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Tech News: 2025-07

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

Weekly highlight

Updates for editors

  • The "Special pages" portlet link will be moved from the "Toolbox" into the "Navigation" section of the main menu's sidebar by default. This change is because the Toolbox is intended for tools relating to the current page, not tools relating to the site, so the link will be more logically and consistently located. To modify this behavior and update CSS styling, administrators can follow the instructions at T385346. [1]
  • As part of this year's work around improving the ways readers discover content on the wikis, the Web team will be running an experiment with a small number of readers that displays some suggestions for related or interesting articles within the search bar. Please check out the project page for more information.
  • Advanced item Template editors who use TemplateStyles can now customize output for users with specific accessibility needs by using accessibility related media queries (prefers-reduced-motion, prefers-reduced-transparency, prefers-contrast, and forced-colors). Thanks to user Bawolff for these improvements. [2]
  • Recurrent item View all 22 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the global blocks log will now be shown directly on the Special:CentralAuth page, similarly to global locks, to simplify the workflows for stewards. [3]

Updates for technical contributors

  • Wikidata now supports a special language as a "default for all languages" for labels and aliases. This is to avoid excessive duplication of the same information across many languages. If your Wikidata queries use labels, you may need to update them as some existing labels are getting removed. [4]
  • The function getDescription was invoked on every Wiki page read and accounts for ~2.5% of a page's total load time. The calculated value will now be cached, reducing load on Wikimedia servers. [5]
  • As part of the RESTBase deprecation effort, the /page/related endpoint has been blocked as of February 6, 2025, and will be removed soon. This timeline was chosen to align with the deprecation schedules for older Android and iOS versions. The stable alternative is the "morelike" action API in MediaWiki, and a migration example is available. The MediaWiki Interfaces team can be contacted for any questions. [6]

In depth

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

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:09, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-08

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

Weekly highlight

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

Updates for editors

Highlighted talk pages improvements
  • Starting next week, talk pages at these wikis – Spanish Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia – will get a new design. This change was extensively tested as a Beta feature and is the last step of talk pages improvements. [7]
  • You can now navigate to view a redirect page directly from its action pages, such as the history page. Previously, you were forced to first go to the redirect target. This change should help editors who work with redirects a lot. Thanks to user stjn for this improvement. [8]
  • When a Cite reference is reused many times, wikis currently show either numbers like "1.23" or localized alphabetic markers like "a b c" in the reference list. Previously, if there were so many reuses that the alphabetic markers were all used, an error message was displayed. As part of the work to modernize Cite customization, these errors will no longer be shown and instead the backlinks will fall back to showing numeric markers like "1.23" once the alphabetic markers are all used.
  • The log entries for each change to an editor's user-groups are now clearer by specifying exactly what has changed, instead of the plain before and after listings. Translators can help to update the localized versions. Thanks to user Msz2001 for these improvements.
  • A new filter has been added to the Special:Nuke tool, which allows administrators to mass delete pages, to enable users to filter for pages in a range of page sizes (in bytes). This allows, for example, deleting pages only of a certain size or below. [9]
  • Non-administrators can now check which pages are able to be deleted using the Special:Nuke tool. Thanks to user MolecularPilot for this and the previous improvements. [10]
  • Recurrent item View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed in the configuration for the AV1 video file format, which enables these files to play again. [11]

Updates for technical contributors

  • Parsoid Read Views is going to be rolling out to most Wiktionaries over the next few weeks, following the successful transition of Wikivoyage to Parsoid Read Views last year. For more information, see the Parsoid/Parser Unification project page. [12][13]
  • Developers of tools that run on-wiki should note that mw.Uri is deprecated. Tools requiring mw.Uri must explicitly declare mediawiki.Uri as a ResourceLoader dependency, and should migrate to the browser native URL API soon. [14]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 21:19, 17 February 2025 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/2024 review/Phase III/Administrator elections

Administrator Elections | Renewal RFC phase
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:20, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-09

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

Updates for editors

  • Administrators can now customize how the Babel feature creates categories using Special:CommunityConfiguration/Babel. They can rename language categories, choose whether they should be auto-created, and adjust other settings. [15]
  • The wikimedia.org portal has been updated – and is receiving some ongoing improvements – to modernize and improve the accessibility of our portal pages. It now has better support for mobile layouts, updated wording and links, and better language support. Additionally, all of the Wikimedia project portals, such as wikibooks.org, now support dark mode when a reader is using that system setting. [16][17][18]
  • One new wiki has been created: a Wiktionary in Santali (wikt:sat:) [19]
  • Recurrent item View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that prevented clicking on search results in the web-interface for some Firefox for Android phone configurations. [20]

Meetings and events

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

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:38, 25 February 2025 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 February 2025

French Wikipedia defends a user against public threats, steward elections, and other news from the Wikimedia world.
"The only time I ever took photos in my entire life".
From patrolling new edits to uploading photos or joining a campaign, you can count on the Wikimedia platform to be up and running — in your language, anywhere in the world. That is, except for a couple of minutes during the equinoctes.
Or just the end of Wikipedia as we know it?
Of "hunters", "busybodies" and "dancers".
User Sennecaster shares her thoughts on her recent RfA and the aspects that might have played a role in making it successful.
What are they? Why are they important? How can we make them better? And what can you do to help?
Liberté, liberté chérie.
Grammys, politics and the Super Bowl.
Straight from the source's mouth. A source is a source, of course, of course!
Turkish linguist wrote about languages and plants; Brazilian informaticist studied Wikimedia projects and education.
* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:27, 27 February 2025 (UTC)

A cup of coffee for you!

Hey dropping by to say hi. Any collabs you wanna do, like GA or FA? I've been busy irl for the past few months. Hit me up, if so. Seeya :) — Benison (Beni · talk) 18:57, 24 February 2025 (UTC)
@Benison: I will email you tomorrow. – DreamRimmer (talk) 19:00, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

Scripts

I'm sorry to report that neither of those scripts would actually simplify much of anything, because those aren't where the problems actually are.

When it comes to the redlinked categories, that's already a very simple and easy process: every two or three days, the redlinked category report updates with all of the new redlinked categories — and once I'm on the page with the redlinked category on it, it's already incredibly easy to just wipe out the redlinked category with HotCat. So that's already a quick and easy process, which installing a script wouldn't actually improve upon. What would be more genuinely helpful is a bot that could sweep through the redlinked category report on its own, removing most of them from pages by itself so that human editors only had to worry about five or six "complicated" cases instead of 150-200 pages — but even that would be fraught with problems, because sometimes the category is just an easily fixed typo, or a misguided page-reversion following the "redlink" having simply been moved to a different name, rather than a category that genuinely doesn't exist, and a bot might not be able to catch such issues effectively. But getting the categories off the pages really isn't the complicated part, the sheer number of pages there usually are to deal with in the first place is the complicated part.

And when it comes to draft and user pages, the thing is that there's already a bot that cleans out Category:AfC submissions with categories on a regular basis — I never have to worry about or work with that category at all, because there's a bot that handles that on its own. The thing, though, is that category only catches categorized drafts that have an WP:AFC submission template on them, and doesn't catch categorized drafts that don't have an AFC submission template on them. So that's why you see me having to work on manual draftnocat and usernocat cleanup, because not all categorized draft or user pages are showing up in that category in order to get dealt with by the bot — but because a bot is already handling the categorized drafts that do end up in that category, I don't need to worry about that category at all, and have to concentrate on the other stuff that isn't getting caught by that category.

So thanks for the effort, and if you want to refine the scripts further I'd be happy to give you some feedback on what might actually be helpful improvements — but those two scripts wouldn't actually simplify the process very much, because those aren't where the real problems in the process are. Bearcat (talk) 18:50, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

@Bearcat: I created these scripts so that we don’t have to manually edit pages; they can do the cleanup in a single click. Regarding draft categories, I am aware that Danny's bot disables categories that appear in this category, but I have seen you doing this type of cleanup, so I thought you were also handling this. But maybe all those cleanups you are doing are from database reports. If these scripts are not useful for you, then you can ignore them. If there is anything I can help you with, like automating some of your work with a bot, then please let me know. I will be happy to help. – DreamRimmer (talk) 19:33, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

MMSLite

Hi there, can I use that outside enwiki, such as on viwiki? Thanks! Phương Linh (thảo luận) 07:41, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

@Hide on Rosé: Yes, of course, you can use it, but before doing so, please read User:DreamRimmer/massMessageLite#Cautions. – DreamRimmer (talk) 08:10, 2 March 2025 (UTC)
Thank you, I suggest adding an option to hide edits from rc feed for users with the bot flag e.g. gbl-rollbacker. Phương Linh (thảo luận) 09:47, 2 March 2025 (UTC)
Thanks for the suggestion; I will do it once I have some free time for development. – DreamRimmer (talk) 11:12, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

Barnstar(s)

Hi,DreamRimmer!Just noticed you use a lot of different barnstars for pcrs, wonder if you want to use this one.{{subst:The Reviewer's Barnstar|1=message ~~~~|2=alt}} Xiphoid Vigour ||⚔|⚔|| 12:33, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

@Xiphoid Vigour: Thanks for the suggestion! I use different barnstars each month, but I will definitely use this one in the next distribution. – DreamRimmer (talk) 13:25, 2 March 2025 (UTC)
Oh, so that's the reason for different barnstars. Xiphoid Vigour ||⚔|⚔|| 15:03, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

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. [21]
  • 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.[22] In contrast, transcluding a file description page (e.g. {{:File:MediaWiki.png}}) will now restrict edits to the page.[23]
  • 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,[24] and respects cascading protection.[25]
  • 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. [26]
  • 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. [27]
  • One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Sylheti (w:syl:) [28]
  • Recurrent item 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. [29]

Updates for technical contributors

  • Recurrent item 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)

Administrators' newsletter – March 2025

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

Administrator changes

removed

CheckUser changes

removed

Oversighter changes

removed AmandaNP

Guideline and policy news

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

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:37, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

Precious anniversary

Precious
One year!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:23, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

Thank you :) @Gerda Arendt – DreamRimmer (talk) 10:24, 10 February 2025 (UTC)
story · music · places
On the main page Edith Mathis, who portrayed young women by Mozart, the video of a 1993 interview has videos of her performances, - yesterday's story. - "places" come with food and flowers, - sharing with you ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:18, 14 February 2025 (UTC)
I point at a composer today, as the main page does. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:16, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
Could you please give us Main page history 3 May? I wonder if bot could do it? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:38, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
3 March or 3 May? – DreamRimmer (talk) 15:10, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
I must have been dreaming, March of course, premiere of Carmen 150 years ago, but interested almost every day ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:14, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
Since it uses templates and doesn't keep a history, retrieving past content isn't easy. While it's possible to manually collect all the main page content from March 3 and recreate it, that would take a lot of time. If you want, I can set up an automated script on Toolforge to check every day whether the main page history is saved. If it’s not, the script can save a txt file so we can manually paste the content here for any missed days. – DreamRimmer (talk) 17:37, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
I thought it's there to keep history, - wrong? How did you write 4 March? About changes: TFA remains the same, DYK remains the same, OTD remains the same, and for ITN, one could find the state, no? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 18:18, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
@Gerda Arendt: ProcBot creates main page history snapshots daily, but it has been down for a few days due to issues with its Cloud VPS environment. If the bot has not saved the history for a given day by 12:00, you can use this script to save it semi-automatically. To keep track of this, you can add the {{MPH alert}} template to your user page or any page you visit daily. This template indicates whether a history snapshot has been created for the day. If not, you can run the script to create one.
@ProcrastinatingReader, just a friendly suggestion—I have written a Python script for this, so if you are having trouble with your VPS instance, you might find it easier to use this script on Toolforge. – DreamRimmer (talk) 13:32, 5 March 2025 (UTC)
Thank you, I'll keep it on my mind, but am not a technical person ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:11, 5 March 2025 (UTC)
But I know you are an awesome person who is capable of achieving anything. – DreamRimmer (talk) 16:53, 5 March 2025 (UTC)
blushing, thank you for the encouragement, - sometimes I'm loosing patience in the process ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:45, 5 March 2025 (UTC)
Ah shucks, I thought the cluster recreation would've fixed it :(
Thanks for that script! I'll run it on Toolforge for some redundancy. I'll set it to run once at end of day. Seems DYK doesn't rotate twice a day anymore, so separate `b` pages are probably not as worthwhile saving. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 18:25, 5 March 2025 (UTC)
DYK is on and off the 12 hour cycles, and RD also changes fast - sometimes. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:45, 5 March 2025 (UTC)
Please check my attempt at Wikipedia:Main Page history/2025 March 3. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:14, 6 March 2025 (UTC)
Would it be easy for you to write today's b-version, - with 2 of "my" DYK in the same time, nos. 2 and 3 of the year? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:37, 7 March 2025 (UTC)
Sure, done. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 14:52, 8 March 2025 (UTC)
@ProcrastinatingReader: If you could provide me with that EW script or SQL query, I can write it in Python so you can use it on Toolforge without any VPS issues. I can also help with other scripts if needed :) – DreamRimmer (talk) 15:07, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

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. [30][31]
  • 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.
  • Recurrent item View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Recurrent item 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 23:06, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

Bootstrapping possible unattributed articles via Wikidata

 Courtesy link: User:DreamRimmer/Possible unattributed articles

Hi, DreamRimmer. I am starting to think about how to improve productivity on what is now the weak link in the chain for resolving unattributed articles, which is the creation of the input file. (Or maybe the weakest link is finding them in the first place, but you've looked at that, and I haven't.) I have gained a lot of experience with building the Input file, but I am still improving and finding efficiencies, which I will have to stop and document at some point. I'll just mention at this point some templates that have helped me; maybe you are already aware of them. Given a page history line containing an en-wiki article name (as it must), and the name of a language somewhere in the edit summary (which the editor may have added), you can find the likely origin article on the foreign Wikipedia automatically by translating the language name into a language code, and then using {{Sitelink}}.

The lang to code versions of {{iso 639 name}} are handy; I make use of those at Thriley/translations. If you are pretty sure it is translated, but the language name or code is not available, you can automatically add the Wikidata qid to the file, which gives you one-click access to all the foreign articles, which you can then manualy peruse to help discover the right one (still a manual operation though). See Pete Maverick/translations for an example where I included qid in a file that is a precursor to an attrib input file; the qid is an intermediate step to get me to the foreign source, but {{Sitelink}} (which I discovered later) is more powerful and more direct. Qid is still useful, for those cases where you have neither country nor language.

If something in the title has ties to some country, then you can likely find the country through a series of steps (maybe just one step) using Module:WikidataIB (function location, #25 under § Utilities functions), and from the country, a property get_value will get you the language, and with the lang code and the en-wiki title, you've got a likely culprit for the translation source page. I just discovered Module:WikidataIB yesterday, it is very powerful, but I haven't had time to experiment with it yet. I might write a template wrapper for the useful bits, once I figure out how it works. For example, a new wrapper template {{Title to langcode}} would return the language code for the country which a given en-wiki title has ties to, or empty if it can't figure it out. Then, with the lang code and en-wiki title, {{Sitelink}} will get you the foreign title. Putting it all together, we should be able to automatically update many of the lines in Possible unattributed articles with a single regex replace edit to link the desired foreign source article candidate.

I'm only at the initial stages of this, but I'm imagining a big new section in the Attrib bot proposal page about how to build the Input file, taking advantage of a lot of these tips, and maybe some new templates to help out, once I figure it all out and create them to simplify the process. But if you are familiar enough with Sitelink and WikidataIB already, maybe you don't need to wait and can upgrade the poss unattrib list using some of these ideas. Mathglot (talk) 10:01, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

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

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. [32]
  • 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. [33]
  • Recurrent item 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. [34]

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.
  • Recurrent item 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 23:45, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

The Signpost: 22 March 2025

It's an ecstasy, my spring.
Let them know what you think!
Read this, then forget all about it.
Life on the Wiki as usual!
And WMF invites multi-year research fund proposals
The Oscars, politics, and death elbow for the most attention.
The photographers are the celebrities!
And very unusual biographical images.
Send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:04, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

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

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. [35]
  • 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. [36]
  • Recurrent item 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. [37][38]
  • Recurrent item 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)

Need help?

Hi!

I'm Pawnyy. I'm relatively new to contributing on wikipedia. Unfortunately, I'm not that great of a writer, but my background is in Computer Science and Software Engineering. I see you're very active in Wikipedia:Bot requests and I was just wondering how I could get started with helping out the project, code-wise. I've been lurking around for the better part of a couple months trying to understand the lay of the land, and I figured I might as well ask! If you have a backlog of tasks, I'd be happy to take one off and figure out how I can help!

Thanks! Pawnyy (talk) 02:38, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) Hi, Pawnyy! Well, there are many related areas. You can read WP:HI for introduction! As you're related to computers etc, you can learn wikitext and help us out in templates & userboxes. I'm happy to help! saluere, Ɔþʱʏɾɪʊs⚔ 08:35, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

March music

story · music · places

On Ravel's birthday, we also think of a conductor and five more composers ;) -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:47, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

Today I could have written five stories off the main page, and chose Sofia Gubaidulina. I find the TFA also interesting, and two DYK, and a birthday OTD. How about you? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:49, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for improving article quality in March! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:11, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

Today, 300 years of Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 1! We sang works for (mostly) double choir by Pachelbel, Johann Christoph Bach, Kuhnau/Bach, Gounod and Rheinberger! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:22, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

Satish Kumar (IRSME Officer)

DreamRimmer, Hi there and I hope you're doing well, can you help me to rectifying few several issue on my newly created article if possible and remove notability tag and please mark this page as reviewed. Best regards, Sukumar05 (talk) 08:18, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

I don't find this subject notable, so I don't feel comfortable marking it as reviewed. Also, you should phrase it something like: ...is currently serving as the CEO of the Railway Board of Indian Railways. He is the first Dalit to hold this post, since 'first Dalit chairperson' doesn't seem accurate. – DreamRimmer (talk) 12:11, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Quarry

Hello, DreamRimmer,

I'm having trouble again with a Quarry query you helped me set up last year. It returns 0 results even when your bot returns several G13-eligible pages. I'm wondering if something changed with the daylight savings time in the U.S. but then I don't know where you are located. The last time this happened, you advised me to change some hourly totals for the period but I wanted to get your opinion again. But here it is if you have any suggestions here. Thanks for any tweaking you can suggest. Liz Read! Talk! 04:28, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

@Liz: I have fixed it at quarry:query/91568. Please copy or fork it. After this change, you won't encounter this issue again. – DreamRimmer (talk) 05:28, 10 March 2025 (UTC)
Hey, DreamRimmer,
I just remembered this query and returned to find your answer. I forked this query and have run it at least a dozen times but it always comes up with no entries. Is my timing just bad? The previous query had days (like 184 days) while this one uses months (6 months). Does this make a difference? I'll keep trying but I thought at least once it would pop up with an old draft page. Thanks. Liz Read! Talk! 05:15, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

Notification of administrators without tools

Greetings, DreamRimmer. You are receiving this notification because you've agreed to consider endorsing prospective admin candidates identified by the process outlined at Administrators without tools. Recently, the following editor(s) received this distinction and the associated endearing title:
  • Thank you for supporting this effort. Your contributions are an integral part of overall success, and an example for others to follow.
  • To stop receiving these notifications, remove your name from the list.

TolBot (talk) 21:00, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

User:DreamRimmer bot II/Reports/G13 eligible drafts

Hello, DreamRimmer,

The bot hasn't issued a report in a few hours so I thought I'd check in and makr sure nothing was wrong in bot world. I mean, it's not Thursday, right? Hope you have a great weekend. Liz Read! Talk! 15:44, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

Fixed! – DreamRimmer (talk) 16:01, 29 March 2025 (UTC)
That was quick! Many thanks. Liz Read! Talk! 19:05, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

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.
  • Recurrent item 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.
  • Recurrent item 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)

K-Electric

Looking back at February 21, you undid Kelectric's edit. A few days later, an IP reinstated that same edit:( DMacks (talk) 16:14, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

@DMacks: I missed it. Thanks for noticing and cleaning it up :) – DreamRimmer (talk) 16:58, 31 March 2025 (UTC)
I actually was cleaning up some unrelated mess by a different presumably COI editor. Hadn't touched this one. DMacks (talk) 17:29, 31 March 2025 (UTC)
Oh, I see it now. – DreamRimmer (talk) 15:15, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

"The Network State" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect The Network State has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Anyone, including you, is welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 April 3 § The Network State until a consensus is reached. Iknowyoureadog (talk) 03:30, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

enwiki CHUHelper

For some reason that script doesn't work for me. Phương Linh (thảo luận) 12:25, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

@Hide on Rosé, are you still facing this issue? – DreamRimmer (talk) 13:23, 28 March 2025 (UTC)
Yes, nothing happen when I go to WP:CHUS. Phạm Ngọc Phương Linh (T • C • CA • L • B) 13:26, 28 March 2025 (UTC)
Your common.js installation looks fine. Try clearing your browser cache or using a different browser. – DreamRimmer (talk) 13:36, 28 March 2025 (UTC)
I switched to Firefox and still doesn't work :(
P/s: For mmsLite, when I install on viwiki, it says "cannot get access control list". Phạm Ngọc Phương Linh (T • C • CA • L • B) 14:42, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
You can use this w:vi:Thành viên:DreamRimmer/massMessageLite.js – DreamRimmer (talk) 05:45, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – April 2025

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

Administrator changes

added
readded Dennis Brown
removed

Bureaucrat changes

added Barkeep49

CheckUser changes

added 0xDeadbeef

Oversighter changes

removed GB fan
readded Moneytrees

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:45, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-15

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

Updates for technical contributors

  • The Design System Team is preparing to release the next major version of Codex (v2.0.0) on April 29. Editors and developers who use CSS from Codex should see the 2.0 overview documentation, which includes guidance related to a few of the breaking changes such as font-size, line-height, and size-icon.
  • The results of the Developer Satisfaction Survey (2025)  are now available. Thank you to all participants. These results help the Foundation decide what to work on next and to review what they recently worked on.
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

  • The 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon will take place in Istanbul, Turkey, between 2–4 May. Registration for attending the in-person event will close on 13 April. Before registering, please note the potential need for a visa or e-visa to enter the country.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 18:49, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

User:DreamRimmer bot II

Hello, DreamRimmer,

For some reason, for the 22:23 UTC hour, the bot tagged the CSD G13 drafts with CSD tags but didn't publish User:DreamRimmer bot II/Reports/G13 eligible drafts report for the hour. We've been having issues with the bot lately so I thought I'd bring this to your attention sooner, rather than later. Liz Read! Talk! 22:46, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

Looks like it was just a fluke. Liz Read! Talk! 00:30, 6 April 2025 (UTC)
It looks like DreamRimmer bot II skipped the 02:23 UTC report. Just updating you. There seems to be some odd glitches every so often lately.
Secondly, I have gotten complaints from admins staffing the WP:REFUND noticeboard. They restore deleted G13 drafts and then they make a minor edit to the page so the draft won't immediately be eligible for CSD G13 speedy deletion. I've been notified three times that DreamRimmer bot II has tagged drafts that had just been restored before the admin had time to make that small edit to the draft. This seems unlikely, I know, but it has apparently happened several times. Because I have such faith in the bot's reliability, I do not, as a rule, check the log of the page history for every draft that it tags. So, these drafts were deleted, most several months ago, later restored, then tagged for deletion, I deleted them and then they have to be restored again.
One way to avoid this is, is there any chance you could program the bot to "skip" drafts that had been recently restored, say, within the past hour? I don't know if this is possible but you have gone out of your way to adapt the bot so it could take care of maintenance steps that I wouldn't have predicted it could take care of so I thought you might see this as a challenge. Let me know what you think. Liz Read! Talk! 02:45, 8 April 2025 (UTC)
@Liz: The report didn’t update in the last hour because I had paused the bot to check User talk:DreamRimmer bot II#User:SDZeroBot/Draftify Watch. It’s now running again.
I am aware of the REFUND issue and will try to fix it as soon as I get some free time. I’ve been a bit busy with real-life stuff, but I’ll try to fix it in the next couple of days. If I forget, please feel free to remind me. Sorry for the trouble :) – DreamRimmer (talk) 02:58, 8 April 2025 (UTC)
The bot now ignores drafts that were restored in the past two hours. – DreamRimmer (talk) 17:34, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

The Signpost: 9 April 2025

Fellow doctor Osama Khalid remains behind bars for "violating public morals" by editing.
Major changes to core content policy, or still-developing plan for new initiative?
Defeat, or just a setback?
Plus: 30-year anniversary of wiki software commemorated.
Our content is free, our infrastructure is not!
What is to be done?
Advice to aspirants: "Read RfA debriefs", including this one.
Rest in peace.
Snow White sinking, Adolescence soaring, spacefarers stranded, this list has it all!
The Wikimedia Foundation's announcement from Diff.
Gadzooks!
* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:20, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-16

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

  • Later this week, the default thumbnail size will be increased from 220px to 250px. This changes how pages are shown in all wikis and has been requested by some communities for many years, but wasn't previously possible due to technical limitations. [40]
  • File thumbnails are now stored in discrete sizes. If a page specifies a thumbnail size that's not among the standard sizes (20, 40, 60, 120, 250, 330, 500, 960), then MediaWiki will pick the closest larger thumbnail size but will tell the browser to downscale it to the requested size. In these cases, nothing will change visually but users might load slightly larger images. If it doesn't matter which thumbnail size is used in a page, please pick one of the standard sizes to avoid the extra in-browser down-scaling step. [41][42]

Updates for editors

  • The Wikimedia Foundation are working on a system called Edge Uniques which will enable A/B testing, help protect against Distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks), and make it easier to understand how many visitors the Wikimedia sites have. This is so that they can more efficiently build tools which help readers, and make it easier for readers to find what they are looking for.
  • To improve security for users, a small percentage of logins will now require that the account owner input a one-time password emailed to their account. It is recommended that you check that the email address on your account is set correctly, and that it has been confirmed, and that you have an email set for this purpose. [43]
  • "Are you interested in taking a short survey to improve tools used for reviewing or reverting edits on your Wiki?" This question will be asked at 7 wikis starting next week, on Recent Changes and Watchlist pages. The Moderator Tools team wants to know more about activities that involve looking at new edits made to your Wikimedia project, and determining whether they adhere to your project's policies.
  • On April 15, the full Wikidata graph will no longer be supported on query.wikidata.org. After this date, scholarly articles will be available through query-scholarly.wikidata.org, while the rest of the data hosted on Wikidata will be available through the query.wikidata.org endpoint. This is part of the scheduled split of the Wikidata Graph, which was announced in September 2024. More information is available on Wikidata.
  • The latest quarterly Wikimedia Apps Newsletter is now available. It covers updates, experiments, and improvements made to the Wikipedia mobile apps.
  • Recurrent item View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: an invitation for tool maintainers to attend the Toolforge UI Community Feedback Session on April 15th; recent community metrics; and recent technical blog posts.
  • Recurrent item 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 00:21, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

MassMessage fix request

Hi DreamRimmer! I was wondering if you would be able to use DreamRimmer bot III to fix the delivery of the Guild of Copy Editors April 2025 Newsletter? It has erroneously added all recipients to Category:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors newsletters from 2025. Courtesy link to the MassMessage log entry, and courtesy ping to Dhtwiki, who sent the MassMessage. Best, HouseBlaster (talk • he/they) 00:34, 16 April 2025 (UTC)

 Done – DreamRimmer (talk) 03:20, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
Thank you :) HouseBlaster (talk • he/they) 03:22, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
Apologies and thank you. Recently, the newsletters were categorized, but those categories weren't meant to apply to recipients. I will have to make a non-obvious-to-me-at-this-point change to prevent this happening again. Dhtwiki (talk) 05:45, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
HouseBlaster, almost-identical code (except for the year) appears on Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Newsletters/December 2024; why didn't the problem arise then? Pinging Baffle gab1978 (who created the 2024 category) and Bearcat, who created the 2025 cat. All the best, Miniapolis 17:01, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
Never mind; I see that the categorization must be removed before sending. All the best, Miniapolis 17:13, 16 April 2025 (UTC)

DraftNoCat script

Hello, I noticed you disabled the category Pending template and disambiguation AfC submissions from an AfC draft using your DraftNoCat script, and was wondering if that was intentional. The category is meant for submissions in draftspace and since WP:DRAFTNOCAT doesn't apply to apply to non-content categories, so would it be possible for the script to exclude that and any other pending AfC categories? Sophisticatedevening🍷(talk) 21:18, 20 April 2025 (UTC)

@Sophisticatedevening: My apologies, that was unintentional. These tracking categories are usually added via templates and do not appear as visible text. I will update the script to ignore them. – DreamRimmer (talk) 04:35, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

MassMove feedback

Hi! Very thanks for MassMove tool! I'm trying usage this in Meta and Commons, and generally - successfully.

In Meta all ok, but in Commons my 'suppressredirect' rights was not realized (related option was not seen). Maybe this because this right is granted for me through special group 'filemover'?. But if i'm perform this action manually, this option is available for me. Kaganer (talk) 19:26, 12 April 2025 (UTC)

@Kaganer: Updated :) – DreamRimmer (talk) 07:10, 13 April 2025 (UTC)
Thanks again!
Also link to MassMove (in the Tools pane) is not shown on any pages (in Commons). Maybe this because this link is generated without unical id (like, e.g. 't-massmove') ? Kaganer (talk) 23:47, 13 April 2025 (UTC)
Will fix it. – DreamRimmer (talk) 04:36, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

Chasing the Wind

Hello DreamRimmer, I hope you're doing well. I always wanted to explore Turkish Wikipedia, so I have created the article Rüzgara Bırak. Your suggestion are appreciated. Thank you C1K98V (💬 ✒️ 📂) 05:18, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

Looks good to me. – DreamRimmer (talk) 04:36, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-17

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

  • Wikifunctions is now integrated with Dagbani Wikipedia since April 15. It is the first project that will be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in articles. A function is something that takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, such as adding up two numbers, converting miles into metres, calculating how much time has passed since an event, or declining a word into a case. Wikifunctions will allow users to do that through a simple call of a stable and global function, rather than via a local template. [44]
  • A new type of lint error has been created: Empty headings (documentation). The Linter extension's purpose is to identify wikitext patterns that must or can be fixed in pages and provide some guidance about what the problems are with those patterns and how to fix them. [45]
  • Recurrent item View all 37 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Following its publication on HuggingFace, the "Structured Contents" dataset, developed by Wikimedia Enterprise, is now also available on Kaggle. This Beta initiative is focused on making Wikimedia data more machine-readable for high-volume reusers. They are releasing this beta version in a location that open dataset communities already use, in order to seek feedback, to help improve the product for a future wider release. You can read more about the overall Structured Contents project, and about the first release that's freely usable.
  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings and events

  • The Editing and Machine Learning Teams invite interested volunteers to a video meeting to discuss Peacock check, which is the latest Edit check that will detect "peacock" or "overly-promotional" or "non-neutral" language whilst an editor is typing. Editors who work with newcomers, or help to fix this kind of writing, or are interested in how we use artificial intelligence in our projects are encouraged to attend. The meeting will be on April 28, 2025 at 18:00–19:00 UTC and hosted on Zoom.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:57, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

New pages patrol May 2025 Backlog drive

May 2025 Backlog Drive | New pages patrol
  • On 1 May 2025, a one-month backlog drive for New Pages Patrol will begin.
  • Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles patrolled.
  • Barnstars will also be granted for re-reviewing articles previously reviewed by other patrollers during the drive.
  • Each review will earn 1 point.
  • Interested in taking part? Sign up here.
You're receiving this message because you are a new page patroller. To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:25, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-18

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

Updates for editors

  • Event organizers who host collaborative activities on multiple wikis, including Bengali, Japanese, and Korean Wikipedias, will have access to the CampaignEvents extension this week. Also, admins in the Wikipedia where the extension is enabled will automatically be granted the event organizer right soon. They won't have to manually grant themselves the right before they can manage events as requested by a community.
  • Recurrent item View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • The release of the next major version of Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, is scheduled for 29 April 2025. Technical editors will have access to the release by the week of 5 May 2025. This update will include a number of breaking changes and minor visual changes. Instructions on handling the breaking and visual changes are documented on this page. Pre-release testing is reported in T386298, with post-release issues tracked in T392379 and T392390.
  • Users of Wiki Replicas will notice that the database views of ipblocks, ipblocks_ipindex, and ipblocks_compat are now deprecated. Users can query the block and block_target new views that mirror the new tables in the production database instead. The deprecated views will be removed entirely from Wiki Replicas in June, 2025.
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

Meetings and events

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, 28 April 2025 (UTC)

The Signpost: 1 May 2025

As always, Wikimedia community governance relies on user participation; plus, more updates from the Wikimedia world
Scrapers, an Indian lawsuit, and a crash-or-not-crash?
And other new research findings.
And don't bite those newbies!
And don't bite those newbies!
Television dramas, televised sports, film, the Pope, and ... bioengineering at the top of the list?
Community volunteers network among themselves and use technology to counter attacks on information sharing.
A look at some product and tech highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation's Annual Plan (July–December 2024).
Hey! At least it is something!
Zounds!
Would a billion articles be a good idea?
There's a lot more to this than you think.
I wonder about having crats, but decided to become one anyway.
Just beautiful photos!
Rest in Paradise.
* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:16, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-19

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

Weekly highlight

Updates for editors

  • For wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled, two new feature improvements have been released:
    • Admins can now choose which namespaces are permitted for Event Registration via Community Configuration (documentation). The default setup is for event registration to be permitted in the Event namespace, but other namespaces (such as the project namespace or WikiProject namespace) can now be added. With this change, communities like WikiProjects can now more easily use Event Registration for their collaborative activities.
    • Editors can now transclude the Collaboration List on a wiki page (documentation). The Collaboration List is an automated list of events and WikiProjects on the wikis, accessed via Special:AllEvents (example). Now, the Collaboration List can be added to all sorts of wiki pages, such as: a wiki mainpage, a WikiProject page, an affiliate page, an event page, or even a user page.
  • Recurrent item View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Developers who use the moment library in gadgets and user scripts should revise their code to use alternatives like the Intl library or the new mediawiki.DateFormatter library. The moment library has been deprecated and will begin to log messages in the developer console. You can see a global search for current uses, and ask related questions in this Phabricator task.
  • Developers who maintain a tool that queries the Wikidata term store tables (wbt_*) need to update their code to connect to a separate database cluster. These tables are being split into a separate database cluster. Tools that query those tables via the wiki replicas must be adapted to connect to the new cluster instead. Documentation and related links are available. [46]
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

  • The latest Chart Project newsletter is available. It includes updates on preparing to expand the deployment to additional wikis as soon as this week (starting May 6) and scaling up over the following weeks, plus exploring filtering and transforming source data.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:11, 6 May 2025 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – May 2025

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

Administrator changes

added Rusalkii
readded NaomiAmethyst (overlooked last month)
removed

Interface administrator changes

removed Galobtter

Guideline and policy news

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:01, 6 May 2025 (UTC)

DreamRimmer Bot question

Have you considered the possibility of making the bot update all redirect pages' talk pages with the redirect wikiproject page or the redirect categories that they wish to use? Regards! Bgrus22 (talk) 07:50, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

This is a backup task that originally belongs to DannyS712 bot III. It only patrols redirects and does not modify any text. I do not plan to add that functionality, but thank you for the suggestion ;) – DreamRimmer (talk) 04:46, 21 April 2025 (UTC)
Hi, DreamRimmer! Wanted to ask you if you can add a new task for your bot to remove pa:wikt:ਫਰਮਾ:pronunciation-punjabi from every mainspace page in pa:wiktionary. It's very irritating as there are issues in the template & there's large red warning on every page where it's used. saluere, Ɔþʱʏɾɪʊs⚔ 16:18, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

Notification of administrators without tools

Greetings, DreamRimmer. You are receiving this notification because you've agreed to consider endorsing prospective admin candidates identified by the process outlined at Administrators without tools. Recently, the following editor(s) received this distinction and the associated endearing title:
  • Thank you for supporting this effort. Your contributions are an integral part of overall success, and an example for others to follow.
  • To stop receiving these notifications, remove your name from the list.

TolBot (talk) 21:00, 10 May 2025 (UTC)

Question about your Bot,

Hello! You operate a bot, DreamRimmer bot. I was looking to create a Wikipedia Bot, and the bot creation guide listed here. I was looking to operate a bot, and one of the steps state the following...

If you decide you need a bot of your own due to the frequency or novelty of your requirements, you don't need to write one from scratch. There are already a number of bots running on Wikipedia and many of these bots publish their source code, which can sometimes be reused with little additional development time. There are also a number of standard bot frameworks available. Modifying an existing bot or using a framework greatly speeds development time. Also, because these code bases are in common usage and are maintained community projects, it is far easier to get bots based on these frameworks approved for use. The most popular and common of these frameworks is Pywikibot (PWB), a bot framework written in Python. It is thoroughly documented and tested and many standardized Pywikibot scripts (bot instructions) are already available. Other examples of bot frameworks can be found below. For some of these bot frameworks, such as PWB, a general familiarity with scripts is all that is necessary to run the bot successfully (it is important to update these frameworks regularly).

How should I go with using the codebase if I DO in fact have source code? Cooldudeseven7 talk 16:12, 9 May 2025 (UTC)

Can you explain it a bit more? What problem are you facing? – DreamRimmer ◆ 16:27, 10 May 2025 (UTC)
I was able to fix the problem, thanks for the reply Cooldudeseven7 talk 23:58, 10 May 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-20

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 "Get shortened URL" link on the sidebar now includes a QR code. Wikimedia site users can now use it by scanning or downloading it to quickly share and access shared content from Wikimedia sites, conveniently.

Updates for editors

  • The Wikimedia Foundation is working on a system called Edge Uniques, which will enable A/B testing, help protect against distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks), and make it easier to understand how many visitors the Wikimedia sites have. This is to help more efficiently build tools which help readers, and make it easier for readers to find what they are looking for. Tech News has previously written about this. The deployment will be gradual. Some might see the Edge Uniques cookie the week of 19 May. You can discuss this on the talk page.
  • Starting May 19, 2025, Event organisers in wikis with the CampaignEvents extension enabled can use Event Registration in the project namespace (e.g., Wikipedia namespace, Wikidata namespace). With this change, communities don't need admins to use the feature. However, wikis that don't want this change can remove and add the permitted namespaces at Special:CommunityConfiguration/CampaignEvents.
  • The Wikipedia project now has a Wikipedia in Nupe (w:nup:). This is a language primarily spoken in the North Central region of Nigeria. Speakers of this language are invited to contribute to new Wikipedia.
  • Recurrent item View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Developers can now access pre-parsed Dutch Wikipedia, amongst others (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese) through the Structured Contents snapshots (beta). The content includes parsed Wikipedia abstracts, descriptions, main images, infoboxes, article sections, and references.
  • The /page/data-parsoid REST API endpoint is no longer in use and will be deprecated. It is scheduled to be turned off on June 7, 2025.
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

  • The IPv6 support is a newly introduced Cloud virtual network that significantly boosts Wikimedia platforms' scalability, security, and readiness for the future. If you are a technical contributor eager to learn more, check out this blog post for an in-depth look at the journey to IPv6.

Meetings and events

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:35, 12 May 2025 (UTC)

Renamer question

Hello, Dreamrimmer,

I have a question about a renamer action you took in April. For some weeks, I have had a tab open on a window on my screen for User talk:Xiphoid Vigour/Archive 1 based on a question I had at the time. But today when I went to look at User talk:Xiphoid Vigour to see if that question had now been answered, I saw that it was now redirected to User talk:Ophyrius although it did still have some content on it on the Xiphoid Vigour User talk page. When I looked at the Ophyrius User talk page, I see that you renamed the editor from User talk:Sarvebhyah to User talk:Ophyrius last month. Typically, when an editor gets renamed, all of their User pages are renamed. But I'm not sure where Xiphoid Vigour comes into this editor's history and if this User talk page archive page should get renamed to become a Ophyrius User talk page archive page. Can you explain the situation to me and suggest what should happen with the Xiphoid Vigour User talk page archive page. Thanks. Liz Read! Talk! 01:09, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

Xiphoid Vigour and Ophyrius are both the same person. Their original account got compromised, so they have been editing from Ophyrius now (which used to be called Sarvebhyah). I think it makes sense to move the archive to their current talk page, but I would check with Ophyrius first before doing that. – DreamRimmer ◆ 02:50, 14 May 2025 (UTC)
@Ophyrius: Are you okay with me moving the archive? – DreamRimmer ◆ 02:52, 14 May 2025 (UTC)
@DreamRimmer Well, I intended not to move as I thought that it would be better if the archives of this account should be in this userpace, while of that account should be in that userspace. But, as it caused a bit of confusion, I think it will be better if it's moved, so I'm moving it myself. Thanks for pinging me & letting me know about this discussion. saluere, Ɔþʱʏɾɪʊs⚔ 04:20, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

April music

story · music · places

Thank you for improving article quality in April! - My story is about music that Bach and Picander gave the world 300 years (and 19 days) ago, - listen (on the conductor's birthday) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:28, 20 April 2025 (UTC)

I finally managed to upload the pics I meant for Easter, see places. - Also finally, I managed a FAC, Easter Oratorio. I wanted that on the main page for Easter Sunday, but no, twice. You are invited to join a discussion about what "On this day" means, day or date. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:49, 25 April 2025 (UTC)

May will come ... - Just explaining that I used rollback for a few notices of removed privileges due to inactivity where recipients are dead or at least have been dead for Wikipedia for years, so would not care. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:35, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

The Signpost: 14 May 2025

And comment is requested on a privacy whitepaper.
And other courtroom drama.
And how he knows it: all about lawyer letters and editing logs.
Why the language barrier is not the only impediment to navigating sources from another culture.
And QR codes for every page!
When an editor is ready to become staff at a public library (not a brother in a fraternity).
Rest in peace.
The technology behind it, and the other stuff.
Gadzooks!
And more.
* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:57, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

User:DreamRimmer bot II

Hello, DreamRimmer,

It looks like the bot stopped working a couple of hours ago. I also use a link to search for empty categories that runs on Toolforge and that is apparently down today, I don't know if there is any connection. But I thought I'd let you know. I, and other admins, have become a little dependent on DreamRimmer bot II's hourly reports! Thanks for any help you can supply. Liz Read! Talk! 19:34, 15 May 2025 (UTC)

Apologies for the hassle. The bot should update the report soon. – DreamRimmer ◆ 08:58, 16 May 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-21

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 and the Machine Learning Team are working on a new check for newcomers: Peacock 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 Peacock language model for the following languages: Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Japanese. Users from these wikis interested in reviewing this model are invited to sign up at MediaWiki.org. The deadline to sign up is on May 23, which will be the start date of the test.

Updates for editors

  • From May 20, 2025, oversighters and checkusers will need to have their accounts secured with two-factor authentication (2FA) to be able to use their advanced rights. All users who belong to these two groups and do not have 2FA enabled have been informed. In the future, this requirement may be extended to other users with advanced rights. Learn more.
  • Wishlist item Multiblocks will begin mass deployment by the end of the month: all non-Wikipedia projects plus Catalan Wikipedia will adopt Multiblocks in the week of May 26, while all other Wikipedias will adopt it in the week of June 2. Please contact the team if you have concerns. Administrators can test the new user interface now on your own wiki by browsing to Special:Block?usecodex=1, and can test the full multiblocks functionality on testwiki. Multiblocks is the feature that makes it possible for administrators to impose different types of blocks on the same user at the same time. See the help page for more information. [47]
  • Later this week, the Special:SpecialPages listing of almost all special pages will be updated with a new design. This page has been redesigned to improve the user experience in a few ways, including: The ability to search for names and aliases of the special pages, sorting, more visible marking of restricted special pages, and a more mobile-friendly look. The new version can be previewed at Beta Cluster now, and feedback shared in the task. [48]
  • The Chart extension is being enabled on more wikis. For a detailed list of when the extension will be enabled on your wiki, please read the deployment timeline.
  • Wikifunctions will be deployed on May 27 on five Wiktionaries: Hausa, Igbo, Bengali, Malayalam, and Dhivehi/Maldivian. This is the second batch of deployment planned for the project. After deployment, the projects will be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in their pages. A function is something that takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, such as adding up two numbers, converting miles into metres, calculating how much time has passed since an event, or declining a word into a case. Wikifunctions will allow users to do that through a simple call of a stable and global function, rather than via a local template.
  • Later this week, the Wikimedia Foundation will publish a hub for experiments. This is to showcase and get user feedback on product experiments. The experiments help the Wikimedia movement understand new users, how they interact with the internet and how it could affect the Wikimedia movement. Some examples are generated video, the Wikipedia Roblox speedrun game and the Discord bot.
  • Recurrent item View all 29 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a bug with creating an account using the API, which has now been fixed. [49]

Updates for technical contributors

  • Gadgets and user scripts that interact with Special:Block may need to be updated to work with the new manage blocks interface. Please review the developer guide for more information. If you need help or are unable to adapt your script to the new interface, please let the team know on the talk page. [50]
  • The mw.title object allows you to get information about a specific wiki page in the Lua programming language. Starting this week, a new property will be added to the object, named isDisambiguationPage. This property allows you to check if a page is a disambiguation page, without the need to write a custom function. [51]
  • Advanced item User script developers can use a new reverse proxy tool to load javascript and css from gitlab.wikimedia.org with mw.loader.load. The tool's author hopes this will enable collaborative development workflows for user scripts including linting, unit tests, code generation, and code review on gitlab.wikimedia.org without a separate copy-and-paste step to publish scripts to a Wikimedia wiki for integration and acceptance testing. See Tool:Gitlab-content on Wikitech for more information.
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

  • The 12th edition of Wiki Workshop 2025, a forum that brings together researchers that explore all aspects of Wikimedia projects, will be held virtually on 21-22 May. Researchers can register now.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:09, 19 May 2025 (UTC)

Unreferenced articles June 2025 backlog drive

WikiProject Unreferenced articles | June 2025 Backlog Drive

There is a substantial backlog of unsourced articles on Wikipedia, and we need your help! The purpose of this drive is to add sources to these unsourced articles and make a meaningful impact.

  • Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles cited.
  • Remember to tag your edit summary with #JUN25, both to advertise the event and tally the points later using Hashtag Summary Search.
  • Interested in taking part? Sign up here.
You're receiving this message because you have subscribed to the mailing list. To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:15, 21 May 2025 (UTC)

A cheeseburger for you!

New signature...me likey :) — Benison (Beni · talk) 06:51, 24 May 2025 (UTC)
Thanks @Benison. I saw this type of signature somewhere and decided to set mine :) – DreamRimmer ■ 08:45, 24 May 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-22

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 community-wide discussion about a very delicate issue for the development of Abstract Wikipedia is now open on Meta: where to store the abstract content that will be developed through functions from Wikifunctions and data from Wikidata. The discussion is open until June 12 at Abstract Wikipedia/Location of Abstract Content, and every opinion is welcomed. The decision will be made and communicated after the consultation period by the Foundation.

Updates for editors

  • Since last week, on all wikis except the largest 20, people using the mobile visual editor will have additional tools in the menu bar, accessed using the new + toolbar button. To start, the new menu will include options to add: citations, hieroglyphs, and code blocks. Deployment to the remaining wikis is scheduled to happen in June.
  • Advanced item The #ifexist parser function will no longer register a link to its target page. This will improve the usefulness of Special:WantedPages, which will eventually only list pages that are the target of an actual red link. This change will happen gradually as the source pages are updated. [52]
  • This week, the Moderator Tools team will launch a new filter to Recent Changes, starting at Indonesian Wikipedia. This new filter highlights edits that are likely to be reverted. The goal is to help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic edits. Other wikis will benefit from this filter in the future.
  • Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users will see suggestions of articles for further reading. The feature will be available on both desktop and mobile. Readers of Catalan, Hebrew, and Italian Wikipedias and some sister projects will receive the change between May 21 and mid-June. Readers of other wikis will receive the change later. The goal is to encourage users to read the wikis more. Learn more.
  • Some users of the Wikipedia Android app can use a new feature for readers, WikiGames, a daily trivia game based on real historical events. The release has started as an A/B test, available to 50% of users in the following languages: English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Turkish.
  • The Newsletter extension that is available on MediaWiki.org allows the creation of various newsletters for global users. The extension can now publish new issues as section links on an existing page, instead of requiring a new page for each issue. [53]
  • Recurrent item View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

Meetings and events

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:02, 26 May 2025 (UTC)

May thanks

story · music · places

Thank you for improving article quality in May. One of mine was Jadwiga Rappé. -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 18:48, 24 May 2025 (UTC)

A first: two stories about two people who worked together and died the same day --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:21, 27 May 2025 (UTC)

Mass messaging

Hi, how can I send out a mass message to alert editors of Wikipedia:The World Destubathon instead of doing it manually? I want to alert members of all country WikiProjects and all topic WikiProjects and invite them to participate. Would take me ages manually :-). ♦ Dr. Blofeld 11:59, 29 May 2025 (UTC)

@Dr. Blofeld: Do you have a list of users who are subscribed to receive updates about this contest or related activities? If so, I would be happy to send a mass message on your behalf. Otherwise, I am unable to send unsolicited messages to random users’ talk pages. As an alternative, you might consider posting a request at MediaWiki talk:Watchlist-messages to display a watchlist notice for the contest. Approval is not guaranteed, but it is worth a try. – DreamRimmer ■ 12:49, 29 May 2025 (UTC)
I haven't unfortunately. Yes, Richard Nevill is going to put in a central watchlist notice request soon, the last one was approved. I just wanted a way I could mass reach members of every country and topic WikiProject without doing it manually. ♦ Dr. Blofeld 12:56, 29 May 2025 (UTC)
You can try User:DreamRimmer/massMessageLite, but I would suggest being cautious, as users often do not like unwanted messages. – DreamRimmer ■ 12:59, 29 May 2025 (UTC)
Well, I'm offering them all a chance to win something to buy books so I hope it won't be too annoying for them :-). I get drilled deletion notices all the time, now they're annoying hehe! ♦ Dr. Blofeld 13:02, 29 May 2025 (UTC)
Hehe, I would appreciate a message, though :) – DreamRimmer ■ 13:05, 29 May 2025 (UTC)
I installed this but no idea how I go about mass messaging people now. Ideally something which sends messages to Category:Wikipedians by WikiProject, or minimum Category:WikiProject Countries projects.♦ Dr. Blofeld 13:28, 29 May 2025 (UTC)
You installed the wrong script. Please add {{subst:iusc|User:DreamRimmer/massMessageLite.js}} to your Special:MyPage/common.js. After that, go to the Special:BlankPage/massMessageLite link. You will need to add individual talk pages where you want to send a message, as the current script cannot send messages to pages in a category. Check File:Screenshot of massMessageLite.js user script.png for more info. – DreamRimmer ■ 13:40, 29 May 2025 (UTC)
Thanks. Unfortunately it has introduced a Article Links Tools section at the top of every article I visit now thought. ♦ Dr. Blofeld 17:53, 30 May 2025 (UTC)
Yo DreamRimmer, just for confirmation, is it a good idea if the evil genius and criminal mastermind @Dr. Blofeld: sends thousands of messages? Because they are planning to. Polygnotus (talk) 19:41, 30 May 2025 (UTC)
I promise I won't use it to try to take over the world, though it is a natural move to want to run a global scale scheme. :-) As it is a world destubathon covering all countries and topics would make sense to alert all members of WikiProjects, I will be running future contests too, so would be convenient to have a list of members and mass message tool.♦ Dr. Blofeld 21:21, 30 May 2025 (UTC)
Understood, but User:DreamRimmer/massMessageLite#Cautions warns against such things Please do not send messages to random users, as users often do not like receiving messages they did not request or show interest in., and it looks like the Rimmer of Dreams also advices caution above I am unable to send unsolicited messages to random users’ talk pages... I would suggest being cautious, as users often do not like unwanted messages... I would appreciate a message, though., if I understand them correctly. Combined the lists contain 13.396 usernames.
The Wikipedia:The World Destubathon starts June 16 and DreamRimmer is online almost every day so you won't have to wait long. We all know what can happen if a criminal mastermind gains a new, very powerful, arsenal and uses it on the unsuspecting populace. Polygnotus (talk) 21:34, 30 May 2025 (UTC)
Also DreamRimmer that script should regularly check for new talkpage messages and stop and warn the operator. Polygnotus (talk) 00:47, 31 May 2025 (UTC)
I don't think it's a good idea to send mass messages to that many random users. I was under the impression that Dr. Blofeld would only message active and genuinely interested users, maybe 50 to 100 at most. People will definitely complain if this goes too far. – DreamRimmer ■ 00:47, 31 May 2025 (UTC)
Non active people have been removed for the list. How does one know which editors are genuinely interested? I have no way of knowing, the only way is to contact members of relevant projects. If it was just 50-100 I'd do it manually. I don't want to get you in trouble DreamRimmer, so I've requested formal mass message rights. ♦ Dr. Blofeld 08:41, 31 May 2025 (UTC)
@Dr. Blofeld　An alternative method would be collating the list of users from the wikiprojects' MassMessage lists. This limits you to send to those who have opted in for updates. You can also put the message on the wikiprojects' talk pages. – robertsky (talk) 04:37, 31 May 2025 (UTC)
That list would be useful but I think there are a lot of potential editors who would be interested not currently on lists and not even in project categories. Contacting 13,000 people does seem excessive, I was thinking it would be around 1-2 thousand of the most active editors for different country and topic projects, but even if it was a few hundred it would be something. I've already sent over a 100 invites out manually, it looks as if I'll have to do it all manually if you're worried about complaints. ♦ Dr. Blofeld 10:06, 31 May 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-23

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 Chart extension is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. Editors can use this new extension to create interactive data visualizations like bar, line, area, and pie charts. Charts are designed to replace many of the uses of the legacy Graph extension.

Updates for editors

  • It is now easier to configure automatic citations for your wiki within the visual editor's citation generator. Administrators can now set a default template by using the _default key in the local MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json page (example diff). Setting this default will also help to future-proof your existing configurations when new item types are added in the future. You can still set templates for individual item types as they will be preferred to the default template. [54]
  • Recurrent item View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Starting the week of June 2, bots logging in using action=login or action=clientlogin will fail more often. This is because of stronger protections against suspicious logins. Bots using bot passwords or using a loginless authentication method such as OAuth are not affected. If your bot is not using one of those, you should update it; using action=login without a bot password was deprecated in 2016. For most bots, this only requires changing what password the bot uses. [55]
  • From this week, Wikimedia wikis will allow ES2017 features in JavaScript code for official code, gadgets, and user scripts. The most visible feature of ES2017 is async/await syntax, allowing for easier-to-read code. Until this week, the platform only allowed up to ES2016, and a few months before that, up to ES2015. [56]
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

  • Scholarship applications to participate in the GLAM Wiki Conference 2025 are now open. The conference will take place from 30 October to 1 November, in Lisbon, Portugal. GLAM contributors who lack the means to support their participation can apply here. Scholarship applications close on June 7th.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:52, 2 June 2025 (UTC)

Username change

Your message at Wikipedia:Changing username/Simple clearly shows you are a little bit off.

First of all, Ronaldo7Mil wasn't even reviewed. @FlightTime: simply said he won't override @Cabayi:, which makes no sense given that the request that was refused by Cabayi was Ronaldo7M. It was a different request.

Second of all, I was not "pinging random users". I was pinging users who had changed usernames recently.

To be honest, I just got incredibly unlucky that Cabayi got to my request before FlightTime, otherwise, my username would have been changed to Ronaldo7M on 05/05/25, and none of this would have happen. But that's just how life is sometimes. It not always goes your way.

With that said, thank you for changing my username. I was really starting to get stressed over the fact that I wouldn't be able to change it on time. By the way, you changed the username at "12:16", and that is actually kind clutch, because I currently have 1,207 creations, so I only need to create 9 more to get there (mostly surnames), take that juicy print, and publish it on my userpage before mid-night.

Oh man, I can still make it work!! Jeeez, this entire thing has taken years of my life! Thank you so much, truly. Kind regards. Luis7M (talk) 14:59, 27 May 2025 (UTC)

@Luis7M: There is no meaningful difference between Ronaldo7M and Ronaldo7Mil, as "M" stands for "million" in both cases. When FlightTime stated they would not override Cabayi, that was effectively a no. You also pinged JBW and Yamla, neither of whom has participated in any of your previous requests. I assumed good faith and approved this request, but you are continuing a pattern of repeatedly pinging renamers and asserting that all prior renaming decisions were incorrect while only your view is valid. I encourage you to reconsider this behavior, as it is unhelpful and counterproductive to collaborative processes. – DreamRimmer ■ 15:22, 27 May 2025 (UTC)
Luis7M, let me paint you the alternative situation, that you had been renamed to Ronaldo7M and then someone noticed your edit to Ronaldo's biography. You would have been softblocked until either you could prove you ARE Ronaldo or you changed your username yet again. More to the point of a {{uw-ublock-wellknown}} block, you would have created the impression that Ronaldo edits his own biography. The refusal was (repeatedly) to protect Ronaldo, not to rain on your day. Cabayi (talk) 16:47, 27 May 2025 (UTC)
@Cabayi: Hence my refusal to override you, due to the apparent COI. - FlightTime (open channel) 17:17, 27 May 2025 (UTC)
@Cabayi: @FlightTime: @DreamRimmer:, I guess you were right all along, given that @Cielquiparle: has literally just compared me to Cristiano Ronaldo. Luis7M (talk) 20:21, 3 June 2025 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – June 2025

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

Administrator changes

removed

Interface administrator changes

added 0xDeadbeef

CheckUser changes

readded L235

Oversight changes

readded L235

Guideline and policy news

  • An RfC is open to determine whether the English Wikipedia community should adopt a position on AI development by the WMF and its affiliates.

Technical news

Arbitration

  • An arbitration case named Indian military history has been opened. Evidence submissions for this case close on 8 June.

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:16, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-24

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 Trust and Safety Product team is finalizing work needed to roll out temporary accounts on large Wikipedias later this month. The team has worked with stewards and other users with extended rights to predict and address many use cases that may arise on larger wikis, so that community members can continue to effectively moderate and patrol temporary accounts. This will be the second of three phases of deployment – the last one will take place in September at the earliest. For more information about the recent developments on the project, see this update. If you have any comments or questions, write on the talk page, and join a CEE Catch Up this Tuesday.

Updates for editors

  • Wishlist item The watchlist expiry feature allows editors to watch pages for a limited period of time. After that period, the page is automatically removed from your watchlist. Starting this week, you can set a preference for the default period of time to watch pages. The preferences also allow you to set different default watch periods for editing existing pages, pages you create, and when using rollback. [57]
Screenshot of the visual improvements made on talk pages
Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.
  • The appearance of talk pages will change at almost all Wikipedias (some have already received this design change, a few will get these changes later). You can read details about the changes on Diff. It is possible to opt out of these changes in user preferences ("Show discussion activity"). [58][59]
  • Users with specific extended rights (including administrators, bureaucrats, checkusers, oversighters, and stewards) can now have IP addresses of all temporary accounts revealed automatically during time-limited periods where they need to combat high-speed account-hopping vandalism. This feature was requested by stewards. [60]
  • This week, the Moderator Tools and Machine Learning teams will continue the rollout of a new filter to Recent Changes, releasing it to several more Wikipedias. This filter utilizes the Revert Risk model, which was created by the Research team, to highlight edits that are likely to be reverted and help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic contributions. The feature will be rolled out to the following Wikipedias: Afrikaans Wikipedia, Belarusian Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Welsh Wikipedia, Hawaiian Wikipedia, Icelandic Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia. The rollout will continue in the coming weeks to include the rest of the Wikipedias in this project. [61]
  • Recurrent item View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • AbuseFilter editors active on Meta-Wiki and large Wikipedias are kindly asked to update AbuseFilter to make it compatible with temporary accounts. A link to the instructions and the private lists of filters needing verification are available on Phabricator.
  • Lua modules now have access to the name of a page's associated thumbnail image, and on some wikis to the WikiProject assessment information. This is possible using two new properties on mw.title objects, named pageImage and pageAssessments. [62][63]
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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MediaWiki message delivery 01:14, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

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