User talk:The Grid

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These fragments of time

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Welcome to the drive!

Welcome, welcome, welcome The Grid! I'm glad that you are joining the drive! Please, have a cup of WikiTea, and go cite some articles.

Fix a random page lacking sources

CactiStaccingCrane (talk)18:56, 1 February 2024 UTC [refresh]via JWB and Geardona (talk to me?)

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]

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. [1]
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.[2] In contrast, transcluding a file description page (e.g. {{:File:MediaWiki.png}}) will now restrict edits to the page.[3]
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,[4] and respects cascading protection.[5]
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. [6]
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. [7]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Sylheti (w:syl:) [8]
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. [9]

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]

Invitation to participate in research

Hello,

The Wikimedia Foundation is conducting a survey of a group of Wikipedians to better understand their experiences! We are also looking to interview some survey respondents in more detail, and you will be eligible to receive a thank-you gift for the completion of an interview. The outcomes of this research will shape future work designed to improve on-wiki experiences.

We have identified you as a good candidate for this research, and would greatly appreciate your participation in this survey, which shouldn’t take more than 2-3 minutes. You may view its privacy statement here. Please contact me if you have any questions or concerns. Kind regards, Sam Walton (talk) 16:34, 10 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback request: History and geography request for comment

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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. [10][11]
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. [12]
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. [13]
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. [14]

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]

Interactive map removal

Grid - The justification for "reverting" the Sarasota CSA map to the 2015 map was based on, with all due respect, a personal assessment and not a consensus per Wikipedia guidelines. The reason I added the adjacent Fort Myers CSA because the two CSAs may merge or exchange components/counties with the next MSA delineation. The larger map also adds clarity for those of us who do not live in SW Florida and do not know the progression of settlements/cities going from Tampa south. Feel free to offer a compromise. StillWatchesCartoons (talk) 02:18, 18 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The last delineation was in 2023 and the next one won't be until 2030 census. [15] They definitely aren't going to merge as they separated in the 1960s-1970s for a better way to analyze the regions. Southwest Florida provides information about the region anyways because it's not a statistical area.

Are you trying to say my revert was a personal assessment? You seem to be the only one adding these adjacent CSAs. – The Grid (talk) 12:43, 18 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The statement you made about delineation revisions in 2030 is not completely accurate. The standards are revised every ten years, but OMB does review commuting and population patterns annually. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/metro-micro/about/delineation-files.html#:~:text=The%20standards%20for%20delineating%20the,and%20other%20criteria%20are%20met.&text=Metropolitan%2C%20micropolitan%2C%20and%20related%20statistical,delineation%20files%20are%20available%20here.

Yes, your revert was a personal opinion solely because it started with "I don't see..." While you may not agree with my conclusion here, I can objectively argue that adding the adjacent CSA adds clarity and reference, like a map of Florida would label the adjacent state as Georgia or Alabama. I offered a compromise as Wikipedia's editors suggested, an interactive map of just the current Sarasota CSA, but I don't want to prepare one if you are just going to revert it (again) to your 2015 map. I don't want to have an edit battle, so I wish you good day. StillWatchesCartoons (talk) 17:06, 18 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia is not a guide if you want a policy on why I reverted it. I haven't seen interactive maps used for area on here. I do not see high importance on showing the adjacent CSAs. The focus should be on that CSA or it leads to coatrack issues creeping in.

I don't know why you want to argue about the delineation when it's specifically stated in the highlighted text: Generally, the areas are delineated using the most recent set of standards following each decennial census. Between censuses, the delineations are revised to reflect Census Bureau population estimates and--once each decade--updated commuting-to-work data. The next decennial census is in 2030. I don't know where you are getting "2015 map" from, the article prose states what was renamed in 2020 and its 2023 delineration. – The Grid (talk) 13:39, 19 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Is the issue the interactive map or the fact I added the adjacent CSA...or both?

Like I said, I can prepare one of just your sarasota area and call it a day, but I don't want it being reverted immediately afterward. I love making maps and spend time prepping them, and I don't like them being thrown away. StillWatchesCartoons (talk) 22:03, 19 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It's really the usage of the adjacent CSAs. I'm ok with the interactive map. – The Grid (talk) 12:29, 20 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This sounds fair. I added the interactive map just for the subject CSA. StillWatchesCartoons (talk) 02:14, 25 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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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

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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. [16]
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. [17]
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. [18][19]
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

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

Tech News: 2025-14

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

Updates for editors

The Editing team is working on a new Edit check: Peacock check. This check's goal is to identify non-neutral terms while a user is editing a wikipage, so that they can be informed that their edit should perhaps be changed before they publish it. This project is at the early stages, and the team is looking for communities' input: in this Phabricator task, they are gathering on-wiki policies, templates used to tag non-neutral articles, and the terms (jargon and keywords) used in edit summaries for the languages they are currently researching. You can participate by editing the table on Phabricator, commenting on the task, or directly messaging Trizek (WMF).
Single User Login has now been updated on all wikis to move login and account creation to a central domain. This makes user login compatible with browser restrictions on cross-domain cookies, which have prevented users of some browsers from staying logged in.
View all 35 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

Starting on March 31st, the MediaWiki Interfaces team will begin a limited release of generated OpenAPI specs and a SwaggerUI-based sandbox experience for MediaWiki REST APIs. They invite developers from a limited group of non-English Wikipedia communities (Arabic, German, French, Hebrew, Interlingua, Dutch, Chinese) to review the documentation and experiment with the sandbox in their preferred language. In addition to these specific Wikipedia projects, the sandbox and OpenAPI spec will be available on the on the test wiki REST Sandbox special page for developers with English as their preferred language. During the preview period, the MediaWiki Interfaces Team also invites developers to share feedback about your experience. The preview will last for approximately 2 weeks, after which the sandbox and OpenAPI specs will be made available across all wiki projects.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

Sometimes a small, one line code change can have great significance: in this case, it means that for the first time in years we're able to run all of the stack serving maps.wikimedia.org - a host dedicated to serving our wikis and their multi-lingual maps needs - from a single core datacenter, something we test every time we perform a datacenter switchover. This is important because it means that in case one of our datacenters is affected by a catastrophe, we'll still be able to serve the site. This change is the result of extensive work by two developers on porting the last component of the maps stack over to kubernetes, where we can allocate resources more efficiently than before, thus we're able to withstand more traffic in a single datacenter. This work involved a lot of complicated steps because this software, and the software libraries it uses, required many long overdue upgrades. This type of work makes the Wikimedia infrastructure more sustainable.

Meetings and events

MediaWiki Users and Developers Workshop Spring 2025 is happening in Sandusky, USA, and online, from 14–16 May 2025. The workshop will feature discussions around the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies in different industries and will inspire and onboard new users. Registration and presentation signup is now available at the workshop's website.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:02, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]