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Archive 13

January 2024 NPP backlog drive – Points award

		The Invisible Barnstar
		This award is given in recognition to Vermont for collecting at least 5 points during the January 2024 NPP backlog drive. Your contributions played a part in the 16,070 reviews completed during the drive. Thank you so much for taking part and contributing to help reduce the backlog! Hey man im josh (talk) 22:46, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue 215, March 2024

Your Military History Newsletter Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content Book review: Hawkeye7 and Nick-D look at four recent works

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 22:56, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

oops

I did not receive your email---please try again to rjensen@uic.edu Rjensen (talk) 02:32, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

Rjensen, sent! Vermont (🐿️—🏳️‍🌈) 04:30, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

New Pages Patrol newsletter April 2024

Hello Vermont,

New Page Review queue January to March 2024

Backlog update: The October drive reduced the article backlog from 11,626 to 7,609 and the redirect backlog from 16,985 to 6,431! Congratulations to Schminnte, who led with over 2,300 points.

Following that, New Page Patrol organized another backlog drive for articles in January 2024. The January drive started with 13,650 articles and reduced the backlog to 7,430 articles. Congratulations to JTtheOG, who achieved first place with 1,340 points in this drive.

Looking at the graph, it seems like backlog drives are one of the only things keeping the backlog under control. Another backlog drive is being planned for May. Feel free to participate in the May backlog drive planning discussion.

It's worth noting that both queues are gradually increasing again and are nearing 14,034 articles and 22,540 redirects. We encourage you to keep contributing, even if it's just a single patrol per day. Your support is greatly appreciated!

2023 Awards

Onel5969 won the 2023 cup with 17,761 article reviews last year - that's an average of nearly 50/day. There was one Platinum Award (10,000+ reviews), 2 Gold Awards (5000+ reviews), 6 Silver (2000+), 8 Bronze (1000+), 30 Iron (360+) and 70 more for the 100+ barnstar. Hey man im josh led on redirect reviews by clearing 36,175 of them. For the full details, see the Awards page and the Hall of Fame. Congratulations everyone for their efforts in reviewing!

WMF work on PageTriage: The WMF Moderator Tools team and volunteer software developers deployed the rewritten NewPagesFeed in October, and then gave the NewPagesFeed a slight visual facelift in November. This concludes most major work to Special:NewPagesFeed, and most major work by the WMF Moderator Tools team, who wrapped up their major work on PageTriage in October. The WMF Moderator Tools team and volunteer software developers will continue small work on PageTriage as time permits.

Recruitment: A couple of the coordinators have been inviting editors to become reviewers, via mass-messages to their talk pages. If you know someone who you'd think would make a good reviewer, then a personal invitation to them would be great. Additionally, if there are Wikiprojects that you are active on, then you can add a post there asking participants to join NPP. Please be careful not to double invite folks that have already been invited.

Reviewing tip: Reviewers who prefer to patrol new pages within their most familiar subjects can use the regularly updated NPP Browser tool.

Reminders:

• You can access live chat with patrollers on the New Pages Patrol Discord.
• Consider adding the project discussion page to your watchlist.
• To opt out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:27, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue 216, April 2024

Your Military History Newsletter Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content Book review: Hawkeye7, Nick-D and Pickersgill-Cunliffe discuss six (count 'em, six!) works comprising eight volumes Op-ed: Hawkeye7 on a lecture by the Australian official historian

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
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New page patrol May 2024 Backlog drive

New Page Patrol | May 2024 Articles Backlog Drive
On 1 May 2024, a one-month backlog drive for New Page Patrol will begin. Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles patrolled. Barnstars will also be granted for re-reviewing articles previously reviewed by other patrollers during the drive. Each review will earn 1 point. Interested in taking part? Sign up here.
You're receiving this message because you are a new page patroller. To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:15, 17 April 2024 (UTC)

Reminder to vote now to select members of the first U4C

You can find this message translated into additional languages on Meta-wiki. Please help translate to other languages.

Dear Wikimedian,

You are receiving this message because you previously participated in the UCoC process.

This is a reminder that the voting period for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) ends on May 9, 2024. Read the information on the voting page on Meta-wiki to learn more about voting and voter eligibility.

The Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is a global group dedicated to providing an equitable and consistent implementation of the UCoC. Community members were invited to submit their applications for the U4C. For more information and the responsibilities of the U4C, please review the U4C Charter.

Please share this message with members of your community so they can participate as well.

On behalf of the UCoC project team,

RamzyM (WMF) 23:10, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue 217, May 2024

Your Military History Newsletter Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content Book review: Hawkeye7 and Nick-D look at a diverse range of works Op-ed: Hawkeye7 on the "center of gravity"

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 20:19, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

Rosie’s Law

Hey Vermont, thanks for your clean-ups edits on Rosie Jimenez, another newcomer actually started a draft on Rosie’s Law. Let me know if it is a good enough stub to move to the (now) redirect of the article, thanks, Oscar_. (talk) 22:17, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

Hi Oscar .! It's probably good enough for mainspace, though the draft has an overreliance on primary sources. I might have time next week to work on that, sufficient secondary sources definitely exist. Vermont (🐿️—🏳️‍🌈) 22:35, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

That sounds great, thank you @Vermont! Oscar_. (talk) 16:10, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

Merry Christmas

Nosebagbear (talk) is wishing you a Merry Christmas! This greeting (and season) promotes WikiLove and hopefully this note has made your day a little better. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Happy New Year!

Spread the cheer by adding {{subst:Xmas5}} to their talk page with a friendly message.

And a happy non-Simple new year!

Happy New Year!

~~~~
User:1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk) — is wishing you a Happy New Year! This greeting (and season) promotes WikiLove and hopefully this note has made your day a little better. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Happy New Year!

Spread the New Year cheer by adding {{subst:New Year 1}} to their talk page with a friendly message.

New Page Patrol newsletter October 2022

Hello Vermont,

Much has happened since the last newsletter over two months ago. The open letter finished with 444 signatures. The letter was sent to several dozen people at the WMF, and we have heard that it is being discussed but there has been no official reply. A related article appears in the current issue of The Signpost. If you haven't seen it, you should, including the readers' comment section.

Awards: Barnstars were given for the past several years (thanks to MPGuy2824), and we are now all caught up. The 2021 cup went to John B123 for leading with 26,525 article reviews during 2021. To encourage moderate activity, a new "Iron" level barnstar is awarded annually for reviewing 360 articles ("one-a-day"), and 100 reviews earns the "Standard" NPP barnstar. About 90 reviewers received barnstars for each of the years 2018 to 2021 (including the new awards that were given retroactively). All awards issued for every year are listed on the Awards page. Check out the new Hall of Fame also.

Software news: Novem Linguae and MPGuy2824 have connected with WMF developers who can review and approve patches, so they have been able to fix some bugs, and make other improvements to the Page Curation software. You can see everything that has been fixed recently here. The reviewer report has also been improved.

NPP backlog May – October 15, 2022

Suggestions:

• There is much enthusiasm over the low backlog, but remember that the "quality and depth of patrolling are more important than speed".
• Reminder: an article should not be tagged for any kind of deletion for a minimum of 15 minutes after creation and it is often appropriate to wait an hour or more. (from the NPP tutorial)
• Reviewers should focus their effort where it can do the most good, reviewing articles. Other clean-up tasks that don't require advanced permissions can be left to other editors that routinely improve articles in these ways (creating Talk Pages, specifying projects and ratings, adding categories, etc.) Let's rely on others when it makes the most sense. On the other hand, if you enjoy doing these tasks while reviewing and it keeps you engaged with NPP (or are guiding a newcomer), then by all means continue.
• This user script puts a link to the feed in your top toolbar.

Backlog:

Saving the best for last: From a July low of 8,500, the backlog climbed back to 11,000 in August and then reversed in September dropping to below 6,000 and continued falling with the October backlog drive to under 1,000, a level not seen in over four years. Keep in mind that there are 2,000 new articles every week, so the number of reviews is far higher than the backlog reduction. To keep the backlog under a thousand, we have to keep reviewing at about half the recent rate!

Reminders

• Newsletter feedback - please take this short poll about the newsletter.
• If you're interested in instant messaging and chat rooms, please join us on the New Page Patrol Discord, where you can ask for help and live chat with other patrollers.
• Please add the project discussion page to your watchlist.
• If you are no longer very active on Wikipedia or you no longer wish to be a reviewer, please ask any admin to remove you from the group. If you want the tools back again, just ask at PERM.
• To opt out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.

New Pages Patrol newsletter January 2023

Hello Vermont,

New Page Review queue December 2022

Backlog

The October drive reduced the backlog from 9,700 to an amazing 0! Congratulations to WaddlesJP13 who led with 2084 points. See this page for further details. The queue is steadily rising again and is approaching 2,000. It would be great if <2,000 were the “new normal”. Please continue to help out even if it's only for a few or even one patrol a day.

2022 Awards

Onel5969 won the 2022 cup for 28,302 article reviews last year - that's an average of nearly 80/day. There was one Gold Award (5000+ reviews), 11 Silver (2000+), 28 Iron (360+) and 39 more for the 100+ barnstar. Rosguill led again for the 4th year by clearing 49,294 redirects. For the full details see the Awards page and the Hall of Fame. Congratulations everyone!

Minimum deletion time: The previous WP:NPP guideline was to wait 15 minutes before tagging for deletion (including draftification and WP:BLAR). Due to complaints, a consensus decided to raise the time to 1 hour. To illustrate this, very new pages in the feed are now highlighted in red. (As always, this is not applicable to attack pages, copyvios, vandalism, etc.)

New draftify script: In response to feedback from AFC, the The Move to Draft script now provides a choice of set messages that also link the creator to a new, friendly explanation page. The script also warns reviewers if the creator is probably still developing the article. The former script is no longer maintained. Please edit your edit your common.js or vector.js file from User:Evad37/MoveToDraft.js to User:MPGuy2824/MoveToDraft.js

Redirects: Some of our redirect reviewers have reduced their activity and the backlog is up to 9,000+ (two months deep). If you are interested in this distinctly different task and need any help, see this guide, this checklist, and spend some time at WP:RFD.

Discussions with the WMF The PageTriage open letter signed by 444 users is bearing fruit. The Growth Team has assigned some software engineers to work on PageTriage, the software that powers the NewPagesFeed and the Page Curation toolbar. WMF has submitted dozens of patches in the last few weeks to modernize PageTriage's code, which will make it easier to write patches in the future. This work is helpful but is not very visible to the end user. For patches visible to the end user, volunteers such as Novem Linguae and MPGuy2824 have been writing patches for bug reports and feature requests. The Growth Team also had a video conference with the NPP coordinators to discuss revamping the landing pages that new users see.

Reminders

• Newsletter feedback - please take this short poll about the newsletter.
• There is live chat with patrollers on the New Page Patrol Discord.
• Please add the project discussion page to your watchlist.
• If you no longer wish to be a reviewer, please ask any admin to remove you from the group. If you want the tools back again, just ask at PERM.
• To opt out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.

New Pages Patrol newsletter June 2023

Hello Vermont,

New Page Review queue April to June 2023

Backlog

Redirect drive: In response to an unusually high redirect backlog, we held a redirect backlog drive in May. The drive completed with 23851 reviews done in total, bringing the redirect backlog to 0 (momentarily). Congratulations to Hey man im josh who led with a staggering 4316 points, followed by Meena and Greyzxq with 2868 and 2546 points respectively. See this page for more details. The redirect queue is steadily rising again and is steadily approaching 4,000. Please continue to help out, even if it's only for a few or even one review a day.

Redirect autopatrol: All administrators without autopatrol have now been added to the redirect autopatrol list. If you see any users who consistently create significant amounts of good quality redirects, consider requesting redirect autopatrol for them here.

WMF work on PageTriage: The WMF Moderator Tools team, consisting of Sam, Jason and Susana, and also some patches from Jon, has been hard at work updating PageTriage. They are focusing their efforts on modernising the extension's code rather than on bug fixes or new features, though some user-facing work will be prioritised. This will help make sure that this extension is not deprecated, and is easier to work on in the future. In the next month or so, we will have an opt-in beta test where new page patrollers can help test the rewrite of Special:NewPagesFeed, to help find bugs. We will post more details at WT:NPPR when we are ready for beta testers.

Articles for Creation (AFC): All new page reviewers are now automatically approved for Articles for Creation draft reviewing (you do not need to apply at WT:AFCP like was required previously). To install the AFC helper script, visit Special:Preferences, visit the Gadgets tab, tick "Yet Another AFC Helper Script", then click "Save". To find drafts to review, visit Special:NewPagesFeed, and at the top left, tick "Articles for Creation". To review a draft, visit a submitted draft, click on the "More" menu, then click "Review (AFCH)". You can also comment on and submit drafts that are unsubmitted using the script.

You can review the AFC workflow at WP:AFCR. It is up to you if you also want to mark your AFC accepts as NPP reviewed (this is allowed but optional, depends if you would like a second set of eyes on your accept). Don't forget that draftspace is optional, so moves of drafts to mainspace (even if they are not ready) should not be reverted, except possibly if there is conflict of interest.

Pro tip: Did you know that visual artists such as painters have their own SNG? The most common part of this "creative professionals" criteria that applies to artists is WP:ARTIST 4b (solo exhibition, not group exhibition, at a major museum) or 4d (being represented within the permanent collections of two museums).

Reminders

• Newsletter feedback - please take this short poll about the newsletter.
• There is live chat with patrollers on the New Page Patrol Discord and #wikimedia-npp ^connect on IRC.
• Please add the project discussion page to your watchlist.
• To opt out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.

The Bugle: Issue 218, June 2024

Your Military History Newsletter Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content Book review: Hawkeye7 looks at the Tokyo war crimes trials

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 09:43, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue 219, July 2024

Your Military History Newsletter Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content Book review: Recent external reviews

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 12:08, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-31

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

Feature news

• Editors using the Visual Editor in languages that use non-Latin characters for numbers, such as Hindi, Manipuri and Eastern Arabic, may notice some changes in the formatting of reference numbers. This is a side effect of preparing a new sub-referencing feature, and will also allow fixing some general numbering issues in Visual Editor. If you notice any related problems on your wiki, please share details at the project talkpage.

Bugs status

• Some logged-in editors were briefly unable to edit or load pages last week. These errors were mainly due to the addition of new linter rules which led to caching problems. Fixes have been applied and investigations are continuing.
• Editors can use the IP Information tool to get information about IP addresses. This tool is available as a Beta Feature in your preferences. The tool was not available for a few days last week, but is now working again. Thank you to Shizhao for filing the bug report. You can read about that, and 28 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Project updates

• There are new features and improvements to Phabricator from the Release Engineering and Collaboration Services teams, and some volunteers, including: the search systems, the new task creation system, the login systems, the translation setup which has resulted in support for more languages (thanks to Pppery), and fixes for many edge-case errors. You can read details about these and other improvements in this summary.
• There is an update on the Charts project. The team has decided which visualization library to use, which chart types to start focusing on, and where to store chart definitions.
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikivoyage in Czech (voy:cs:) [1]

Learn more

• There is a new Wikimedia Foundation data center in São Paulo, Brazil which helps to reduce load times.
• There is new user research on problems with the process of uploading images.
• Commons Impact Metrics are now available via data dumps and API.
• The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:08, 29 July 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-32

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

Feature news

• Two new parser functions will be available this week: {{#dir}} and {{#bcp47}}. These will reduce the need for Template:Dir and Template:BCP47 on Commons and allow us to drop 100 million rows from the "what links here" database. Editors at any wiki that use these templates, can help by replacing the templates with these new functions. The templates at Commons will be updated during the Hackathon at Wikimania. [2][3]
• Communities can request the activation of the visual editor on entire namespaces where discussions sometimes happen (for instance Wikipedia: or Wikisource: namespaces) if they understand the known limitations. For discussions, users can already use DiscussionTools in these namespaces.
• The tracking category "Pages using Timeline" has been renamed to "Pages using the EasyTimeline extension" in TranslateWiki. Wikis that have created the category locally should rename their local creation to match.

Project updates

• Editors who help to organize WikiProjects and similar on-wiki collaborations, are invited to share ideas and examples of successful collaborations with the Campaigns and Programs teams. You can fill out a brief survey or share your thoughts on the talkpage. The teams are particularly looking for details about successful collaborations on non-English wikis.
• The new parser is being rolled out on Wikivoyage wikis over the next few months. The English Wikivoyage and Hebrew Wikivoyage were switched to Parsoid last week. For more information, see Parsoid/Parser Unification.

Learn more

• There will be more than 200 sessions at Wikimania this week. Here is a summary of some of the key sessions related to the product and technology area.
• The latest Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin is available.
• The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New design previews for Translatable pages; Updates about MinT for Wiki Readers; the release of Translation dumps; and more.
• The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available.
• The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:41, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-33

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

Feature news

• AbuseFilter editors and maintainers can now make a CAPTCHA show if a filter matches an edit. This allows communities to quickly respond to spamming by automated bots. [4]
• Stewards can now specify if global blocks should prevent account creation. Before this change by the Trust and Safety Product Team, all global blocks would prevent account creation. This will allow stewards to reduce the unintended side-effects of global blocks on IP addresses.

Project updates

• Nominations are open on Wikitech for new members to refresh the Toolforge standards committee. The committee oversees the Toolforge Right to fork policy and Abandoned tool policy among other duties. Nominations will remain open until at least 2024-08-26.
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in West Coast Bajau (w:bdr:) [5]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:19, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue 220, August 2024

Your Military History Newsletter Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content Book review: Hawkeye7 looks at two works on logistics and one on the Battle of Arnhem

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 11:17, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

Question from Eliane Aparecida Casagrande Fragoso (17:19, 16 August 2024)

Boa tarde! Sou de origem italiana e gosto muito da cultura desse país. Ouvindo as músicas italianas no Yutube, acabei ouvindo as músicas e a história que terminou em uma fatalidade…O casal Albano e Romina Carrisi- Power que tiveram a vida de sua filha mais velha interrompida por nada que está concreto. E o motivo pelo qual envio essa mensagem, é lembrar a nação italiana que hoje o mundo está unanimemente transformado. Sinto que se nós uníssemos contando com autoridades dos outros países, poderão encontrar Ylenia Carrisi que pode ter sofrido traumas neurológicos… hoje a medicina avançou e o mundo se uniu para o bem ao próximo. Vamos lutar e vamos procurar.( Não vamos desistir) senti em meu coração em deixar essas entrelinhas. Att: - Eliane Aparecida Casagrande Fragoso. --Eliane Aparecida Casagrande Fragoso (talk) 17:19, 16 August 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-34

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

Feature news

• Editors who want to re-use references but with different details such as page numbers, will be able to do so by the end of 2024, using a new sub-referencing feature. You can read more about the project and how to test the prototype.
• Editors using tracking categories to identify which pages use specific extensions may notice that six of the categories have been renamed to make them more easily understood and consistent. These categories are automatically added to pages that use specialized MediaWiki extensions. The affected names are for: DynamicPageList, Kartographer, Phonos, RSS, Score, WikiHiero. Wikis that have created the category locally should rename their local creation to match. Thanks to Pppery for these improvements. [6]
• Technical volunteers who edit modules and want to get a list of the categories used on a page, can now do so using the categories property of mw.title objects. This enables wikis to configure workflows such as category-specific edit notices. Thanks to SD001 for these improvements. [7][8]

Bugs status

• Your help is needed to check if any pages need to be moved or deleted. A maintenance script was run to clean up unreachable pages (due to Unicode issues or introduction of new namespaces/namespace aliases). The script tried to find appropriate names for the pages (e.g. by following the Unicode changes or by moving pages whose titles on Wikipedia start with Talk:WP: so that their titles start with Wikipedia talk:), but it may have failed for some pages, and moved them to Special:PrefixIndex/T195546/ instead. Your community should check if any pages are listed there, and move them to the correct titles, or delete them if they are no longer needed. A full log (including pages for which appropriate names could be found) is available in phab:P67388.
• Editors who volunteer as mentors to newcomers on their wiki are once again able to access lists of potential mentees who they can connect with to offer help and guidance. This functionality was restored thanks to a bug fix. Thank you to Mbch331 for filing the bug report. You can read about that, and 18 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Project updates

• The application deadline for the Product & Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) has been extended to September 16. Members will help by providing advice to Foundation Product and Technology leadership on short and long term plans, on complex strategic problems, and help to get feedback from more contributors and technical communities. Selected members should expect to spend roughly 5 hours per month for the Council, during the one year pilot. Please consider applying, and spread the word to volunteers you think would make a positive contribution to the committee.

Learn more

• The 2024 Coolest Tool Awards were awarded at Wikimania, in seven categories. For example, one award went to the ISA Tool, used for adding structured data to files on Commons, which was recently improved during the Wiki Mentor Africa Hackathon. You can see video demonstrations of each tool at the awards page. Congratulations to this year's recipients, and thank you to all tool creators and maintainers.
• The latest Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin is available, and includes some highlights from Wikimania, an upcoming Language community meeting, and other news from the movement.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:51, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

New pages patrol September 2024 Backlog drive

New pages patrol | September 2024 Backlog Drive
On 1 September 2024, a one-month backlog drive for new pages patrol will begin. Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles and redirects patrolled. Barnstars will also be granted for re-reviewing articles previously reviewed by other patrollers during the drive. Each article review will earn 1 point, and each redirect review will earn 0.2 points. Interested in taking part? Sign up here.
You're receiving this message because you are a new page patroller. To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:11, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-35

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

Feature news

• Administrators can now test the temporary accounts feature on test2wiki. This was done to allow cross-wiki testing of temporary accounts, for when temporary accounts switch between projects. The feature was enabled on testwiki a few weeks ago. No further temporary account deployments are scheduled yet. Temporary Accounts is a project to create a new type of user account that replaces IP addresses of unregistered editors which are no longer made public. Please share your opinions and questions on the project talk page.
• Later this week, editors at wikis that use FlaggedRevs (also known as "Pending Changes") may notice that the indicators at the top of articles have changed. This change makes the system more consistent with the rest of the MediaWiki interface. [9]

Bugs status

• Editors who use the 2010 wikitext editor, and use the Character Insert buttons, will no longer experience problems with the buttons adding content into the edit-summary instead of the edit-window. You can read more about that, and 26 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Project updates

• Please review and vote on Focus Areas, which are groups of wishes that share a problem. Focus Areas were created for the newly reopened Community Wishlist, which is now open year-round for submissions. The first batch of focus areas are specific to moderator workflows, around welcoming newcomers, minimizing repetitive tasks, and prioritizing tasks. Once volunteers have reviewed and voted on focus areas, the Foundation will then review and select focus areas for prioritization.
• Do you have a project and are willing to provide a three (3) month mentorship for an intern? Outreachy is a twice a year program for people to participate in a paid internship that will start in December 2024 and end in early March 2025, and they need mentors and projects to work on. Projects can be focused on coding or non-coding (design, documentation, translation, research). See the Outreachy page for more details, and a list of past projects since 2013.

Learn more

• If you're curious about the product and technology improvements made by the Wikimedia Foundation last year, read this recent highlights summary on Diff.
• To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
  • Community Configuration - Shaping On-Wiki Functionality Together (55 mins) - about the Community Configuration project.
  • Future of MediaWiki. A sustainable platform to support a collaborative user base and billions of page views (30 mins) - an overview for both technical and non technical audiences, covering some of the challenges and open questions, related to the platform evolution, stewardship and developer experiences research.

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MediaWiki message delivery 20:30, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Question from GenEli1L1 (15:57, 26 August 2024)

Hey! So I've done quite a bit of editing without an account, and now that I have one I'm going to continue, but I wanted to know when to add/remove red links. And I also was under the impression that places get linked the first time they show up in the page, but I'm 100% sure that is the case. Thank you. --GenEli1L1 (talk) 15:57, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Hi GenEli1L1! Welcome :)

This guide page on red links has the most specific information, but the short version is: you can link topics that should have articles but currently do not. For example, red links would not be useful for topics that don't meet the notability guideline, because an article shouldn't be created about that topic.

You're correct that topics get linked the first time they show up in the page/major section. There are some exceptions, like in citations or infoboxes. (or were you referring to geographic places?) Best, Vermont (🐿️—🏳️‍🌈) 16:27, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

By info boxes you mean the thing in the top right, not the part at the top that summarizes the entire article...right? GenEli1L1 (talk) 16:43, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

@GenEli1L1: Yep! The top-right box, on the articles that have one, is an infobox. The summary bit at the top is usually called a lead. Vermont (🐿️—🏳️‍🌈) 21:22, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Question from GenEli1L1 (23:48, 26 August 2024)

I feel like i'm asking a lot of questions, but when I do the citations, what does it mean by ref. group, ref. name, or the ref with the little question mark in the top. --GenEli1L1 (talk) 23:48, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

@GenEli1L1: No worries re: asking a lot of questions! That's what I signed up for :P

• ref group: as you've noticed, articles have in-line citations that show up in a big list ("References") at the bottom. Sometimes we'll want to add in-line notes that are clarifications rather than references, and these can be differentiated (and shown in separate lists) with ref groups.
• ref name: reference names allow us to define a source once and cite it in that article as many times as we need.
• Not sure what you mean by question mark, can you link to an example?
• As a note: when it comes to citing sources, we try to cite them in-line, generally at the end of the sentence they support. This helps both readers and other editors quickly find which source is being used to support which claims in the article.

Also, I see you're editing American Civil War articles, which is awesome! As a fun fact, my only good article is Charles Mattocks, who was a Colonel in the Union Army. And for future questions, while I'm more than happy to continue talking on my talk page, if it'd be easier I'm also on Discord and a few other platforms. Vermont (🐿️—🏳️‍🌈) 01:03, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

Question from GenEli1L1 (19:56, 27 August 2024)

what do the + green thingys and the -red thingys next to my edits mean (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/GenEli1L1). --GenEli1L1 (talk) 19:56, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

@GenEli1L1: they're the change in the number of bytes of the page, which is basically the number of characters added or removed. Vermont (🐿️—🏳️‍🌈) 01:59, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

Question from George.barnes1945 (07:54, 24 August 2024)

Hello. are you a real person or a BOT? I am here NOW because I was trying to login to my existing account. Been here for many many years but not logging in. Donated etc. Just reading.

    Found out - dont know where - that I could save pages access from different devices. I usually use my cell phone, but have dozens of computers in multiple locations.  Not relevant.

.. BUT did not know my user name or password. Bumbled around using my usual suspects, my Google passwords did have record. Tried your password reset which just never knew who I was. Refused to let me use my usual default username: George.barnes45 saying user already exists. ... too much irrelevant detail...

   Slightly modified to George...1945 allowed me to create new setup account. 
   So what do I want.  MERGE any existing accounts. Save topics and pages I have save on my Cell phone to this account. Clean up mess. Dont want multiple accounts. Will confuse me by tomorrow. As obvious from 1945, I am 79 years old and dont want complication in what is left of my life. 
     Not relevant, but I may be 79 but not a dummy. I have a Ph.D in math, published, 35 years teaching University Math and was married to a University Provost. Your Wiki information notes seem to be purposely obscure like they were written by somebody in New Zealand. No offense intended. My wife was born in Minsk and got her doctorate in Christchurch. Will print this out, and toss it at her. --George.barnes1945 (talk) 07:54, 24 August 2024 (UTC)

Hi George.barnes1945! I'm a real person :)

So, there are a few things here:

• Assuming you're referring to the "saved pages" list in the iOS mobile app, those are tied to your account and only available in the mobile app. On desktop, most browsers have easy ways to make bookmarks, which you can use instead.
• If you've forgotten the password to your previous account (presumably George.barnes45, which was made ~5 years ago?), you can reset the password if you have an email attached. Without an email attached, you won't be able to reset the password.

While you're still logged in to your original account on your phone, it might be worth writing down the articles on your saved pages list. Then you can log into your current account and re-save those pages. I'm not sure if there's a better way to migrate saved lists from one account to another on mobile, but there is no way to merge Wikimedia accounts. Vermont (🐿️—🏳️‍🌈) 23:42, 24 August 2024 (UTC)

@George.barnes1945, for questions about the iOS app, you can email ios-support@wikimedia.org. Vermont (🐿️—🏳️‍🌈) 18:57, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

Voting for coordinators is now open!

Nominations for the upcoming project coordinator election have opened. A team of up to ten coordinators will be elected for the next coordination year. The project coordinators are the designated points of contact for issues concerning the project, and are responsible for maintaining our internal structure and processes. They do not, however, have any authority over article content or editor conduct, or any other special powers. More information on being a coordinator is available here. If you are interested in running, please sign up here by 23:59 UTC on 14 September! Voting will commence on 15 September. If you have any questions, you can contact any member of the current coord team. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:41, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-36

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

Weekly highlight

• Editors and volunteer developers interested in data visualisation can now test the new software for charts. Its early version is available on beta Commons and beta Wikipedia. This is an important milestone before making charts available on regular wikis. You can read more about this project update and help to test the charts.

Feature news

• Editors who use the Special:UnusedTemplates page can now filter out pages which are expected to be there permanently, such as sandboxes, test-cases, and templates that are always substituted. Editors can add the new magic word __EXPECTUNUSEDTEMPLATE__ to a template page to hide it from the listing. Thanks to Sophivorus and DannyS712 for these improvements. [10]
• Editors who use the New Topic tool on discussion pages, will now be reminded to add a section header, which should help reduce the quantity of newcomers who add sections without a header. You can read more about that, and 28 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
• Last week, some Toolforge tools had occasional connection problems. The cause is still being investigated, but the problems have been resolved for now. [11]
• Translation administrators at multilingual wikis, when editing multiple translation units, can now easily mark which changes require updates to the translation. This is possible with the new dropdown menu.

Project updates

• A new draft text of a policy discussing the use of Wikimedia's APIs has been published on Meta-Wiki. The draft text does not reflect a change in policy around the APIs; instead, it is an attempt to codify existing API rules. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome on the proposed update’s talk page until September 13 or until those discussions have concluded.

Learn more

• To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
  • Charts, the successor of Graphs - A secure and extensible tool for data visualization (25 mins) – about the above-mentioned Charts project.
  • State of Language Technology and Onboarding at Wikimedia (90 mins) – about some of the language tools that support Wikimedia sites, such as Content/Section Translation, MinT, and LanguageConverter; also the current state and future of languages onboarding. [12]

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MediaWiki message delivery 01:04, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

Question from Tiel xx (23:45, 3 September 2024)

I want to publish my article --Tiel xx (talk) 23:45, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-37

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

Feature news

• Starting this week, the standard syntax highlighter will receive new colors that make them compatible in dark mode. This is the first of many changes to come as part of a major upgrade to syntax highlighting. You can learn more about what's to come on the help page. [13][14]
• Editors of wikis using Wikidata will now be notified of only relevant Wikidata changes in their watchlist. This is because the Lua functions entity:getSitelink() and mw.wikibase.getSitelink(qid) will have their logic unified for tracking different aspects of sitelinks to reduce junk notifications from inconsistent sitelinks tracking. [15]

Project updates

• Users of all Wikis will have access to Wikimedia sites as read-only for a few minutes on September 25, starting at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [16]
• Contributors of 11 Wikipedias, including English will have a new MOS namespace added to their Wikipedias. This improvement ensures that links beginning with MOS: (usually shortcuts to the Manual of Style) are not broken by Mooré Wikipedia (language code mos). [17]

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MediaWiki message delivery 18:49, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Question from Lotetree99 (04:49, 12 September 2024)

Hi there, I wanted to do a page for AbudQudoos Azhari, but seen a page that has been made but has yet to be uploaded to Wiki. I did some changes to it, can it go live?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Abdul_Quddoos_Al-Azhari --Lotetree99 (talk) 04:49, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue 221, September 2024

Your Military History Newsletter Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content Book review: Hog Farm looks at the bayou battles for Vicksburg

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 21:57, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-38

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

Improvements and Maintenance

• Editors interested in templates can help by reading the latest Wishlist focus area, Template recall and discovery, and share your feedback on the talkpage. This input helps the Community Tech team to decide the right technical approach to build. Everyone is also encouraged to continue adding new wishes.
• The new automated Special:NamespaceInfo page helps editors understand which namespaces exist on each wiki, and some details about how they are configured. Thanks to DannyS712 for these improvements. [18]
• References Check is a feature that encourages editors to add a citation when they add a new paragraph to a Wikipedia article. For a short time, the corresponding tag "Edit Check (references) activated" was erroneously being applied to some edits outside of the main namespace. This has been fixed. [19]
• It is now possible for a wiki community to change the order in which a page’s categories are displayed on their wiki. By default, categories are displayed in the order they appear in the wikitext. Now, wikis with a consensus to do so can request a configuration change to display them in alphabetical order. [20]
• Tool authors can now access ToolsDB's public databases from both Quarry and Superset. Those databases have always been accessible to every Toolforge user, but they are now more broadly accessible, as Quarry can be accessed by anyone with a Wikimedia account. In addition, Quarry's internal database can now be queried from Quarry itself. This database contains information about all queries that are being run and starred by users in Quarry. This information was already public through the web interface, but you can now query it using SQL. You can read more about that, and 20 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
• Any pages or tools that still use the very old CSS classes mw-message-box need to be updated. These old classes will be removed next week or soon afterwards. Editors can use a global-search to determine what needs to be changed. It is possible to use the newer cdx-message group of classes as a replacement (see the relevant Codex documentation, and an example update), but using locally defined onwiki classes would be best. [21]

Technical project updates

• Next week, all Wikimedia wikis will be read-only for a few minutes. This will start on September 25 at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. This maintenance process also targets other services. The previous switchover took 3 minutes, and the Site Reliability Engineering teams use many tools to make sure that this essential maintenance work happens as quickly as possible. [22]

Tech in depth

• The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes details about: research about hook handlers to help simplify development, research about performance improvements, work to improve the REST API for end-users, and more.
• To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
  • Hackathon Showcase (45 mins) - 19 short presentations by some of the Hackathon participants, describing some of the projects they worked on, such as automated testing of maintenance scripts, a video-cutting command line tool, and interface improvements for various tools. There are more details and links available in the Phabricator task.
  • Co-Creating a Sustainable Future for the Toolforge Ecosystem (40 mins) - a roundtable discussion for tool-maintainers, users, and supporters of Toolforge about how to make the platform sustainable and how to evaluate the tools available there.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:59, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Voting for WikiProject Military history coordinators is now open!

Voting for WikiProject Military history coordinators is now open! A team of up to ten coordinators will be elected for the next coordination year. Register your vote here by 23:59 UTC on 29 September! MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:35, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

Question from Shaji Civiyadhen (14:24, 22 September 2024)

how can I upload my profile photo >? --Shaji Civiyadhen (talk) 14:24, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-39

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

Weekly highlight

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday September 25 at 15:00 UTC. Reading the wikis will not be interrupted, but editing will be paused. These twice-yearly processes allow WMF's site reliability engineering teams to remain prepared to keep the wikis functioning even in the event of a major interruption to one of our data centers.

Updates for editors

A screenshot of the interface for the Alt Text suggested-edit feature

• Editors who use the iOS Wikipedia app in Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Chinese, may see the Alt Text suggested-edit experiment after editing an article, or completing a suggested edit using "Add an image". Alt-text helps people with visual impairments to read Wikipedia articles. The team aims to learn if adding alt-text to images is a task that editors can be successful with. Please share any feedback on the discussion page.
• The Codex color palette has been updated with new and revised colors for the MediaWiki user interfaces. The most noticeable changes for editors include updates for: dark mode colors for Links and for quiet Buttons (progressive and destructive), visited Link colors for both light and dark modes, and background colors for system-messages in both light and dark modes.
• It is now possible to include clickable wikilinks and external links inside code blocks. This includes links that are used within <syntaxhighlight> tags and on code pages (JavaScript, CSS, Scribunto and Sanitized CSS). Uses of template syntax {{…}} are also linked to the template page. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements. [23]
• Two bugs were fixed in the GlobalVanishRequest system by improving the logging and by removing an incorrect placeholder message. [24][25]
• View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• From Wikimedia Enterprise:
  • The API now enables 5,000 on-demand API requests per month and twice-monthly HTML snapshots freely (gratis and libre). More information on the updates and also improvements to the software development kits (SDK) are explained on the project's blog post. While Wikimedia Enterprise APIs are designed for high-volume commercial reusers, this change enables many more community use-cases to be built on the service too.
  • The Snapshot API (html dumps) have added beta Structured Contents endpoints (blog post on that) as well as released two beta datasets (English and French Wikipedia) from that endpoint to Hugging Face for public use and feedback (blog post on that). These pre-parsed data sets enable new options for researchers, developers, and data scientists to use and study the content.

In depth

• The Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) is used to get answers to questions using the Wikidata data set. As Wikidata grows, we had to make a major architectural change so that WDQS could remain performant. As part of the WDQS Graph Split project, we have new SPARQL endpoints available for serving the "scholarly" and "main" subgraphs of Wikidata. The query.wikidata.org endpoint will continue to serve the full Wikidata graph until March 2025. After this date, it will only serve the main graph. For more information, please see the announcement on Wikidata.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:33, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

Question from Tyler Sedgwick Team 21 (00:39, 27 September 2024)

Trish Stratus formely of WWE --Tyler Sedgwick Team 21 (talk) 00:39, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-40

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

Updates for editors

• Readers of 42 more wikis can now use Dark Mode. If the option is not yet available for logged-out users of your wiki, this is likely because many templates do not yet display well in Dark Mode. Please use the night-mode-checker tool if you are interested in helping to reduce the number of issues. The recommendations page provides guidance on this. Dark Mode is enabled on additional wikis once per month.
• Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor as their default can access features from the 2017 wikitext editor by adding ?veaction=editsource to the URL. If you would like to enable the 2017 wikitext editor as your default, it can be set in your preferences. [26]
• For logged-out readers using the Vector 2022 skin, the "donate" link has been moved from a collapsible menu next to the content area into a more prominent top menu, next to "Create an account". This restores the link to the level of prominence it had in the Vector 2010 skin. Learn more about the changes related to donor experiences. [27]
• The CampaignEvents extension provides tools for organizers to more easily manage events, communicate with participants, and promote their events on the wikis. The extension has been enabled on Arabic Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Swahili Wikipedia, and Meta-Wiki. Chinese Wikipedia has decided to enable the extension, and discussions on the extension are in progress on Spanish Wikipedia and on Wikidata. To learn how to enable the extension on your wiki, you can visit the CampaignEvents page on Meta-Wiki.
• View all 22 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Developers with an account on Wikitech-wiki should check if any action is required for their accounts. The wiki is being changed to use the single-user-login (SUL) system, and other configuration changes. This change will help reduce the overall complexity for the weekly software updates across all our wikis.

In depth

• The server switch was completed successfully last week with a read-only time of only 2 minutes 46 seconds. This periodic process makes sure that engineers can switch data centers and keep all of the wikis available for readers, even if there are major technical issues. It also gives engineers a chance to do maintenance and upgrades on systems that normally run 24 hours a day, and often helps to reveal weaknesses in the infrastructure. The process involves dozens of software services and hundreds of hardware servers, and requires multiple teams working together. Work over the past few years has reduced the time from 17 minutes down to 2–3 minutes. [28]

Meetings and events

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

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MediaWiki message delivery 22:17, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

Question from Happygharpersundheiemr (17:30, 3 October 2024)

hi! Can you find a basic page for me to fix Grammer. Have a good day. :) --Happygharpersundheiemr (talk) 17:30, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

Hi Happygharpersundheiemr! If you go to Special:Homepage, you should see some suggested tasks there. Best, Vermont (🐿️—🏳️‍🌈) 18:13, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-41

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

Weekly highlight

• Communities can now request installation of Automoderator on their wiki. Automoderator is an automated anti-vandalism tool that reverts bad edits based on scores from the new "Revert Risk" machine learning model. You can read details about the necessary steps for installation and configuration. [29]

Updates for editors

• Translators in wikis where the mobile experience of Content Translation is available, can now customize their articles suggestion list from 41 filtering options when using the tool. This topic-based article suggestion feature makes it easy for translators to self-discover relevant articles based on their area of interest and translate them. You can try it with your mobile device. [30]
• View all 12 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• It is now possible for <syntaxhighlight> code blocks to offer readers a "Copy" button if the copy=1 attribute is set on the tag. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements. [31]
• Customized copyright footer messages on all wikis will be updated. The new versions will use wikitext markup instead of requiring editing raw HTML. [32]
• Later this month, temporary accounts will be rolled out on several pilot wikis. The final list of the wikis will be published in the second half of the month. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 11 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts. Guidance on how to update the code is available.
• Rate limiting has been enabled for the code review tools Gerrit and GitLab to address ongoing issues caused by malicious traffic and scraping. Clients that open too many concurrent connections will be restricted for a few minutes. This rate limiting is managed through nftables firewall rules. For more details, see Wikitech's pages on Firewall, GitLab limits and Gerrit operations.
• Five new wikis have been created:
  • a Wikipedia in Komering (w:kge:) [33]
  • a Wikipedia in Mooré (m:mos:) [34]
  • a Wiktionary in Madurese (wikt:mad:) [35]
  • a Wikiquote in Gorontalo (q:gor:) [36]
  • a Wikinews in Shan (n:shn:) [37]

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MediaWiki message delivery 23:39, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Question from Geimers (12:45, 10 October 2024)

Hi Rae.

I am a native Spanish speaker and I am starting to translate articles that do not have a Spanish version. I am also a big fan of video games and I constantly see that in the original versions of pages (in English) there are often missing information.

I wanted to know if it is possible to edit a page in English, adding the missing information and linking the references even if they are in Spanish, in case there are no articles in English that give this information.

Greetings. --https://geimers.com/ (talk) 12:45, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

Hi Geimers! You can definitely cite sources that are not in English, though English-language sources are preferred where they exist. (for more info, see this section of the Verifiability policy) Best regards, Vermont (🐿️—🏳️‍🌈) 19:12, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Question from KavyaOdari (16:16, 9 October 2024)

how do i create an article. --KavyaOdari (talk) 16:16, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

@KavyaOdari: What topic(s) do you want to write about? Best regards, Vermont (🐿️—🏳️‍🌈) 19:13, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-42

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

Updates for editors

• The Structured Discussion extension (also known as Flow) is starting to be removed. This extension is unmaintained and causes issues. It will be replaced by DiscussionTools, which is used on any regular talk page. A first set of wikis are being contacted. These wikis are invited to stop using Flow, and to move all Flow boards to sub-pages, as archives. At these wikis, a script will move all Flow pages that aren't a sub-page to a sub-page automatically, starting on 22 October 2024. On 28 October 2024, all Flow boards at these wikis will be set in read-only mode. [38][39]
• WMF's Search Platform team is working on making it easier for readers to perform text searches in their language. A change last week on over 30 languages makes it easier to find words with accents and other diacritics. This applies to both full-text search and to types of advanced search such as the hastemplate and incategory keywords. More technical details (including a few other minor search upgrades) are available. [40]
• View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, EditCheck was installed at Russian Wikipedia, and fixes were made for some missing user interface styles.

Updates for technical contributors

• Editors who use the Toolforge tool Earwig's Copyright Violation Detector will now be required to log in with their Wikimedia account before running checks using the "search engine" option. This change is needed to help prevent external bots from misusing the system. Thanks to Chlod for these improvements. [41]
• Phabricator users can create tickets and add comments on existing tickets via Email again. Sending email to Phabricator has been fixed. [42]
• Some HTML elements in the interface are now wrapped with a <bdi> element, to make our HTML output more aligned with Web standards. More changes like this will be coming in future weeks. This change might break some tools that rely on the previous HTML structure of the interface. Note that relying on the HTML structure of the interface is not recommended and might break at any time. [43]

In depth

• The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes: updates on Wikimedia's authentication system, research to simplify feature development in the MediaWiki platform, updates on Parser Unification and MathML rollout, and more.
• The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition include: research about improving topic suggestions related to countries, improvements to PHPUnit tests, and more.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 21:18, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Question from Kingdomfirst81 (16:02, 12 October 2024)

I am trying to help a friend who is a actor, author, detective. Who has had a t.v. show on the history channel and had been on many TV shows and news interviews and has written several books. He has a YouTube page with 115k subs. He is asking me why he doesn't have a wiki page and I cannot figure this stuff out. He was the lead actor on the hunt for the zodiac t.v series on history channel and has a peacock series about to start very soon. Just seems odd he's solved cold case murders and been on TV was an fbi task force member undercover narcotics and now celebrity but he's not on wiki but all his co stars are. He also have a fb group called unsolved no more. His youtube group with 115k subs is called unsolved no more. I can help verify his identify etc but he's easily verified on imdb, and news articles both local, national paper news and t.v. news Nancy grace type stuff. --Kingdomfirst81 (talk) 16:02, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

@Kingdomfirst81, welcome to Wikipedia! I'd recommend against trying to write an article about your friend; as an encyclopedia we value neutrality, and thus strongly discourage people from editing about topics where they have a conflict of interest. Vermont (🐿️—🏳️‍🌈) 02:54, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Question from GravyOnToast (16:15, 12 October 2024)

Hello Rae, it's nice to meet you. I made a Wikipedia account so that I could more consistently keep up-to-date the "Opinion polling for the next United Kingdom general election" page without any future semi-protections affecting me. I have edited there under the IPs 81.149.255.205 and 144.178.213.98. I know that my description of changes is not standard, so I will try and make it so in future :) --GravyOnToast (talk) 16:15, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

Hi @GravyOnToast! I'm happy to hear that you've made an account to keep editing, and it's definitely an interesting username lol. Let me know if you have any questions :) Vermont (🐿️—🏳️‍🌈) 02:56, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

No questions as of yet :), I've just been waiting for the semi-protected status of that page to end so that I can add a bunch of missed polls GravyOnToast (talk) 11:32, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

And yeah... I have no justification for the username

(Also I made an edit request almost a week ago that hasn't been answered to the page so that's fun) GravyOnToast (talk) 11:36, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

@GravyOnToast: I don't edit much around elections and am not familiar with how we usually incorporate and describe polling, so I'll leave that for another editor, sorry. Vermont (🐿️—🏳️‍🌈) 21:14, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

It's okay, the page's protection has expired so I'm adding the missed polls now :) GravyOnToast (talk) 13:23, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-43

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

Weekly highlight

• The Mobile Apps team has released an update to the iOS app's navigation, and it is now available in the latest App store version. The team added a new Profile menu that allows for easy access to editor features like Notifications and Watchlist from the Article view, and brings the "Donate" button into a more accessible place for users who are reading an article. This is the first phase of a larger planned navigation refresh to help the iOS app transition from a primarily reader-focused app, to an app that fully supports reading and editing. The Wikimedia Foundation has added more editing features and support for on-wiki communication based on volunteer requests in recent years.

iOS Wikipedia App's profile menu and contents

Updates for editors

• Wikipedia readers can now download a browser extension to experiment with some early ideas on potential features that recommend articles for further reading, automatically summarize articles, and improve search functionality. For more details and to stay updated, check out the Web team's Content Discovery Experiments page and subscribe to their newsletter.
• Later this month, logged-out editors of these 12 wikis will start to have temporary accounts created. The list may slightly change - some wikis may be removed but none will be added. Temporary account is a new type of user account. It enhances the logged-out editors' privacy and makes it easier for community members to communicate with them. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 12 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts. Guidance on how to update the code is available. Read more about the deployment plan across all wikis.
• View all 33 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the South Ndebele, Pannonian Rusyn, Obolo, Iban and Tai Nüa Wikipedia languages were created last week. [44][45][46][47][48]
• It is now possible to create functions on Wikifunctions using Wikidata lexemes, through the new Wikidata lexeme type launched last week. When you go to one of these functions, the user interface provides a lexeme selector that helps you pick a lexeme from Wikidata that matches the word you type. After hitting run, your selected lexeme is retrieved from Wikidata, transformed into a Wikidata lexeme type, and passed into the selected function. Read more about this in the latest Wikifunctions newsletter.

Updates for technical contributors

• Users of the Wikimedia sites can now format dates more easily in different languages with the new {{#timef:…}} parser function. For example, {{#timef:now|date|en}} will show as "26 December 2024". Previously, {{#time:…}} could be used to format dates, but this required knowledge of the order of the time and date components and their intervening punctuation. #timef (or #timefl for local time) provides access to the standard date formats that MediaWiki uses in its user interface. This may help to simplify some templates on multi-lingual wikis like Commons and Meta. [49][50]
• Commons and Meta users can now efficiently retrieve the user's language using {{USERLANGUAGE}} instead of using {{int:lang}}. [51]
• The Product and Tech Advisory Council (PTAC) now has its pilot members with representation across Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America. They will work to address the Movement Strategy's Technology Council initiative of having a co-defined and more resilient technological platform. [52]

In depth

• The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: an upcoming Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module, new Community Configuration options, and details on new projects.
• The Wikimedia Foundation is now an official partner of the CVE program, which is an international effort to catalog publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities. This partnership will allow the Security Team to instantly publish common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) records that are affecting MediaWiki core, extensions, and skins, along with any other code the Foundation is a steward of.
• The Community Wishlist is now testing machine translations for Wishlist content. Volunteers can now read machine-translated versions of wishes and dive into discussions even before translators arrive to translate content.

Meetings and events

• 24 October - Wiki Education Speaker Series Webinar - Open Source Tech: Building the Wiki Education Dashboard, featuring Wikimedia interns and a Web developer in the panel.
• 20–22 December 2024 - Indic Wikimedia Hackathon Bhubaneswar 2024 in Odisha, India. A hackathon for community members, including developers, designers and content editors, to build technical solutions that improve contributors' experiences.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:50, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-44

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

Updates for editors

• Later in November, the Charts extension will be deployed to the test wikis in order to help identify and fix any issue. A security review is underway to then enable deployment to pilot wikis for broader testing. You can read the October project update and see the latest documentation and examples on Beta Wikipedia.
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, Pediapress.com, an external service that creates books from Wikipedia, can now use Wikimedia Maps to include existing pre-rendered infobox map images in their printed books on Wikipedia. [53]

Updates for technical contributors

• Wikis can use the Guided Tour extension to help newcomers understand how to edit. The Guided Tours extension now works with dark mode. Guided Tour maintainers can check their tours to see that nothing looks odd. They can also set emitTransitionOnStep to true to fix an old bug. They can use the new flag allowAutomaticBack to avoid back-buttons they don't want. [54]
• Administrators in the Wikimedia projects who use the Nuke Extension will notice that mass deletions done with this tool have the "Nuke" tag. This change will make reviewing and analyzing deletions performed with the tool easier. [55]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:54, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Question from PatchPofStars (04:04, 29 October 2024)

Hello, Why do you allow people to add and edit to the Wikipedia when they clearly don't know what it's about? I've had to redo the same Wikipage because someone keeps putting in the wrong information and undoing my changes :( --PatchPofStars (talk) 04:04, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

You could just ask the person who keeps reverting you. It is highly irregular to edit something in like 'clearly not (x)'. I suggest you go to the talk page. Fantastic Mr. Fox (talk) 09:47, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

Question from PatchPofStars (14:33, 29 October 2024)

Hello, How do i report someone? They're adding information that is false and it's aggravating me, They won't do the proper research for it please😭 --PatchPofStars (talk) 14:33, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

Hi @PatchPofStars! When you edit a Wikipedia article, you're editing an encyclopedia entry: adding commentary about past edits into the article itself isn't encyclopedic and will be removed. As you've found, justifying the changes is what edit summaries and talk pages are for. I think your most recent edit has an appropriate tone. I'll start a discussion on the talk page - it looks like there is a character named Eurylochus in Bibliotheca (Pseudo-Apollodorus), which the source (that your edit removes) describes. Vermont (🐿️—🏳️‍🌈) 15:56, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

Oh My bad, I thought it was Talking about Eurylochus from the Odyssey :'<

sorry

And thank you ^^ PatchPofStars (talk) 16:14, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue 222, October 2024

Your Military History Newsletter Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content Book review: Hawkeye7 on US Army divisions in the Pacific War, Nick-D on the First Indochina War

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 12:02, 30 October 2024 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – November 2024

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

Administrator changes

• Crisco 1492

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

CheckUser changes

Maxim

Oversighter changes

Maxim

Guideline and policy news

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

Technical news

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

Arbitration

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

Miscellaneous

• An unreferenced articles backlog drive is happening in November 2024 to reduce the backlog of articles tagged with {{Unreferenced}}. You can help reduce the backlog by adding citations to these articles. Sign up to participate!

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• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:22, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-45

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

Updates for editors

• Stewards can now make global account blocks cause global autoblocks. This will assist stewards in preventing abuse from users who have been globally blocked. This includes preventing globally blocked temporary accounts from exiting their session or switching browsers to make subsequent edits for 24 hours. Previously, temporary accounts could exit their current session or switch browsers to continue editing. This is an anti-abuse tool improvement for the Temporary Accounts project. You can read more about the progress on key features for temporary accounts. [56]
• Wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled can now use the Collaboration List feature. This list provides a new, easy way for contributors to learn about WikiProjects on their wikis. Thanks to the Campaign team for this work that is part of the 2024/25 annual plan. If you are interested in bringing the CampaignEvents extension to your wiki, you can follow these steps or you can reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for help.
• The text color for red links will be slightly changed later this week to improve their contrast in light mode. [57]
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, on multilingual wikis, users can now hide translations from the WhatLinksHere special page.

Updates for technical contributors

• XML data dumps have been temporarily paused whilst a bug is investigated. [58]

In depth

• Temporary Accounts have been deployed to six wikis; thanks to the Trust and Safety Product team for this work, you can read about the deployment plans. Beginning next week, Temporary Accounts will also be enabled on seven other projects. If you are active on these wikis and need help migrating your tools, please reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for assistance.
• The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New languages supported in translatewiki or in MediaWiki; New keyboard input methods for some languages; details about recent and upcoming meetings, and more.

Meetings and events

• MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2024 is happening in Vienna, Austria and online from 4 to 6 November 2024. The conference will feature discussions around the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies in different industries and will inspire and onboard new users.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:48, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Question from Elmaestrobert (15:09, 1 November 2024)

Hi Rae! I work for a think tank and started exploring adding text to the page of my organization, which I learned should only be done through edit requests. Can I edit directly pages other then the ones from my organization / create new pages that are not linked to my organization? --Elmaestrobert (talk) 15:09, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

@Elmaestrobert, thank you for disclosing your conflict of interest. Re: editing other pages...yes, but would you be paid to edit those pages as well? I'd recommend a read of WP:COIE. Vermont (🐿️—🏳️‍🌈) 05:12, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Notice of noticeboard discussion

There is currently a discussion at WP:AN regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. The thread is Is there a way to get an ENWP account blocked for multiple account abuse without filing an RFCU?. Thank you. Dane|Geld 17:12, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-46

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

Updates for editors

• On wikis with the Translate extension enabled, users will notice that the FuzzyBot will now automatically create translated versions of categories used on translated pages. [59]
• View all 29 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the submitted task to use the SecurePoll extension for English Wikipedia's special administrator election was resolved on time. [60]

Updates for technical contributors

• In 1.44.0-wmf-2, the logic of Wikibase function getAllStatements changed to behave like getBestStatements. Invoking the function now returns a copy of values which are immutable. [61]
• Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. The API will be rerouting some page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newer MediaWiki REST API endpoints. The impacted endpoints include getting page/revision metadata and rendered HTML content. These changes will be available on testwiki later this week, with other projects to follow. This change should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints should verify behavior on testwiki, and raise any concerns on the related Phabricator ticket.

In depth

• Admins and users of the Wikimedia projects where Automoderator is enabled can now monitor and evaluate important metrics related to Automoderator's actions. This Superset dashboard calculates and aggregates metrics about Automoderator's behaviour on the projects in which it is deployed. Thanks to the Moderator Tools team for this Dashboard; you can visit the documentation page for more information about this work. [62]

Meetings and events

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

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:05, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

Question from Albertediting (16:49, 9 November 2024)

Can you help me review the biography article i created on sandbox? --Albertediting (talk) 16:49, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Albertediting! I see that the draft has had comments from AfC reviewers since you left this message, which on a cursory look I agree with. Vermont (🐿️—🏳️‍🌈) 20:16, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

Question from Ysrkavali (16:54, 11 November 2024)

Hello , I edited some small changes is it possible to check and correct if there was any mistakes --Ysrkavali (talk) 16:54, 11 November 2024 (UTC)

@Ysrkavali, thanks for your question! Looks good to me, though it's best to include sources for new information that you add to articles. For example, if there is a reliable source (primary or secondary) that mentions that someone played a role in a particular movie, you should cite that source when adding that information to Wikipedia. Vermont (🐿️—🏳️‍🌈) 20:14, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

@Vermontsure Ysrkavali (talk) 02:43, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

Nominations now open for the WikiProject Military history newcomer of the year and military historian of the year

Nominations now open for the WikiProject Military History newcomer of the year and military historian of the year awards for 2024! The the top editors will be awarded the coveted Gold Wiki. Nominations are open here and here respectively. The nomination period closes at 23:59 on 30 November 2024 when voting begins. On behalf of the coordinators, wishing you the very best for the festive season and the new year. MediaWiki message delivery via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:21, 16 November 2024 (UTC)