled by sophisticated cyberattack of schoolboy typing "balls" in infobox
  Project in shambles – "it had never occurred to us that this was possible".

• Concept: Palimpsestuous
  Hypertext.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:27, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Just wondering why you added my editor data to one of your user pages

Doug Weller talk 07:54, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Doug

Your name is on one of my talk pages serendipitously. Over the years, whenever I encounter something that is interesting and I do not have time to fully comprehend its content and such; I copy it to my talk page so I can read it later and keep track of it to see how things turned out. In one of those "save for later"' items, was from 2020 something about "left sidebars". So when I copied the post, you had commented in the conversation, your name was included. So that is why your name is on one of my talk pages. Nothing sinister. Out of curiosity, what prompted you to read my talk pages? I don't have any problem, it's ok that you did, I just want to know the back story. Osomite 🐻 (hablemos) 21:14, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Doug

PS

I did a little more research. Your name is on my talk page purposely. When I encounter an editor who is interesting I include it an section "Editor Stuff". At some point I found you interesting and want to follow (not stalk) your postings. So you are interesting and occasionally I would look at your contributions because you are interesting. If you have a concern about with this, I will wiling remove your from my interesting "Editor Stuff". Osomite 🐻 (hablemos) 21:38, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I would say that you should remove all names or better state why user names appear on your talk page. I have user names and user talk pages linked on mine too but it clearly states why they are there and generally it is because of a good encounter or something I learned from them. Had you been more concise, depending on your reasons, it may have been looked at and dismissed. As it stands right now it has become disruptive and concerning to some of the editors mentioned. Probably best to just remove. You can watchlist certain pages to keep up with subjects you are interested in. --ARoseWolf 12:59, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

ARoseWolf

About my talk page section "Interesting Editors". There is nothing sinister or nefarious about it. I am puzzled how it is has “become disruptive and concerning to some of the editors mentioned.”

The content "Interesting Editors" is the result of several years of taking note of editors that I have encountered while editing an article, or have "come across" their posting in various talk pages and various "request for" pages. These editors catch my interest because of what they write, how they write, and in many cases because they are quite humorous. These editors I wanted to follow to see what they might "create". In some cases I would want to follow an editor because I might learn something from their massive efforts in creating and editing articles. I would look in on their talk pages to "see what might be going on".

In short, I follow editors because I enjoy observing Wikipedia's sociology, culture, and editor interaction "behind the scenes". It is quite interesting.

I realize how my "Interesting Editors" section "got into the spotlight". A couple of days ago I realized that my "Stuff" talk page was quite big and cumbersome. So I realized I could create a subpage to move some sections to so I could do some talk page housekeeping and cleanup and deletions. I created "More Stuff" which was a new page which apparently the new page patrol took notice.

You say if I documented each editor with why I "follow" them it would be OK. I have looked over "Interesting Editors" and I can not recall why I have added so many editors which I was interested in following. Thinking back, I would add editors who were involved in discussing a particular subject or "request for" issue or editing wars.. And after the discussion ended, I didn't delete those editors. And as the years went by I just "added new interesting editors" to the top of the section and basically ignored and forgot about the "bottom of the list".

So that is where I am at.

What is occurring makes me weary. I have to defend myself about something that you say has “become disruptive and concerning to some of the editors mentioned.” Somehow I don’t find this surprising considering the Wikipedia culture.

ARoseWolf, I appreciate your advice. But I wonder, what exactly have I done that is wrong? What rules have I violated?

The nature of this entire episode has reaffirmed my view of the Wikipedia environment. Rather than approaching me with concerns, it was an attack (ok, pretty strong word), a confrontation. It was done with little "collegiality" (one of the pillars of Wikipedia) and was quite abrupt. It was done almost ambiguously with an editor asking why that editor's name was on my list, And then an editor claimed that I made personal attacks on editors in that section. (There are no personal attacks in my “Interesting Editors” section.) All of this was very cynical and unfriendly. In my experience, the Wikipedia environment is just another type of “social media” culture where editors, being basically anonymous, take offense easily, are rude, offensive, and fail to have any sensitivity about how they behave. It is easier to be angry than to be friendly.

I am a bit distressed that I have been confronted about this situation. As I see often in Wikipedia, a mountain is made of a molehill and it becomes a can of worms.

Yes, I have written quite a bit about this mole hill. I thought that I needed to explain my “Interesting Editors” on the record so whoever could understand what is actually what.

I fail to see any rule that indicates that what I have accumulated is prohibited. What I have done is not a threat to anyone, I have had this accumulated list for several years, I have used it, and have never used it for any nefarious purpose. It is passive. I am sorry that editors imagine that it is considered a threat to them.

I will not just delete my “Interesting Editors” section. I need it for my process to engage in the Wikipedia. I will clean it up. If that is not satisfactory, make it an issue of a “request for” or whatever.

I am sorry if I have inadvertently offended. I apologize. Osomite 🐻 (hablemos) 19:55, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I fail to see any rule that indicates that what I have accumulated is prohibited

You were given links to three rules that do just that. Viriditas (talk) 19:59, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oh my God..have I finally been accepted into....dun-dun-deeerrrrr, the Illuminati?!?! Or at least the No Homers' Club.Halbared (talk) 09:57, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Halbared

The Illuminati? Say what? Osomite 🐻 (hablemos) 21:16, 19 June 2024 (UTC

What does the Geneology tag mean in your other stuff?Halbared (talk) 22:09, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Not possible. I didn't send an invite. Chairman Doug and I have a matter of grave importance to discuss. Apparently they ran out of gummy bears as an ice cream topper in the cafeteria. --ARoseWolf 20:02, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

ARoseWolf

Your post is most puzzling. I like a good puzzle. About running out of gummy bears, that's a shame. You can never have tooo many bears.. Osomite 🐻 (hablemos) 21:19, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Osomite: It's easy for all the editors you blue-linked to find out that you blue-linked to them. I've read that section, and it sounds very much like you are criticizing editors, not just innocently keeping track of interesting discussions. Please be aware of the WP:Attack page policy. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:21, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Tryptofish: Evidently you did not read my "Interesting Editor Stuff" section very closely. I have carefully read it to see what "sounds very much like you are criticizing editors" comments I might have made in your opinion. Tryptofish, I don't see what you see. If there is a criticism, it is content that I did not originate, but copied from its source.somewhere on Wikipedia.

I would appreciate it if you would point out any criticism of editors that "I posted" in that section so I can remove them.

Out of curiosity, what prompted you chime in on this post?

Osomite 🐻 (hablemos) 22:02, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

D ;).Halbared (talk) 22:11, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I've taken time to think about it, and I've carefully read your explanations here, and then I re-read the editor stuff with your explanations in mind. I guess I can see how you have, over time, found certain discussions or editors interesting or amusing, and wanted to keep track of what you encountered. But, without a whole lot of explanation, what it looks like is that you are assembling a sort of log of editors you want to follow, along with references to administrator actions taken, to various scandals, and to situations in which various editors were criticized. Regardless of what you might have intended, it comes across as a sort of "enemies list". If I try very hard to WP:AGF, I can make a rationale for why you do not intend it that way. It's worth considering the policy at WP:Harassment#Hounding, for what it says about tracking other editors' edits, and the need "to avoid raising the suspicion that an editor's contributions are being followed to cause them distress". WP:NOTWEBHOST also puts some limitations on what you can keep in user space, just because you find it interesting. I know you said that you don't want to delete the section, but I suggest that you think seriously about doing so. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:28, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tryptofish

"it comes across as a sort of "enemies list"." Seriously? Do you realize how paranoid that sounds. To say that I have created an "enemies list" is insulting to me. What in the "Interesting Editors" section supports your supposition? You are not adhering to the Wikipedia behavioral guideline of "Assume Good Faith" WP:GOODFAITH which in part says, "Unless there is clear evidence to the contrary, assume that people who work on the project are trying to help it, not hurt it. If criticism is needed, discuss editors' actions, but avoid accusing others of harmful motives." What "action" have I taken? I would appreciate an apology for that accusation.

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar". And I point out, "Sometimes a list is just a list", Don't extrapolate the purpose of my "Interesting Editors" list with little information and a lot of imagination.

You have fabricated a current situation as well as a hypothetical future, that I am evil mastermind with some nefarious plan to do "something" that will upset the natural order of Wikipedia. The horror, the horror.

I am getting very weary of this, My list has existing for many years. In all those years, I have not harassed or confronted any editors. I don't have any of those intentions. Please quit assuming things.

If I am considered a threat in the opinion of any editor, if there are editors that remain upset after the explanations I have made, they can approach me directly and tell me what they believe and how I am an actual threat to them. Doing that will put some actual substantial evidence into this Salem Witch Trial environment (yes, that is quite a cliche and hoary trope, but it seems quit appropriate to me). I will apologize to those editors and remove their user name from my "interesting Editors" list.

At this point I consider what is happening is harassment. Please stop.

. Osomite 🐻 (hablemos) 04:14, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I know better than to assume malice but I am still thoroughly confused about why I'm on that list. Aside from the initial drama when I was briefly known as SinglePorpoiseAccount (a play on words that some people didn't find too amusing) I don't recall doing anything particularly significant here. Maybe you could add a little context? MrPorpoise (talk) 23:47, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Now that...was a good name.Halbared (talk) 23:07, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

User:Osomite/Stuff/More Stuff

Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. Your user page may not meet Wikipedia's user page guidelines. It is intended for basic information about yourself, your interests and goals as they relate to editing Wikipedia, as well as disclosures of conflicts of interest and paid editing. Although a lot of freedom is allowed in personalizing your user page, it is not:

• an encyclopedia article (and should not be styled to look like one)
• a workspace for a draft article
• a personal website, blog, or social media site
• a space for self-promotion or other advertising
• a CV, resumé or lengthy autobiography

The user page guidelines have additional information on what is and what is not considered acceptable content. Please use your user sandbox or the draft article space to practice editing or to create new articles. Thank you. Viriditas (talk) 00:24, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 4 July 2024

• News and notes: WMF board elections and fundraising updates
  Three new admins, but overall numbers still shrinking.

• Special report: Wikimedia Movement Charter ratification vote underway, new Council may surpass power of Board
  Will we weather the storm?

• In focus: How the Russian Wikipedia keeps it clean despite having just a couple dozen administrators
  Unbundling, automation, fighting spirit, and a bot named Reimu Hakurei.

• Discussion report: Wikipedians are hung up on the meaning of Madonna
  Debate unsettled after seventeen years.

• In the media: War and information in war and politics
  Advocacy organizations, a journalist, mycophobes, conservatives, leftists, photographers, and a disinformation task force imagine themselves in Wikipedia.

• Sister projects: On editing Wikisource
  A journey to a sister project.

• Obituary: Hanif Al Husaini, Salazarov, Hyacinth, and PirjanovNurlan
  Rest in peace.

• Opinion: Etika: a Pop Culture Champion
  An article about Etika's appeal and legacy in pop culture.

• Gallery: Spokane Willy's photos
  A virtual visit to the Inland Northwest.

• Op-Ed: Why you should not vote in the 2024 WMF BoT elections
  "Simply not good enough".

• Crossword: On a day of independence, beat crosswords into crossploughshares
  How well do you know the main page (no peeking)?

• Humour: A joke
  ...!

• Cobwebs: Counting to a billion — manuscripts don't burn
  Special:Diff/1 and related techno-trivia more complicated than you'd think.

• Recent research: Is Wikipedia Politically Biased? Perhaps
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• Traffic report: Talking about you and me, and the games people play
  Elections, movies, sports.

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Administrators' newsletter – July 2024

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

Administrator changes

• Elli
• HouseBlaster
• Pickersgill-Cunliffe

• Brianga
• De728631
• Georgewilliamherbert
• Hyacinth (deceased)
• ProveIt
• The Night Watch

Technical news

• Local administrators can now add new links to the bottom of the site Tools menu without using JavaScript. Documentation is available on MediaWiki. (T6086)

Miscellaneous

• The Community Wishlist is re-opening on 15 July 2024. Read more

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:59, 6 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Books & Bytes – Issue 63

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 63, May – June 2024

• One new partner
• 1Lib1Ref
• Spotlight: References check

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --12:16, 18 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 22 July 2024

• Discussion report: Internet users flock to Wikipedia to debate its image policy over Trump raised-fist photo
  Iconic photograph, invalid fair use exemption criterion #3a claimant, or both?

• News and notes: Wikimedia community votes to ratify Movement Charter; Wikimedia Foundation opposes ratification
  Establishment of power-sharing agreement between WMF corporation and volunteer user community in limbo.

• News from the WMF: Wikimedia Foundation Board resolution and vote on the proposed Movement Charter
  Natalia Tymkiv, Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, on the Charter vote results, the resolution, meeting minutes, and proposed next steps.

• Essay: Reflections on editing and obsession
  A lost Signpost submission from fifteen years ago brought into the light, as good and true now as it was then.

• In the media: What's on Putin's fork, the court's docket, and in Harrison's book?
  Failing forks, smart and well-researched stories, LGBT rights, and oral sex!

• Obituary: JamesR
  Rest in peace.

• Crossword: Vaguely bird-shaped crossword
  Do you know these Wikipedia quotes?

• Humour: Joe Biden withdraws RfA, Donald Trump selects co-nom
  Dems in disarray, GOP in chaos — analysts say news expected, but few can predict how race will shape up from here.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:31, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 14 August 2024

• In the media: Portland pol profile paid for from public purse
  A STORM over an AI that writes articles. And other notes of interest.

• Recent research: STORM: AI agents role-play as "Wikipedia editors" and "experts" to create Wikipedia-like articles, a more sophisticated effort than previous auto-generation systems
  And other findings.

• In focus: Twitter marks the spot
  Musk's Twitter acquisition and rebranding have caused long debates on Wikipedia.

• News and notes: Another Wikimania has concluded.
  And Movement Charter ratification vote comments have been published

• Special report: Nano or just nothing: Will nano go nuclear?
  Possibly paid articles.

• Opinion: HouseBlaster's RfA debriefing
  HouseBlaster's reflections on his RfA. In particular, do not ask superlative questions.

• Traffic report: Ball games, movies, elections, but nothing really weird
  Just normally weird!

• Humour: I'm proud to be a template
  Come in, you whippersnapper, have a cup of tea.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:49, 14 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:43, 2 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 4 September 2024

• News and notes: WikiCup enters final round, MCDC wraps up activities, 17-year-old hoax article unmasked
  JCW compilation now tracks free DOIs, Wiki Loves Monuments getting started, WMF's status as UN observer stymied by China for fourth time.

• In the media: AI is not playing games anymore. Is Wikipedia ready?
  Updates from the Portland pol's case, the war in Gaza, and other Wiki-related reports.

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

• News from the WMF: Meet the 12 candidates running in the WMF Board of Trustees election
  Who are they, why are they running and what are they bringing to the Board?

• Wikimania: A month after Wikimania 2024
  What all happened in Katowice?

• Serendipity: What it's like to be Wikimedian of the Year
  Hannah Clover shares her fondest memories of her first Wikimania.

• Traffic report: After the gold rush
  The Olympics (yay!) and the American election (oh no).

• Humour: Local man halfway through rude reply no longer able to recall why he hates other editor
  "I can't remember whether he is an incompetent moron, or an incorrigible POV warrior, or some other thing, but either way, to hell with him."

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Books & Bytes – Issue 64

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 64, July – August 2024

• The Hindu Group joins The Wikipedia Library
• Wikimania presentation
• New user script for easily searching The Wikipedia Library

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --16:34, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 26 September 2024

• In the media: Courts order Wikipedia to give up names of editors, legal strain anticipated from "online safety laws"
  ANI (but probably not the one you're thinking of), bias and bans, crisis and Clover, Engelhorn's euros, and will the zoomers inherit the project?

• Community view: Indian courts order Wikipedia to take down name of crime victim, editors strive towards consensus
  In response to a takedown request, Wikipedia editors reached a consensus on how to handle it appropriately.

• Serendipity: A Wikipedian at the 2024 Paralympics
  User Hawkeye7 opens up on his experience as a media representative following the Australian team at the latest Summer Paralympics in Paris.

• Opinion: asilvering's RfA debriefing
  User asilvering reflects on their recent successful request for adminship.

• News and notes: Are you ready for admin elections?
  More changes to RfA on the way in October, final results for the U4C elections revealed, and other news from the Wikimedia world.

• Gallery: Are Luddaites defending the English Wikipedia?
  Picture this: medicine, drugs, JFK, Cleopatra, anachronism, and global catastrophe.

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

• Traffic report: Jump in the line, rock your body in time
  Band reunions and Beetlejuice!

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:10, 26 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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) 16:00, 2 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 19 October 2024

• News and notes: One election's end, another election's beginning
  Find more about the new Trustees, the first election cycle for admins, and other news from the Wikimedia world.

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

• In the media: Off to the races! Wikipedia wins!
  Perplexing persistence, pay to play, potential president's possible plagiarism, crossword crossover to culture, and a wish come true!

• Contest: A WikiCup for the Global South
  Can it be fun to address systemic bias? Eighty participants say yes, it can!

• Traffic report: A scream breaks the still of the night
  Help me make it through the night!

• Book review: The Editors
  A novel about us, from the point of view of three of us.

• Humour: The Newspaper Editors
  Where do I even start?

• Crossword: Spilled Coffee Mug
  Pasta, acronyms, and one computer-crashing talk page.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:15, 19 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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) 10:21, 3 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 6 November 2024

• From the editors: Editing Wikipedia should not be a crime
  But not everybody is able to legally read Wikipedia, and not everybody is able to legally edit Wikipedia.

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

• In the media: An old scrimmage, politics and purported libel
  Plus human knowledge and Ozzie places!

• Special report: Wikipedia editors face litigation, censorship
  Asian News International, the Delhi High Court, and the encyclopedia.

• Gallery: Why you should take more photos and upload them
  Your photos are more valuable than you may realize.

• In focus: Questions and answers about the court case
  What is going on?

• Traffic report: Twisted tricks or tempting treats?
  And Tata too!

• Technology report: Wikimedia tech, the Asian News International case, and the ultra-rare BLACKLOCK
  IP address privacy tools, and mysterious archive sites.

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

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:05, 6 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Books & Bytes – Issue 65

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 65, September – October 2024

• Hindu Tamil Thisai joins The Wikipedia Library
• Frankfurt Book Fair 2024 report
• Tech tip: Mass downloads

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --12:50, 12 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 18 November 2024

• News and notes: Open letter to WMF about court case breaks one thousand signatures, big arb case declined, U4C begins accepting cases
  Many cases: many such cases.

• In the media: Summons issued for Wikipedia editors by Indian court, "Gaza genocide" RfC close in news, old admin Gwern now big AI guy, and a "spectrum of reluctance" over Australian place names
  Publisher versus intermediary, bias versus verifiability, and probing questions about Gwern's personal finances.

• Recent research: SPINACH: AI help for asking Wikidata "challenging real-world questions"
  And other recent publications.

• News from the WMF: Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Endowment audit reports: FY 2023–2024
  An overview of the finances and an explanation of what the numbers mean.

• Traffic report: Well, let us share with you our knowledge, about the electoral college
  It's so over.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:43, 18 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – December 2024

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

Administrator changes

• Ahecht
• DoubleGrazing
• Dr vulpes
• FOARP
• Peaceray
• Queen of Hearts
• Rsjaffe
• SD0001
• SilverLocust
• Sohom Datta
• ThadeusOfNazereth
• Voorts

• Ajpolino
• Fathoms Below
• Pppery
• Tamzin
• Worm That Turned

• Aervanath
• Christopher Sundita
• Dank
• Dennis Brown
• Dragons flight
• Fastily
• Graham87
• JaGa
• Kbh3rd
• Marine 69-71
• Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington
• Yamamoto Ichiro

Interface administrator changes

• SD0001
• Sohom Datta

Pppery

CheckUser changes

• Spicy
• TheresNoTime

Guideline and policy news

• Following an RFC, the policy on restoration of adminship has been updated. All former administrators may now only regain the tools following a request at the Wikipedia:Bureaucrats' noticeboard within 5 years of their most recent admin action. Previously this applied only to administrators deysopped for inactivity.
• Following a request for comment, a new speedy deletion criterion, T5, has been enacted. This applies to template subpages that are no longer used.

Technical news

• Technical volunteers can now register for the 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which will take place in Istanbul, Turkey. Application for travel and accommodation scholarships is open from November 12 to December 10, 2024.

Arbitration

• The arbitration case Yasuke (formerly titled Backlash to diversity and inclusion) has been closed.
• An arbitration case titled Palestine-Israel articles 5 has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case will close on 14 December.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:20, 3 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 12 December 2024

• News and notes: Arbitrator election concludes
  New arbs to be seated in January.

• Arbitration report: Palestine-Israel articles 5
  Will the fifth try at achieving peace be a mudfight, or something better?

• Disinformation report: Sex, power, and money revisited
  Should old acquaintance be forgot?

• Op-ed: On the backrooms
  An editor's reflection on social capital and their changing relationship with Wikipedia culture. by Tamzin

• In focus: Are Wikipedia articles representative of Western or world knowledge?
  Wikipedia aims to represent the sum of all knowledge. Is there an imbalance between Western countries and the rest of the world.

• In the media: Like the BBC, often useful but not impartial
  Ballooning British bias bombast!

• Traffic report: Something Wicked for almost everybody
  Fighting and killing – on screen, in politics, and in the ring – competes for attention with Disney.

• Opinion: Worm That Turned's reconfirmation RfA debriefing
  The importance of feedback.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:58, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 24 December 2024

• News and notes: Responsibilities and liabilities as a "Very Large Online Platform"
  What the VLOP – findings of an outside auditor for "responsibilization" of Wikipedia. Plus, new EU Commissioners for tech policy, WLE 2024 winners, and a few other bits of news from the Wikipedia world.

• Op-ed: Beeblebrox on Wikipediocracy, the Committee, and everything
  A personal essay.

• Opinion: Graham87 on being the first-ever administrator recall subject
  Explanations for what led to it and what it was like to undergo it.

• In the media: Delhi High Court considers Caravan and Ken for evaluating the ANI vs. WMF case
  Plus, the dangers of editing, Morrissey's page gets marred, COVID coverage critique, Kimchi consultation, kids' connectivity curtailed, centenarian Claudia, Christmas cramming, and more.

• From the archives: Where to draw the line in reporting?
  Who's news?

• Recent research: "Wikipedia editors are quite prosocial", but those motivated by "social image" may put quantity over quality
  And other new research findings.

• Humour: Backlash over Santa Claus' Wikipedia article intensifies
  Good faith edits REVERTED and accounts BLOCKED.

• Gallery: A feast of holidays and carols
  Peace on earth, goodwill to all!

• Traffic report: Was a long and dark December
  Wicked war, martial law, killing, death and an Indian movie with a new chess champ!

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:02, 25 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Your mention of me on your user page

Hello, I'm glad you found me and my recent Signpost article interesting enough to mention on your user page User:Osomite/Stuff/More Stuff. I found it while doing a wikisource search for markup about my Signpost page. Just one correction though: I'm not one of Wikipedia's earliest editors, by a long way ... the site was already four years old when I started! Graham87 (talk) 14:11, 29 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Graham, what can I say? What you have contributed is (what's a word for ultra amazing?), oh, it's ultra amazing. And how you have done it is also ultra amazing. Even if you weren't "one of the first", your starting is basically during the mists of the beginning--it was a long, long time ago.

Being an "old timer", you definitely qualify as someone, to me, who is quite interesting.

Part of my interest in Wikipedia is the interaction editors have with editors and the interactions that editors have with admins. I sort of study the sociology of the Wikipedia world.

Your situation with blocking editors and having the Wikipedia "powers to be" chaste you, to me, was questionable. It seems to me it was the frequently occurring Wikipedian act of ganging up to punish. I see this happening a lot. Sadly, I think that there is a culture of disfunction within Wikipedia that is very toxic and dysfunctional. The fact that editors have to continually be reminded to "not bite newbies" demonstrates that "the blame game and hypercritical opinions" is ongoing. I think this bad behaviors is sort of similar to what occurred in the Stanford prison experiment. Sometimes, people exceed the authority of their role.

I have been editing Wikipedia off and on since 2007 and I still find Wikipedia to be a monolith. I have difficulty finding information within Wikipedia. I am continually searching and searching to find references that should be obvious/easy to find. But the basic things I have to keep looking for are not obvious nor easy to find. I have to keep notes (on my stuff talk page) for things I have found in Wikipedia. Somehow I think a function should be added to Wikipedia to provide a universal search of all of the various rules and methods to allow a friendly interface into the monolith. And, since I have continuing problems with the Wikipedia environment, I was very impressed with your facility and capability in an environment I find difficult.

Thanks for your note. Osomite 🐻 (hablemos) 01:24, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

PS I find your story to be compelling (admiration in a powerfully irresistible way).Osomite 🐻 (hablemos) 22:32, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – January 2025

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

Administrator changes

Sennecaster

• Daniel
• Hog Farm

• BozMo
• Ferret
• John M Wolfson
• MaxSem
• Panyd
• Tide rolls
• Titoxd

CheckUser changes

• Daniel
• Elli
• Liz
• ScottishFinnishRadish
• Theleekycauldron

Worm That Turned

Ferret

Oversight changes

• Daniel
• Elli
• Liz
• ScottishFinnishRadish
• Theleekycauldron

Worm That Turned

Guideline and policy news

• Following an RFC, Wikipedia:Notability (species) was adopted as a subject-specific notability guideline.
• A request for comment is open to discuss whether admins should be advised to warn users rather than issue no-warning blocks to those who have posted promotional content outside of article space.

Technical news

• The Nuke feature also now provides links to the userpage of the user whose pages were deleted, and to the pages which were not selected for deletion, after page deletions are queued. This enables easier follow-up admin-actions.

Arbitration

• Following the 2024 Arbitration Committee elections, the following editors have been elected to the Arbitration Committee: CaptainEek, Daniel, Elli, KrakatoaKatie, Liz, Primefac, ScottishFinnishRadish, Theleekycauldron, Worm That Turned.

Miscellaneous

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

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:46, 5 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Books & Bytes – Issue 66

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 66, November – December 2024

• Les Jours and East View Press join the library
• Tech tip: Newspapers.com

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --17:33, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 15 January 2025

• From the editors: Looking back, looking forward
  The 20th anniversary of The Signpost.

• Traffic report: The most viewed articles of 2024
  A lot of psephology!

• In the media: Will you be targeted?
  HUMINT or humbug?

• Technology report: New Calculator template brings interactivity at last
  Hallelujah!

• Essay: Meet the Canadian who holds the longest editing streak on Wikipedia
  Johnny Au has edited for 17 years straight without missing a day.

• Opinion: Reflections one score hence
  Some thoughts from the original editor-in-chief.

• News and notes: It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me... and I'm feeling free
  Public Domain Day 2025, Women in Red hits 20% biography milestone, Spanish Wikipedia reaches two million articles, and other news from the Wikimedia world.

• Serendipity: What we've left behind, and where we want to go next
  The Signpost staff on achievements of '24 and hopes for '25.

• Op-ed: Elon Musk and the right on Wikipedia
  The latest crusade?

• In focus: Twenty years of The Signpost: What did it take?
  Our alumni speak!

• Arbitration report: Analyzing commonalities of some contentious topics
  Applying the scientific method to a model of conflict that leads to arbitration.

• Humour: How to make friends on Wikipedia
  This post fact-checked by real Wikipedian patriots.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:55, 15 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – February 2025

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

Administrator changes

• Arcticocean
• Wugapodes

Euryalus

CheckUser changes

• Firefly
• L235

Oversighter changes

• Firefly
• Guerillero
• L235
• Moneytrees

Technical news

• Administrators can now nuke pages created by a user or IP address from the last 90 days, up from the initial 30 days. T380846
• A 'Recreated' tag will now be added to pages that were created with the same title as a page which was previously deleted and it can be used as a filter in Special:RecentChanges and Special:NewPages. T56145

Arbitration

• The arbitration case Palestine-Israel articles 5 has been closed.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:28, 5 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 7 February 2025

• Recent research: GPT-4 writes better edit summaries than human Wikipedians
  But an open language model is ready to help.

• News and notes: Let's talk!
  The WMF executive team delivers a new update; plus, the latest EU policy report, good-bye to the German Wikipedia's Café, and other news from the Wikimedia world.

• Opinion: Fathoms Below, but over the moon
  Editor Fathoms Below reminisces over their successful RfA from February 2024.

• In the media: Wikipedia is an extension of legacy media propaganda, says Elon Musk
  Plus, reports on the ARBPIA5 case, new concerns over projects targeting Wikipedia editors, John Green gets his sponsor flowers, and other news.

• Community view: 24th Wikipedia Day in New York City
  Wikimedians and newbies celebrate 24 years of Wikipedia in the Brooklyn Central Library. Special guests Stephen Harrison and Clay Shirky joined in conversation.

• Arbitration report: Palestine-Israel articles 5 has closed
  Ending with some bans, and a new set of editing sanctions.

• Traffic report: A wild drive
  The start of the year was filled with a few unfortunate losses, tragic disasters, emerging tech forces and A LOT of politics.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * Sent manually via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:46, 7 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 27 February 2025

• News and notes: Administrator elections up for reapproval and 1bil GET snagged on Commons
  French Wikipedia defends a user against public threats, steward elections, and other news from the Wikimedia world.

• Serendipity: Guinea-Bissau Heritage from Commons to the World
  "The only time I ever took photos in my entire life".

• Technology report: Hear that? The wikis go silent twice a year
  From patrolling new edits to uploading photos or joining a campaign, you can count on the Wikimedia platform to be up and running — in your language, anywhere in the world. That is, except for a couple of minutes during the equinoctes.

• In the media: The end of the world
  Or just the end of Wikipedia as we know it?

• Recent research: What's known about how readers navigate Wikipedia; Italian Wikipedia hardest to read
  Of "hunters", "busybodies" and "dancers".

• Opinion: Sennecaster's RfA debriefing
  User Sennecaster shares her thoughts on her recent RfA and the aspects that might have played a role in making it successful.

• Tips and tricks: One year after this article is posted, will every single article on Wikipedia have a short description?
  What are they? Why are they important? How can we make them better? And what can you do to help?

• Community view: Open letter from French Wikipedians says "no" to intimidation of volunteer contributors
  Liberté, liberté chérie.

• Traffic report: Temporary scars, February stars
  Grammys, politics and the Super Bowl.

• Essay: The source, the whole source, and nothing but the source
  Straight from the source's mouth. A source is a source, of course, of course!

• Obituary: Ümüt Çınar (Kmoksy) and Vinícius Medina Kern (Vmkern)
  Turkish linguist wrote about languages and plants; Brazilian informaticist studied Wikimedia projects and education.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:29, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – March 2025

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

Administrator changes

• Jarry1250
• Lethe

CheckUser changes

• AmandaNP
• Drmies

Oversighter changes

AmandaNP

Guideline and policy news

• A request for comment is open to discuss whether AI-generated images (meaning those wholly created by generative AI, not human-created images modified with AI tools) should be banned from use in articles.
• A series of 22 mini-RFCs that double-checked consensus on some aspects and improved certain parts of the administrator elections process has been closed (see the summary of the changes).
• A request for comment is open to gain consensus on whether future administrator elections should be held.

Technical news

• A new filter has been added to the Special:Nuke tool, which allows administrators to filter for pages in a range of page sizes (in bytes). This allows, for example, deleting pages only of a certain size or below. T378488
• Non-administrators can now check which pages are able to be deleted using the Special:Nuke tool. T376378

Miscellaneous

• The 2025 appointees for the Ombuds commission are だ＊ぜ, Arcticocean, Ameisenigel, Emufarmers, Faendalimas, Galahad, Nehaoua, Renvoy, Revi C., RoySmith, Teles and Zafer as members, with Vermont serving as steward-observer.
• Following the 2025 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: 1234qwer1234qwer4, AramilFeraxa, Daniuu, KonstantinaG07, MdsShakil and XXBlackburnXx.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:38, 4 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Books & Bytes – Issue 67

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 67, January – February 2025

• East View Press and The Africa Report join the library
• Spotlight: Wikimedia+Libraries International Convention and WikiCredCon
• Tech tip: Suggest page

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --18:48, 19 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 22 March 2025

• From the editor: Hanami
  It's an ecstasy, my spring.

• Opinion: Talking about governments editing Wikipedia
  Let them know what you think!

• News and notes: Deeper look at takedowns targeting Wikipedia
  Read this, then forget all about it.

• In the media: The good, the bad, and the unusual
  Life on the Wiki as usual!

• Recent research: Explaining the disappointing history of Flagged Revisions; and what's the impact of ChatGPT on Wikipedia so far?
  And WMF invites multi-year research fund proposals

• Traffic report: All the world's a stage, we are merely players...
  The Oscars, politics, and death elbow for the most attention.

• Gallery: WikiPortraits rule!
  The photographers are the celebrities!

• Essay: Unusual biographical images
  And very unusual biographical images.

• Obituary: Rest in peace
  Send not to know
  For whom the bell tolls,
  It tolls for thee.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:06, 22 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-13

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

Weekly highlight

• The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking your feedback on the drafts of the objectives and key results that will shape the Foundation's Product and Technology priorities for the next fiscal year (starting in July). The objectives are broad high-level areas, and the key-results are measurable ways to track the success of their objectives. Please share your feedback on the talkpage, in any language, ideally before the end of April.

Updates for editors

• The CampaignEvents extension will be released to multiple wikis (see deployment plan for details) in April 2025, and the team has begun the process of engaging communities on the identified wikis. The extension provides tools to organize, manage, and promote collaborative activities (like events, edit-a-thons, and WikiProjects) on the wikis. The extension has three tools: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation Lists. It is currently on 13 Wikipedias, including English Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia, as well as Wikidata. Questions or requests can be directed to the extension talk page or in Phabricator (with #campaigns-product-team tag).
• Starting the week of March 31st, wikis will be able to set which user groups can view private registrants in Event Registration, as part of the CampaignEvents extension. By default, event organizers and the local wiki admins will be able to see private registrants. This is a change from the current behavior, in which only event organizers can see private registrants. Wikis can change the default setup by requesting a configuration change in Phabricator (and adding the #campaigns-product-team tag). Participants of past events can cancel their registration at any time.
• Administrators at wikis that have a customized MediaWiki:Sidebar should check that it contains an entry for the Special pages listing. If it does not, they should add it using * specialpages-url|specialpages. Wikis with a default sidebar will see the link moved from the page toolbox into the sidebar menu in April. [2]
• The Minerva skin (mobile web) combines both Notice and Alert notifications within the bell icon (). There was a long-standing bug where an indication for new notifications was only shown if you had unseen Alerts. This bug is now fixed. In the future, Minerva users will notice a counter atop the bell icon when you have 1 or more unseen Notices and/or Alerts. [3]
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• VisualEditor has introduced a new client-side hook for developers to use when integrating with the VisualEditor target lifecycle. This hook should replace the existing lifecycle-related hooks, and be more consistent between different platforms. In addition, the new hook will apply to uses of VisualEditor outside of just full article editing, allowing gadgets to interact with the editor in DiscussionTools as well. The Editing Team intends to deprecate and eventually remove the old lifecycle hooks, so any use cases that this new hook does not cover would be of interest to them and can be shared in the task.
• Developers who use the mw.Api JavaScript library, can now identify the tool using it with the userAgent parameter: var api = new mw.Api( { userAgent: 'GadgetNameHere/1.0.1' } );. If you maintain a gadget or user script, please set a user agent, because it helps with library and server maintenance and with differentiating between legitimate and illegitimate traffic. [4][5]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:39, 24 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-14

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 Editing team is working on a new Edit check: Peacock check. This check's goal is to identify non-neutral terms while a user is editing a wikipage, so that they can be informed that their edit should perhaps be changed before they publish it. This project is at the early stages, and the team is looking for communities' input: in this Phabricator task, they are gathering on-wiki policies, templates used to tag non-neutral articles, and the terms (jargon and keywords) used in edit summaries for the languages they are currently researching. You can participate by editing the table on Phabricator, commenting on the task, or directly messaging Trizek (WMF).
• Single User Login has now been updated on all wikis to move login and account creation to a central domain. This makes user login compatible with browser restrictions on cross-domain cookies, which have prevented users of some browsers from staying logged in.
• View all 35 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Starting on March 31st, the MediaWiki Interfaces team will begin a limited release of generated OpenAPI specs and a SwaggerUI-based sandbox experience for MediaWiki REST APIs. They invite developers from a limited group of non-English Wikipedia communities (Arabic, German, French, Hebrew, Interlingua, Dutch, Chinese) to review the documentation and experiment with the sandbox in their preferred language. In addition to these specific Wikipedia projects, the sandbox and OpenAPI spec will be available on the on the test wiki REST Sandbox special page for developers with English as their preferred language. During the preview period, the MediaWiki Interfaces Team also invites developers to share feedback about your experience. The preview will last for approximately 2 weeks, after which the sandbox and OpenAPI specs will be made available across all wiki projects.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• Sometimes a small, one line code change can have great significance: in this case, it means that for the first time in years we're able to run all of the stack serving maps.wikimedia.org - a host dedicated to serving our wikis and their multi-lingual maps needs - from a single core datacenter, something we test every time we perform a datacenter switchover. This is important because it means that in case one of our datacenters is affected by a catastrophe, we'll still be able to serve the site. This change is the result of extensive work by two developers on porting the last component of the maps stack over to kubernetes, where we can allocate resources more efficiently than before, thus we're able to withstand more traffic in a single datacenter. This work involved a lot of complicated steps because this software, and the software libraries it uses, required many long overdue upgrades. This type of work makes the Wikimedia infrastructure more sustainable.

Meetings and events

• MediaWiki Users and Developers Workshop Spring 2025 is happening in Sandusky, USA, and online, from 14–16 May 2025. The workshop will feature discussions around the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies in different industries and will inspire and onboard new users. Registration and presentation signup is now available at the workshop's website.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:02, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – April 2025

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

Administrator changes

• Giraffer
• Goldsztajn

Dennis Brown

• Cyclonebiskit
• Nohat
• Someguy1221

Bureaucrat changes

Barkeep49

CheckUser changes

0xDeadbeef

Oversighter changes

GB fan

Moneytrees

Miscellaneous

• Sign up for The Core Contest, a competition running from 15 April to 31 May to improve vital articles.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:46, 7 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-15

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

• From now on, interface admins and centralnotice admins are technically required to enable two-factor authentication before they can use their privileges. In the future this might be expanded to more groups with advanced user-rights. [6]
• View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• The Design System Team is preparing to release the next major version of Codex (v2.0.0) on April 29. Editors and developers who use CSS from Codex should see the 2.0 overview documentation, which includes guidance related to a few of the breaking changes such as font-size, line-height, and size-icon.
• The results of the Developer Satisfaction Survey (2025)  are now available. Thank you to all participants. These results help the Foundation decide what to work on next and to review what they recently worked on.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• The 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon will take place in Istanbul, Turkey, between 2–4 May. Registration for attending the in-person event will close on 13 April. Before registering, please note the potential need for a visa or e-visa to enter the country.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 18:50, 7 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 9 April 2025

• Special report: Wikipedian and physician Ziyad al-Sufiani reportedly released from Saudi prison
  Fellow doctor Osama Khalid remains behind bars for "violating public morals" by editing.

• In focus: WMF to explore "common standards" for NPOV policies; implications for project autonomy remain unclear
  Major changes to core content policy, or still-developing plan for new initiative?

• In the media: Indian judges demand removal of content critical of Asian News International
  Defeat, or just a setback?

• News and notes: 35,000 user accounts compromised, locked in attempted credential-stuffing attack
  Plus: 30-year anniversary of wiki software commemorated.

• Op-ed: How crawlers impact the operations of the Wikimedia projects
  Our content is free, our infrastructure is not!

• Opinion: Crawlers, hogs and gorillas
  What is to be done?

• Debriefing: Giraffer's RfA debriefing
  Advice to aspirants: "Read RfA debriefs", including this one.

• Obituary: RHaworth, TomCat4680 and PawełMM
  Rest in peace.

• Traffic report: Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho, off to report we go...
  Snow White sinking, Adolescence soaring, spacefarers stranded, this list has it all!

• News from Diff: Strengthening Wikipedia’s neutral point of view
  The Wikimedia Foundation's announcement from Diff.

• Comix: Thirteen
  Gadzooks!

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:22, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-16

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

Weekly highlight

• Later this week, the default thumbnail size will be increased from 220px to 250px. This changes how pages are shown in all wikis and has been requested by some communities for many years, but wasn't previously possible due to technical limitations. [7]
• File thumbnails are now stored in discrete sizes. If a page specifies a thumbnail size that's not among the standard sizes (20, 40, 60, 120, 250, 330, 500, 960), then MediaWiki will pick the closest larger thumbnail size but will tell the browser to downscale it to the requested size. In these cases, nothing will change visually but users might load slightly larger images. If it doesn't matter which thumbnail size is used in a page, please pick one of the standard sizes to avoid the extra in-browser down-scaling step. [8][9]

Updates for editors

• The Wikimedia Foundation are working on a system called Edge Uniques which will enable A/B testing, help protect against Distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks), and make it easier to understand how many visitors the Wikimedia sites have. This is so that they can more efficiently build tools which help readers, and make it easier for readers to find what they are looking for.
• To improve security for users, a small percentage of logins will now require that the account owner input a one-time password emailed to their account. It is recommended that you check that the email address on your account is set correctly, and that it has been confirmed, and that you have an email set for this purpose. [10]
• "Are you interested in taking a short survey to improve tools used for reviewing or reverting edits on your Wiki?" This question will be asked at 7 wikis starting next week, on Recent Changes and Watchlist pages. The Moderator Tools team wants to know more about activities that involve looking at new edits made to your Wikimedia project, and determining whether they adhere to your project's policies.
• On April 15, the full Wikidata graph will no longer be supported on query.wikidata.org. After this date, scholarly articles will be available through query-scholarly.wikidata.org, while the rest of the data hosted on Wikidata will be available through the query.wikidata.org endpoint. This is part of the scheduled split of the Wikidata Graph, which was announced in September 2024. More information is available on Wikidata.
• The latest quarterly Wikimedia Apps Newsletter is now available. It covers updates, experiments, and improvements made to the Wikipedia mobile apps.
• View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

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

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:21, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-17

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

Updates for editors

• Wikifunctions is now integrated with Dagbani Wikipedia since April 15. It is the first project that will be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in articles. A function is something that takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, such as adding up two numbers, converting miles into metres, calculating how much time has passed since an event, or declining a word into a case. Wikifunctions will allow users to do that through a simple call of a stable and global function, rather than via a local template. [11]
• A new type of lint error has been created: Empty headings (documentation). The Linter extension's purpose is to identify wikitext patterns that must or can be fixed in pages and provide some guidance about what the problems are with those patterns and how to fix them. [12]
• View all 37 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

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

Meetings and events

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

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:57, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-18

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

Updates for editors

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

Updates for technical contributors

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

In depth

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

Meetings and events

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

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

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

The Signpost: 1 May 2025

• News and notes: India cut off from Wiki money; WMF annual plan and Wikimedia programs seek comment
  As always, Wikimedia community governance relies on user participation; plus, more updates from the Wikimedia world

• In the media: Feds aiming for WMF's nonprofit status
  Scrapers, an Indian lawsuit, and a crash-or-not-crash?

• Recent research: How readers use Wikipedia health content; Scholars generally happy with how their papers are cited on Wikipedia
  And other new research findings.

• Arbitration report: Sysop Tinucherian removed and admonished by the ArbCom
  And don't bite those newbies!

• Discussion report: Latest news from Centralized discussions
  And don't bite those newbies!

• Traffic report: Of Wolf and Man
  Television dramas, televised sports, film, the Pope, and ... bioengineering at the top of the list?

• Disinformation report: At WikiCredCon, Wikipedia editors and Internet Archive discuss threats to trust in media
  Community volunteers network among themselves and use technology to counter attacks on information sharing.

• News from the WMF: Product & Tech Progress on the Annual Plan
  A look at some product and tech highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation's Annual Plan (July–December 2024).

• Humour: Crisis erupts as furious admins, functionaries complain about crappy t-shirts
  Hey! At least it is something!

• Comix: By territory
  Zounds!

• In focus: Using AI on the Russian Wikipedia: opportunities or challenges?
  Would a billion articles be a good idea?

• Community view: A deep dive into Wikimedia
  There's a lot more to this than you think.

• Debriefing: Barkeep49's RfB debriefing
  I wonder about having crats, but decided to become one anyway.

• Gallery: Meet the winners of Wiki Loves Monuments 2024
  Just beautiful photos!

• Obituary: JarrahTree, JohnClarknew and Yashthepunisher
  Rest in Paradise.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:18, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-19

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

Weekly highlight

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

Updates for editors

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

Updates for technical contributors

• Developers who use the moment library in gadgets and user scripts should revise their code to use alternatives like the Intl library or the new mediawiki.DateFormatter library. The moment library has been deprecated and will begin to log messages in the developer console. You can see a global search for current uses, and ask related questions in this Phabricator task.
• Developers who maintain a tool that queries the Wikidata term store tables (wbt_*) need to update their code to connect to a separate database cluster. These tables are being split into a separate database cluster. Tools that query those tables via the wiki replicas must be adapted to connect to the new cluster instead. Documentation and related links are available. [13]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

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

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

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

Administrators' newsletter – May 2025

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

Administrator changes

Rusalkii

NaomiAmethyst (overlooked last month)

• Master Jay
• Orderinchaos
• Roger Davies
• Tinucherian

Interface administrator changes

Galobtter

Guideline and policy news

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

Miscellaneous

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

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

Tech News: 2025-20

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

Weekly highlight

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

Updates for editors

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

Updates for technical contributors

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

In depth

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

Meetings and events

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

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

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

Books & Bytes – Issue 68

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

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

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --10:19, 13 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 14 May 2025

• News and notes: WMF to kick off new-CEO quest as Iskander preps to move on — Supreme Court nixes gag of Wiki page for other India court row on ANI — code-heads give fix-up date for Charts in lieu of long-dead Graph gizmo
  And comment is requested on a privacy whitepaper.

• In the media: Wikimedia Foundation sues over UK government decision that might require identity verification of editors worldwide
  And other courtroom drama.

• Disinformation report: What does Jay-Z know about Wikipedia?
  And how he knows it: all about lawyer letters and editing logs.

• In focus: On the hunt for sources: Swedish AfD discussions
  Why the language barrier is not the only impediment to navigating sources from another culture.

• Technology report: WMF introduces unique but privacy-preserving browser cookie
  And QR codes for every page!

• Debriefing: Goldsztajn's RfA debriefing
  When an editor is ready to become staff at a public library (not a brother in a fraternity).

• Obituary: Max Lum (User:ICOHBuzz)
  Rest in peace.

• Community view: A Deep Dive Into Wikimedia (part 2)
  The technology behind it, and the other stuff.

• Comix: Collection
  Gadzooks!

• From the archives: Humor from the Archives
  And more.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:59, 14 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-21

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 Editing Team and the Machine Learning Team are working on a new check for newcomers: Peacock check. Using a prediction model, this check will encourage editors to improve the tone of their edits, using artificial intelligence. We invite volunteers to review the first version of the Peacock language model for the following languages: Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Japanese. Users from these wikis interested in reviewing this model are invited to sign up at MediaWiki.org. The deadline to sign up is on May 23, which will be the start date of the test.

Updates for editors

• From May 20, 2025, oversighters and checkusers will need to have their accounts secured with two-factor authentication (2FA) to be able to use their advanced rights. All users who belong to these two groups and do not have 2FA enabled have been informed. In the future, this requirement may be extended to other users with advanced rights. Learn more.
• Multiblocks will begin mass deployment by the end of the month: all non-Wikipedia projects plus Catalan Wikipedia will adopt Multiblocks in the week of May 26, while all other Wikipedias will adopt it in the week of June 2. Please contact the team if you have concerns. Administrators can test the new user interface now on your own wiki by browsing to Special:Block?usecodex=1, and can test the full multiblocks functionality on testwiki. Multiblocks is the feature that makes it possible for administrators to impose different types of blocks on the same user at the same time. See the help page for more information. [14]
• Later this week, the Special:SpecialPages listing of almost all special pages will be updated with a new design. This page has been redesigned to improve the user experience in a few ways, including: The ability to search for names and aliases of the special pages, sorting, more visible marking of restricted special pages, and a more mobile-friendly look. The new version can be previewed at Beta Cluster now, and feedback shared in the task. [15]
• The Chart extension is being enabled on more wikis. For a detailed list of when the extension will be enabled on your wiki, please read the deployment timeline.
• Wikifunctions will be deployed on May 27 on five Wiktionaries: Hausa, Igbo, Bengali, Malayalam, and Dhivehi/Maldivian. This is the second batch of deployment planned for the project. After deployment, the projects will be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in their pages. A function is something that takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, such as adding up two numbers, converting miles into metres, calculating how much time has passed since an event, or declining a word into a case. Wikifunctions will allow users to do that through a simple call of a stable and global function, rather than via a local template.
• Later this week, the Wikimedia Foundation will publish a hub for experiments. This is to showcase and get user feedback on product experiments. The experiments help the Wikimedia movement understand new users, how they interact with the internet and how it could affect the Wikimedia movement. Some examples are generated video, the Wikipedia Roblox speedrun game and the Discord bot.
• View all 29 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a bug with creating an account using the API, which has now been fixed. [16]

Updates for technical contributors

• Gadgets and user scripts that interact with Special:Block may need to be updated to work with the new manage blocks interface. Please review the developer guide for more information. If you need help or are unable to adapt your script to the new interface, please let the team know on the talk page. [17]
• The mw.title object allows you to get information about a specific wiki page in the Lua programming language. Starting this week, a new property will be added to the object, named isDisambiguationPage. This property allows you to check if a page is a disambiguation page, without the need to write a custom function. [18]
• User script developers can use a new reverse proxy tool to load javascript and css from gitlab.wikimedia.org with mw.loader.load. The tool's author hopes this will enable collaborative development workflows for user scripts including linting, unit tests, code generation, and code review on gitlab.wikimedia.org without a separate copy-and-paste step to publish scripts to a Wikimedia wiki for integration and acceptance testing. See Tool:Gitlab-content on Wikitech for more information.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• The 12th edition of Wiki Workshop 2025, a forum that brings together researchers that explore all aspects of Wikimedia projects, will be held virtually on 21-22 May. Researchers can register now.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:10, 19 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-22

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

• A community-wide discussion about a very delicate issue for the development of Abstract Wikipedia is now open on Meta: where to store the abstract content that will be developed through functions from Wikifunctions and data from Wikidata. The discussion is open until June 12 at Abstract Wikipedia/Location of Abstract Content, and every opinion is welcomed. The decision will be made and communicated after the consultation period by the Foundation.

Updates for editors

• Since last week, on all wikis except the largest 20, people using the mobile visual editor will have additional tools in the menu bar, accessed using the new + toolbar button. To start, the new menu will include options to add: citations, hieroglyphs, and code blocks. Deployment to the remaining wikis is scheduled to happen in June.
• The #ifexist parser function will no longer register a link to its target page. This will improve the usefulness of Special:WantedPages, which will eventually only list pages that are the target of an actual red link. This change will happen gradually as the source pages are updated. [19]
• This week, the Moderator Tools team will launch a new filter to Recent Changes, starting at Indonesian Wikipedia. This new filter highlights edits that are likely to be reverted. The goal is to help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic edits. Other wikis will benefit from this filter in the future.
• Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users will see suggestions of articles for further reading. The feature will be available on both desktop and mobile. Readers of Catalan, Hebrew, and Italian Wikipedias and some sister projects will receive the change between May 21 and mid-June. Readers of other wikis will receive the change later. The goal is to encourage users to read the wikis more. Learn more.
• Some users of the Wikipedia Android app can use a new feature for readers, WikiGames, a daily trivia game based on real historical events. The release has started as an A/B test, available to 50% of users in the following languages: English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Turkish.
• The Newsletter extension that is available on MediaWiki.org allows the creation of various newsletters for global users. The extension can now publish new issues as section links on an existing page, instead of requiring a new page for each issue. [20]
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• The previously deprecated ipblocks views in Wiki Replicas will be removed in the beginning of June. Users are encouraged to query the new block and block_target views instead.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• Wikidata and Sister Projects is a multi-day online event that will focus on how Wikidata is integrated to Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects. The event runs from May 29 – June 1. You can read the Program schedule and register.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:02, 26 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-23

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 Chart extension is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. Editors can use this new extension to create interactive data visualizations like bar, line, area, and pie charts. Charts are designed to replace many of the uses of the legacy Graph extension.

Updates for editors

• It is now easier to configure automatic citations for your wiki within the visual editor's citation generator. Administrators can now set a default template by using the _default key in the local MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json page (example diff). Setting this default will also help to future-proof your existing configurations when new item types are added in the future. You can still set templates for individual item types as they will be preferred to the default template. [21]
• View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Starting the week of June 2, bots logging in using action=login or action=clientlogin will fail more often. This is because of stronger protections against suspicious logins. Bots using bot passwords or using a loginless authentication method such as OAuth are not affected. If your bot is not using one of those, you should update it; using action=login without a bot password was deprecated in 2016. For most bots, this only requires changing what password the bot uses. [22]
• From this week, Wikimedia wikis will allow ES2017 features in JavaScript code for official code, gadgets, and user scripts. The most visible feature of ES2017 is async/await syntax, allowing for easier-to-read code. Until this week, the platform only allowed up to ES2016, and a few months before that, up to ES2015. [23]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• Scholarship applications to participate in the GLAM Wiki Conference 2025 are now open. The conference will take place from 30 October to 1 November, in Lisbon, Portugal. GLAM contributors who lack the means to support their participation can apply here. Scholarship applications close on June 7th.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:52, 2 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – June 2025

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

Administrator changes

• DDima
• Gimmetrow
• Huon
• Johan Elisson
• Spangineer
• The Land

Interface administrator changes

0xDeadbeef

CheckUser changes

L235

Oversight changes

L235

Guideline and policy news

• An RfC is open to determine whether the English Wikipedia community should adopt a position on AI development by the WMF and its affiliates.

Technical news

• A new feature called Multiblocks will be deployed on English Wikipedia on the week of June 2. See the relevant announcement on the administrators' noticeboard.
• History merges performed using the mergehistory special page are now logged at both the source and destination, rather than just the source as previously, after this RFC and the resolution of T118132.

Arbitration

• An arbitration case named Indian military history has been opened. Evidence submissions for this case close on 8 June.

Miscellaneous

• Voting for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) election is open until 17 June 2025. Read the voting page on Meta-Wiki and cast your vote here!
• An Articles for Creation backlog drive is happening in June 2025, with over 1,600 drafts awaiting review from the past two months. In addition to AfC participants, all administrators and new page patrollers can help review using the Yet Another AFC Helper Script, which can be enabled in the Gadgets settings. Sign up here to participate!
• The Unreferenced articles backlog drive is happening in June 2025 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) 17:17, 6 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-24

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 Trust and Safety Product team is finalizing work needed to roll out temporary accounts on large Wikipedias later this month. The team has worked with stewards and other users with extended rights to predict and address many use cases that may arise on larger wikis, so that community members can continue to effectively moderate and patrol temporary accounts. This will be the second of three phases of deployment – the last one will take place in September at the earliest. For more information about the recent developments on the project, see this update. If you have any comments or questions, write on the talk page, and join a CEE Catch Up this Tuesday.

Updates for editors

• The watchlist expiry feature allows editors to watch pages for a limited period of time. After that period, the page is automatically removed from your watchlist. Starting this week, you can set a preference for the default period of time to watch pages. The preferences also allow you to set different default watch periods for editing existing pages, pages you create, and when using rollback. [24]

Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.

• The appearance of talk pages will change at almost all Wikipedias (some have already received this design change, a few will get these changes later). You can read details about the changes on Diff. It is possible to opt out of these changes in user preferences ("Show discussion activity"). [25][26]
• Users with specific extended rights (including administrators, bureaucrats, checkusers, oversighters, and stewards) can now have IP addresses of all temporary accounts revealed automatically during time-limited periods where they need to combat high-speed account-hopping vandalism. This feature was requested by stewards. [27]
• This week, the Moderator Tools and Machine Learning teams will continue the rollout of a new filter to Recent Changes, releasing it to several more Wikipedias. This filter utilizes the Revert Risk model, which was created by the Research team, to highlight edits that are likely to be reverted and help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic contributions. The feature will be rolled out to the following Wikipedias: Afrikaans Wikipedia, Belarusian Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Welsh Wikipedia, Hawaiian Wikipedia, Icelandic Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia. The rollout will continue in the coming weeks to include the rest of the Wikipedias in this project. [28]
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• AbuseFilter editors active on Meta-Wiki and large Wikipedias are kindly asked to update AbuseFilter to make it compatible with temporary accounts. A link to the instructions and the private lists of filters needing verification are available on Phabricator.
• Lua modules now have access to the name of a page's associated thumbnail image, and on some wikis to the WikiProject assessment information. This is possible using two new properties on mw.title objects, named pageImage and pageAssessments. [29][30]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:14, 10 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-25

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

• You can nominate your favorite tools for the sixth edition of the Coolest Tool Award. Nominations are anonymous and will be open until June 25. You can re-use the survey to nominate multiple tools.
• View all 33 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• Foundation staff and technical volunteers use Wikimedia APIs to build the tools, applications, features, and integrations that enhance user experiences. Over the coming years, the MediaWiki Interfaces team will be investing in Wikimedia web (HTTP) APIs to better serve technical volunteer needs and protect Wikimedia infrastructure from potential abuse. You can read more about their plans to evolve the APIs in this Techblog post.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:36, 16 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-26

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

• This week, the Moderator Tools and Machine Learning teams will continue the rollout of a new filter to Recent Changes, releasing it to the third and last batch of Wikipedias. This filter utilizes the Revert Risk model, which was created by the Research team, to highlight edits that are likely to be reverted and help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic contributions. The feature will be rolled out to the following Wikipedias: Azerbaijani Wikipedia, Latin Wikipedia, Macedonian Wikipedia, Malayalam Wikipedia, Marathi Wikipedia, Norwegian Nynorsk Wikipedia, Punjabi Wikipedia, Swahili Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Tagalog Wikipedia. The rollout will continue in the coming weeks to include the rest of the Wikipedias in this project. [31]

Updates for editors

• Last week, temporary accounts were rolled out on Czech, Korean, and Turkish Wikipedias. This and next week, deployments on larger Wikipedias will follow. Share your thoughts about the project. [32]
• Later this week, the Editing team will release Multi Check to all Wikipedias (except English Wikipedia). This feature shows multiple Reference checks within the editing experience. This encourages users to add citations when they add multiple new paragraphs to a Wikipedia article. This feature was previously available as an A/B test. The test shows that users who are shown multiple checks are 1.3 times more likely to add a reference to their edit, and their edit is less likely to be reverted (-34.7%). [33]
• A few pages need to be renamed due to software updates and to match more recent Unicode standards. All of these changes are related to title-casing changes. Approximately 71 pages and 3 files will be renamed, across 15 wikis; the complete list is in the task. The developers will rename these pages next week, and they will fix redirects and embedded file links a few minutes later via a system settings update.
• View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that had caused pages to scroll upwards when text near the top was selected. [34]

Updates for technical contributors

• Editors can now use Lua modules to filter and transform tabular data for use with Extension:Chart. This can be used for things like selecting a subset of rows or columns from the source data, converting between units, statistical processing, and many other useful transformations. Information on how to use transforms is available. [35]
• The all_links variable in AbuseFilter is now renamed to new_links for consistency with other variables. Old usages will still continue to work. [36]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: the recent updates for the "Add a Link" Task, two new Newcomer Engagement Features, and updates to Community Configuration.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:18, 23 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 24 June 2025

• News and notes: Happy 7 millionth!
  Admins arrested in Belarus.

• In the media: Playing professor pong with prosecutorial discretion
  Pardon our alliteration!

• Disinformation report: Pardon me, Mr. President, have you seen my socks?
  A get-out-of-jail card!

• Recent research: Wikipedia's political bias; "Ethical" LLMs accede to copyright owners' demands but ignore those of Wikipedians
  And other new research publications.

• Traffic report: All Sinners, a future, all Saints, a past
  Holy men and not-as-holy movies.

• News from Diff: Call for candidates is now open: Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
  Get your self-nomination in by July 2nd!

• Opinion: Russian Wiki-fork flails, failing readers and editors
  After two years RuWiki fails to thrive.

• Debriefing: EggRoll97's RfA² debriefing
  With some sweet-and-sour sauce!

• Community view: A Deep Dive Into Wikimedia (part 3)
  Every thing you need to know about the Wikimedia Foundation?

• Comix: Hamburgers
  Egad!

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:28, 24 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-27

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 CampaignEvents extension has been enabled on all Wikipedias. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. The extension has three features: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List. To request the extension for your wiki, visit the Deployment information page.

Updates for editors

• AbuseFilter maintainers can now match against IP reputation data in AbuseFilters. IP reputation data is information about the proxies and VPNs associated with the user's IP address. This data is not shown publicly and is not generated for actions performed by registered accounts. [37]
• Hidden content that is within collapsible parts of wikipages will now be revealed when someone searches the page using the web browser's "Find in page" function (Ctrl+F or ⌘F) in supporting browsers. [38][39]
• A new feature, called Favourite Templates, will be deployed later this week on all projects (except English Wikipedia, which will receive the feature next week), following a piloting phase on Polish and Arabic Wikipedia, and Italian and English Wikisource. The feature will provide a better way for new and experienced contributors to recall and discover templates via the template dialog, by allowing users to put templates on a special "favourite list". The feature works with both the visual editor and the wikitext editor. The feature is a community wishlist focus area.
• View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that had caused some Notifications to be sent multiple times. [40]

Updates for technical contributors

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:38, 30 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Books & Bytes – Issue 69

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 69, May–June 2025

In this issue we highlight a new partnership, Citation Watchlist and, as always, a roundup of news and community items related to libraries and digital knowledge.

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team – 13:11, 1 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – July 2025

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

Administrator changes

NuclearWarfare

Interface administrator changes

L235

Guideline and policy news

• Following a talk page discussion, speedy deletion criterion G13 has been amended to remove "Userspace with no content except the article wizard placeholder text."
• WP:Manual of Style/Superscripts and subscripts was upgraded to a guideline following a RfC discussion.

Miscellaneous

• The 2025 Developing Countries WikiContest will run from 1 July to 30 September. Sign up now!
• Administrator elections will take place this month. Administrator elections are an alternative to RFA that is a gentler process for candidates due to secret voting and multiple people running together. The call for candidates is July 9–15, the discussion phase is July 18–22, and the voting phase is July 23–29. Get ready to submit your candidacy, or (with their consent) to nominate a talented candidate!

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:49, 7 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-28

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

• Temporary accounts have been rolled out on 18 large and medium-sized Wikipedias, including German, Japanese, French, and Chinese. Now, about 1/3 of all logged-out activity across wikis is coming from temporary accounts. Users involved in patrolling may be interested in two new documentation pages: Access to IP, explaining everything related to access to temporary account IP addresses, and Repository with a list of new gadgets and user scripts.

Updates for editors

• Anyone can play an experimental new game, WikiRun, that lets you race through Wikipedia by clicking from one article to another, aiming to reach a target page in as few steps and in as little time as possible. The project's goal is to explore new ways of engaging readers. Try playing the game and let the team know what you think on the talk page.
• Users of the Wikipedia Android app in some languages can now play the new trivia game. Which came first? is a simple history game where you guess which of two events happened earlier on today's date. It was previously available as an A/B test. It is now available to all users in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, and Chinese. The goal of the feature is to help engage with new generations of readers. [41]
• Users of the iOS Wikipedia App in some languages may see a new tabbed browsing feature that enables you to open multiple tabs while reading. This feature makes it easier to explore related topics and switch between articles. The A/B test is currently running in Arabic, English, and Japanese in selected regions. More details are available on the Tabbed Browsing project page.
• Bureaucrats on Wikimedia wikis can now use Special:VerifyOATHForUser to check if users have enabled two-factor authentication. [42]
• A new feature related to Template Recall and Discovery will be deployed later this week to all Wikimedia projects: a template category browser will be introduced to assist users in finding templates to put in their “favourite” list. The browser will allow users to browse a list of templates which have been organised into a given category tree. The feature has been requested by the community through the Community Wishlist.
• It is now possible to access watchlist preferences from the watchlist page. Also the redundant button to edit the watchlist has been removed. [43]
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• As part of MediaWiki 1.44 there is now a unified built-in Notifications system that makes it easier for developers to send, manage, and customize notifications. Check out the updated documentation at Manual:Notifications, information about migration in T388663 and details on deprecated hooks in T389624.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• WikidataCon 2025, the conference dedicated to Wikidata is now open for session proposals and for registration. This year's event will be held online from October 31 – November 02 and will explore on the theme of "Connecting People through Linked Open Data".

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:02, 8 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-29

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

• Featured templates, a new feature related to Template Recall and Discovery will be deployed this week to all Wikimedia projects: With this feature, editors will be able to quickly access a list of templates that are likely to be useful. These templates will be displayed in a list, under the "featured" tab of the template discovery interface. Administrators can define the list via the Community Configuration interface. The feature fulfills a request by the community through the Community Wishlist. [44][45]
• View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the request to add Malayalam fonts in the Wikisource Book Export Tool was resolved and now, the rendering of Malayalam letters in exported Wikisource books are accurate. [46]

Updates for technical contributors

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• Developers, designers, and all Wikimedians are invited to submit a project idea for the Wikimania Hackathon 2025. Read this Diff blog post for more details.

Meetings and events

• WikiIndaba 2025 scholarship application and program submission is open until 23:59 GMT on July 20. WikiIndaba is a regional conference for African Wikimedians both on the continent and in the diaspora to unite and grow together. Submit your scholarship application and program proposal now!
• WikiCon Brasil 2025 will take place on July 19-20 in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. The Brazilian community members are encouraged to register and attend!

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:06, 14 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 18 July 2025

• News and notes: Is no WikiNews good WikiNews? — Election season returns!
  Endowment tax form, Wikimania, elections, U4C, fundraising and a duck!

• In the media: How bad (or good) is Wikipedia?
  And how do we know?

• WikiProject report: WikiProject Medicine reaches milestone of zero unreferenced articles
  Five-year journey comes to healthy fruition.

• In focus: Wikimania 2025: Connecting Wikimedians across the world for 20 years
  Wikimedians from around the world will gather in person and online at the twentieth annual meeting of Wikimania.

• Recent research: Knowledge manipulation on Russia's Wikipedia fork; Marxist critique of Wikidata license; call to analyze power relations of Wikipedia
  As well as "hermeneutic excursions" and other scientific research findings.

• News from the WMF: Form 990 released for the Wikimedia Foundation’s fiscal year 2023-2024
  The report covers the Foundation's operations from July 2023 - June 2024

• Discussion report: Six thousand noticeboard discussions in 2025 electrically winnowed down to a hundred
  A step towards objective and comprehensive coverage of a project nearly too big to follow.

• Comix: Divorce
  Drawn this century!

• Opinion: Women are somewhat under-represented on the English-language Wikipedia, and other observations from analysis
  How data from the Wikipedia "necessary articles" lists can shed new light on the gender gap

• Community view: A Deep Dive Into Wikimedia (part 4): The Future Of Wikimedia and Conclusion
  Annual plans, external trends, infrastructure, equity, safety, and effectiveness. What does it all mean?

• Obituary: Pvmoutside, Atomicjohn, Rdmoore6, Jaknouse, Morven, Martin of Sheffield, MarnetteD, Herewhy, BabelStone
  Rest in peace.

• Traffic report: God only knows
  Wouldn't it be nice without billionaires, scandals, deaths, and wars?

• Humour: New forum created for people who don't care about Wikipedia
  If you are too blasé for Mr. Blasé and don't give a FAC.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:50, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-30

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 Translation Suggestions feature in the Content Translation tool now has another level of article filters added to the "... More" category. Translators who use the Suggestions feature can now select and receive article suggestions that are customized to geographical locations of their interest using the new "Regions" filter. [47]
• Administrators can now limit "Add a Link" to newcomers. The "Add a Link" Structured Task helps new account holders start editing, but some communities have requested the ability to restrict it to its intended audience: newcomers. Administrators can configure this setting within the Community Configuration feature.
• View all 29 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• For AbuseFilter editors on some wikis, it is now possible to filter edits based on the RevertRisk score of the edit being attempted. It is only populated if the action being evaluated is an edit. For more information, please see the ORES/AbuseFilter variables documentation.
• The Beta Cluster wikis have been moved from beta.wmflabs.org to beta.wmcloud.org. Users may need to update URLs in any tools, or in their password managers. Any related issues can be reported in the task.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• WikiCite 2025 will take place from 29–31 August, both online and in-person in Bern, Switzerland. The event's goals are to reconnect communities, institutions, and individuals working with open citations, bibliographic data, and the Wikidata/Wikibase ecosystem. Registration is open and the call for proposals will be announced soon. [48]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:39, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-31

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 Community Tech team will be focusing on wishes related to Watchlists and Recent Changes pages, over the next few months. They are looking for feedback. Please read the latest update, and if you have ideas, please submit a wish on the topic.

Updates for editors

• The Wikimedia Commons community has decided to block cross-wiki uploads to Wikimedia Commons, for all users without autoconfirmed rights on that wiki, starting on August 16. This is because of widespread problems related to files that are uploaded by newcomers. Users who are affected by this will get an error message with a link to the less restrictive UploadWizard on Commons. Please help translating the message or give feedback on the message text. Please also update your local help pages to explain this restriction. [49]
• On wikis with temporary accounts enabled and Meta-Wiki, administrators may now set up a footer for the Special:Contributions pages of temporary accounts, similar to those which can be shown on IP and user-account pages. They may do it by creating the page named MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer-temp. [50]
• View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• Wikimania 2025 will run from August 6–9. The program is available for you to plan which sessions you want to attend. Most sessions will be live-streamed, with exceptions for those that show the "no camera" icon. If you are joining online to watch live-streams and use the interactive features, please register for a free virtual ticket. For example, you may be interested in technical sessions such as:
  • Temporary Accounts: Enhancing privacy for our unregistered editors
  • Building a Sustainable Future for Wikimedia Contributors
  • A dozen visions for wikitext!
  • Coordinate Across Stakeholders with the Product and Technology Advisory Council
• The MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference, Fall 2025 will be held 28–30 October 2025 in Hanover, Germany. This event is organized by and for the third-party MediaWiki community. You can propose sessions and register to attend.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:23, 29 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-32

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

• Editors can now enable the User Info card. This feature adds an icon next to usernames on history pages and similar user-contribution log pages. When you tap or click on the icon, it displays data related to that user account such as the number of edits, reverted edits, blocks, and more. It's part of a broader project to make it easier for moderators to evaluate account trustworthiness. The feature can be enabled in your global preferences, and later this week it will be available in local preferences. [51]
• Everybody is invited to share comments on Collaborative Contributions, a project recently launched by the Connection team. The project aims to create a new way to display the impact of collaborative editing activities (such as edit-a-thons, backlog drives, and WikiProjects) on the wikis. Post your comments on the project talk page. [52]
• Administrators can now define the default block duration for temporary accounts. To do that, they need to create a page named MediaWiki:Ipb-default-expiry-temporary-account and use a value defined in MediaWiki:Ipboptions. This allows administrators to easily block temporary accounts for 90 days, which is functionally equivalent to an indefinite block. The advantage of this solution is that it does not clutter Special:BlockList. More documentation is available. [53]
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Gadgets can now include .vue files. This makes it easier to develop modern user interfaces using Vue.js, in particular using Codex, the official design system of Wikimedia. Codex icons can be loaded through the gadget definition. The documentation has examples. For user scripts that use Vue.js, an API module now exists to load Codex icons. [54][55]
• Module developers can now use a Lua interface to simplify the preparation of Lua modules for translation on Meta-Wiki. This improvement makes it easier for translators to find and edit module strings without dealing with raw Lua code. It helps prevent mistakes that could break the module during translation. Module developers and translators are invited to watch the demo video, read more about translatable modules to understand how it works, refer to Meta-Wiki's Module:User Wikimedia project for example usage, and share their feedback on how well it addresses the challenges in their workflow. The interface still has some performance issues, so it should not be used in widely used modules yet. [56]
• Developers of external tools that connect to Wikimedia pages must set a user-agent that complies with the user-agent policy. This policy will start to be more strongly enforced in August because of external crawlers that are overusing Wikimedia's resources. Tools that are hosted on Wikimedia's Toolforge or Cloud VPS will not be affected by this for now, but should still set a user-agent. More technical details are available, and related questions are welcome in that task.
• Parsoid Read Views is going to be rolling out to some smaller Wikipedias over the next few weeks, following the successful transition of Wikivoyages and Wiktionaries to Parsoid Read Views. For more information, see the Parsoid/Parser Unification project page. [57]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• Wikimania 2025 will run from August 6–9. The program is available for you to plan which sessions you want to attend. Most sessions will be live-streamed, with exceptions for those that show the "no camera" icon. If you are joining online to watch live-streams and use the interactive features, please register for a free virtual ticket. For example, you may be interested in technical sessions such as:
  • Wikimedia’s knowledge infrastructure in a changing internet: Establishing sustainable pathways for content reuse
  • Wikifunctions is coming soon to a wiki near you!
  • Shaping the Future of Wikipedia’s Reader Experience
  • Making Wikipedia More Readable: What Comes Next

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

MediaWiki message delivery 03:37, 5 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – August 2025

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

Administrator changes

• CoconutOctopus
• Curbon7
• Hinnk
• Jlwoodwa
• Kj cheetham
• KylieTastic
• Ser!
• Smasongarrison
• UndercoverClassicist

• Bbb23
• Beeblebrox
• David Gerard
• Oleg Alexandrov
• Satori Son

CheckUser changes

• Alison
• Bradv
• Joe Roe
• RickinBaltimore
• ST47

Oversight changes

• Bradv
• RickinBaltimore

Guideline and policy news

• Following a request for comment, a new speedy deletion criterion, G15, has been enacted. It applies to pages generated by a large language model (LLM) without human review.
• Following a request for comment, there is a new policy outlining the granting of permissions to view the IP addresses of temporary accounts. Temporary account deployment on the English Wikipedia is currently scheduled for September 2025, and editors can request access to the permission ahead of time. Admins are encouraged to keep an eye on the request page; there will likely be a flood of editors requesting the permission when they realize they can no longer see IP addresses.

Technical news

• Administrators can now restrict the "Add a Link" feature to newcomers. The "Add a Link" Structured Task helps new account holders get started with editing. Administrators can configure this setting in the Community Configuration page.

Arbitration

• The arbitration case Indian military history has been closed.
  • South Asia (WP:CT/SA) is designated a contentious topic. The topic area is specifically defined as All pages related to the region of South Asia (India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal), broadly construed, including but not limited to history, politics, ethnicity, and social groups.
  • The contentious topic designations for Sri Lanka (SL) and India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan (IPA) are folded into this new contentious topic.
  • The community-authorized general sanctions regarding South Asian social groups (GS/CASTE) are rescinded and folded into this new contentious topic.
• The arbitration case Article titles and capitalisation 2 has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case closed on 31 July.
• The arbitration case Transgender healthcare and people has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case will close on 11 August.

Miscellaneous

• Wikimania 2025 is happening in Nairobi, Kenya, and online from August 6 to August 9. This year marks 20 years of Wikimania. Interested users can join the online event. Registration for the virtual event is free and will remain open throughout Wikimania. You can register here now.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:56, 7 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 9 August 2025

• News and notes: Court order snips out part of Wikipedia article, editors debate whether to frame shreds or pulp them
  Plus a mysterious CheckUser incident, and the news with Wikinews.

• Discussion report: News from ANI, AN, RSN, BLPN, ELN, FTN, and NPOVN
  A review of June, July and August.

• Disinformation report: The article in the most languages
  Who is this guy?

• Community view: News from the Villages Pump
  Threads since June.

• In the media: Disgrace, dive bars, deceased despots, and diverse dispatches
  And slop.

• Crossword: Accidental typography
  It's not a conlang, it's a crossword puzzle.

• Comix: best-laid schemes o' wikis an' men
  gang aft agley, an' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, for promis'd joy!

• Traffic report: I'm not the antichrist or the Superman
  Everybody's Somebody's Fool.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:24, 9 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-33

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 WikiEditor toolbar now includes its keyboard shortcuts in the tooltips for its buttons. This will help to improve the discoverability of this feature. [58]
• The Product and Technology Advisory Council published a set of proposed experiments the Wikimedia Foundation can try to improve communication with community. Feedback on the proposals are welcomed until August 22 on this talk page.
• The search bar on the Minerva skin (mobile) has been updated to use the same type-ahead search component that is used on the Vector 2022 skin. There are no changes in search functionality but there are minor visual changes. Specifically, the close-search button has been changed from an "X" to a back arrow. This helps to distinguish it from the other "X" button that is used to clear any text. [59]
• Editors on some wikis will see a new toggle for "Group results by page" on watchlist, related changes, and recent changes pages. This is an A/B experiment that is planned to start on August 11, and will run for 3–6 weeks on the Bengali, Chinese, Czech, French, Greek, Portuguese, and Urdu Wikipedias. The experiment will examine how making this feature more discoverable might affect editors' ability to find the edits they are looking for. [60]
• View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• The multiwiki datasets of Unicode data have been moved to Category:Unicode Module Datasets on Wikimedia Commons, to follow the idea of "One common data source, multiple local wikis". Most wikis have been updated to use the Commons version. You can ask questions at the talkpage. [61]
• Lua code can add warnings when something is wrong, by using the mw.addWarning() function. It is now possible to add more than one warning, instead of new warnings replacing old ones. If you maintain a Lua module that used warnings, you should check it still works as expected. [62]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:26, 11 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-34

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

Updates for editors

• Later this week, people who are logged-in and have the "Discussion tools" Beta Feature enabled will gain the ability to "Thank" individual comments directly from talk pages, rather than needing to navigate to page history. Learn more about this feature. [63]
• An A/B test comparing two versions of the desktop donate link launched on testwiki on 12 August and on English Wikipedia 14 August for 0.1% of logged out users on the desktop site. The experiment will run for three weeks, ending on 12 September. [64]
• An A/A test to measure the baseline for reader retention was launched 12 August using Experimentation Lab. This measures the percentage of users who revisit a wiki after their initial visit over a 14-day period. No visual changes are expected. The experiment will run through 31 August. [65]
• Five new wikis have been created:
  • a Wikisource in Tagalog (s:tl:) [66]
  • a Wikisource in Madurese (s:mad:) [67]
  • a Wikipedia in Rakhine (w:rki:) [68]
  • a Wikibooks in Minangkabau (b:min:) [69]
  • a Wiktionary in Standard Moroccan Amazigh (wikt:zgh:) [70]
• View all 46 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:34, 19 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-35

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

Updates for editors

• Template authors can now use additional CSS properties, since the CSS sanitizer used by TemplateStyles was updated. For example: width: fit-content; ruby-align; relative units such as lh; and custom strings in list-style-type. These improvements are a Community Wishlist wish. [71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80]
• On large wikis, the default time period to display edits from, within the Special:RecentChanges page, has been changed from 7 days to 1 day. This is part of a performance improvement project. This should have no user-facing impact due to the quantity of edits on these wikis. [81]
• Administrators can now access the Special:BlockedExternalDomains page from the Special:CommunityConfiguration list page. This makes it easier to find. [82]
• Wikimedia Commons videos were not shown in the Videos tab in Google Search. The problem was investigated and reported to Google who have now fixed the issue. [83][84]
• One new wiki has been created: a Wiktionary in Betawi (wikt:bew:) [85]
• View all 39 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Two fields of the recentchanges database table are being removed. rc_new and rc_type are being removed in favor of rc_source. Queries to these older fields will start to fail starting this week and developers should use rc_source instead. These older fields were deprecated over 10 years ago and should not be in use. This is part of work to improve the performance and stability of queries to the recentchanges table. [86]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: support for new languages in MediaWiki and translatewiki; the start of the Language Onboarding and Development project to help support the growth of new and small wikis; updates on research projects; and more.

Meetings and events

• The next Language Community Meeting is happening soon, August 29th at 15:00 UTC. This week's meeting will cover: the Avro keyboard developers from Wikimedia Bangladesh, who were recently awarded a national award for their contributions to this keyboard; and other topics.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:08, 26 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-36

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

• The Editing team wants to compile a list of templates, jargon terms, and policies used in edit summaries when a copyright violation is removed. This will help them identify the number of edits reverted due to copyright issues. We invite community members from the following Wikis to list these terms in T402601, or to share their list with Trizek_(WMF): Arabic Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, Persian Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Vietnamese Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia. This project is open until September 9th 2025.

Updates for editors

• The CampaignEvents extension has been enabled for all Wikisources. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. The extension has three features: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List. To request the extension for your wiki, visit the Deployment information page. [87]
• The lists in the footer of the editing interface, such as "Templates used on this page," will now be organized into columns when there is enough space. This enhancement minimizes scrolling when editing lengthy articles on Wikipedia. [88]
• On September 3rd, 2025 we will increase the sampling percentages of our group by toggle experiment of the Special:RecentChanges, Special:Watchlist, and Special:RelatedChanges pages on the Chinese, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias to 100 percent, allowing more editors to be part of this experiment. This adjustment is intended to ensure we have sufficient data to make informed decisions when evaluating the experiment results. [89][90]
• Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users will see suggestions of articles for further reading on English Wikipedia beginning the week of September 22. The feature will be available on both desktop and mobile. All non-English wikis received this change in June and July. The goal is to make it easier for users to find articles. Learn more.
• View all 37 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• Wikifunctions now has a new capability called "lightweight enumeration types", an enumeration type is simply a fixed set of values that's in the type's definition. This capability makes it quick and easy to define such a type, and allows for the reuse of values that are already present in Wikidata. Here is a newsletter to learn more.
• The latest Readers Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: the formation of two new teams — Reader Growth and Reader Experience; insights into declining pageviews and account creations; highlights from the Wikimania Nairobi panel on improving the reading experience; upcoming experiments to engage new and existing readers; and more.

Meetings and events

• Spotlight on some Wikimania 2025 Sessions:
  • Identifying AI-generated text by searching for ISBNs whose checksums fail: Mathias Schindler of WMDE shared tools to help communities search for these.
  • La durabilité du mouvement Wikimedia face aux défis actuels et futurs: This session explored how Wikimedia can stay a trusted source of knowledge in the age of generative AI, information overload, and disinformation.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:46, 1 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – September 2025

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

Administrator changes

Euryalus

• Admrboltz
• FloNight
• Floquenbeam
• Ganeshk
• JesseW
• Night Gyr
• Nixdorf

Interface administrator changes

Ragesoss

CheckUser changes

AmandaNP

SQL

Oversight changes

AmandaNP

Guideline and policy news

• An RfC is open on whether use of emojis with no encyclopedic value in mainspace and draftspace (e.g., at the start of paragraphs or in place of bullet points) should be added as a criterion under G15.

Technical news

• Administrators can now access the Special:BlockedExternalDomains page from the Special:CommunityConfiguration list page. This makes it easier to find. T393240

Arbitration

• The arbitration case Article titles and capitalisation 2 has been closed.
• An RfC is in progress to amend the structure, rules, and procedures of the Arbitration Committee election and resolve any issues not covered by existing rules.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:16, 6 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 9 September 2025

• News and notes: Wikimedia Foundation loses a round in court
  UK Online Safety Act remains undefeated.

• In the media: Congress probes, mayor whitewashed, AI stinks
  Plus Wiki rules, Wiki Spin, and physicists get street cred!

• Disinformation report: A guide for Congress
  The price of Liberty is eternal vigilance.

• Recent research: Minority-language Wikipedias, and Wikidata for botanists
  And other new research findings.

• Technology report: A new way to read Wikisource
  Tis true: there's magic in the web of it.

• Traffic report: Check out some new Weapons, weapon of choice
  With the usual mix of war, death, super heroes, a belt, and Wednesday.

• Essay: The one question
  It's an easy one.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:06, 9 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-37

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

Weekly highlight

• The Editing team is working on a new check: Paste check. This check informs newcomers who paste text into Wikipedia that the content might not be accepted. This check is an effort to increase the likelihood that the new content people are adding to Wikipedia is aligned with the Movement's commitment to offering information under a free content license. This check will soon be tested at a few wikis. If your community is interested in this test, please tell us in this task, or contact the team.

Updates for editors

• Later this week, users of the "Improved Syntax Highlighting" beta feature will be able to use a linting tool to see errors or other potential problems in wikitext in real time. See the help page for more information. [91]
• When browsing a wiki (like en.wikipedia.org), the software responds in one of two ways: a desktop page, or a redirect to a mobile version on an "m" domain (like en.m.wikipedia.org). Over the next three weeks, MediaWiki will start displaying the mobile version to mobile devices directly on the standard domain, without this redirect. This change does not affect existing m-dot URLs, or the "Desktop view" opt-out. Learn more. [92]
• When an edit changes the categories of a page, the changes to the category membership counts are now happening asynchronously. This improves the speed of saving edits, especially when moving many pages to or from the same category, and reduces the risk of site outages, but it means that the counts can show outdated information for a few minutes. [93]
• Edits on Wikidata to qualifiers (properties and values) and references (properties and values) in a Wikidata item statement will now not add entries to the RecentChanges or Watchlist pages on all other Wikis. This is a temporary change to improve performance while other solutions are created. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. Learn more. [94][95]
• Japanese-language wikis have had a major upgrade to the way that search works. The new search should generally give more accurate and more relevant search results. [96]
• View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:11, 9 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-38

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

Updates for editors

• References lists that are made using the <references/> tag will now automatically display with columns in Vector 2022 when readers are using its 'standard' settings for text-size and page-width. [97]
• Starting in the week of October 6, on small wikis and medium wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled, all autoconfirmed users will be able to use Event Registration as an organizer. No changes will be made for large wikis unless requested in Phabricator. This change is being made to make it easier for more people to use Event Registration, especially on wikis that are less likely to have policies related to the Event Organizer right. Learn more.
• Users that search using regular expressions (regex) can now use additional features including:
  • for the intitle: keyword: metacharacters for start-of-line (^) and end-of-line ($) anchors [98]
  • for both intitle: and insource: keywords: shorthand character classes for digits (\d), whitespace (\s), and word characters (\w); and escape codes for line feed (\r), newline (\n), tab (\t), and unicode (e.g. \uHHHH). [99]
• When you search for text that looks like an IP, the system will now show search results. It used to take you to the contributions for that IP instead of showing search results. [100]
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 24. This is planned at 15:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests which happen twice a year. You can read more about the background and details of this process on the Diff blog.
• View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that affected users who used the page-tabs to switch from wikitext editing of a section into the visualeditor. [101]

Updates for technical contributors

• The MediaWiki Interfaces team is redesigning the Wikimedia REST API Sandbox with Codex. If you have feedback on improvements for the API documentation or what makes developer experiences smooth (or frustrating), you’re invited to join an upcoming discovery interview, or leave feedback onwiki. Learn more.
• Edits to Wikidata aliases (an alternative name for an item or a property) will now be shown in RecentChanges and Watchlist entries on other wikis less often, reducing unnecessary notifications. This will reduce the overall quantity of 'noisy' entries. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. Learn more. [102]
• The new Unicode 17.0 version has been released. The datasets on Commons for the Module:Unicode data have been updated. Wikipedias that do not use the Commons datasets should either update their own data or switch to the Commons datasets.
• Users of the Wikimedia Enterprise Structured Contents endpoints can now access Parsed Tables. The new Parsed Tables feature extracts and represents Wikipedia tables in structured JSON. This improves machine accessibility as part of the Structured Contents initiative. Structured Contents output is freely available through the On-demand API, or through Wikimedia Cloud Services.
• A dataset of English Wikipedia biographical information from Wikimedia Enterprise has been published on Kaggle, for evaluation and research. This provides structured data from more than 1.5 million biographies, including birth and death dates, education, affiliations, careers, awards, and more (from a June 2024 snapshot).
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• Scholarship applications for Wikimania 2026 in Paris, France, are open until October 31.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 17:03, 15 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Books & Bytes – Issue 70

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 70, July–August 2025

• New collections:
  • Times of Malta
  • Africa Intelligence
  • Intelligence Online
  • La Lettre
  • Glitz
• Spotlight: Wikimania

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team – 13:16, 18 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

(This message was sent to User:Osomite and is being posted here due to a redirect.)

Tech News: 2025-39

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

• On September 24th at 15:00 UTC, all Wikimedia sites users will experience a brief read-only period due to a scheduled datacenter server switchover. The Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team will redirect all traffic from one primary server to its backup. You can listen to the switchover using the "Listen to Wikipedia" tool, where you will hear edits stop for a few minutes during the read-only phase, then resume. This twice-yearly datacenter server switchover ensures reliability by testing the backup datacenter, so that our sites can stay online even if the primary datacenter fails. You can read more about the process on the Diff blog.

Updates for editors

• Editors of 60 more Wiktionaries will soon be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them into their pages. A function takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, like adding numbers, converting miles to meters, calculating elapsed time, or declining a word into a case. They will join the other 65 Wiktionary language editions, which already have access to embedded Wikifunctions calls. Later this year, plans are in place to expand to more Wiktionaries and the Incubator.
• A new parser function has been added: {{#contentmodel}}. Template editors and admins can use it to get the localized or canonical name of the content model of a specific page. The function makes it easier to create and edit system messages, such as MediaWiki:editinginterface, even when you switch types of pages, like wiki, JavaScript, CSS or JSON page. [103]
• Adding or editing a DISPLAYTITLE for an article using VisualEditor will no longer be broken. Editors who use VisualEditor mode to modify the {{DISPLAYTITLE}} would no longer have the literal text "DISPLAYTITLE" or its localized variant added to their articles. A list of pages that may have been affected and might need cleanup is documented in this ticket.
• Beta users of the Wikipedia Android app can now try the redesigned Activity tab, which replaces the Edits tab. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging.
• View all 12 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• Wikifunctions users can now import many essential facts involving geo-coordinates, quantities and time values from Wikidata. This is made possible by the creation of Wikifunctions types for these values, which makes them available for use by functions in Wikifunctions. Learn more about how this works in this video and Wikifunctions' August 1 newsletter (for quantities) and August 22 newsletter (for geo-coordinates).

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:52, 22 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-40

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

Weekly highlight

• A major software upgrade has been made to Phabricator. The update introduces performance improvements, a refreshed search interface, enhancements to Maniphest task search, updates to user profile pages and project workboards, new Herald automation features, as well as general text input, mobile experience improvements and more. [104]

Updates for editors

• The Community Tech team will release the new Community Wishlist extension on October 1, that will improve the way wishes will be submitted. The new extension will allow users to add tags to their wishes to better categorise them, and (in a future iteration) to filter them by status, tags and focus areas. It will also be possible to support individual wishes again, as requested by the community in many instances. The old system will be retired. There will be a brief period of downtime while the extension is deployed and wishes are migrated to the new system. You can read more about this in the latest update or you can consult the current documentation on MediaWiki.
• As announced on Diff blog, the production trial of the hCaptcha service for bot detection has begun. The trial is currently using hCaptcha to protect account creation on Chinese, Persian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, and Turkish Wikipedias, where it will replace our existing CAPTCHA (FancyCaptcha). The goal with the trial is to better block bots while also improving usability and accessibility for users who encounter CAPTCHA challenges.
• The CampaignEvents extension has been deployed to Wikimedia Commons. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. On Commons, anyone who is a registered user can use it as an event participant. To use it as an organizer, someone needs to have the event organizer right.
• Sub-referencing, a new feature to re-use references with different details has been released to German Wikipedia. You can test the feature on testwiki or on betawiki as well. Please share your thoughts on using templates in sub-references or volunteer to become a pilot wiki.
• On wikis using the Mentorship system, communities can now opt experienced editors out of Mentorship through Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship. Within this setting, communities may define thresholds, based on edit count and account age, to decide when an editor is considered experienced enough to no longer receive Mentorship. [105]
• The Editing Team and the Machine Learning Team are working on a new check for newcomers: Tone check. Using a prediction model, this check will encourage editors to improve the tone of their edits, using artificial intelligence. We invite volunteers to review the first version of the Tone language model for the following languages: Arabic, Czech, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Farsi, Italian, Norwegian, Romanian and Latvian. Users from these wikis interested in reviewing this model are invited to sign up at MediaWiki.org. The deadline to sign up is on October 3, which will be the start date of the test.
• The rollout of multiblocks had the side effect that non-active block logs may have been shown on Special:Contributions and on blocked users' user and user_talk pages. This issue will be fully resolved in a few days. As part of the fix, messages prefixed with sp-contributions-blocked-notice will be removed and replaced with those prefixed with blocked-notice-logextract in a few weeks. Please help translate the new messages and update any local overrides if needed.
• There was a bug with links added using visual editor if they included characters such as [ ] | after the fragment identifier (#). They were not encoded properly creating an incorrect link. This has been fixed. [106]
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikiquote in Malay (q:ms:) [107]
• View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the User Info Card now displays currently active global lock/blocks. [108]

Updates for technical contributors

• Later this week, editors using Lua modules will be able to use the mw.title.newBatch function to look up the existence of up to 25 pages at once, in a way that only increases the expensive function count once.
• A new Unsupported Tools Working Group has been formed as part of ongoing efforts to collectively determine technical work priorities, similar to the Product & Technology Advisory Council (PTAC). The working group will help prioritize and review requests for support of unmaintained extensions, gadgets, bots, and tools. For the first cycle, the group will be prioritizing an unsupported Wikimedia Commons tool.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:48, 29 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 2 October 2025

• News and notes: Larry Sanger returns with "Nine Theses on Wikipedia"; WMF publishes transparency report
  This time "not merely negative".

• In the media: Extraordinary eruption of "EVIL" explained
  Wickedpedia wrangles post-truth politics.

• Disinformation report: Emails from a paid editing client
  Unexpected news!

• Discussion report: Sourcing, conduct, policy and LLMs: another 1,339 threads analyzed
  Fifty hot topics from fourteen noticeboards.

• Community view: The pressing questions of the modern WWW, as seen from the Village Pump
  Policy, politics, icons, captchas, and LLMs.

• Recent research: Is Wikipedia a merchant of (non-)doubt for glyphosate?; eight projects awarded Wikimedia Research Fund grants
  And other recent publications.

• Opinion: Some disputes aren't worth it
  When to walk away.

• Obituary: Michael Q. Schmidt
  Rest in peace.

• Traffic report: Death, hear me call your name
  Celebrities, deaths and software.

• Comix: A grand spectacle
  All invited!

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:51, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-41

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

• Paste Check is a new Edit Check feature to help avoid and fight copyright violations. When editors paste text into an article, Paste Check prompts them to confirm the origin and licensing of the content. Starting Wednesday, 8 October, 22 wikis will test Paste Check. Paste Check will help new volunteers understand and follow the policies and guidelines necessary to make constructive contributions to Wikipedia projects.

Updates for editors

• Mobile devices will receive mobile articles directly on the standard domain (like en.wikipedia.org), instead of via a redirect to an "m" domain (like en.m.wikipedia.org). This change improves performance. This week it will be enabled on Wikipedias. The existing mobile URLs and the "Desktop view" opt-out remain available. Learn more. [109]
• New date filters, creationdate: and lasteditdate:, are now available in the wiki search engine. This allows users to filter search results by a page's first or last revision date. The filters support comparison operators (e.g. >2024) and relative dates (e.g. today-1d), making it easier to find recently updated content or pages within specific age ranges. [110]
• Wikifunctions now supports rich text in embedded calls across the 150 wikis where it's enabled. To showcase this, the team created a Latin declination table that Wiktionary editors can use to automatically generate noun forms, producing clear, formatted results — see an example output. If you need any help or have any feedback, please contact the Wikifunctions Team. [111]
• An edit link will now appear inside the categories box on article pages for logged in users, which will directly launch the VisualEditor category dialog. [112]
• View all 34 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a problem downloading pdf files last week and that has been resolved. [113]

Updates for technical contributors

• The field rev_sha1 in the revision database table is being removed in favor of content_sha1 in the content database table. See the announcement for more information.
• The Reader Experience team will roll out Dark Mode user interface on all Wikimedia sites on October 29, 2025. All anonymous users of Wikimedia sites will have the option to activate a color scheme that features light-colored text on a dark background. This is designed to provide a more comfortable reading experience, especially in low-light situations. Template authors and technical contributors are encouraged to learn how to make pages ready for Dark mode and address any compatibility issues found in templates in their wiki before the enablement. Please contact the Web team for questions or any support on this talk page before the enablement. [114]
• Starting on Monday, October 6, API endpoints under the rest.php path will be rerouted through a new internal API Gateway. Individual wikis will be updated based on the standard release groups, with total traffic increased over time. This change is expected to be non-breaking and non-disruptive. If any issues are observed, please file a Phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board. [115]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 17:19, 6 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – October 2025

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

Administrator changes

• Billinghurst
• Crisco 1492
• DarkFalls
• Spike Wilbury
• Valereee
• Ergo Sum

CheckUser changes

Vanamonde93

Arbitration

• After a motion, arbitration enforcement page protections no longer need to be logged in the AELOG. A bot now automatically posts protections at WP:AELOG/P. To facilitate this bot, protection summaries must include a link to the relevant CT page (e.g. [[WP:CT/BLP]]), and you will receive talk page reminders if you forget to specify the contentious topic but otherwise indicate it is an AE action.

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• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:57, 8 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-42

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

Weekly highlight

• Last week, improvements to account security and two-factor authentication (2FA) features were enabled across all wikis. These changes include user interface improvements for Special:AccountSecurity, the support of multiple 2FA methods via authenticator apps and portable security keys (previously users could only enable one method), and a new Recovery Codes module which facilitates fewer account lockouts due to lost two-factor apps and devices. As part of the Account Security project, work is continuing through the rest of 2025 on further user experience improvements, and support for passkeys as an alternate second factor.

Updates for editors

• Another part of the Account security project is making 2FA generally available to all users. Along with editors with advanced privileges, such as administrators and bureaucrats, 40% of editors now have access to 2FA. You can check if you have access at Special:AccountSecurity. Instructions for activation are on the linked page. The plan is to continue increasing availability if it is determined that the user support capabilities are able to support global usage. [116]
• This week, users at wikis where talk page Usability Improvements are already available by default (everywhere except the 12 wikis listed in T379264) will gain the ability to Thank a comment directly from the talk page it appears on. Before this change, Thanking could only be done by visiting the revision history of the talk page. You can learn more about this change. [117]
• Users who have not verified their email address will soon be receiving monthly Notification reminders to do so. This is because users who have verified their email can more easily recover their account. These reminders will not be sent if the user is inactive or removes the unverified email from their account. [118][119]
• View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a fix was made for an occasional error with saving translated paragraphs in the Content Translation tool, and the related error messages are now easier to see. [120]

Updates for technical contributors

• The Unsupported Tools Working Group has chosen Video2Commons as the first tool for its pilot cycle. The group will explore ways to improve and sustain the tool over the coming months. Learn more on Meta.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 18:56, 13 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-43

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

Updates for editors

• To optimize how user data is stored in our databases, the saved preferences of users who haven't logged in for over five years and have fewer than 100 edits will be cleared. When those users return, default settings will apply. [121]
• View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a broken link from the GlobalContributions interface message to the XTools GlobalContributions page which has now been fixed. [122]

Updates for technical contributors

• The work to reroute all traffic to API endpoints under the rest.php route through a common API gateway is now complete. If any issues are observed, please file a phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board.
• Edits to Wikidata references or qualifiers will now be shown in RecentChanges and Watchlist entries on other wikis less often, reducing unnecessary notifications. This will reduce the overall quantity of 'noisy' entries. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. [123]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:32, 20 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 20 October 2025

• News and notes: Board shuffles, LLM blocks increase, IPs are going away
  And the "Global Resource Distribution Committee" emerges.

• Special report: The election that isn't
  Two shortlisted WMF Board candidates removed from the ballot.

• Interview: The BoT bump
  Who was bumped and why?

• In the media: An incident at WikiConference North America; WMF reports AI-related traffic drop and explains Wikipedia to US conservatives
  ...while Musk prepares to launch "Grokipedia".

• Traffic report: One click after another
  Serial-killer miniseries, deceased scientist, government shutdowns and Sandalwood hit "Kantara" crowd the tubes.

• Humour: Wikipedia pay rates
  Don't get too excited before you read this.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:42, 20 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-44

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

• The Wikipedia iOS app has launched an A/B/C test of improvements made to the tabbed browsing feature for select regions and languages. The test, named “More dynamic tabs”, explores new tab experiences and includes “Did you know” and “Because you read” article recommendations. You can read more on the project page.
• Autoconfirmed users on small and medium wikis with the CampaignEvents extension can now use Event Registration without the Event Organizer right. This feature lets organizers enable registration, manage participants, and lets users register with one click instead of signing event pages.
• View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue of flashing colors when holding or pressing the arrow keys under the dark mode settings in Vector 2022 has been fixed. [124]

Updates for technical contributors

• The CampaignEvents extension will be deployed to all remaining wikis during the week of 17 November 2025. The extension currently includes three features: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List. For this rollout, Invitation List will not be enabled on Wikifunctions and MediaWiki unless requested by those communities. Visit the deployment page to learn more.
• The SwaggerUI-based REST sandbox experience is now live on all wiki projects. The sandbox can be accessed through the Special:RestSandbox page. Please report any issues to the MediaWiki Interfaces team board, or join the discussion on the project launch page. [125]
• Transform endpoints with a trailing slash path in the MediaWiki REST API are now marked as deprecated. They will remain functional during this time, but removal is expected by the end of January 2026. All API users currently calling them are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. Both endpoint variations can be found and tested using the REST Sandbox. See the MediaWiki REST API Deprecation page for more detailed information about the API deprecation policies and procedures.
• A dedicated changelog now exists for the MediaWiki REST API. The changelog provides an overview of these changes, making it easier for developers to keep track of improvements and iterations. Announcements will also continue to flow through the standard communication channels, including Tech News and email distribution lists, but can now be more easily referenced from a central location. If you have feedback about the style, structure, or content of this changelog, please join the discussion.
• Administrators can delete the tracking category which was previously added by the JsonConfig extension, as it is no longer used. See the categories linked from Q130635582. It is OK if there are still pages listed in the category as that is just a caching issue, and they will be automatically cleared out the next time each page is edited. [126]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:28, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-45

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

• Administrators will now find that Special:MergeHistory is now significantly more flexible about what it can merge. It can now merge sections taken from the middle of the history of the source (rather than only the start) and insert revisions anywhere in the history of the destination page (rather than only the start). [127]
• For users with "Automatically subscribe to topics" enabled in their preferences, starting a new topic or adding a reply to an existing topic will now subscribe them to replies to that topic. Previously, this would only happen if the DiscussionTools "Add topic" or "Reply" widgets were used. When DiscussionTools was originally launched existing accounts were not opted in to automatic topic subscriptions, so this change should primarily affect newer accounts and users who have deliberately changed their preferences since that time. [128]
• Scribunto modules can now be used to generate SVG images. This can be used to build charts, graphics and other visualizations dynamically through Lua, reducing the need to compose them externally and upload them as files. [129]
• Wikimedia sites now provide all anonymous users with the option to enable a dark mode color scheme, featuring light-colored text on a dark background. This enhancement aims to deliver a more enjoyable reading experience, especially in dimly lit environments. [130]
• Users with large watchlists have long faced timeouts when editing Special:EditWatchlist. The page now loads entries in smaller sections instead of all at once due to a paging update, allowing everyone to edit their watchlists smoothly. As part of the database update, sorting by expiry has been removed because it was over 100× slower than sorting by title. A community wish has been created to explore alternative ways to restore sort-by-expiry. If this feature is important to you, please support the wish! [131]
• View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the fixing of the persisting highlighting when using VisualEditor find and replace during a query. [132]

Updates for technical contributors

• Since 2019 the Wikimedia URL Shortener at https://w.wiki is available for all Wikimedia wikis to create short links to articles, permalinks, diffs, etc. It is available in the sidebar as "Get shortened URL". There are 30 wikis that also install an older "ShortUrl" extension. The old extension will soon be removed. This means /s/ URLs will not be advertised under article titles via HTML class="title-shortlink". The /s/ URLs will keep working. [133]
• On Thursday, October 30, the MediaWiki Interfaces and SRE Service Operations teams began rerouting Action API traffic through a common API gateway. Individual wikis will be updated based on the standard release groups, with total traffic increased over time. This change is expected to be non-breaking and non-disruptive. If any issues are observed, please file a Phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board.
• MediaWiki Train deployments will pause for the final two weeks of 2025: 22 December and 29 December. Backport windows will also pause between Monday, 22 December 2025 and Thursday, 2 January 2026. A backport window is a scheduled time to add things like bug fixes and configuration changes. There are seven deployment trains remaining for 2025. [134]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• In 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation reported that AI systems and search engines increasingly use Wikipedia content without driving users to the site, contributing to an 8% drop in human pageviews compared to 2024. After detecting bots disguised as humans, Wikimedia updated its traffic data to reflect this shift. Read more about current user trends on Wikipedia in a Diff blog post.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:31, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – November 2025

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

Administrator changes

Toadspike

• Elahrairah
• Juliancolton
• Magnus Manske

CheckUser changes

asilvering

Guideline and policy news

• The speedy deletion criteria U5 has been repealed, with U6 and U7 replacing it. See the FAQ for more clarifications.
• Community-designated contentious topics may now be enforced and appealed at the arbitration enforcement noticeboard (AE) as a result of an RfC.

Technical news

• You can enable a handy user info card next to usernames, which when clicked displays edit count, blocks, thanks, and other information. To enable this feature, visit Preferences → Appearance → Advanced options → Enable the user info card

Arbitration

• The arbitration case Transgender healthcare and people has been closed
  • Uninvolved administrators may impose an AE participation restriction on any thread at the Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard.

Miscellaneous

• An unreferenced articles backlog drive is happening in November 2025 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) 16:35, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 10 November 2025

• News and notes: Temporary accounts go live and WMF board member self-suspends
  ArbCom elections draw close, and Wikimania '27 in Santiago.

• Community view: Six Wikipedians' thoughts on Grokipedia, and the humanity of it all
  It ain't a five course meal, according to one of our interviewees.

• Wikicup report: BeanieFan11, WikiCup victor of 2025, covers the results
  Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

• In the media: Jimbo's book, an argument about genocide, and a train of shame
  Wikipedia's new rival, political controversy in Italy and other Wiki-reports.

• Recent research: Taking stock of the 2024–2025 research grants
  $400,000 USD in total funding: what did we get?

• Opinion: With Grokipedia, top-down control of knowledge is new again
  Does it shed any light on particular topics that are better suited to LLM-generation than others?

• Obituary: Struway
  Rest in peace.

• Traffic report: The documentaried, the disowned, the deceased, Diwali and the Dodgers
  You know your man is working hard, he's worth a deuce.

• Comix: Head of steam
  'Sblood!

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:54, 10 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-46

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

Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.

• Starting November 12, users will see a change in the appearance of talk pages on some Wikipedias. Almost all wikis have received this design change; English Wikipedia will get these changes later. You can read more on Diff. Users can opt out of these changes in their user preferences in "Show discussion activity". [135]
• MediaWiki can now display a page indicator automatically while a page is protected. This feature is disabled by default. It can be enabled by community request. [136]
• Using the "Show preview" or "Show changes" buttons in the wikitext editor will now carry over certain URL parameters like 'useskin', 'uselang' and 'section'. This update also fixes an issue where, if the browser crashed while previewing an edit to a single section, saving this edit could overwrite the entire page with just that section’s content. [137][138][139]
• Wikivoyage wikis can use colored map markers in the article text. The text of these markers will now be shown in contrasting black or white color, instead of always being white. Local workarounds for the problem can be removed. [140]
• The Activity tab in the Wikipedia Android app is now available for all users. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging. [141]
• The Reader Growth team is launching an experiment called "Image browsing" to test how to make it easier for readers to browse and discover images on Wikipedia articles. This experiment, a mobile-only A/B test, will go live on English Wikipedia in the week of November 17 and will run for four weeks, affecting 0.05% of users on English wiki. The test launched on November 3 on Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese wikis, affecting up to 10% of users on those wikis. [142]
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example the inability to lock accounts on mobile sites has been fixed. [143]

Updates for technical contributors

• Nominations are open on Wikitech for new Toolforge standards committee members. The committee oversees the Toolforge Right to fork policy and Abandoned tool policy among other duties. Nominations will remain open through 2025-11-28.
• The JWT issuer field in OAuth 2 access tokens for SUL wikis has been changed to https://meta.wikimedia.org. Old access tokens will still work. [144]
• The JWT subject field in OAuth 2 access tokens will soon change from <user id> to mw:<identity type>:<user id>, where <identity type> is typically CentralAuth: (for SUL wikis) or local:<wiki id> (for other wikis). This is to avoid conflicts between different user ID types, and to make OAuth 2 access tokens and the sessionJwt cookie more similar. Old access tokens will still work. [145]
• MediaWiki's block messages (blockedtext, blockedtext-partial, autoblockedtext, systemblockedtext, blockedtext-tempuser, autoblockedtext-tempuser) now support additional parameters indicating whether the user is blocked from editing their own user talk page $9 or emailing other users $10. [146]
• A REL1_45 branch for MediaWiki core and each of the extensions and skins in Wikimedia git has been created. This is the first step in the release process for MediaWiki 1.45.0, scheduled for late November 2025. If you are working on a critical bug fix or working on a new feature, you may need to take note of this change. [147]
• The process for generating CirrusSearch dumps has been updated due to slowing performance. If you encounter any issues migrating to the replacement dumps, please contact the Search Platform Team for support. [148][149]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:36, 10 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-47

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 Reader Experience team is experimenting with reading lists on mobile web, allowing logged-in readers with no edits to save private lists of articles for later. The experiment is running on Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias since the week of 10 November, and will begin on English Wikipedia the week of 17 November.
• Users who can’t receive their email verification code during login can now get help by submitting a form on a new special page. This update is part of the Account Security initiative. If your account has an email address, please make sure you still have access to it. When logging in from a new device or location without 2FA, you may be asked to enter a 6-digit code sent by email to finish logging in. Learn more.
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikisource in Minangkabau (s:min:) [150]
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• As part of the Parser Unification project, the Content Transform Team rolled out Parsoid as the default parser to many low-traffic Wikipedias and is preparing the next step to high traffic ones. This message is an invitation for you to opt-in to Parsoid, as described in the Extension:ParserMigration documentation, and identify any issues you might encounter with your own workflow using bots, gadgets, or user scripts. Please, let us know through the "Report Visual Bug" link in the Tools sidebar or create a phab ticket and tag the Content Transform Team in Phabricator.
• Unsupported Tools: Several issues with Video2Commons have been fixed, including filename-related upload failures, black-video imports, and retry handling. AV1 support has also been added. Ongoing work focuses on backend stability, ffmpeg errors, subtitle imports, metadata handling, and playlist uploads. To track specific tasks, check the Phabricator board.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• Save the date for the next Wikimedia Hackathon happening in Milan, Italy from May 1–3, 2026. Registration will open in January 2026. Scholarship applications are currently open, and will close on November 28, 2025. If you have any questions, please email [e-mail].

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

MediaWiki message delivery 17:24, 17 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom 2025 Elections voter message

Hello! Voting in the 2025 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 1 December 2025. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2025 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:25, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Books & Bytes – Issue 71

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 71, September–October 2025

• Spotlight: 1Lib1Ref 2025 in Nigeria
• Frankfurt Book Fair
• Tech tip: Wikipedia Library access template

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team – 15:22, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

(This message was sent to User:Osomite and is being posted here due to a redirect.)

Tech News: 2025-48

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

• Last week, the Wikimedia Search Team recreated the "DWIM" (Do What I Mean) gadget functionality server-side, for Russian and Hebrew Wikipedias. This feature adds cross-keyboard suggestions to the standard search-box suggestions. For example, searching for cxfcnmt on Russian Wikipedia will now add suggestions for счастье ("happiness") that the user probably intended. They plan to enable this feature for other Russian and Hebrew wikis this week. [151]
• Later this week, users of the "Improved Syntax Highlighting" beta feature will have syntax highlighting available in DiscussionTools. This requires that the "Enable editing tools in source mode" preference be set. [152]
• Campaign events extension – the set of tools for coordinating events and other on-wiki collaborations has now been deployed to all Wikimedia wikis. A new feature known as Collaborative contribution to help organizers and participants see the impact of activities has also been added. Join the upcoming learning session to see the new feature in action and share your feedback.
• View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the bug which stopped CodeReviewBot from working, has now been fixed. [153]

Updates for technical contributors

• Users of Wikimedia API can join a usability study to help validate the new design of Wikimedia REST API sandboxes. Interested participants should fill the recruitment survey. [154]
• The MediaWiki Interfaces team is deprecating XSLT stylesheets within the Action API. Support for format=xml&xlst={stylesheet} will be removed from Wikimedia projects by the end of November, 2025. In addition, it will soon be disabled by default in MediaWiki release versions: v1.43 (LTS), v1.44, and v1.45. Support for XSLT stylesheets will be fully removed from MediaWiki v1.46 (expected to release between April and May 2026). [155]
• The WDQS legacy endpoint (query-legacy-full.wikidata.org) will be decommissioned at the end of December 2025, and finally closed down on 7th January 2026. After this date, users should expect requests to query.wikidata.org that require the full graph to fail or return invalid results if they are not rewritten to use SPARQL federation. The team encourages users to ensure that tools and workflows use the supported WDQS endpoints (https://query.wikidata.org/ - Main graph or https://query-scholarly.wikidata.org/ - Scholarly graph). For support with migrating use cases, please review the Data Access and Request a Query pages for details and assistance on alternative access methods.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 15:54, 24 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 1 December 2025

• News and notes: Election cycles come and go, and Wikimedia Foundation achieves record revenue in 2024–2025!
  Admin and ArbCom elections upcoming, BoT elects two new members, task force advises to close Wikinews and keep Wikispore, and other news from the Wikimedia world.

• In the media: Wales walk-off, antisemitism, supernatural powers, feminism turmoil, saints, and sex
  Plus mammoth mummy sex-change operation completed!

• Recent research: At least 80 million inconsistent facts on Wikipedia – can AI help find them?
  And other recent publications about contradictions and retractions.

• Disinformation report: Epstein email exchanges planned strategy, edits and reported progress
  At work on Wikipedia whitewashing. How much should they be paid?

• Traffic report: It's a family affair
  Even in these times there is something to be thankful for!

• Book review: The Seven Rules of Trust
  Jimmy Wales and Dan Gardner write a book inspired by Wikipedia. What's in it?

• From the archives: "I have been asked by Jeffrey Epstein ..."
  The twists and turns of Epstein’s portrayal on Wikipedia.

• Humour: An interview with Wikipe-tan
  A conversation about being the mascot of Wikipedia.

• Opinion: AI finds errors in 90% of Wikipedia's best articles
  Using ChatGPT to fact-check a month's worth of Today's featured articles.

• Serendipity: Highlights from the itWikiCon 2025
  A recap of the latest convention of the Italian Wiki-community, held in Catania from 7–9 November.

• Comix: Madness
  It could happen to anyone.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:14, 1 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-49

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 Wikipedia Year in Review 2025 will be available on December 2 for users of iOS and Android Wikipedia apps, featuring new personalized insights, updated reading highlights, and refreshed designs. Learn more on the review's project page.
• The Growth team is working on improving the text and presentation of the Verification Email sent to new users to make them more welcoming, useful and informative. Some new text have been drafted for A/B testing and you can help by translating them. See Phabricator.
• Add a link will now be deployed at Japanese, Urdu and Chinese Wikipedias on December 2. Add a link is based on a prediction model that suggests links to be added to articles. While this feature has already been available on most Wikipedias, the prediction model could not support certain languages. A new model has now been developed to handle these languages, and it will be gradually rolled out to other Wikipedias over time. If you would like to know more, please contact Trizek (WMF).
• View all 34 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where search boxes on some Commons pages showed no results due to switch from SpecialSearch to MediaSearch, has now been fixed. [156]
• Two new wikis have been created:
  • a Wikipedia in Toki Pona (w:tok:) [157]
  • a Wikiquote in Nigerian Pidgin (q:pcm:) [158]

Updates for technical contributors

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The Wikimedia Foundation is in the early stages of exploring approaches to Article guidance. The initiative aims to identify interventions that could help new editors easily understand and apply existing Wikipedia practices and policies when creating an article. The project is in the exploration and early experimental design phase. All community members are encouraged to learn more about the project, and share their thoughts 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 18:56, 1 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – December 2025

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

Administrator changes

• Chaotic Enby
• Rjjiii

Valereee

• Fathoms Below
• Tamzin

CheckUser changes

Spicy

Technical news

• Starting on November 4, the IP addresses of logged-out editors are no longer being publicly displayed. Instead, they will have a temporary account associated with their edits.
• Administrators will now find that Special:MergeHistory is now significantly more flexible about what it can merge. It can now merge sections taken from the middle of the history of the source (rather than only the start) and insert revisions anywhere in the history of the destination page (rather than only the start). T382958

Miscellaneous

• The December 2025 administrator elections are scheduled from Nov 25 – Dec 15.
• An Articles for Creation backlog drive is happening in December 2025, with over 1,000 drafts awaiting review from the past two months. In addition to AfC participants, all administrators and new page patrollers can help review using the Yet Another AFC Helper Script, which can be enabled in the Gadgets settings. Sign up here to participate!

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• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent byMediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:44, 8 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-50

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

• Anybody who wishes to secure their user account can now use two-factor authentication (2FA). This is available to all registered users of all Wikimedia projects. This is part of the Account Security initiative. Later, 2FA will be required for all users who can take security- or privacy-sensitive actions.

Updates for editors

• Following last week's deployments, the Add a link feature, which allows editors to add suggested links during editing, will be available to an additional 33 Wikipedias starting on 9 December. This expansion is possible thanks to the new prediction model that now supports all languages, including those that were previously not covered. While the feature has been available on most Wikipedias for some time, this rollout brings us closer to using the improved model everywhere. If you have any questions or would like more details please contact Trizek (WMF).
• Last week, the Search Platform team added transliterated as-you-type search suggestions to Georgian wikis. If there are only a few regular search suggestions, then queries in Latin or Cyrillic script are now rewritten into Georgian script to look for more matches. For example, searching for either bedniereba or бедниереба will now suggest the existing article about ბედნიერება ("happiness"). You can recommend other languages where transliterated suggestions would be useful on Phabricator for future development.
• Later this week, a controlled experiment will begin for editors on the 100 largest Wikipedias who are editing a section in the mobile web visual editor. 50% of these editors will notice a new "Edit full page" button that will enable them to expand their editing session to the whole page. This feature is intended to make it easier for people on mobile web to edit any article section, regardless of which section-edit icon they tapped to begin. The experiment will last ~4 weeks. You can find more details about the project.
• Later this week, the Reader Growth team will launch a mobile web experiment to expand all article sections by default (currently they are collapsed by default) and pin the section header the user is currently reading to the top of the page. The experiment will affect 10% of users on Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. [159]
• The Wikipedia Year in Review 2025, a feature in the Wikipedia mobile apps (iOS and Android) that provides users with a personalised summary of their engagement with Wikipedia over the year, is now available on the iOS and Android apps. This edition includes expanded personalised insights, improved reading highlights, new donor messaging, and updated designs. Open the app to view your Year in Review and explore your reading journey from 2025.
• A recent software bug caused edits made with VisualEditor to make unintended changes to wikitext, including removing whitespace and replacing spaces with underscores in wikilinks inside citations. This was partially fixed last week, and further fixes are in progress. Editors who used VisualEditor between November 28 and December 2 should review their edits for unexpected modifications. [160]
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the incorrect handling of URLs copied from the address bar of Microsoft Edge users, has been resolved. [161]

Updates for technical contributors

• Starting this week, users of the "Improved Syntax Highlighting" beta feature will have CodeMirror as the editor for Lua, JavaScript, CSS, JSON and Vue content models, instead of CodeEditor. With this, the linters will be upgraded. This is part of a larger effort to eventually replace CodeEditor and provide a consistent code editing experience. [162]
• Developers are encouraged to take the 2025 Developer Satisfaction Survey, which remains open until 5 January 2026. If you build software for the Wikimedia ecosystem and would like to share your experiences or feedback, your participation is greatly appreciated. [163]
• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 17:43, 8 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-51

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

• View all 18 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, one of the fixes addressed an issue for temporary accounts adding an external URL, which triggered an hCaptcha request in more cases than intended, and did not display the required popup on the first attempt to publish the edit. [164]

Updates for technical contributors

• To improve database and site performance, external links to Wikimedia projects will no longer be stored in the database. This means they will not be searchable in Special:LinkSearch, will not be checked by the Spam Blacklist or AbuseFilter as new links, and will not be in the externallinks table on database replicas. In the future this may be extended to other highly-linked trusted websites on a per-wiki basis, such as Creative Commons links on Wikimedia Commons. [165]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:01, 15 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 17 December 2025

• Interview: Part 1: Bernadette Meehan
  Say hello to the new WMF CEO.

• News and notes: We're gonna have a party!
  And a new WMF CEO!

• In the media: The "bigg" bosses: Robertsky and the Pope
  Pay up, big guys!

• Traffic report: Death and stranger things
  And going for the FIFA prize!

• Gallery: A feast of holidays and carols
  Something old and something new!

• Obituary: Michal Lewi (Iwelam) and Alan R. King (A R King)
  Rest in peace.

• Concept: List of xxtreme sports (redirected from Electrojousting)
  You are viewing an old revision of this page, as edited on 2065-11-10 04:33:10.

• Comix: display: flex-inline;
  ampersand nb semicolon ampersand nb semicolon ampersand nb semicolon

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:02, 17 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-52

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

• From January, edit filters can be set to automatically suppress their details such as rules and list of attempted edits and actions. This will help oversighters use edit filters to prevent doxxing or other suppressible material. [166]
• The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 12 January 2026 because of the end of year holidays. Thank you to all of the translators, and people who submitted content or feedback, this year.
• View all 16 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the crash that occurred when tapping "First Steps" in the Wikipedia Android Year in Review has now been fixed, and the feature opens as expected. [167]

Updates for technical contributors

• Interface elements such as diffs and categories generated by MediaWiki used to have the attribute data-mw="interface" to distinguish from wiki content. The attribute has been replaced with data-mw-interface="", to avoid potential conflicts with other data-mw attributes, which are generated by Parsoid. [168]
• There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.

Meetings and events

• The Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026 will take place on 13-14 March 2026 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Applications just opened mid-December and will close in mid-January or earlier if capacity is reached. With space for approximately 100 participants, early application is encouraged.

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MediaWiki message delivery 21:43, 22 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]