User talk:robertsky

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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]

Soft block for username

Hi, it's my understanding that a soft block for a username should just be removed once the account is renamed(since a soft block allows account creation); other concerns should be handled separately. 331dot (talk) 08:16, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@331dot, Hmm.. I initially thought so too, then I saw WP:SOFTBLOCK recently which simply stating that a smaller number of rights are disabled, and silent on if another admin can step in and unblock upon renaming. but if the practice is to rename and unblock soft block, sure. – robertsky (talk) 13:19, 30 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

In the media: Feds aiming for WMF's nonprofit status

Recent research: How readers use Wikipedia health content; Scholars generally happy with how their papers are cited on Wikipedia

Arbitration report: Sysop Tinucherian removed and admonished by the ArbCom

Discussion report: Latest news from Centralized discussions

Traffic report: Of Wolf and Man

Disinformation report: At WikiCredCon, Wikipedia editors and Internet Archive discuss threats to trust in media

News from the WMF: Product & Tech Progress on the Annual Plan

Humour: Crisis erupts as furious admins, functionaries complain about crappy t-shirts

Comix: By territory

In focus: Using AI on the Russian Wikipedia: opportunities or challenges?

Community view: A deep dive into Wikimedia

Debriefing: Barkeep49's RfB debriefing

Gallery: Meet the winners of Wiki Loves Monuments 2024

Obituary: JarrahTree, JohnClarknew and Yashthepunisher

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:18, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from JoNeedsSleep (18:11, 3 May 2025)

Hello! I am writing an article on an expanding field in machine learning called Mechanistic Interpretability. It is currently a very short section in explainable ai, and I was hoping to create an entire article for it. Do you have any advice for how I should go about this? Thanks! --JoNeedsSleep (talk) 18:11, 3 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from Amir Davidson (08:24, 5 May 2025)

Hi Dudhhr, I'm new to Wikipedia but intend to contribute and share my expertise and knowledge as a Local Guide based on Caesarea, Israel. I'm more onto Real Esate Category.

Can you guide me walk through my first article on Wiki aligned with Wikipedia guideline, please --Amir Davidson (talk) 08:24, 5 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. [1]
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)

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!

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:02, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from Valuableinformationonly (22:30, 6 May 2025)

I have published an article but it got denied can you please give me some help --Valuableinformationonly (talk) 22:30, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]