User talk:StefenTower/Archive 39
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| This is an archive of past discussions with User:StefenTower. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
| Archive 35 | ← | Archive 37 | Archive 38 | Archive 39 | Archive 40 | Archive 41 | Archive 42 |
Tech News: 2025-33
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- The WikiEditor toolbar now includes its keyboard shortcuts in the tooltips for its buttons. This will help to improve the discoverability of this feature.
- The Product and Technology Advisory Council published a set of proposed experiments the Wikimedia Foundation can try to improve communication with community. Feedback on the proposals are welcomed until August 22 on this talk page.
- The search bar on the Minerva skin (mobile) has been updated to use the same type-ahead search component that is used on the Vector 2022 skin. There are no changes in search functionality but there are minor visual changes. Specifically, the close-search button has been changed from an "X" to a back arrow. This helps to distinguish it from the other "X" button that is used to clear any text.
- Editors on some wikis will see a new toggle for "Group results by page" on watchlist, related changes, and recent changes pages. This is an A/B experiment that is planned to start on August 11, and will run for 3–6 weeks on the Bengali, Chinese, Czech, French, Greek, Portuguese, and Urdu Wikipedias. The experiment will examine how making this feature more discoverable might affect editors' ability to find the edits they are looking for.
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- The multiwiki datasets of Unicode data have been moved to Category:Unicode Module Datasets on Wikimedia Commons, to follow the idea of "One common data source, multiple local wikis". Most wikis have been updated to use the Commons version. You can ask questions at the talkpage.
- Lua code can add warnings when something is wrong, by using the
mw.addWarning()function. It is now possible to add more than one warning, instead of new warnings replacing old ones. If you maintain a Lua module that used warnings, you should check it still works as expected.
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 23:26, 11 August 2025 (UTC)
Kentucky Louisville Rivalry page
Hello I see you are undoing some of my edits. I am the one over the years who has updated a majority of Louisville's and Kentucky's records. I do not remember my login. The since 2000 records are correct, if you have a problem with them check the numbers I assure you they are correct figures. 104.191.19.226 (talk) 19:40, 12 August 2025 (UTC)
- That's not the point. The figures are not cited with a reliable source (your assurance is not a source), and they are time-biased to make Louisville, one side of the rivalry, appear better, violating WP:NPOV. Please remove this material. Stefen 𝕋owers among the rest! Gab • Gruntwerk 19:43, 12 August 2025 (UTC)
I understand your point about citations, but there is a lot on these pages that is not citated. I am Alex22406, who created and updated much of the Louisville and Kentucky pages over the years. I can no longer log into that account because it was tied to my IU email, which I no longer have access to. I have for years been updating records for both programs with different IP's. The “since 2000” records I’ve added are accurate—I researched them thoroughly and double-checked the numbers before posting, but you have no problem with " UofL baseball is 15-4 in the past 19 games" that I added and is not sourced but you are mad about the since 2000 additions. Regarding the “time-biased” concern, my intent is to present context. Many of UK’s all-time wins occurred before 1960, prior to the integration of Black athletes, and UK’s programs were established decades earlier than UofL’s in some cases. That’s why I think modern-era comparisons—such as since 2000—provide additional clarity alongside historical records. Really since the late 1990's UofL has a winning record in every sport listed except for Men's Basketball vs Kentukcy. If sourcing is the main issue, I’m willing to work on finding citations so the modern records can remain while still meeting Wikipedia’s reliability and neutrality guidelines, but I just never had to get sources before for other things I have added. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 104.191.19.226 (talk) 20:14, 15 August 2025 (UTC)
- "Since 2000" is a time-based bias that appears to boost Louisville. STOP adding this material especially as you aren't bothering to cite the significance with reliable sources. As far as other material is concerned, I have not reviewed the entire article for bias. Re: "That’s why I think" is a large part of the problem. The Wikipedia isn't about our opinions. DO NOT add what you think belongs. Consult independent reliable sources FIRST. Stefen 𝕋ower's got the power!!1! Gab • Gruntwerk 20:20, 15 August 2025 (UTC)
This week's article for improvement (week 34, 2025)
Hello, StefenTower. The article for improvement of the week is:
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Kingdom of Norway (872–1397) • Housing Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 18 August 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
|---|
Tech News: 2025-34
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- Later this week, people who are logged-in and have the "Discussion tools" Beta Feature enabled will gain the ability to "Thank" individual comments directly from talk pages, rather than needing to navigate to page history. Learn more about this feature.
- An A/B test comparing two versions of the desktop donate link launched on testwiki on 12 August and on English Wikipedia 14 August for 0.1% of logged out users on the desktop site. The experiment will run for three weeks, ending on 12 September.
- An A/A test to measure the baseline for reader retention was launched 12 August using Experimentation Lab. This measures the percentage of users who revisit a wiki after their initial visit over a 14-day period. No visual changes are expected. The experiment will run through 31 August.
- Five new wikis have been created:
- a Wikisource in Tagalog (
s:tl:) - a Wikisource in Madurese (
s:mad:) - a Wikipedia in Rakhine (
w:rki:) - a Wikibooks in Minangkabau (
b:min:) - a Wiktionary in Standard Moroccan Amazigh (
wikt:zgh:)
- a Wikisource in Tagalog (
View all 46 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
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 00:34, 19 August 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-35
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Template authors can now use additional CSS properties, since the CSS sanitizer used by TemplateStyles was updated. For example: width: fit-content;ruby-align; relative units such aslh; and custom strings inlist-style-type. These improvements are a Community Wishlist wish.- On large wikis, the default time period to display edits from, within the Special:RecentChanges page, has been changed from 7 days to 1 day. This is part of a performance improvement project. This should have no user-facing impact due to the quantity of edits on these wikis.
- Administrators can now access the Special:BlockedExternalDomains page from the Special:CommunityConfiguration list page. This makes it easier to find.
- Wikimedia Commons videos were not shown in the Videos tab in Google Search. The problem was investigated and reported to Google who have now fixed the issue.
- One new wiki has been created: a Wiktionary in Betawi (
wikt:bew:)
View all 39 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Two fields of the recentchanges database table are being removed.
rc_newandrc_typeare being removed in favor ofrc_source. Queries to these older fields will start to fail starting this week and developers should userc_sourceinstead. These older fields were deprecated over 10 years ago and should not be in use. This is part of work to improve the performance and stability of queries to the recentchanges table.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: support for new languages in MediaWiki and translatewiki; the start of the Language Onboarding and Development project to help support the growth of new and small wikis; updates on research projects; and more.
Meetings and events
- The next Language Community Meeting is happening soon, August 29th at 15:00 UTC. This week's meeting will cover: the Avro keyboard developers from Wikimedia Bangladesh, who were recently awarded a national award for their contributions to this keyboard; and other topics.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 00:09, 26 August 2025 (UTC)
This week's article for improvement (week 36, 2025)
Hello, StefenTower. The article for improvement of the week is:
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Liquor • Town Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 1 September 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
|---|
Tech News: 2025-36
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- The Editing team wants to compile a list of templates, jargon terms, and policies used in edit summaries when a copyright violation is removed. This will help them identify the number of edits reverted due to copyright issues. We invite community members from the following Wikis to list these terms in T402601, or to share their list with Trizek_(WMF): Arabic Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, Persian Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Vietnamese Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia. This project is open until September 9th 2025.
Updates for editors
- The CampaignEvents extension has been enabled for all Wikisources. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. The extension has three features: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List. To request the extension for your wiki, visit the Deployment information page.
- The lists in the footer of the editing interface, such as "Templates used on this page," will now be organized into columns when there is enough space. This enhancement minimizes scrolling when editing lengthy articles on Wikipedia.
- On September 3rd, 2025 we will increase the sampling percentages of our group by toggle experiment of the
Special:RecentChanges,Special:Watchlist, andSpecial:RelatedChangespages on the Chinese, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias to 100 percent, allowing more editors to be part of this experiment. This adjustment is intended to ensure we have sufficient data to make informed decisions when evaluating the experiment results. - Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users will see suggestions of articles for further reading on English Wikipedia beginning the week of September 22. The feature will be available on both desktop and mobile. All non-English wikis received this change in June and July. The goal is to make it easier for users to find articles. Learn more.
View all 37 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- Wikifunctions now has a new capability called "lightweight enumeration types", an enumeration type is simply a fixed set of values that's in the type's definition. This capability makes it quick and easy to define such a type, and allows for the reuse of values that are already present in Wikidata. Here is a newsletter to learn more.
- The latest Readers Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: the formation of two new teams — Reader Growth and Reader Experience; insights into declining pageviews and account creations; highlights from the Wikimania Nairobi panel on improving the reading experience; upcoming experiments to engage new and existing readers; and more.
Meetings and events
- Spotlight on some Wikimania 2025 Sessions:
- Identifying AI-generated text by searching for ISBNs whose checksums fail: Mathias Schindler of WMDE shared tools to help communities search for these.
- La durabilité du mouvement Wikimedia face aux défis actuels et futurs: This session explored how Wikimedia can stay a trusted source of knowledge in the age of generative AI, information overload, and disinformation.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 20:46, 1 September 2025 (UTC)
This week's article for improvement (week 37, 2025)
Hello, StefenTower. The article for improvement of the week is:
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Comic timing • Liquor Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 8 September 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
|---|
The Signpost: 9 September 2025
- News and notes: Wikimedia Foundation loses a round in court
UK Online Safety Act remains undefeated.
- In the media: Congress probes, mayor whitewashed, AI stinks
Plus Wiki rules, Wiki Spin, and physicists get street cred!
- Disinformation report: A guide for Congress
The price of Liberty is eternal vigilance.
- Recent research: Minority-language Wikipedias, and Wikidata for botanists
And other new research findings.
- Technology report: A new way to read Wikisource
Tis true: there's magic in the web of it.
- Traffic report: Check out some new Weapons, weapon of choice
With the usual mix of war, death, super heroes, a belt, and Wednesday.
- Essay: The one question
It's an easy one.
Tech News: 2025-37
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- The Editing team is working on a new check: Paste check. This check informs newcomers who paste text into Wikipedia that the content might not be accepted. This check is an effort to increase the likelihood that the new content people are adding to Wikipedia is aligned with the Movement's commitment to offering information under a free content license. This check will soon be tested at a few wikis. If your community is interested in this test, please tell us in this task, or contact the team.
Updates for editors
Later this week, users of the "⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽" beta feature will be able to use a linting tool to see errors or other potential problems in wikitext in real time. See the help page for more information.
When browsing a wiki (like en.wikipedia.org), the software responds in one of two ways: a desktop page, or a redirect to a mobile version on an "m" domain (likeen.m.wikipedia.org). Over the next three weeks, MediaWiki will start displaying the mobile version to mobile devices directly on the standard domain, without this redirect. This change does not affect existing m-dot URLs, or the "Desktop view" opt-out. Learn more.- When an edit changes the categories of a page, the changes to the category membership counts are now happening asynchronously. This improves the speed of saving edits, especially when moving many pages to or from the same category, and reduces the risk of site outages, but it means that the counts can show outdated information for a few minutes.
- Edits on Wikidata to qualifiers (properties and values) and references (properties and values) in a Wikidata item statement will now not add entries to the RecentChanges or Watchlist pages on all other Wikis. This is a temporary change to improve performance while other solutions are created. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. Learn more.
- Japanese-language wikis have had a major upgrade to the way that search works. The new search should generally give more accurate and more relevant search results.
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
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 01:11, 9 September 2025 (UTC)
This week's article for improvement (week 38, 2025)
An economic analysis of climate change estimating the median income change by 2050 compared to a baseline scenario
Economic analysis of climate change Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Lead Belly • Comic timing Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:10, 15 September 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
|---|
Tech News: 2025-38
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- References lists that are made using the
<references/>tag will now automatically display with columns in Vector 2022 when readers are using its 'standard' settings for text-size and page-width. - Starting in the week of October 6, on small wikis and medium wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled, all autoconfirmed users will be able to use Event Registration as an organizer. No changes will be made for large wikis unless requested in Phabricator. This change is being made to make it easier for more people to use Event Registration, especially on wikis that are less likely to have policies related to the Event Organizer right. Learn more.
- Users that search using regular expressions (regex) can now use additional features including:
- for the
intitle:keyword: metacharacters for start-of-line (^) and end-of-line ($) anchors - for both
intitle:andinsource:keywords: shorthand character classes for digits (\d), whitespace (\s), and word characters (\w); and escape codes for line feed (\r), newline (\n), tab (\t), and unicode (e.g.\uHHHH).
- for the
- When you search for text that looks like an IP, the system will now show search results. It used to take you to the contributions for that IP instead of showing search results.
- All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 24. This is planned at 15:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests which happen twice a year. You can read more about the background and details of this process on the Diff blog.
View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that affected users who used the page-tabs to switch from wikitext editing of a section into the visualeditor.
Updates for technical contributors
- The MediaWiki Interfaces team is redesigning the Wikimedia REST API Sandbox with Codex. If you have feedback on improvements for the API documentation or what makes developer experiences smooth (or frustrating), you’re invited to join an upcoming discovery interview, or leave feedback onwiki. Learn more.
- Edits to Wikidata aliases (an alternative name for an item or a property) will now be shown in RecentChanges and Watchlist entries on other wikis less often, reducing unnecessary notifications. This will reduce the overall quantity of 'noisy' entries. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. Learn more.
- The new Unicode 17.0 version has been released. The datasets on Commons for the Module:Unicode data have been updated. Wikipedias that do not use the Commons datasets should either update their own data or switch to the Commons datasets.
- Users of the Wikimedia Enterprise Structured Contents endpoints can now access Parsed Tables. The new Parsed Tables feature extracts and represents Wikipedia tables in structured JSON. This improves machine accessibility as part of the Structured Contents initiative. Structured Contents output is freely available through the On-demand API, or through Wikimedia Cloud Services.
- A dataset of English Wikipedia biographical information from Wikimedia Enterprise has been published on Kaggle, for evaluation and research. This provides structured data from more than 1.5 million biographies, including birth and death dates, education, affiliations, careers, awards, and more (from a June 2024 snapshot).
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- Scholarship applications for Wikimania 2026 in Paris, France, are open until October 31.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 17:03, 15 September 2025 (UTC)
Books & Bytes – Issue 70
Issue 70, July–August 2025
- New collections:
- Times of Malta
- Africa Intelligence
- Intelligence Online
- La Lettre
- Glitz
- Spotlight: Wikimania
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team – 13:16, 18 September 2025 (UTC)
(This message was sent to User:StefenTower and is being posted here due to a redirect.)
This week's article for improvement (week 39, 2025)
Exterior firefighting at an abandoned convent in Massueville, Canada
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Economic analysis of climate change • Lead Belly Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:09, 22 September 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
|---|
Tech News: 2025-39
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- On September 24th at 15:00 UTC, all Wikimedia sites users will experience a brief read-only period due to a scheduled datacenter server switchover. The Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team will redirect all traffic from one primary server to its backup. You can listen to the switchover using the "Listen to Wikipedia" tool, where you will hear edits stop for a few minutes during the read-only phase, then resume. This twice-yearly datacenter server switchover ensures reliability by testing the backup datacenter, so that our sites can stay online even if the primary datacenter fails. You can read more about the process on the Diff blog.
Updates for editors
- Editors of 60 more Wiktionaries will soon be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them into their pages. A function takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, like adding numbers, converting miles to meters, calculating elapsed time, or declining a word into a case. They will join the other 65 Wiktionary language editions, which already have access to embedded Wikifunctions calls. Later this year, plans are in place to expand to more Wiktionaries and the Incubator.
- A new parser function has been added:
{{#contentmodel}}. Template editors and admins can use it to get the localized or canonical name of the content model of a specific page. The function makes it easier to create and edit system messages, such as MediaWiki:editinginterface, even when you switch types of pages, like wiki, JavaScript, CSS or JSON page. - Adding or editing a
DISPLAYTITLEfor an article using VisualEditor will no longer be broken. Editors who use VisualEditor mode to modify the{{DISPLAYTITLE}}would no longer have the literal text "DISPLAYTITLE" or its localized variant added to their articles. A list of pages that may have been affected and might need cleanup is documented in this ticket. - Beta users of the Wikipedia Android app can now try the redesigned Activity tab, which replaces the Edits tab. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging.
View all 12 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- Wikifunctions users can now import many essential facts involving geo-coordinates, quantities and time values from Wikidata. This is made possible by the creation of Wikifunctions types for these values, which makes them available for use by functions in Wikifunctions. Learn more about how this works in this video and Wikifunctions' August 1 newsletter (for quantities) and August 22 newsletter (for geo-coordinates).
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 22:52, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #219 is out: Accessing qualifiers in Wikidata statements
There is a new update for Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia. Please, come and read it!
In this issue, we introduce the possibility of calling also qualifiers from Wikidata, we update you on the recent deployments of Wikifunctions and on the Wikifunctions presentations at Wikimedia events, we give you the recent updates on Types, and we take a look at the latest software developments.
Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!
Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 17:46, 26 September 2025 (UTC)
This week's article for improvement (week 40, 2025)
An Antarctic fur seal biting another one while fighting
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Firefighting • Economic analysis of climate change Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 29 September 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
|---|
Tech News: 2025-40
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- A major software upgrade has been made to Phabricator. The update introduces performance improvements, a refreshed search interface, enhancements to Maniphest task search, updates to user profile pages and project workboards, new Herald automation features, as well as general text input, mobile experience improvements and more.
Updates for editors
- The Community Tech team will release the new Community Wishlist extension on October 1, that will improve the way wishes will be submitted. The new extension will allow users to add tags to their wishes to better categorise them, and (in a future iteration) to filter them by status, tags and focus areas. It will also be possible to support individual wishes again, as requested by the community in many instances. The old system will be retired. There will be a brief period of downtime while the extension is deployed and wishes are migrated to the new system. You can read more about this in the latest update or you can consult the current documentation on MediaWiki.
- As announced on Diff blog, the production trial of the hCaptcha service for bot detection has begun. The trial is currently using hCaptcha to protect account creation on Chinese, Persian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, and Turkish Wikipedias, where it will replace our existing CAPTCHA (FancyCaptcha). The goal with the trial is to better block bots while also improving usability and accessibility for users who encounter CAPTCHA challenges.
- The CampaignEvents extension has been deployed to Wikimedia Commons. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. On Commons, anyone who is a registered user can use it as an event participant. To use it as an organizer, someone needs to have the event organizer right.
- Sub-referencing, a new feature to re-use references with different details has been released to German Wikipedia. You can test the feature on testwiki or on betawiki as well. Please share your thoughts on using templates in sub-references or volunteer to become a pilot wiki.
- On wikis using the Mentorship system, communities can now opt experienced editors out of Mentorship through Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship. Within this setting, communities may define thresholds, based on edit count and account age, to decide when an editor is considered experienced enough to no longer receive Mentorship.
- The Editing Team and the Machine Learning Team are working on a new check for newcomers: Tone check. Using a prediction model, this check will encourage editors to improve the tone of their edits, using artificial intelligence. We invite volunteers to review the first version of the Tone language model for the following languages: Arabic, Czech, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Farsi, Italian, Norwegian, Romanian and Latvian. Users from these wikis interested in reviewing this model are invited to sign up at MediaWiki.org. The deadline to sign up is on October 3, which will be the start date of the test.
- The rollout of multiblocks had the side effect that non-active block logs may have been shown on Special:Contributions and on blocked users' user and user_talk pages. This issue will be fully resolved in a few days. As part of the fix, messages prefixed with
sp-contributions-blocked-noticewill be removed and replaced with those prefixed withblocked-notice-logextractin a few weeks. Please help translate the new messages and update any local overrides if needed. - There was a bug with links added using visual editor if they included characters such as
[ ] |after the fragment identifier (#). They were not encoded properly creating an incorrect link. This has been fixed. - One new wiki has been created: a Wikiquote in Malay (
q:ms:)
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the User Info Card now displays currently active global lock/blocks.
Updates for technical contributors
- Later this week, editors using Lua modules will be able to use the
mw.title.newBatchfunction to look up the existence of up to 25 pages at once, in a way that only increases the expensive function count once. - A new Unsupported Tools Working Group has been formed as part of ongoing efforts to collectively determine technical work priorities, similar to the Product & Technology Advisory Council (PTAC). The working group will help prioritize and review requests for support of unmaintained extensions, gadgets, bots, and tools. For the first cycle, the group will be prioritizing an unsupported Wikimedia Commons tool.
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 20:49, 29 September 2025 (UTC)
The Signpost: 2 October 2025
- News and notes: Larry Sanger returns with "Nine Theses on Wikipedia"; WMF publishes transparency report
This time "not merely negative".
- In the media: Extraordinary eruption of "EVIL" explained
Wickedpedia wrangles post-truth politics.
- Disinformation report: Emails from a paid editing client
Unexpected news!
- Discussion report: Sourcing, conduct, policy and LLMs: another 1,339 threads analyzed
Fifty hot topics from fourteen noticeboards.
- Community view: The pressing questions of the modern WWW, as seen from the Village Pump
Policy, politics, icons, captchas, and LLMs.
- Recent research: Is Wikipedia a merchant of (non-)doubt for glyphosate?; eight projects awarded Wikimedia Research Fund grants
And other recent publications.
- Opinion: Some disputes aren't worth it
When to walk away.
- Obituary: Michael Q. Schmidt
Rest in peace.
- Traffic report: Death, hear me call your name
Celebrities, deaths and software.
- Comix: A grand spectacle
All invited!
Editor experience invitation
Hi Steven. I'm looking for experienced editors to interview here. Feel free to pass if you're not interested. Btw, I thought your recent comments at The Signpost were insightful. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 00:51, 3 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #220 is out: Rich text now available in embedded function calls on 148 Wiktionaries and Incubator
There is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!
In this issue, we update you on the latest functions and types you can create, we announce that functions are now available to call on 152 projects, we talk about our presentations at Wikimedia meetings, and we take a look at the latest software developments.
Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!
Also, we remind you that if you have questions or ideas to discuss, the next Volunteers' Corner will be held on October 6, at 17:30 UTC (link to the meeting).
Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 08:55, 4 October 2025 (UTC)
This week's article for improvement (week 41, 2025)
The hierarchy of biological classification's eight major taxonomic ranks. A family contains one or more genera.
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Biting • Firefighting Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 6 October 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
|---|
Tech News: 2025-41
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- Paste Check is a new Edit Check feature to help avoid and fight copyright violations. When editors paste text into an article, Paste Check prompts them to confirm the origin and licensing of the content. Starting Wednesday, 8 October, 22 wikis will test Paste Check. Paste Check will help new volunteers understand and follow the policies and guidelines necessary to make constructive contributions to Wikipedia projects.
Updates for editors
- Mobile devices will receive mobile articles directly on the standard domain (like
en.wikipedia.org), instead of via a redirect to an "m" domain (likeen.m.wikipedia.org). This change improves performance. This week it will be enabled on Wikipedias. The existing mobile URLs and the "Desktop view" opt-out remain available. Learn more. - New date filters,
creationdate:andlasteditdate:, are now available in the wiki search engine. This allows users to filter search results by a page's first or last revision date. The filters support comparison operators (e.g.>2024) and relative dates (e.g.today-1d), making it easier to find recently updated content or pages within specific age ranges. - Wikifunctions now supports rich text in embedded calls across the 150 wikis where it's enabled. To showcase this, the team created a Latin declination table that Wiktionary editors can use to automatically generate noun forms, producing clear, formatted results — see an example output. If you need any help or have any feedback, please contact the Wikifunctions Team.
- An edit link will now appear inside the categories box on article pages for logged in users, which will directly launch the VisualEditor category dialog.
View all 34 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a problem downloading pdf files last week and that has been resolved.
Updates for technical contributors
- The field
rev_sha1in the revision database table is being removed in favor ofcontent_sha1in the content database table. See the announcement for more information. - The Reader Experience team will roll out Dark Mode user interface on all Wikimedia sites on October 29, 2025. All anonymous users of Wikimedia sites will have the option to activate a color scheme that features light-colored text on a dark background. This is designed to provide a more comfortable reading experience, especially in low-light situations. Template authors and technical contributors are encouraged to learn how to make pages ready for Dark mode and address any compatibility issues found in templates in their wiki before the enablement. Please contact the Web team for questions or any support on this talk page before the enablement.
- Starting on Monday, October 6, API endpoints under the
rest.phppath will be rerouted through a new internal API Gateway. Individual wikis will be updated based on the standard release groups, with total traffic increased over time. This change is expected to be non-breaking and non-disruptive. If any issues are observed, please file a Phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board.
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 17:20, 6 October 2025 (UTC)
Word to the wise Wikipedian
If you can't rationally defend your change, and another editor disagrees with it, change it back. Stefen 𝕋ower's got the power!!1! Gab • Gruntwerk 23:57, 6 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #221 is out: Decision on location for abstract content and Quarterly Planning for October–December
There is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!
In this issue, we introduce our naming contest for Abstract Wikipedia, we discuss our plans and work for the upcoming quarter (October-December 2025), we report on the next events we'll be part of, and we take a look at the latest software developments.
Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!
Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 17:47, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
This week's article for improvement (week 42, 2025)
A woman in a crocheted cape
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Genus • Biting Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 13 October 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
|---|
Tech News: 2025-42
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- Last week, improvements to account security and two-factor authentication (2FA) features were enabled across all wikis. These changes include user interface improvements for Special:AccountSecurity, the support of multiple 2FA methods via authenticator apps and portable security keys (previously users could only enable one method), and a new Recovery Codes module which facilitates fewer account lockouts due to lost two-factor apps and devices. As part of the Account Security project, work is continuing through the rest of 2025 on further user experience improvements, and support for passkeys as an alternate second factor.
Updates for editors
- Another part of the Account security project is making 2FA generally available to all users. Along with editors with advanced privileges, such as administrators and bureaucrats, 40% of editors now have access to 2FA. You can check if you have access at Special:AccountSecurity. Instructions for activation are on the linked page. The plan is to continue increasing availability if it is determined that the user support capabilities are able to support global usage.
- This week, users at wikis where talk page Usability Improvements are already available by default (everywhere except the 12 wikis listed in T379264) will gain the ability to Thank a comment directly from the talk page it appears on. Before this change, Thanking could only be done by visiting the revision history of the talk page. You can learn more about this change.
- Users who have not verified their email address will soon be receiving monthly Notification reminders to do so. This is because users who have verified their email can more easily recover their account. These reminders will not be sent if the user is inactive or removes the unverified email from their account.
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a fix was made for an occasional error with saving translated paragraphs in the Content Translation tool, and the related error messages are now easier to see.
Updates for technical contributors
- The Unsupported Tools Working Group has chosen Video2Commons as the first tool for its pilot cycle. The group will explore ways to improve and sustain the tool over the coming months. Learn more on Meta.
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 18:56, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #222 is out: Kicking Off the Naming Contest for Abstract Wikipedia; Visualizing functions
There is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!
In this issue, we kickstart our naming contest for Abstract Wikipedia, we present a beautiful representation of functions by a community member, we report on the next events we'll be part of, and we take a look at the latest software developments.
Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!
Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 17:04, 15 October 2025 (UTC)
Category:American city council members by city has been nominated for renaming
Category:American city council members by city has been nominated for renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether it complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. SMasonGarrison 14:20, 19 October 2025 (UTC)
This week's article for improvement (week 43, 2025)
A sign at an anti-monarchy protest in the United Kingdom
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Cape • Genus Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 20 October 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
|---|
My skepticism may get the best of me here
I have to admit I am a skeptic of corporate news media, and have been for a long time. And this includes magazines produced in the past, such as the print version of Life. Life became so vaunted that people, including editors here, take their photojournalism as the golden truth no matter what the facts on the ground suggest. Art over facts. And this is formerly from the same company that produced Time, yes the magazine that recently portrayed Donald Trump, in a Life sort of manner, as a man who advanced this supposedly big Israel-Hamas peace deal, only to see it fall apart in well under two weeks. But we editors dare not declare anything produced by these outfits to be inauthentic, even when we can show hard data that they are. Of course if we can't get media to officially correct what we find to be wrong, our skepticism is original research and can't be used in articles here. I accept that. But it sure is frustrating! Stefen 𝕋ower's got the power!!1! Gab • Gruntwerk 04:43, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-43
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- To optimize how user data is stored in our databases, the saved preferences of users who haven't logged in for over five years and have fewer than 100 edits will be cleared. When those users return, default settings will apply.
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a broken link from the GlobalContributions interface message to the XTools GlobalContributions page which has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- The work to reroute all traffic to API endpoints under the
rest.phproute through a common API gateway is now complete. If any issues are observed, please file a phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board. - Edits to Wikidata references or qualifiers will now be shown in RecentChanges and Watchlist entries on other wikis less often, reducing unnecessary notifications. This will reduce the overall quantity of 'noisy' entries. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged.
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 19:32, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
The Signpost: 20 October 2025
- News and notes: Board shuffles, LLM blocks increase, IPs are going away
And the "Global Resource Distribution Committee" emerges.
- Special report: The election that isn't
Two shortlisted WMF Board candidates removed from the ballot.
- Interview: The BoT bump
Who was bumped and why?
- In the media: An incident at WikiConference North America; WMF reports AI-related traffic drop and explains Wikipedia to US conservatives
...while Musk prepares to launch "Grokipedia".
- Traffic report: One click after another
Serial-killer miniseries, deceased scientist, government shutdowns and Sandalwood hit "Kantara" crowd the tubes.
- Humour: Wikipedia pay rates
Don't get too excited before you read this.
Kentucky Wildcats women's volleyball
A few days ago, you added Category:Long stubs with short prose to Kentucky Wildcats women's volleyball. I have added some narrative to the article. Do you think it is still deserving of the tag?. Thank you. rogerd (talk) 02:42, 22 October 2025 (UTC)
- Rogerd It's definitely long enough to be a start, although Rater is showing just 30% confidence right now (not sure why). I went ahead and re-rated and removed this category. Cheers! Stefen 𝕋ower's got the power!!1! Gab • Gruntwerk 04:17, 22 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #223 is out: Welcome Zaree and Laura! Naming contest round 1 kicked off
There is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!
In this issue, we welcome two new additions to the team, we update you on our naming contest for Abstract Wikipedia, we report on the next events we'll be part of, and we take a look at the latest software developments.
Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!
Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 21:10, 23 October 2025 (UTC)
This week's article for improvement (week 44, 2025)
The Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory, granting a 99-year lease on the New Territories
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Criticism of monarchy • Cape Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 27 October 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
|---|
Tech News: 2025-44
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- The Wikipedia iOS app has launched an A/B/C test of improvements made to the tabbed browsing feature for select regions and languages. The test, named “More dynamic tabs”, explores new tab experiences and includes “Did you know” and “Because you read” article recommendations. You can read more on the project page.
- Autoconfirmed users on small and medium wikis with the CampaignEvents extension can now use Event Registration without the Event Organizer right. This feature lets organizers enable registration, manage participants, and lets users register with one click instead of signing event pages.
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue of flashing colors when holding or pressing the arrow keys under the dark mode settings in Vector 2022 has been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- The CampaignEvents extension will be deployed to all remaining wikis during the week of 17 November 2025. The extension currently includes three features: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List. For this rollout, Invitation List will not be enabled on Wikifunctions and MediaWiki unless requested by those communities. Visit the deployment page to learn more.
- The SwaggerUI-based REST sandbox experience is now live on all wiki projects. The sandbox can be accessed through the Special:RestSandbox page. Please report any issues to the MediaWiki Interfaces team board, or join the discussion on the project launch page.
- Transform endpoints with a trailing slash path in the MediaWiki REST API are now marked as deprecated. They will remain functional during this time, but removal is expected by the end of January 2026. All API users currently calling them are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. Both endpoint variations can be found and tested using the REST Sandbox. See the MediaWiki REST API Deprecation page for more detailed information about the API deprecation policies and procedures.
- A dedicated changelog now exists for the MediaWiki REST API. The changelog provides an overview of these changes, making it easier for developers to keep track of improvements and iterations. Announcements will also continue to flow through the standard communication channels, including Tech News and email distribution lists, but can now be more easily referenced from a central location. If you have feedback about the style, structure, or content of this changelog, please join the discussion.
- Administrators can delete the tracking category which was previously added by the JsonConfig extension, as it is no longer used. See the categories linked from Q130635582. It is OK if there are still pages listed in the category as that is just a caching issue, and they will be automatically cleared out the next time each page is edited.
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 19:28, 27 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #224 is out: Round 1 of “abstract content wiki” naming vote ending Monday; An example of short descriptions
There is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!
In this issue, we update you on our naming contest for Abstract Wikipedia, we announce our first experimentation with short descriptions on Wikidata, we talk about our presentations at the upcoming WikidataCon 2025, and we take a look at the latest Type and software developments.
Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!
Also, we remind you that if you have questions or ideas to discuss, the next Volunteers' Corner will be held on November 3, at 18:30 UTC (link to the meeting).
Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 13:48, 30 October 2025 (UTC)
This week's article for improvement (week 45, 2025)
Hello, StefenTower. The article for improvement of the week is:
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: 99-year lease • Criticism of monarchy Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 3 November 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
|---|
