User talk:MusikAnimal/Archive 48
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The Signpost: 27 February 2025
- Serendipity: Guinea-Bissau Heritage from Commons to the World
- Technology report: Hear that? The wikis go silent twice a year
- In the media: The end of the world
- Recent research: What's known about how readers navigate Wikipedia; Italian Wikipedia hardest to read
- Opinion: Sennecaster's RfA debriefing
- Tips and tricks: One year after this article is posted, will every single article on Wikipedia have a short description?
- Community view: Open letter from French Wikipedians says "no" to intimidation of volunteer contributors
- Traffic report: Temporary scars, February stars
This week's article for improvement (week 10, 2025)
 A kerosene storage tank
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Jewish deli • Family cookbooks Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 3 March 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
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Tech News: 2025-10
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- All logged-in editors using the mobile view can now edit a full page. The "Edit full page" link is accessible from the "More" menu in the toolbar. This was previously only available to editors using the Advanced mobile contributions setting. [1]
- Interface administrators can now help to remove the deprecated Cite CSS code matching "
mw-ref" from their local MediaWiki:Common.css. The list of wikis in need of cleanup, and the code to remove, can be found with this global search and in this example, and you can learn more about how to help on the CSS migration project page. The Cite footnote markers ("[1]") are now rendered by Parsoid, and the deprecated CSS is no longer needed. The CSS for backlinks ("mw:referencedBy") should remain in place for now. This cleanup is expected to cause no visible changes for readers. Please help to remove this code before March 20, after which the development team will do it for you. - When editors embed a file (e.g.
[[File:MediaWiki.png]]) on a page that is protected with cascading protection, the software will no longer restrict edits to the file description page, only to new file uploads.[2] In contrast, transcluding a file description page (e.g.{{:File:MediaWiki.png}}) will now restrict edits to the page.[3] - When editors revert a file to an earlier version it will now require the same permissions as ordinarily uploading a new version of the file. The software now checks for 'reupload' or 'reupload-own' rights,[4] and respects cascading protection.[5]
- When administrators are listing pages for deletion with the Nuke tool, they can now also list associated talk pages and redirects for deletion, alongside pages created by the target, rather than needing to manually delete these pages afterwards. [6]
- The previously noted update to Single User Login, which will accommodate browser restrictions on cross-domain cookies by moving login and account creation to a central domain, will now roll out to all users during March and April. The team plans to enable it for all new account creation on Group0 wikis this week. See the SUL3 project page for more details and an updated timeline.
- Since last week there has been a bug that shows some interface icons as black squares until the page has fully loaded. It will be fixed this week. [7]
- One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Sylheti (
w:syl:) [8] 
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed with loading images in very old versions of the Firefox browser on mobile. [9]
Updates for technical contributors
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 02:28, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
Administrators' newsletter – March 2025
News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2025).
Administrator changes
CheckUser changes
Oversighter changes
Guideline and policy news
- A request for comment is open to discuss whether AI-generated images (meaning those wholly created by generative AI, not human-created images modified with AI tools) should be banned from use in articles.
- A series of 22 mini-RFCs that double-checked consensus on some aspects and improved certain parts of the administrator elections process has been closed (see the summary of the changes).
- A request for comment is open to gain consensus on whether future administrator elections should be held.
Technical news
- A new filter has been added to the Special:Nuke tool, which allows administrators to filter for pages in a range of page sizes (in bytes). This allows, for example, deleting pages only of a certain size or below. T378488
- Non-administrators can now check which pages are able to be deleted using the Special:Nuke tool. T376378
Miscellaneous
- The 2025 appointees for the Ombuds commission are だ＊ぜ, Arcticocean, Ameisenigel, Emufarmers, Faendalimas, Galahad, Nehaoua, Renvoy, Revi C., RoySmith, Teles and Zafer as members, with Vermont serving as steward-observer.
- Following the 2025 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: 1234qwer1234qwer4, AramilFeraxa, Daniuu, KonstantinaG07, MdsShakil and XXBlackburnXx.
NPP
Hi MA. Your work was indispensable when we were setting up WP:NPR and its section for the rights at PERM. We are working on a project for NPP which exists practically all but the scripts and js tooltips. It does not need the intervention of the WMF so although it's a local en.Wiki project it might conflict with their way of thinking. You often think of things we might have missed and your input would be invaluable. If you have a moment, please take a look and let me know what you think and if you would be interested in working on it. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:19, 5 March 2025 (UTC)
Wed March 12: Wiki Gala NYC
| March 12: Wiki Gala @ Prime Produce | |
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 You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community and visitors from the global Wikimedia Foundation for our Wiki Gala at Prime Produce in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan. All are welcome! This is a sequel to the March 2024 Wiki Gala at Prime Produce, the March 2023 Grand Central Salon and the March 2022 Wiki-Tent Brunch. The event will feature thematic video art installations and our traditional Wiki-fashion show, for which you are encouraged to dress in your finest Wikimedia clothing and accessories (bags, buttons, even books), or clothing connected to the topics you edit on wiki projects. All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct and Photography Policy. Meeting info:
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(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)
--Wikimedia New York City Team via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:17, 7 March 2025 (UTC)
This week's article for improvement (week 11, 2025)
 Wooden rake
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Kerosene • Jewish deli Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 10 March 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
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Tech News: 2025-11
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- Editors who use password managers at multiple wikis may notice changes in the future. The way that our wikis provide information to password managers about reusing passwords across domains has recently been updated, so some password managers might now offer you login credentials that you saved for a different Wikimedia site. Some password managers already did this, and are now doing it for more Wikimedia domains. This is part of the SUL3 project which aims to improve how our unified login works, and to keep it compatible with ongoing changes to the web-browsers we use. [10][11]
- The Wikipedia Apps Team is inviting interested users to help improve Wikipedia’s offline and limited internet use. After discussions in Afrika Baraza and the last ESEAP call, key challenges like search, editing, and offline access are being explored, with upcoming focus groups to dive deeper into these topics. All languages are welcome, and interpretation will be available. Want to share your thoughts? Join the discussion or email aramadan@wikimedia.org!
- All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 19. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
- View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: the launch of the Community Updates module, the most recent changes in Community Configuration, and the upcoming test of in-article suggestions for first-time editors.
- An old API that was previously used in the Android Wikipedia app is being removed at the end of March. There are no current software uses, but users of the app with a version that is older than 6 months by the time of removal (2025-03-31), will no longer have access to the Suggested Edits feature, until they update their app. You can read more details about this change.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:07, 10 March 2025 (UTC)
This week's article for improvement (week 12, 2025)
Hello, MusikAnimal. The article for improvement of the week is:
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Rake (tool) • Kerosene Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 17 March 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
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Tech News: 2025-12
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- Twice a year, around the equinoxes, the Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team performs a datacenter server switchover, redirecting all traffic from one primary server to its backup. This provides reliability in case of a crisis, as we can always fall back on the other datacenter. Thanks to the Listen to Wikipedia tool, you can hear the switchover take place: Before it begins, you'll hear the steady stream of edits; Then, as the system enters a brief read-only phase, the sound stops for a couple of minutes, before resuming after the switchover. You can read more about the background and details of this process on the Diff blog. If you want to keep an ear out for the next server switchover, listen to the wikis on March 19 at 14:00 UTC.
Updates for editors
- The improved Content Translation tool dashboard is now available in 10 Wikipedias and will be available for all Wikipedias soon. With the unified dashboard, desktop users can now: Translate new sections of an article; Discover and access topic-based article suggestion filters (initially available only for mobile device users); Discover and access the Community-defined lists filter, also known as "Collections", from wiki-projects and campaigns.
- On Wikimedia Commons, a new system to select the appropriate file categories has been introduced: if a category has one or more subcategories, users will be able to click on an arrow that will open the subcategories directly within the form, and choose the correct one. The parent category name will always be shown on top, and it will always be possible to come back to it. This should decrease the amount of work for volunteers in fixing/creating new categories. The change is also available on mobile. These changes are part of planned improvements to the UploadWizard.
- The Community Tech team is seeking wikis to join a pilot for the Multiblocks feature and a refreshed Special:Block page in late March. Multiblocks enables administrators to impose multiple different types of blocks on the same user at the same time. If you are an admin or steward and would like us to discuss joining the pilot with your community, please leave a message on the project talk page.
- Starting March 25, the Editing team will test a new feature for Edit Check at 12 Wikipedias: Multi-Check. Half of the newcomers on these wikis will see all Reference Checks during their edit session, while the other half will continue seeing only one. The goal of this test is to see if users are confused or discouraged when shown multiple Reference Checks (when relevant) within a single editing session. At these wikis, the tags used on edits that show References Check will be simplified, as multiple tags could be shown within a single edit. Changes to the tags are documented on Phabricator. [12]
- The Global reminder bot, which is a service for notifying users that their temporary user-rights are about to expire, now supports using the localized name of the user-rights group in the message heading. Translators can see the listing of existing translations and documentation to check if their language needs updating or creation.
- The GlobalPreferences gender setting, which is used for how the software should refer to you in interface messages, now works as expected by overriding the local defaults. [13]
- View all 26 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the Wikipedia App for Android had a bug fixed for when a user is browsing and searching in multiple languages. [14]
Updates for technical contributors
- Later this week, the way that Codex styles are loaded will be changing. There is a small risk that this may result in unstyled interface message boxes on certain pages. User generated content (e.g. templates) is not impacted. Gadgets may be impacted. If you see any issues please report them. See the linked task for details, screenshots, and documentation on how to fix any affected gadgets.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:45, 17 March 2025 (UTC)
The Signpost: 22 March 2025
- From the editor: Hanami
- News and notes: Deeper look at takedowns targeting Wikipedia
- In the media: The good, the bad, and the unusual
- Recent research: Explaining the disappointing history of Flagged Revisions; and what's the impact of ChatGPT on Wikipedia so far?
- Traffic report: All the world's a stage, we are merely players...
- Gallery: WikiPortraits rule!
- Essay: Unusual biographical images
- Obituary: Rest in peace
Thu March 27: Editing the Open Data Garden @ Prime Produce
| March 27: Editing the Open Data Garden @ Prime Produce | |
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 You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for an urban gardening-themed edit-a-thon at Prime Produce in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan. This event will be hosted in collaboration with Farming Concrete in celebration of Open Data Week in New York City. All are welcome, new and experienced! All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct and Photography Policy. Meeting info:
| |
(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)
--Wikimedia New York City Team via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:15, 22 March 2025 (UTC)
Signature
Hello! Your signature (and your bot's signature) are currently unreadable in dark mode; please consider making the following change to User:MusikAnimal/Signature:
| − | [[User:MusikAnimal|<span style="color:black; font-style:italic">MusikAnimal</span>]] | + | [[User:MusikAnimal|<span class="skin-invert" style="color:black; font-style:italic">MusikAnimal</span>]] |
and likewise with User:MusikBot/Signature. Please forgive the lack of rhyming or haiku. Thanks! charlotte 👸♥ 23:26, 7 March 2025 (UTC)
Done Thank you! — MusikAnimal talk 03:18, 22 March 2025 (UTC)
This week's article for improvement (week 13, 2025)
Hello, MusikAnimal. The article for improvement of the week is:
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Cove • Rake (tool) Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 24 March 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
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Tech News: 2025-13
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking your feedback on the drafts of the objectives and key results that will shape the Foundation's Product and Technology priorities for the next fiscal year (starting in July). The objectives are broad high-level areas, and the key-results are measurable ways to track the success of their objectives. Please share your feedback on the talkpage, in any language, ideally before the end of April.
Updates for editors
- The CampaignEvents extension will be released to multiple wikis (see deployment plan for details) in April 2025, and the team has begun the process of engaging communities on the identified wikis. The extension provides tools to organize, manage, and promote collaborative activities (like events, edit-a-thons, and WikiProjects) on the wikis. The extension has three tools: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation Lists. It is currently on 13 Wikipedias, including English Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia, as well as Wikidata. Questions or requests can be directed to the extension talk page or in Phabricator (with #campaigns-product-team tag).
- Starting the week of March 31st, wikis will be able to set which user groups can view private registrants in Event Registration, as part of the CampaignEvents extension. By default, event organizers and the local wiki admins will be able to see private registrants. This is a change from the current behavior, in which only event organizers can see private registrants. Wikis can change the default setup by requesting a configuration change in Phabricator (and adding the #campaigns-product-team tag). Participants of past events can cancel their registration at any time.
- Administrators at wikis that have a customized MediaWiki:Sidebar should check that it contains an entry for the Special pages listing. If it does not, they should add it using
* specialpages-url|specialpages. Wikis with a default sidebar will see the link moved from the page toolbox into the sidebar menu in April. [15] - 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. [16] - 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.ApiJavaScript library, can now identify the tool using it with theuserAgentparameter: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. [17][18] - 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)
This week's article for improvement (week 14, 2025)
_Jack_Black.jpg) Jack Black in 2023
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Ipomoea • Cove Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 31 March 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
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Tech News: 2025-14
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- The Editing team is working on a new Edit check: Peacock check. This check's goal is to identify non-neutral terms while a user is editing a wikipage, so that they can be informed that their edit should perhaps be changed before they publish it. This project is at the early stages, and the team is looking for communities' input: in this Phabricator task, they are gathering on-wiki policies, templates used to tag non-neutral articles, and the terms (jargon and keywords) used in edit summaries for the languages they are currently researching. You can participate by editing the table on Phabricator, commenting on the task, or directly messaging Trizek (WMF).
- Single User Login has now been updated on all wikis to move login and account creation to a central domain. This makes user login compatible with browser restrictions on cross-domain cookies, which have prevented users of some browsers from staying logged in.
- View all 35 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Starting on March 31st, the MediaWiki Interfaces team will begin a limited release of generated OpenAPI specs and a SwaggerUI-based sandbox experience for MediaWiki REST APIs. They invite developers from a limited group of non-English Wikipedia communities (Arabic, German, French, Hebrew, Interlingua, Dutch, Chinese) to review the documentation and experiment with the sandbox in their preferred language. In addition to these specific Wikipedia projects, the sandbox and OpenAPI spec will be available on the on the test wiki REST Sandbox special page for developers with English as their preferred language. During the preview period, the MediaWiki Interfaces Team also invites developers to share feedback about your experience. The preview will last for approximately 2 weeks, after which the sandbox and OpenAPI specs will be made available across all wiki projects.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- Sometimes a small, one line code change can have great significance: in this case, it means that for the first time in years we're able to run all of the stack serving maps.wikimedia.org - a host dedicated to serving our wikis and their multi-lingual maps needs - from a single core datacenter, something we test every time we perform a datacenter switchover. This is important because it means that in case one of our datacenters is affected by a catastrophe, we'll still be able to serve the site. This change is the result of extensive work by two developers on porting the last component of the maps stack over to kubernetes, where we can allocate resources more efficiently than before, thus we're able to withstand more traffic in a single datacenter. This work involved a lot of complicated steps because this software, and the software libraries it uses, required many long overdue upgrades. This type of work makes the Wikimedia infrastructure more sustainable.
Meetings and events
- MediaWiki Users and Developers Workshop Spring 2025 is happening in Sandusky, USA, and online, from 14–16 May 2025. The workshop will feature discussions around the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies in different industries and will inspire and onboard new users. Registration and presentation signup is now available at the workshop's website.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 00:02, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
MusikBot's edit filter change log isn't displaying correctly
For your information, Special:Diff/1283631790 appears to have an unclosed HTML tag and thus displays incorrectly. JJPMaster (she/they) 13:24, 4 April 2025 (UTC)
This week's article for improvement (week 15, 2025)
Hello, MusikAnimal. The article for improvement of the week is:
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Jack Black • Ipomoea Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 7 April 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
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Administrators' newsletter – April 2025
News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2025).
Administrator changes
Bureaucrat changes
CheckUser changes
Oversighter changes
Miscellaneous
- Sign up for The Core Contest, a competition running from 15 April to 31 May to improve vital articles.
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
- From now on, interface admins and centralnotice admins are technically required to enable two-factor authentication before they can use their privileges. In the future this might be expanded to more groups with advanced user-rights. [19]
- View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
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, andsize-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.
- 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 18:50, 7 April 2025 (UTC)
WikiNYC April 11: Foundation and Friends' Free Culture Friday
| April 11: Free Culture Friday | |
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 You are invited to Foundation and Friends' Free Culture Friday at Prime Produce on Friday, April 11. This event will feature a reception with Wikimedia Foundation staff in the afternoon, followed by a more informal salon, hackathon, and game night, utilizing Prime Produce's vast collection of board games. This replaces WikiWednesday Salon this month. No experience of anything at all is required. All are welcome!
All attendees at Wikimedia NYC events are subject to the Wikimedia NYC Code of Conduct and Photography Policy. | |
(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)
--Wikimedia New York City Team via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:30, 8 April 2025 (UTC)
The Signpost: 9 April 2025
- Opinion: Crawlers, hogs and gorillas
- Debriefing: Giraffer's RfA debriefing
- Obituary: RHaworth, TomCat4680 and PawełMM
- Traffic report: Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho, off to report we go...
- News from Diff: Strengthening Wikipedia’s neutral point of view
- Comix: Thirteen
User right question
Hi MusikAnimal, given that EranBot has been completely replaced by CopyPatrolBot I wonder if should still have the copyright violation bot right. The bot flag itself is fine per WP:BOTINACTIVE, but the copyright violation bot flag should be removed as, due to the replacement, it no longer is approved to use that flag. Thanks Nobody (talk) 07:21, 10 April 2025 (UTC)
- Sure! I've asked for bureaucrat assistance at WP:BN. Thanks, — MusikAnimal talk 20:34, 10 April 2025 (UTC)
This week's article for improvement (week 16, 2025)
 Japan as seen from a satellite. Honshu is the largest, middle island.
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Plate (dishware) • Jack Black Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 14 April 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
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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. [20]
- 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. [21][22]
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. [23]
- "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.
- 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.
- 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)
This week's article for improvement (week 17, 2025)
 Homemade sock monkeys have been part of U.S. and Canadian culture since the Great Depression.
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Honshu • Plate (dishware) Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 21 April 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
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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. [24]
- 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. [25]
- 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 |  |
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| 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)
Response helper script
Hi Musik, when you get a chance some new options have been added to the {{RFPP}} response template. Could you please add them to the response helper? The parameters missing are pf / notp / cr / er. Thank you. Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs) 01:37, 27 April 2025 (UTC)
Bot removed protection template from protected page
In this recent edit Musik Bot II appears to have removed a {{pp}} from a protected page. I may be mistaken, but I looked at the page history and protection logs.
The page's protection expired and it was unprotected with a protection template in place for about an hour, but was re-protected at the time the bot removed the template.
I guess the bot works on a backlog and doesn't do a final check before the removal edit, which is fine as this scenario is probably rare and not critical in my opinion. Commander Keane (talk) 06:41, 27 April 2025 (UTC)
Happy Adminship Anniversary!
| Happy Adminship | from the Birthday Committee |
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 Wishing MusikAnimal a very happy adminship anniversary on behalf of the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! | |
This week's article for improvement (week 18, 2025)
Hello, MusikAnimal. The article for improvement of the week is:
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Stuffed toy • Honshu Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:44, 28 April 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
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Happy Adminship Anniversary!
| Happy adminship anniversary! Hi MusikAnimal! On behalf of the Birthday Committee, I'd like to wish you a very happy anniversary of your successful request for adminship. Enjoy this special day! RPE ✍️ 📚 01:16, 28 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.
- 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, andipblocks_compatare now deprecated. Users can query theblockandblock_targetnew views that mirror the new tables in the production database instead. The deprecated views will be removed entirely from Wiki Replicas in June, 2025. - Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization Newsletter is now available. This edition includes an overview of the improved Content Translation Dashboard Tool, support for new languages, highlights from the Wiki Loves Ramadan campaign, results from the Language Onboarding Experiment, an analysis of topic diversity in articles, and information on upcoming community meetings and events.
Meetings and events
- The Let's Connect Learning Clinic will take place on April 29 at 14:30 UTC. This edition will focus on "Understanding and Navigating Conflict in Wikimedia Projects". You can register now to attend.
- The 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which brings the global technical community together to connect, brainstorm, and hack existing projects, will take place from May 2 to 4th, 2025, at Istanbul, Turkey.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 19:29, 28 April 2025 (UTC)
The Signpost: 1 May 2025
- In the media: Feds aiming for WMF's nonprofit status
- Recent research: How readers use Wikipedia health content; Scholars generally happy with how their papers are cited on Wikipedia
- Arbitration report: Sysop Tinucherian removed and admonished by the ArbCom
- Discussion report: Latest news from Centralized discussions
- Traffic report: Of Wolf and Man
- Disinformation report: At WikiCredCon, Wikipedia editors and Internet Archive discuss threats to trust in media
- News from the WMF: Product & Tech Progress on the Annual Plan
- Comix: By territory
- Community view: A deep dive into Wikimedia
- Debriefing: Barkeep49's RfB debriefing
Responsehelper bug
Hi! Any idea why responsehelper doesn't appear for me on WP:RFPP pages? I have it installed but cannot see any buttons or use it in any way that I can tell. I use Vector legacy. Is this a known bug? Thanks! —Ganesha811 (talk) 15:58, 3 May 2025 (UTC)
- @Ganesha811 Are you editing a section? We don't yet have this script working outside of edit mode. I am at the Wikimedia Hackathon 2025 right now and am told it is now possible to integrate with DiscussionTools! So you will hopefully soon be able to use responseHelper without first clicking "edit". — MusikAnimal talk 09:34, 4 May 2025 (UTC)
- Hmm... not sure what you mean by "edit mode" here - I can't see anything when I look at the page as a whole, the transcluded subpages, or after I click "Edit source" and am viewing the source on either the main RfPP page or the subpages. I also can't see anything come up when I click "edit" next to an individual request. On the other hand, great news! Hope the hackathon is good - don't worry about this bug for me too much, clearly the script works for most people. —Ganesha811 (talk) 11:05, 4 May 2025 (UTC)
This week's article for improvement (week 19, 2025)
 Mainboard of a NeXTcube computer
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Internet research • Stuffed toy Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 5 May 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
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NYC: May 7 WikiWed + May 10 WikiCurious
| May 7: WikiWednesday Salon @ Prime Produce | |
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You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our WikiWednesday Salon at Prime Produce in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan. This month's WikiWednesday will be focused on digital safety for editors. Guest digital security trainers will join us to lead this session. All are welcome! Please bring a laptop or the editing device of your choosing for hands-on training that will guide you through steps to take to make yourself safer online. While there will also be an online participation option, the meeting will not be recorded. Meeting info:
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| May 10: Wikicurious – Amplifying Media Art with Rhizome | |
 You are also invited to join the Wikimedia NYC Community and Rhizome for a community memory-focused edit-a-thon in the Financial District. All Wikipedia and Wikidata enthusiasts are welcome, new and experienced! Please RSVP on Rhizome's event page to gain entry to the venue. Meeting info:
All attendees at Wikimedia NYC events are subject to the Wikimedia NYC Code of Conduct and Photography Policy. | |
(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)
--Wikimedia New York City Team via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:10, 5 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
- The Wikimedia Foundation has shared the latest draft update to their annual plan for next year (July 2025–June 2026). This includes an executive summary (also on Diff), details about the three main goals (Infrastructure, Volunteer Support, and Effectiveness), global trends, and the budget and financial model. Feedback and questions are welcome on the talk page until the end of May.
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.
- View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Developers who use the
momentlibrary in gadgets and user scripts should revise their code to use alternatives like theIntllibrary or the newmediawiki.DateFormatterlibrary. Themomentlibrary 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. [26] - 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 00:12, 6 May 2025 (UTC)
Administrators' newsletter – May 2025
News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2025).
Administrator changes
Rusalkii
NaomiAmethyst (overlooked last month)
Interface administrator changes
Guideline and policy news
- Following an RfC, administrator elections were permanently authorized on a five-month schedule. The next election will be scheduled soon; see Wikipedia talk:Administrator elections for more information. This is an alternate process to the RfA process and does not replace the latter.
- An RfC was closed with consensus to allow editors to opt-out of seeing "sticky decorative elements". Such elements should now be wrapped in {{sticky decoration wrapper}}. Editors who wish to opt out can follow the instructions at WP:STICKYDECO.
- An RfC has resulted in a broad prohibition on the use of AI-generated images in articles. A few common-sense exceptions are recognized.
Miscellaneous
- A New Pages Patrol backlog drive is happening in May 2025 to reduce the backlog of articles in the new pages feed. Sign up here to participate!
MusikBot prematurely archived rollback request
Hi MusikAnimal,
I hope you're well. I’d like to bring to your attention a possible issue with MusikBot at Wikipedia:Requests for permissions/Rollback.
I submitted a rollback request on 7 May 2025, but it seems the bot archived it without any admin response. I’ve been advised to notify you, as this might be an unintentional behavior.
Could you kindly look into whether this was expected behavior, or if an adjustment to the archiving logic might be needed?
Thanks for your time and work maintaining the bot!
Best regards, —— 🌸 Sakura emad 💖 (talk) 19:39, 8 May 2025 (UTC)
A message from A bunch of penguins
Dear MusikAnimal,
I have normally been creating articles in my sandbox and then copy and pasting the entire thing into the Main Space when I'm done. But yesterday I noticed that you can "move" the sandbox to the page. I did that, but the sandbox page history moved with it (i.e. all the old pages I had edited are now listed in the edit history for Ken Conca). This wasn't what I intended, and I think not what is expected (or is it?). In any case, it doesn't make any sense to have all the history of the other pages I prepared in the edit history for Ken Conca).
I'm not sure what is done in cases like this, but perhaps the old records could be either moved back to my sandbox, or deleted under RD6? I'd appreciate your feedback, and if it makes sense, if you could take a moment to delete or move the logs. Thanks!
a bunch of penguins (talk) 05:50, 9 May 2025 (UTC)
This week's article for improvement (week 20, 2025)
Hello, MusikAnimal. The article for improvement of the week is:
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Motherboard • Internet research Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 12 May 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
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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. - 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-parsoidREST API endpoint is no longer in use and will be deprecated. It is scheduled to be turned off on June 7, 2025. - 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
- The 2nd edition of 2025 of Afrika Baraza, a virtual platform for African Wikimedians to connect, will take place on May 15 at 17:00 UTC. This edition will focus on discussions regarding Wikimedia Annual planning and progress.
- The MENA Connect Community Call, a virtual meeting for MENA Wikimedians to connect, will take place on May 17 at 17:00 UTC. You can register now to attend.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.