User talk:TheAstorPastor

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Article policies

Happy Holidays

Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2025!

Hello TheAstorPastor, may you be surrounded by peace, success and happiness on this seasonal occasion. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Sending you heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2025.
Happy editing,
Abishe (talk) 22:36, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Spread the love by adding {{subst:Seasonal Greetings}} to other user talk pages.

Abishe (talk) 22:36, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Merry Christmas @Abishe!! The AP (talk) 07:45, 25 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 24 December 2024

News and notes: Responsibilities and liabilities as a "Very Large Online Platform"

Op-ed: Beeblebrox on Wikipediocracy, the Committee, and everything

Opinion: Graham87 on being the first-ever administrator recall subject

In the media: Delhi High Court considers Caravan and Ken for evaluating the ANI vs. WMF case

From the archives: Where to draw the line in reporting?

Recent research: "Wikipedia editors are quite prosocial", but those motivated by "social image" may put quantity over quality

Humour: Backlash over Santa Claus' Wikipedia article intensifies

Gallery: A feast of holidays and carols

Traffic report: Was a long and dark December

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:03, 25 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Welcome to the 2025 WikiCup!

Happy New Year and Happy New WikiCup! The 2025 competition has just begun and all article creators, expanders, improvers and reviewers are welcome to take part. Even if you are a novice editor, we hope the WikiCup will give you a chance to improve your editing skills as you go. If you have already signed up, your submissions page can be found here. If you have not yet signed up, you can add your name here and the judges will set up your submissions page ready for you to take part. Any questions on the scoring, rules or anything else should be directed to one of the judges, or posted to the WikiCup talk page.

For the 2025 WikiCup, we've implemented several changes to the scoring system. The highest-ranking contestants will now receive tournament points at the end of each round, and final rankings are decided by the number of tournament points each contestant has. If you're busy and can't sign up in January, don't worry: Signups are now open throughout the year. To make things fairer for latecomers, the lowest-scoring contestants will no longer be eliminated at the end of each round.

The first round will end on 26 February. The judges for the WikiCup this year are: Cwmhiraeth (talk · contribs · email), Epicgenius (talk · contribs · email), Frostly (talk · contribs · email), Guerillero (talk · contribs · email) and Lee Vilenski (talk · contribs · email). Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:14, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from MaximStatus96 (03:44, 3 January 2025)

Hello, I am editing movie short clips please support me I don't understand copyright --MaximStatus96 (talk) 03:44, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hello @MaximStatus96, I hope you're doing well. Regarding your question: all creative works are protected by copyright under international agreements unless they are in the public domain or their copyright has been explicitly disclaimed. Typically, Wikipedia requires permission to use copyrighted materials, but in some cases, copyrighted works can be used legally without permission. For more information, you can refer to Wikipedia:Copyrights. Could you clarify which articles you're trying to edit? I'd be happy to assist further if needed. The AP (talk) 08:12, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

YouTube

Editing shorts movie clips MaximStatus96 (talk) 03:47, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – January 2025

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

Administrator changes

Sennecaster

CheckUser changes

Worm That Turned

Ferret

Oversight changes

Worm That Turned

Guideline and policy news

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

Technical news

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

Arbitration

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

Miscellaneous

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

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:47, 5 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

ITN recognition for Wayne Osmond

On 7 January 2025, In the news was updated with an item that involved the article Wayne Osmond, which you nominated and updated. If you know of another recently created or updated article suitable for inclusion in ITN, please suggest it on the candidates page. PFHLai (talk) 00:14, 7 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

ITN recognition for 2025 Xizang earthquake

On 7 January 2025, In the news was updated with an item that involved the article 2025 Xizang earthquake, which you nominated. If you know of another recently created or updated article suitable for inclusion in ITN, please suggest it on the candidates page. – robertsky (talk) 07:49, 7 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Pending changes reviewer granted

Hello. Your account has been granted the "pending changes reviewer" userright, allowing you to review other users' edits on pages protected by pending changes. The list of articles awaiting review is located at Special:PendingChanges, while the list of articles that have pending changes protection turned on is located at Special:StablePages.

Being granted reviewer rights neither grants you status nor changes how you can edit articles. If you do not want this user right, you may ask any administrator to remove it for you at any time.

See also:

Wikipedia:Reviewing pending changes, the guideline on reviewing
Wikipedia:Reviewing pending changes#Requirements to accept an edit, when to accept an edit

Beeblebrox ^Beebletalks 22:09, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Speedy deletion declined: Mylampatti

Hello TheAstorPastor, and thanks for patrolling new pages! I am just letting you know that I declined the speedy deletion of Mylampatti, a page you tagged for speedy deletion, because of the following concern: There is sufficient context to identify the subject of the article. You may wish to review the Criteria for Speedy Deletion before tagging further pages. Thank you. Whpq (talk) 14:31, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-03

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 Single User Login system is being updated over the next few months. This is the system which allows users to fill out the login form on one Wikimedia site and get logged in on all others at the same time. It needs to be updated because of the ways that browsers are increasingly restricting cross-domain cookies. To accommodate these restrictions, login and account creation pages will move to a central domain, but it will still appear to the user as if they are on the originating wiki. The updated code will be enabled this week for users on test wikis. This change is planned to roll out to all users during February and March. See the SUL3 project page for more details and a timeline.

Updates for editors

On wikis with PageAssessments installed, you can now filter search results to pages in a given WikiProject by using the inproject: keyword. (These wikis: Arabic Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage, French Wikipedia, Hungarian Wikipedia, Nepali Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia) [1]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Tigre (w:tig:) [2]
View all 35 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a bug with updating a user's edit-count after making a rollback edit, which is now fixed. [3]

Updates for technical contributors

Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. Starting the week of January 13, we will begin rerouting some page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newer MediaWiki REST API endpoints for all wiki projects. This change was previously available on testwiki and should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints may raise issues directly to the MediaWiki Interfaces Team in Phabricator if they arise.
Toolforge tool maintainers can now share their feedback on Toolforge UI, an initiative to provide a web platform that allows creating and managing Toolforge tools through a graphic interface, in addition to existing command-line workflows. This project aims to streamline active maintainers’ tasks, as well as make registration and deployment processes more accessible for new tool creators. The initiative is still at a very early stage, and the Cloud Services team is in the process of collecting feedback from the Toolforge community to help shape the solution to their needs. Read more and share your thoughts about Toolforge UI.
For tool and library developers who use the OAuth system: The identity endpoint used for OAuth 1 and OAuth 2 returned a JSON object with an integer in its sub field, which was incorrect (the field must always be a string). This has been fixed; the fix will be deployed to Wikimedia wikis on the week of January 13. [4]
Many wikis currently use Cite CSS to render custom footnote markers in Parsoid output. Starting January 20 these rules will be disabled, but the developers ask you to not clean up your MediaWiki:Common.css until February 20 to avoid issues during the migration. Your wikis might experience some small changes to footnote markers in Visual Editor and when using experimental Parsoid read mode, but if there are changes these are expected to bring the rendering in line with the legacy parser output. [5]

Meetings and events

The next meeting in the series of Wikimedia Foundation Community Conversations with the Wikimedia Commons community will take place on January 15 at 8:00 UTC and at 16:00 UTC. The topic of this call is defining the priorities in tool investment for Commons. Contributors from all wikis, especially users who are maintaining tools for Commons, are welcome to attend.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:40, 14 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 15 January 2025

From the editors: Looking back, looking forward

Traffic report: The most viewed articles of 2024

In the media: Will you be targeted?

Technology report: New Calculator template brings interactivity at last

Essay: Meet the Canadian who holds the longest editing streak on Wikipedia

Opinion: Reflections one score hence

News and notes: It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me... and I'm feeling free

Serendipity: What we've left behind, and where we want to go next

Op-ed: Elon Musk and the right on Wikipedia

In focus: Twenty years of The Signpost: What did it take?

Arbitration report: Analyzing commonalities of some contentious topics

Humour: How to make friends on Wikipedia

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:56, 15 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-04

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

Updates for editors

Administrators can mass-delete multiple pages created by a user or IP address using Extension:Nuke. It previously only allowed deletion of pages created in the last 30 days. It can now delete pages from the last 90 days, provided it is targeting a specific user or IP address. [6]
On wikis that use the Patrolled edits feature, when the rollback feature is used to revert an unpatrolled page revision, that revision will now be marked as "manually patrolled" instead of "autopatrolled", which is more accurate. Some editors that use filters on Recent Changes may need to update their filter settings. [7]
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the Visual Editor's "Insert link" feature did not always suggest existing pages properly when an editor started typing, which has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

The Structured Discussion extension (also known as Flow) is being progressively removed from the wikis. This extension is unmaintained and causes issues. It will be replaced by DiscussionTools, which is used on any regular talk page. The last group of wikis (Catalan Wikiquote, Wikimedia Finland, Goan Konkani Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikibooks, Wikimedia Sweden) will soon be contacted. If you have questions about this process, please ping Trizek (WMF) at your wiki. [8]
The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: updates about services from the Data Platform Engineering teams, information about Codex from the Design System team, 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 01:35, 21 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-05

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

Patrollers and admins - what information or context about edits or users could help you to make patroller or admin decisions more quickly or easily? The Wikimedia Foundation wants to hear from you to help guide its upcoming annual plan. Please consider sharing your thoughts on this and 13 other questions to shape the technical direction for next year.

Updates for editors

iOS Wikipedia App users worldwide can now access a personalized Year in Review feature, which provides insights based on their reading and editing history on Wikipedia. This project is part of a broader effort to help welcome new readers as they discover and interact with encyclopedic content.
Edit patrollers now have a new feature available that can highlight potentially problematic new pages. When a page is created with the same title as a page which was previously deleted, a tag ('Recreated') will now be added, which users can filter for in Special:RecentChanges and Special:NewPages. [9]
Later this week, there will be a new warning for editors if they attempt to create a redirect that links to another redirect (a double redirect). The feature will recommend that they link directly to the second redirect's target page. Thanks to the user SomeRandomDeveloper for this improvement. [10]
Wikimedia wikis allow WebAuthn-based second factor checks (such as hardware tokens) during login, but the feature is fragile and has very few users. The MediaWiki Platform team is temporarily disabling adding new WebAuthn keys, to avoid interfering with the rollout of SUL3 (single user login version 3). Existing keys are unaffected. [11]
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

For developers that use the MediaWiki History dumps: The Data Platform Engineering team has added a couple of new fields to these dumps, to support the Temporary Accounts initiative. If you maintain software that reads those dumps, please review your code and the updated documentation, since the order of the fields in the row will change. There will also be one field rename: in the mediawiki_user_history dump, the anonymous field will be renamed to is_anonymous. The changes will take effect with the next release of the dumps in February. [12]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:12, 27 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You've got mail!

Hello, TheAstorPastor. Please check your email; you've got mail!
Message added 15:48, 30 January 2025 (UTC). It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.

Serial (speculates here) 15:48, 30 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much @Serial Number 54129: The AP (talk) 15:50, 30 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

DYK for List of things named after Julius Caesar

On 1 February 2025, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article List of things named after Julius Caesar, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that the month of July is named after the Roman dictator Julius Caesar? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/List of things named after Julius Caesar. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, List of things named after Julius Caesar), and the hook may be added to the statistics page after its run on the Main Page has completed. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

SL93 (talk) 00:03, 1 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Nice work at List of things named after Julius Caesar

A nice surprise to find your list on the main page today! I remember working on it with you via the Discord, and it's great to see what became of it. Renerpho (talk) 01:38, 1 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much! As of now I am working on User:TheAstorPastor/Draft/List of things named after Augustus - your help would be appreciated. The AP (talk) 16:10, 1 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-06

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

Updates for editors

Editors who use the "Special characters" editing-toolbar menu can now see the 32 special characters you have used most recently, across editing sessions on that wiki. This change should help make it easier to find the characters you use most often. The feature is in both the 2010 wikitext editor and VisualEditor. [13]
Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor can now create sublists with correct indentation by selecting the line(s) you want to indent and then clicking the toolbar buttons.[14] You can now also insert <code> tags using a new toolbar button.[15] Thanks to user stjn for these improvements.
Help is needed to ensure the citation generator works properly on each wiki.
- (1) Administrators should update the local versions of the page MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json to include entries for preprint, standard, and dataset; Here are example diffs to replicate for 'preprint' and for 'standard' and 'dataset'.
- (2.1) If the citoid map in the citation template used for these types of references is missing, one will need to be added. (2.2) If the citoid map does exist, the TemplateData will need to be updated to include new field names. Here are example updates for 'preprint' and for 'standard' and 'dataset'. The new fields that may need to be supported are archiveID, identifier, repository, organization, repositoryLocation, committee, and versionNumber. [16]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Central Kanuri (w:knc:) [17]
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the OCR (optical character recognition) tool used for Wikisource now supports a new language, Church Slavonic. [18]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:07, 4 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – February 2025

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2025).

Administrator changes

Euryalus

CheckUser changes

Oversighter changes

Technical news

Administrators can now nuke pages created by a user or IP address from the last 90 days, up from the initial 30 days. T380846
A 'Recreated' tag will now be added to pages that were created with the same title as a page which was previously deleted and it can be used as a filter in Special:RecentChanges and Special:NewPages. T56145

Arbitration

The arbitration case Palestine-Israel articles 5 has been closed.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:29, 5 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 7 February 2025

Recent research: GPT-4 writes better edit summaries than human Wikipedians

News and notes: Let's talk!

Opinion: Fathoms Below, but over the moon

In the media: Wikipedia is an extension of legacy media propaganda, says Elon Musk

Community view: 24th Wikipedia Day in New York City

Arbitration report: Palestine-Israel articles 5 has closed

Traffic report: A wild drive

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * Sent manually via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:47, 7 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-07

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 Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) has published a draft of their recommendations for the Wikimedia Foundation's Product and Technology department. They have recommended focusing on mobile experiences, particularly contributions. They request community feedback at the talk page by 21 February.

Updates for editors

The "Special pages" portlet link will be moved from the "Toolbox" into the "Navigation" section of the main menu's sidebar by default. This change is because the Toolbox is intended for tools relating to the current page, not tools relating to the site, so the link will be more logically and consistently located. To modify this behavior and update CSS styling, administrators can follow the instructions at T385346. [19]
As part of this year's work around improving the ways readers discover content on the wikis, the Web team will be running an experiment with a small number of readers that displays some suggestions for related or interesting articles within the search bar. Please check out the project page for more information.
Template editors who use TemplateStyles can now customize output for users with specific accessibility needs by using accessibility related media queries (prefers-reduced-motion, prefers-reduced-transparency, prefers-contrast, and forced-colors). Thanks to user Bawolff for these improvements. [20]
View all 22 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the global blocks log will now be shown directly on the Special:CentralAuth page, similarly to global locks, to simplify the workflows for stewards. [21]

Updates for technical contributors

Wikidata now supports a special language as a "default for all languages" for labels and aliases. This is to avoid excessive duplication of the same information across many languages. If your Wikidata queries use labels, you may need to update them as some existing labels are getting removed. [22]
The function getDescription was invoked on every Wiki page read and accounts for ~2.5% of a page's total load time. The calculated value will now be cached, reducing load on Wikimedia servers. [23]
As part of the RESTBase deprecation effort, the /page/related endpoint has been blocked as of February 6, 2025, and will be removed soon. This timeline was chosen to align with the deprecation schedules for older Android and iOS versions. The stable alternative is the "morelike" action API in MediaWiki, and a migration example is available. The MediaWiki Interfaces team can be contacted for any questions. [24]

In depth

The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: Updates about the "Contribute" menu; details on some of the newest language editions of Wikipedia; details on new languages supported by the MediaWiki interface; updates on the Community-defined lists feature; and more.
The latest Chart Project newsletter is available. It includes updates on the progress towards bringing better visibility into global charts usage and support for categorizing pages in the Data namespace on Commons.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:10, 11 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-08

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 using growth tools can now showcase one event on the Special:Homepage for newcomers. This feature will help newcomers to be informed about editing activities they can participate in. Administrators can create a new event to showcase at Special:CommunityConfiguration. To learn more about this feature, please read the Diff post, have a look at the documentation, or contact the Growth team.

Updates for editors

Starting next week, talk pages at these wikis – Spanish Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia – will get a new design. This change was extensively tested as a Beta feature and is the last step of talk pages improvements. [25]
You can now navigate to view a redirect page directly from its action pages, such as the history page. Previously, you were forced to first go to the redirect target. This change should help editors who work with redirects a lot. Thanks to user stjn for this improvement. [26]
When a Cite reference is reused many times, wikis currently show either numbers like "1.23" or localized alphabetic markers like "a b c" in the reference list. Previously, if there were so many reuses that the alphabetic markers were all used, an error message was displayed. As part of the work to modernize Cite customization, these errors will no longer be shown and instead the backlinks will fall back to showing numeric markers like "1.23" once the alphabetic markers are all used.
The log entries for each change to an editor's user-groups are now clearer by specifying exactly what has changed, instead of the plain before and after listings. Translators can help to update the localized versions. Thanks to user Msz2001 for these improvements.
A new filter has been added to the Special:Nuke tool, which allows administrators to mass delete pages, to enable users to filter for pages in a range of page sizes (in bytes). This allows, for example, deleting pages only of a certain size or below. [27]
Non-administrators can now check which pages are able to be deleted using the Special:Nuke tool. Thanks to user MolecularPilot for this and the previous improvements. [28]
View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed in the configuration for the AV1 video file format, which enables these files to play again. [29]

Updates for technical contributors

Parsoid Read Views is going to be rolling out to most Wiktionaries over the next few weeks, following the successful transition of Wikivoyage to Parsoid Read Views last year. For more information, see the Parsoid/Parser Unification project page. [30][31]
Developers of tools that run on-wiki should note that mw.Uri is deprecated. Tools requiring mw.Uri must explicitly declare mediawiki.Uri as a ResourceLoader dependency, and should migrate to the browser native URL API soon. [32]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 21:14, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-09

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

Updates for editors

Administrators can now customize how the Babel feature creates categories using Special:CommunityConfiguration/Babel. They can rename language categories, choose whether they should be auto-created, and adjust other settings. [33]
The wikimedia.org portal has been updated – and is receiving some ongoing improvements – to modernize and improve the accessibility of our portal pages. It now has better support for mobile layouts, updated wording and links, and better language support. Additionally, all of the Wikimedia project portals, such as wikibooks.org, now support dark mode when a reader is using that system setting. [34][35][36]
One new wiki has been created: a Wiktionary in Santali (wikt:sat:) [37]
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that prevented clicking on search results in the web-interface for some Firefox for Android phone configurations. [38]

Meetings and events

The next Language Community Meeting is happening soon, February 28th at 14:00 UTC. This week's meeting will cover: highlights and technical updates on keyboard and tools for the Sámi languages, Translatewiki.net contributions from the Bahasa Lampung community in Indonesia, and technical Q&A. If you'd like to join, simply sign up on the wiki page.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:39, 25 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 27 February 2025

News and notes: Administrator elections up for reapproval and 1bil GET snagged on Commons

Serendipity: Guinea-Bissau Heritage from Commons to the World

Technology report: Hear that? The wikis go silent twice a year

In the media: The end of the world

Recent research: What's known about how readers navigate Wikipedia; Italian Wikipedia hardest to read

Opinion: Sennecaster's RfA debriefing

Tips and tricks: One year after this article is posted, will every single article on Wikipedia have a short description?

Community view: Open letter from French Wikipedians says "no" to intimidation of volunteer contributors

Traffic report: Temporary scars, February stars

Essay: The source, the whole source, and nothing but the source

Obituary: Ümüt Çınar (Kmoksy) and Vinícius Medina Kern (Vmkern)

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:30, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

WikiCup 2025 March newsletter

The first round of the 2025 WikiCup ended on 26 February. As a reminder, we are no longer disqualifying the lowest-scoring contestants; everyone who competed in round 1 will advance to round 2 unless they have withdrawn or been banned from Wikipedia. Instead, the contestants with the highest round-point totals now receive tournament points at the end of each round. Unlike the round points in the main WikiCup table, which are reset at the end of each round, tournament points are carried over between rounds and can only be earned if a competitor is among the top 16 round-point scorers. This table shows all competitors who have received tournament points so far.

Round 1 was very competitive compared with previous years; two contestants scored more than 1,000 round points, and the top 16 contestants all scored more than 500 round points. The following competitors scored more than 800 round points:

Gog the Mild (submissions) with 1,168 round points, mainly from 4 featured articles and 4 good articles on old military history, in addition to an assortment of GA and FA reviews.
Generalissima (submissions) with 1,095 round points, mainly from 2 FAs, 2 featured lists, 8 GAs, and 16 Did You Know articles mainly on historical topics.
BeanieFan11 (submissions), with 866 round points from 20 GAs, 23 DYKs, and 2 In the News articles primarily about athletes.
Sammi Brie (submissions), with 846 round points from 16 GAs about radio and TV stations, 45 GA reviews, and 3 DYKs.
Hey man im josh (submissions), with 816 round points from 5 FLs about sports and Olympic topics, 46 FL reviews, 3 ITN articles, and a large number of bonus points.
MaranoFan (submissions), with 815 round points primarily from 3 FAs and 1 GA about music, in addition to 9 article reviews.

The full scores for round 1 can be seen here. During this round, contestants have claimed 18 featured articles, 26 featured lists, 1 featured-topic article, 197 good articles, 38 good-topic articles and more than 100 Did You Know articles. In addition, competitors have worked on 23 In the News articles, and they have conducted nearly 550 reviews.

Remember that any content promoted after 26 February but before the start of Round 2 can be claimed in Round 2, which begins on 1 March. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. If you want to help out with the WikiCup, feel free to review one of the nominations listed on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:13, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-10

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

All logged-in editors using the mobile view can now edit a full page. The "Edit full page" link is accessible from the "More" menu in the toolbar. This was previously only available to editors using the Advanced mobile contributions setting. [39]
Interface administrators can now help to remove the deprecated Cite CSS code matching "mw-ref" from their local MediaWiki:Common.css. The list of wikis in need of cleanup, and the code to remove, can be found with this global search and in this example, and you can learn more about how to help on the CSS migration project page. The Cite footnote markers ("[1]") are now rendered by Parsoid, and the deprecated CSS is no longer needed. The CSS for backlinks ("mw:referencedBy") should remain in place for now. This cleanup is expected to cause no visible changes for readers. Please help to remove this code before March 20, after which the development team will do it for you.
When editors embed a file (e.g. [[File:MediaWiki.png]]) on a page that is protected with cascading protection, the software will no longer restrict edits to the file description page, only to new file uploads.[40] In contrast, transcluding a file description page (e.g. {{:File:MediaWiki.png}}) will now restrict edits to the page.[41]
When editors revert a file to an earlier version it will now require the same permissions as ordinarily uploading a new version of the file. The software now checks for 'reupload' or 'reupload-own' rights,[42] and respects cascading protection.[43]
When administrators are listing pages for deletion with the Nuke tool, they can now also list associated talk pages and redirects for deletion, alongside pages created by the target, rather than needing to manually delete these pages afterwards. [44]
The previously noted update to Single User Login, which will accommodate browser restrictions on cross-domain cookies by moving login and account creation to a central domain, will now roll out to all users during March and April. The team plans to enable it for all new account creation on Group0 wikis this week. See the SUL3 project page for more details and an updated timeline.
Since last week there has been a bug that shows some interface icons as black squares until the page has fully loaded. It will be fixed this week. [45]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Sylheti (w:syl:) [46]
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed with loading images in very old versions of the Firefox browser on mobile. [47]

Updates for technical contributors

Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 02:28, 4 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – March 2025

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2025).

Administrator changes

CheckUser changes

Oversighter changes

AmandaNP

Guideline and policy news

A request for comment is open to discuss whether AI-generated images (meaning those wholly created by generative AI, not human-created images modified with AI tools) should be banned from use in articles.
A series of 22 mini-RFCs that double-checked consensus on some aspects and improved certain parts of the administrator elections process has been closed (see the summary of the changes).
A request for comment is open to gain consensus on whether future administrator elections should be held.

Technical news

A new filter has been added to the Special:Nuke tool, which allows administrators to filter for pages in a range of page sizes (in bytes). This allows, for example, deleting pages only of a certain size or below. T378488
Non-administrators can now check which pages are able to be deleted using the Special:Nuke tool. T376378

Miscellaneous

The 2025 appointees for the Ombuds commission are だ＊ぜ, Arcticocean, Ameisenigel, Emufarmers, Faendalimas, Galahad, Nehaoua, Renvoy, Revi C., RoySmith, Teles and Zafer as members, with Vermont serving as steward-observer.
Following the 2025 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: 1234qwer1234qwer4, AramilFeraxa, Daniuu, KonstantinaG07, MdsShakil and XXBlackburnXx.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:39, 4 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-11

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

Updates for editors

Editors who use password managers at multiple wikis may notice changes in the future. The way that our wikis provide information to password managers about reusing passwords across domains has recently been updated, so some password managers might now offer you login credentials that you saved for a different Wikimedia site. Some password managers already did this, and are now doing it for more Wikimedia domains. This is part of the SUL3 project which aims to improve how our unified login works, and to keep it compatible with ongoing changes to the web-browsers we use. [48][49]
The Wikipedia Apps Team is inviting interested users to help improve Wikipedia’s offline and limited internet use. After discussions in Afrika Baraza and the last ESEAP call, key challenges like search, editing, and offline access are being explored, with upcoming focus groups to dive deeper into these topics. All languages are welcome, and interpretation will be available. Want to share your thoughts? Join the discussion or email aramadan@wikimedia.org!
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 19. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: the launch of the Community Updates module, the most recent changes in Community Configuration, and the upcoming test of in-article suggestions for first-time editors.
An old API that was previously used in the Android Wikipedia app is being removed at the end of March. There are no current software uses, but users of the app with a version that is older than 6 months by the time of removal (2025-03-31), will no longer have access to the Suggested Edits feature, until they update their app. You can read more details about this change.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:07, 10 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-12

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

Twice a year, around the equinoxes, the Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team performs a datacenter server switchover, redirecting all traffic from one primary server to its backup. This provides reliability in case of a crisis, as we can always fall back on the other datacenter. Thanks to the Listen to Wikipedia tool, you can hear the switchover take place: Before it begins, you'll hear the steady stream of edits; Then, as the system enters a brief read-only phase, the sound stops for a couple of minutes, before resuming after the switchover. You can read more about the background and details of this process on the Diff blog. If you want to keep an ear out for the next server switchover, listen to the wikis on March 19 at 14:00 UTC.

Updates for editors

The improved Content Translation tool dashboard is now available in 10 Wikipedias and will be available for all Wikipedias soon. With the unified dashboard, desktop users can now: Translate new sections of an article; Discover and access topic-based article suggestion filters (initially available only for mobile device users); Discover and access the Community-defined lists filter, also known as "Collections", from wiki-projects and campaigns.
On Wikimedia Commons, a new system to select the appropriate file categories has been introduced: if a category has one or more subcategories, users will be able to click on an arrow that will open the subcategories directly within the form, and choose the correct one. The parent category name will always be shown on top, and it will always be possible to come back to it. This should decrease the amount of work for volunteers in fixing/creating new categories. The change is also available on mobile. These changes are part of planned improvements to the UploadWizard.
The Community Tech team is seeking wikis to join a pilot for the Multiblocks feature and a refreshed Special:Block page in late March. Multiblocks enables administrators to impose multiple different types of blocks on the same user at the same time. If you are an admin or steward and would like us to discuss joining the pilot with your community, please leave a message on the project talk page.
Starting March 25, the Editing team will test a new feature for Edit Check at 12 Wikipedias: Multi-Check. Half of the newcomers on these wikis will see all Reference Checks during their edit session, while the other half will continue seeing only one. The goal of this test is to see if users are confused or discouraged when shown multiple Reference Checks (when relevant) within a single editing session. At these wikis, the tags used on edits that show References Check will be simplified, as multiple tags could be shown within a single edit. Changes to the tags are documented on Phabricator. [50]
The Global reminder bot, which is a service for notifying users that their temporary user-rights are about to expire, now supports using the localized name of the user-rights group in the message heading. Translators can see the listing of existing translations and documentation to check if their language needs updating or creation.
The GlobalPreferences gender setting, which is used for how the software should refer to you in interface messages, now works as expected by overriding the local defaults. [51]
View all 26 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the Wikipedia App for Android had a bug fixed for when a user is browsing and searching in multiple languages. [52]

Updates for technical contributors

Later this week, the way that Codex styles are loaded will be changing. There is a small risk that this may result in unstyled interface message boxes on certain pages. User generated content (e.g. templates) is not impacted. Gadgets may be impacted. If you see any issues please report them. See the linked task for details, screenshots, and documentation on how to fix any affected gadgets.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:46, 17 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Playing in your sandbox

Hey! Apologies for using your user sandbox. I had tried to access my own and got led astray by my browser. Renerpho (talk) 01:56, 18 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Books & Bytes – Issue 67

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 67, January – February 2025

East View Press and The Africa Report join the library
Spotlight: Wikimedia+Libraries International Convention and WikiCredCon
Tech tip: Suggest page

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --18:48, 19 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 22 March 2025

From the editor: Hanami

Opinion: Talking about governments editing Wikipedia

News and notes: Deeper look at takedowns targeting Wikipedia

In the media: The good, the bad, and the unusual

Recent research: Explaining the disappointing history of Flagged Revisions; and what's the impact of ChatGPT on Wikipedia so far?

Traffic report: All the world's a stage, we are merely players...

Gallery: WikiPortraits rule!

Essay: Unusual biographical images

Obituary: Rest in peace

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:07, 22 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Happy Birthday!

Question from Kai Jewett (22:18, 24 March 2025)

I spent all day completing a page for Gordon J. Linton at his request and when I published it, the old uncompleted version comes up instead of the new version. How do I get the edited version published. --Kai Jewett (talk) 22:18, 24 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hello Kai Jewett,

I’d like to start by informing you about Wikipedia’s policy on COI – you can read it at Wikipedia:Conflict of interest. Since you wrote at the subject’s request, you might have received financial gains. If that’s the case, please read Wikipedia:Paid-contribution disclosure. If you have a direct relation to the subject – Gordon, please disclose it on your user page using the Template:User COI.

Regarding your question, your version was reverted by User:Myrealnamm due to concerns about NPOV and a large number of external links. I highly recommend reading Help:Editing to understand the basics of properly formatting an article. If you try to republish after formatting it correctly, you should submit it for review at WP:AFC, where a neutral editor can point out any issues, such as not adhering to Wikipedia:Neutral point of view or formatting problems.

If you have any other questions, feel free to ask! The AP (talk) 23:22, 24 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-13

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

Weekly highlight

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking your feedback on the drafts of the objectives and key results that will shape the Foundation's Product and Technology priorities for the next fiscal year (starting in July). The objectives are broad high-level areas, and the key-results are measurable ways to track the success of their objectives. Please share your feedback on the talkpage, in any language, ideally before the end of April.

Updates for editors

The CampaignEvents extension will be released to multiple wikis (see deployment plan for details) in April 2025, and the team has begun the process of engaging communities on the identified wikis. The extension provides tools to organize, manage, and promote collaborative activities (like events, edit-a-thons, and WikiProjects) on the wikis. The extension has three tools: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation Lists. It is currently on 13 Wikipedias, including English Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia, as well as Wikidata. Questions or requests can be directed to the extension talk page or in Phabricator (with #campaigns-product-team tag).
Starting the week of March 31st, wikis will be able to set which user groups can view private registrants in Event Registration, as part of the CampaignEvents extension. By default, event organizers and the local wiki admins will be able to see private registrants. This is a change from the current behavior, in which only event organizers can see private registrants. Wikis can change the default setup by requesting a configuration change in Phabricator (and adding the #campaigns-product-team tag). Participants of past events can cancel their registration at any time.
Administrators at wikis that have a customized MediaWiki:Sidebar should check that it contains an entry for the Special pages listing. If it does not, they should add it using * specialpages-url|specialpages. Wikis with a default sidebar will see the link moved from the page toolbox into the sidebar menu in April. [53]
The Minerva skin (mobile web) combines both Notice and Alert notifications within the bell icon (). There was a long-standing bug where an indication for new notifications was only shown if you had unseen Alerts. This bug is now fixed. In the future, Minerva users will notice a counter atop the bell icon when you have 1 or more unseen Notices and/or Alerts. [54]
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

VisualEditor has introduced a new client-side hook for developers to use when integrating with the VisualEditor target lifecycle. This hook should replace the existing lifecycle-related hooks, and be more consistent between different platforms. In addition, the new hook will apply to uses of VisualEditor outside of just full article editing, allowing gadgets to interact with the editor in DiscussionTools as well. The Editing Team intends to deprecate and eventually remove the old lifecycle hooks, so any use cases that this new hook does not cover would be of interest to them and can be shared in the task.
Developers who use the mw.Api JavaScript library, can now identify the tool using it with the userAgent parameter: var api = new mw.Api( { userAgent: 'GadgetNameHere/1.0.1' } );. If you maintain a gadget or user script, please set a user agent, because it helps with library and server maintenance and with differentiating between legitimate and illegitimate traffic. [55][56]
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:39, 24 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]