User talk:Pigsonthewing

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Talk to me, Andy Mabbett

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Books & Bytes – Issue 73

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team – 12:05, 11 March 2026 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: February 2026

This Month in GLAM – Volume XVI, Issue II, February 2026
Headlines
From the team: GLAM in 2026 is calling to action! Belgium report: A photo safari through Wiki Loves Fashion & a rescue mission with Mission Gourmande! Czech Republic report: National Library overview of 2025 Italy report: Cultural Heritage and Memory: 2026 GLAM Call and Executed Renaissance Edit-a-thon New Zealand report: Farewelling the Auckland Museum Summer Students and an update on the NZBSI WiR Poland report: Wikipedia in Cultural Marketing at Crash Mondays Warsaw Serbia report: February in Wikimedia Serbia Spain report: Wikidata in the GLAM context II Switzerland report: Neocomensia, SAPA, Atelier Winterthur, GLAM-on-Tour Disentis UK report: New content in African and Asian languages Biodiversity Heritage Library report: Updates on work by BHLWiki Working Group members Memory of the World report: Focus on Indigenous issues Calendar: March's GLAM events
Read this edition in full • Single-page
To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 00:51, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

Your submission at Articles for creation: Railway 200 has been accepted

Railway 200, which you submitted to Articles for creation, has been accepted!

Congratulations, and thank you for helping expand the scope of Wikipedia! We hope you will continue making quality contributions.

The article has been assessed as C-Class, which is recorded on its talk page. This is a great rating for a new article, and places it among the top 23% of accepted submissions, well done! You may like to take a look at the grading scheme to see how you can improve the article.

See the quality assessment scheme to find out how to improve the article.

Future articles

Since you have made at least 10 edits over more than four days, you can now create articles yourself without submitting a draft for review. However, you may continue submitting drafts to Articles for creation if you prefer.

Once you have made at least 10 edits and had an account for at least four days, you will have the option to create articles yourself without posting a request to Articles for creation.

Next steps

Find other Wikipedia articles related to your topic and add links pointing to the new article. This helps readers find it.
Group the article with similar subjects by adding relevant categories.
You may consider nominating a fact from the article within the next 7 days to appear on the Main Page's Did you know section.
Wikipedia is a work in progress. You can continue to expand and improve the new article.
The new article will become eligible to be indexed on search engines once patrolled or after 90 days; search engines may take time to reflect this.
For friendly peer support regarding editing, sourcing, or policies, visit the Teahouse, a question and answer hub for new editors.

Thanks again, and happy editing!

Cheerio, Mattdaviesfsic. Talk to me. 18:32, 14 March 2026 (UTC)

Thank you

		The Helping Hand Barnstar
		Awarded for enhancing international cooperation by helping to link a Wikipedia article in Japanese Wikipedia to a new article in English Wikipedia. Thank you for your technical assistance. Example of your work was to link the article Avantgardey to show that it is in 2 other languages already. Vanguard10 (talk) 21:46, 15 March 2026 (UTC)

Disclaimer: I have no financial or familial ties to Avantgardey. I am not even Japanese. Vanguard10 (talk) 21:47, 15 March 2026 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #723

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2026-03-16. Missed the previous one? See issue #722.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

Blogs:
- The African Literary Metadata (ALMEDA) project - The ALMEDA project’s key outcome is a linked, open, and searchable metadata repository—built from extensive cataloguing of previously uncatalogued materials and enriched through a user-friendly interface launching in 2025, designed to support ongoing growth beyond the project’s initial five-year funding.
- https://diff.wikimedia.org/2026/03/13/structuring-dagbanli-on-wikidata-lexemes-senses-and-the-digraph-challenge/
Papers: Understanding Wikidata Qualifiers: An Analysis and Taxonomy - This study develops a refined taxonomy of Wikidata qualifiers—based on their semantics, frequency, and diversity—to help contributors select appropriate qualifiers, improve querying and inference, and enhance knowledge graph design, ultimately offering a structured framework that covers the most important qualifiers and supports better recommendation systems. By Falquet & Aljalbout (2026).
Videos: LIVE Wikidata editing #118 at the Open Data Day - Wikipedia Weekly Network:
- Introduction to editing Wikidata on mobile - Art + Feminism in Wikimedia Botswana
- Queer women in the Arts (English): A panel discussion and Wikidata workshop
Podcasts: Wikipediapodden interviews Lydia Pintscher about the ongoing Wikidata notability reform (also available on Commons)
Notebooks: Who gets a biography on French-language Wikipedia? A country-by-country portrait of biographical coverage for people born between 1950 and 2000.

Tool of the week

Wdquery : GraphQL-powered Wikidata item advanced search.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

https://casier-politique.fr
Fornland—aggregates over a million cultural heritage sites from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland into one interface, combining Wikidata and other sources .
m:Coolest Tool Award
The WMF Wikidata Platform team has published its March 2026 newsletter. To have new issues of the WDP monthly newsletter delivered to your user talk page, Subscribe to WDP newsletter!
Reminder that the 4 week grace period for switching to the v1 route for the Wikibase REST API search endpoints will end this week. The v0 route will be turned off and hence will no longer function.

Newest properties and property proposals to review

Newest General datatypes:
- river regime (predominant pattern of annual changes to a stream's discharge at a particular period)
- seat occupied (seat held by a person within an academy or other society)
Newest External identifiers: Génération Nintendo publisher ID, KCI article ID, ‎LINCS ID, radeberger-stadtgeschichte.de Object Identificator, Flohic ID, ‎Vlaams Woordenboek ID, ‎Bach digital person ID, ‎Bach digital work ID, Identificativo Antenati, ‎Liiga.fi player ID, ‎Pesistulokset.fi player ID, ‎Letterboxd producer ID, Fragplace brands ID, Fragplace fragrances ID, Fragplace notes ID, Fragplace perfumers ID
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- population pyramid (Age pyramid image for demography articles)
- StatsF1 ID (Link to a Formula 1 specific database)
- maximum vehicle height (maximum authorized height for vehicles (especially heavy goods vehicles) on a bridge, tunnel or road segment (regulatory limit from signage))
- Bibliografi.dk (Bibliografi.dk)
- PeerTube instance URL (the PeerTube instance of/about the subject)
- Central Registration Number (Indonesia) (primary service registration number assigned to a member of the Indonesian Armed Forces or Indonesian National Police)
New External identifier property proposals to review: Digital Public Good, LUBW-RIPS-Wasserkraftanlage-ID, Identifiant QueenBallers.com d'une joueuse, Foto Atlas taxonomy ID, Brewver beer ID, Göteborgsalliansen, Consumer Rights Wiki article ID, Royal Air Force service number, Identifiant d'une personne dans le Bianco, Tajik-Russian Dictionary word ID, AmericanAristocracy person ID, AmericanAristocracy house ID, Shinmei database ID

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

Showcase Items: Patrice Lumumba (Q161672) - Congolese politician and independence leader (1925–1961)

Development

Mobile statement editing:
- If you have not tried it yet, now is an excellent time to turn it on in the beta features section of your preferences, test it and give feedback.
- We have added support for editing globe coordinate statements
Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are continuing to work on the issue of too many Wikidata in recent changes and watchlists on Wikipedia and co. We are currently prototyping a way to only consider changes that actually have an impact on the article (phab:T419823). We also finished the work on an emergency switch to turn off sending changes for qualifiers and references to Wikipedia and co in case of major database disruptions (phab:T412956).
Ontology federation: We are working towards getting the code for ontology federation (in its first version of using Wikidata Items as values on other Wikibase instances) ready for wider testing.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
Govdirectory weekly focus country: Bangladesh
Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
Help write the next summary!

· Previous issue · JosefAnthony talk ·MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:35, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

March music

Quick facts

story · music · places

Of the four topics I helped to bring to the main page, I'm most proud of a woman's work, so made it my story. As it happens, last year's story OTD was about the woman. -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 17:57, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

on Bach's birthday, a story about my joy --Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:30, 21 March 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-12

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

Updates for editors

The Improved Syntax Highlighting beta feature, also known as CodeMirror 6, has been used for wikitext syntax highlighting since November 2024. It will be promoted out of beta by May 2026 in order to bring improvements and new features to all editors who use the standard syntax highlighter. If you have any questions or concerns about promoting the feature out of beta, please share.
Some changes to local user groups are performed by stewards on Meta-Wiki and logged there only. Now, interwiki rights changes will be logged both on Meta-Wiki and the wiki of the target user to make it easier to access a full record of user's rights changes on a local wiki. Past log entries for such changes will be backfilled in the coming weeks.
On wikis using Flagged Revisions, the number of pending changes shown on Special:PendingChanges previously counted pages which were no longer pending review, because they have been removed from the system without being reviewed, e.g. due to being deleted, moved to a different namespace, or due to wiki configuration changes. The count will be correct now. On some wikis the number shown will be much smaller than before. There should be no change to the list of pages itself.
Wikifunctions composition language has been rewritten, resulting in a new version of the language. This change aims to increase service stability by reducing the orchestrator's memory consumption. This rewrite also enables substantial latency reduction, code simplification, and better abstractions, which will open the door to later feature additions. Read more about the changes.
Users can now sort search results alphabetically by page title. The update gives an additional option to finding pages more easily and quickly. Previously, results could be sorted by Edit date, Creation date, or Relevance. To use the new option, open 'Advanced Search' on the search results page and select 'Alphabetically' under 'Sorting Order'.
View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the bug that prevented UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons from importing files from Flickr has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

A new special page, Special:LintTemplateErrors, has been created to list transcluded pages that are flagged as containing lint errors to help users discover them easily. The list is sorted by the number of transclusions with errors. For example: Special:LintTemplateErrors/night-mode-unaware-background-color.
Users of the Improved Syntax Highlighting beta feature have been using CodeMirror instead of CodeEditor for syntax highlighting when editing JavaScript, CSS, JSON, Vue and Lua content pages, for some time now. Along with promoting CodeMirror 6 out of beta, the plan is to replace CodeEditor as the standard editor for these content models by May 2026. Feedback or concerns are welcome.
The CodeMirror JavaScript modules will soon be upgraded to CodeMirror 6. Leading up to the upgrade, loading the ext.CodeMirror or ext.CodeMirror.lib modules from gadgets and user scripts was deprecated in July 2025. The use of the ext.CodeMirror.switch hook was also deprecated in March 2025. Contributors can now make their scripts or gadgets compatible with CodeMirror 6. See the migration guide for more information.
The MediaWiki Interfaces team is expanding coverage of REST API module definitions to include extension APIs. REST API modules are groups of related endpoints that can be independently managed and versioned. Modules now exist for GrowthExperiments and Wikifunctions APIs. As we migrate extension APIs to this structure, documentation will move out of the main MediaWiki OpenAPI spec and REST Sandbox view, and will instead be accessible via module-specific options in the dropdown on the REST Sandbox (i.e., Special:RestSandbox, available on all wiki projects).
The Scribunto extension provides different pieces of information about the wiki where the module is being used via the mw.site library. Starting last week, the library also provides a way of accessing the wiki ID that can be used to facilitate cross-wiki module maintenance.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

The 2026 Coolest Tool Award celebrating outstanding community tools, is now open for nominations! Nominate your favorite tool using the nomination survey form by 23 March 2026. For more information on privacy and data handling, please see the survey privacy statement.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:34, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 5

Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on February 27. Please help translate.

Highlights

Supporting readers: For most of its history, Wikipedia did not have to worry about attracting readers. But with the way people search for information changing, there is a drop in the number of readers which is impacting the number of accounts created and contributions to our sites. Have a look at some of the ongoing and planned work to support reader experience.
Server switch: All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 25 at 15:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests, which happen twice a year.
Tools improvement: The PTAC Unsupported Tools Working Group continued improvements to Video2Commons in February, with fixes addressing authentication errors, large-file handling, task queue visibility, and clearer upload behavior. Work is still ongoing in some areas, including changes related to deprecated server-side uploads.
Wikipedia 25 Grants: The celebration continues! The Wikimedia Foundation offers Wikipedia 25 Birthday Funds to communities planning Wikipedia’s 25th birthday events with funding between USD 1,000–2,000. Apply before March 31.

Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org

Experiments: The Foundation is frequently conducting experiments to help learn what features will be most effective and valuable to the projects. The list of experiments in Product and Technology, tracks upcoming, live, in-analysis, and completed experiments as well as their rationale. For example, the tracker shares that one upcoming experiment, Reader to Contributor Baseline, will measure how many readers create contributor accounts and whether the rate differs depending on how people arrived to the site.
Article guidance: Help less experienced editors by filling out a questionnaire on this page (available in 7 languages). The Foundation are looking particularly for experienced Wikipedia editors from these pilot wikis. Your answers will help customize guidance for less experienced editors while creating an article.
Wikifunctions: You can now create Functions that will show a citation in their output.
Editing feature: Suggestion Mode is available as a beta feature within the visual editor at all Wikipedias. This feature proactively suggests various types of actions that people can consider taking to improve Wikipedia articles, and learn about related guidelines.
Paste Check: Paste Check is now available at all Wikipedias. The feature prompts newcomers who are pasting text they are not likely to have written into VisualEditor to consider whether doing so risks a copyright violation.
Mobile experience: The user menu in the top corner for all mobile users is standardized so that it is closer to the desktop experience to improve the user interface for readers.
Two-factor authentication: For security reasons, members of certain user groups are required to have two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled. Currently, 2FA is required to use the group, but not to be a member of it. Given that this model still has some vulnerabilities, the situation will gradually change in March.
Tech News: Latest updates from Tech News week 10 and 11 include the new GraphQL API has been released as a flexible alternative to select features of the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS). They also link to the 50 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.

Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · The Wikipedia Library · list of movement events

WikiCelebrate: Celebrating Mervat, one of the most experienced and dedicated contributors to Arabic Wikipedia.
Wikimedia ecosystem: The pilot on the ecosystem of Wikimedia organizations has published a draft proposal for a Future Affiliate Landscape. It welcomes your review and feedback.
Fundraising: The Fundraising Report 2024–2025 has now been published on meta.
International Women's Day 2026: Women, visibility, and the future of trusted knowledge on Wikimedia.
Don't Blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
Wiki Loves Earth 2025: See the winners from the 13th annual edition of the globe-trotting photo contest.
Wikimania 2026: While most Wikimania program submissions are closed, the research track is open until March 31. It accepts proposals from both professional researchers and Wikimedians.

Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters

Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate

For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletinwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!

MediaWiki message delivery 22:17, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue 239, March 2026

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 three recent works
Timeline: This month in military history

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) 12:07, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

archiving

You edited the Grokipedia talk page here. A detail confuses me: "= old(28d)". The help page Help:Archiving a talk page says "Article talk page threads should not typically be archived in less than 30 days except for very busy talk pages." Is the help page worthless (which wouldn't surprise me), or is it right to consider the talk page "very busy" given its recent history, or am I ignorant about algos and you can enlighten me? Peter Gulutzan (talk) 15:23, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

Right at the top of that talk page is a banner including the text "[This page] explains concepts or processes used by the Wikipedia community. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus." Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:44, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

Okay, I take it that you deem the help page worthless (which I suggested wouldn't surprise me). Since there's nothing else to explain 28d, though, I'll increase it to 30. Peter Gulutzan (talk) 17:35, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #724

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2026-03-23. Missed the previous one? See issue #723.

Discussions

New requests for permissions/Bot:
- AraBot - Tasks: Adding Aragonese sitelinks and updating articles on Aragonese Wikipedia with Wikidata's data.
- InventaireBot - Task: Make automated edits generated by the inventaire.io (Q32193244) server and manual edits on behalf of users without a Wikidata account.
Closed request for permissions/Bot: DelintBot - Task: Fix lint errors on pages across all namespaces where Wikitext can be written (namespaces not managed by Wikibase).
New request for comments: archive.today - due to a RfC and policy on enwiki, this discussion needs your input on whether Wikidata will continue listing archive.today links.
Ongoing request for comments: Notability policy reform is looking for input about remaining questions around marginalized knowledge and external identifiers

Events

Upcoming events: (German) Art History Loves Wiki im Museum Schnütgen, YouTube livestream – 28 March 2026 (UTC+1): presentations by Lisa Dieckmann at 12.30 - 12.50 (“Bilder verknüpfen – prometheus, Normdaten und Wikidata”), Lucy Patterson & Lukas Fuchsgruber at 16.30 - 16.45 (“Kritische Arbeit mit Sammlungsdaten auf Wikidata”), and Max Kristen at 17.30 - 17.45 (“usefulQueries: Unkompliziert Kunstgeschichte in Wikidata erkunden”).