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Administrators' newsletter – January 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (December 2023).

Administrator changes

added Clovermoss
readded Dennis Brown
removed

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:54, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

You've got mail!

Hello, AmandaNP/Archives. Please check your email; you've got mail!
Message added 18:14, 3 January 2024 (UTC). It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.

DatGuyTalkContribs 18:14, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Happy New Year, AmandaNP!

Happy New Year!

AmandaNP,
Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia.
--MDK-Fan 23:12, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

   Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year fireworks}} to user talk pages. --MDK-Fan 23:12, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

WP:UAA/BOT again

Hi Amanda, it's me again. Is the bot working correctly, or are there still issues? It looks like it worked only for 20 minutes the last time you fixed it. Also Happy New Year Nobody (talk) 09:48, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

-_- I'm unlikely to have time to review before the weekend...I'll see if I just stupidly forgot something tonight, but otherwise it'll be on hold. -- Amanda (she/her) 01:54, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
@1AmNobody24: Thank you. I made a silly mistake implementing the last fix. After this run, I'll reenable the automatic one, and please let me know if it stops again. -- Amanda (she/her) 06:38, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
Looks good. I'll keep an eye out to see if it keeps working. Thanks for the timely fix. Nobody (talk) 07:48, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
Hi @AmandaNP, could you check if it's still working? There haven't been new listings for 10 hours now. Nobody (talk) 16:19, 15 January 2024 (UTC) nevermind it's listing again.Nobody (talk) 17:48, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

Adminship Nomination

Hi @AmandaNP,

I recently saw your nomination of @Red-tailed hawk and was wondering if you could take a look at my page and see if I qualify. This would be extremely helpful. If you have any criticism, feedback, critiques, comments, etc. please let me know. I would really appreciate this. Please let me know as soon as you can.


Thank you,

@Avishai11

Avishai11 (talk) 01:54, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

My comments would fall in line with WP:TOONEW. -- Amanda (she/her) 03:10, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
Ok, thank you! Avishai11 (talk) 23:12, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

Your other username and old usernames on discussion messages

Hello Amanda,

As I changed my username from Breathinkeeps32 12 hours ago, did you change your name from DeltaQuad to AmandaNP (your main account) at some point? This is because on your old discussions, it still links to User:DeltaQuad, which is an alt account but normally, they redirect to the new username. So basically on old discussions, the username does not change (but newer discussions will) so I still see my former username in existing discussions. Is that correct? JuniperChill (talk) 13:35, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

Correct. -- Amanda (she/her) 01:49, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
Great, thank you for the help Amanda. Your the best! (and loved the fact I got them all right!) JuniperChill (talk) 23:52, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – February 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2024).

CheckUser changes

removed Wugapodes

Interface administrator changes

removed

Guideline and policy news

  • An RfC about increasing the inactivity requirement for Interface administrators is open for feedback.

Technical news

  • Pages that use the JSON contentmodel will now use tabs instead of spaces for auto-indentation. This will significantly reduce the page size. (T326065)

Arbitration

  • Following a motion, the Arbitration Committee adopted a new enforcement restriction on January 4, 2024, wherein the Committee may apply the 'Reliable source consensus-required restriction' to specified topic areas.
  • Community feedback is requested for a draft to replace the "Information for administrators processing requests" section at WP:AE.

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:01, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

User:DeltaQuadBot

Hello, Amanda,

Typically, at about 02:00 UTC, DeltaQuadBot fills up Category:Non-free files with orphaned versions more than 7 days old needing human review with files that need additional review by a human editor. But nothing showed up today so I'm just checking in on the Bot and making sure everything is working fine. DeltaQuadBot somestimes adds images to this category at different times of the day but the main bunch of files arrives at 02:00 UTC so it's unusual that there was nothing tonight. Many thanks for all that you do on the project! Liz Read! Talk! 03:29, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

@Liz: The bot does run every 4 hours, but is contingent on there being files in Category:Non-free files with orphaned versions more than 7 days old. If people don't put them there to begin with, they won't process. I ran the bot, it had zero errors and the category is empty. I'm not sure if one person works later in the night and puts them in the category for mass processing for that time or if a bot does, but my first sense is to say working as intended from the bots viewpoint. -- Amanda (she/her) 04:09, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Did my IP change after moving?

Note, please do not give my IP address here, just say if it changed or not.

Hi Amanda,

I just moved houses around 3 February (where I took a one week pause from editing - my edit history) and idk remember what my IP address was so has it changed? I have never edited anywhere outside my current and former house as I do not edit from my phone. When I moved, it was only a 15 min walk away meaning I still live in the same city the east of England (Norfolk). I also never edited while logged out. In other words, I have only edited from this account on a PC.

I also love it when my current IP is far from accurate as it shows that it comes from London, around ~ 100 miles (160 km) away. But hey, at least it got the country/state (UK and England respectively) correct. JuniperChill (talk) JuniperChill (talk) 13:29, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

I would not give your IP address out as it's against many different policies, but barring security concerns, we don't really run checks just to check things out on accounts. 99% of the time (if your UK based network is not dynamic as hell) when you move, you would get a new IP address. -- Amanda (she/her) 14:00, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
So WP:Checkusers are there only/mostly if there is a concern ? Which explains the main purpose of a checkuser is for WP:sockpuppet reasons or other concerns, rather than what I just did since almost all of my edits were not problematic and I also don't have another account. JuniperChill (talk) 15:27, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
(talk page watcher) @JuniperChill: If you know your old IP, you can get your current IP at whatismyipaddress.com. - FlightTime (open channel) 15:40, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
(talk page stalker) also Wikipedia:Get my IP address. — xaosflux Talk 16:58, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
Basically, but I also forgot what the other talkpage stalkers said as I was super tired when I replied last night. -- Amanda (she/her) 01:36, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

Question

Hello Amanda NP. This is in regards to File:Robert Shulman (serial killer).jpg. I uploaded that image 10 years ago, then it looks like someone came along a week ago and uploaded a new large-sized version against the non-free rules. So, a bot adjusted his version down to size and then your bot deleted my original. Do you know if there is anyway to just reinstate my version of the image? It's not a big deal but still. It doesn't show up in my uploaded images anymore. Thanks, ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 02:59, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

It would have to be the active image in order to do so. See the reasoning on Template:Orphaned non-free revisions. -- Amanda (she/her) 04:45, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – March 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2024).

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • The mobile site history pages now use the same HTML as the desktop history pages. (T353388)

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:21, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

Precious anniversary

Precious
Six years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:39, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Happy Bureaucratship Anniversary!

DQP bot glitch

Just a notice that your bot may have glitched. It flagged a username (CaptainUnderpantsLover) under "derp" and this seems incorrect. Mseingth2133444 (talk/contribs) 02:46, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

@Mseingth2133444: Please see User talk:AmandaNP/UAA/Whitelist#Instructions. -- Amanda (she/her) 13:17, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – April 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2024).

Administrator changes

removed

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • The Toolforge Grid Engine services have been shut down after the final migration process from Grid Engine to Kubernetes. (T313405)

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

  • Editors are invited to sign up for The Core Contest, an initiative running from April 15 to May 31, which aims to improve vital and other core articles on Wikipedia.
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:47, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Unblock table

Your bot seems to have missed the unblock request on User talk:Plutonical. It was posted on 5 February 14:48, but it wasn't added at 15:00. It's still not there. Snowmanonahoe (talk · contribs · typos) 20:17, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Issue was much bigger than was thought, with a total of 26 entries missing. The issue is now fixed and pushed to the server. -- Amanda (she/her) 03:34, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

Can you make your bot undelete an older revision of this file?

Hi. I'm here to ask for moving this file to Commons. I've relicensed under public domain because it's too simple for protection. Files for moving to Commons must have all revisions exist, and it's missing the first revision uploaded by Vacant0. Can you use your bot for undeleting it? If yes, I'm very pleased for moving free files to Commons! Kys5g talk! 02:57, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

I can't use my bot to do it no, but if you can get a commons admin (or recognizable SME in the area of PD-textlogo) to sign off that this is sufficiently meets that standard as I don't have the knowledge to tell, then I will happily make it available from my regular account. -- Amanda (she/her) 03:43, 13 April 2024 (UTC)
Oh, my fault. I though while bots can delete older revisions when unnecessary or unused fair use (CSD F5), bots can also restore revisions in place; but I was wrong, only their owners can undo these deletions. Thanks for your explanation! Kys5g talk! 04:25, 13 April 2024 (UTC)
(talk page stalker) @Kys5g: The file cannot be moved to Commons because it's above threshold of originality in Poland, its country of origin. I have updated the description page accordingly. It's an SVG so the size is just numbers in the file for how the computer should show it by default—in reality the file is essentially infinite resolution. So the revision doesn't have to be restored. It can be though. Snowmanonahoe (talk · contribs · typos) 03:47, 13 April 2024 (UTC)
Then can you explain why did PZ's JPEG logo exist on Commons? Kys5g talk! 04:27, 13 April 2024 (UTC)
It's not supposed to. I've put it up for deletion. Snowmanonahoe (talk · contribs · typos) 04:37, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

JayCubby blocked as sockpuppet

2 days ago, you globally locked BMX is on wikibreak right now! as an LTA. Yesterday, JayCubby, the creator of that account, was blocked for sockpuppetry by Primefac. Snowmanonahoe (talk · contribs · typos) 19:30, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

This is a very puzzling situation cause I feel like I want to AGF, but there is too much here to use AGF, so I've processed a lock in the meantime. -- Amanda (she/her) 02:55, 17 April 2024 (UTC)

Deprotect the redirect page for 9/11

I know WP:WHATABOUT exists (it’s mainly for page deletion but still) but when it comes to page protection and if you’re not trying to compare how “controversial” the things are it’s fine. The page for the actual September 11th attacks that it redirects to are semi protected, so a redirect page that goes to that shouldn’t have extended confirmed protection, especially since it has only been edited a few times since the protection went on (which is a reasonable amount for a redirect page). I propose a trial deprotection of the 9/11 redirect page and, if vandalism returns, raise the level to what you see fit. CharlieEdited (talk) 21:19, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

I have several concerns about this. 9/11 has been subject to alternate theories in the past and currently falls under AMPOL CT. Given this is also the year of an election, and disinformation campaigns that have occurred more and more as of recent, I don't think this is good timing either. And beyond that, the talkpage gives a good indication of how unprotection could go wrong, even if it's not related to a page move. I don't see a balanced argument to deprotect it until at least after the election without a more valid reasoning. If you are wishing to edit the redirect, forming consensus and/or using the edit request would be a good idea. -- Amanda (she/her) 02:41, 17 April 2024 (UTC)
I am not talking about the page for the actual attacks. I am talking about the redirect page. Redirect pages almost never get more vandalism than the page they redirect to, so it makes no sense for the redirect page that is named 9/11 (which is the one I am referring to) to have a higher level of protection than the page it goes to. CharlieEdited (talk) 16:43, 17 April 2024 (UTC)
(Amanda, you are welcome to leave your own reply but I am also giving my own as I am a (talk page stalker)). I think the reason why redirect pages may have a higher protection than its target is because the target pages needs to be edited every now and then, but for redirect pages, there is usually no good reason to. You could either wait until you reach 500 edits, or better yet, do an edit request. Plus, people may do a cut and past move so I see why the redirect needs to be protected.
See the redirect page for kiev as an example. The redirect page is fully protected but the target page kyiv is ECP protected. I am almost ECP myself (480 edits). See Wikipedia:Redirect#protection:
Sometimes, a redirect to an article pertaining to a very controversial topic will be fully or, more rarely, semi-protected indefinitely. This is done when any of the following criteria are met:
*There is no reason for it to be edited
  • It is frequently expanded into whole articles
  • It is an obvious vandalism target
  • It redirects and/or refers to a very controversial topic
IMO, it meets criteria 1, 3 and 4, so its clear why it is protected. Also, 9/11 is actually included in that section so that page will need to change should it be unprotected. JuniperChill (talk) 17:06, 17 April 2024 (UTC)
Fair. I wasn’t even interested in editing it anyway but I just got caught up in the fact that I keep trying to lower protection on certain pages, (namely Roblox which I still think should go back to semi but Ferret said no and the only real argument against it was “JuSt WaIt To EdIt It”), because for many articles their protection stays way after it’s necessary from admins forgetting about it. CharlieEdited (talk) 17:37, 17 April 2024 (UTC)

For your information

I just saw some vandalism on my watchlist mentioning "Project Ban AmandaNP". Perhaps this is a sockpuppet of someone you encountered before? - ZLEA T\C 04:02, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Another satisfied customer of some sort...no clue who this could be. -- Amanda (she/her) 08:39, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – May 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2024).

Administrator changes

readded Nyttend
removed

Bureaucrat changes

removed Nihonjoe

CheckUser changes

readded Joe Roe

Oversight changes

removed GeneralNotability

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • Partial action blocks are now in effect on the English Wikipedia. This means that administrators have the ability to restrict users from certain actions, including uploading files, moving pages and files, creating new pages, and sending thanks. T280531

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:25, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-19

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

Recent changes

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 changed for all wikis, except for Commons, Wikidata and most Wikipedias (a few have already received this design change). You can read the detail of the changes on Diff. It is possible to opt-out these changes in user preferences ("Show discussion activity"). The deployment will happen at remaining wikis in the coming weeks. [1][2]
  • Interface admins now have greater control over the styling of article components on mobile with the introduction of the SiteAdminHelper. More information on how styles can be disabled can be found at the extension's page. [3]
  • Wikimedia Enterprise has added article body sections in JSON format and a curated short description field to the existing parsed Infobox. This expansion to the API is also available via Wikimedia Cloud Services. [4]

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 May. It will be on all wikis from 9 May (calendar). [5][6]
  • When you look at the Special:Log page, the first view is labelled "All public logs", but it only shows some logs. This label will now say "Main public logs". [7]

Future changes

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

MediaWiki message delivery 16:41, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

IP block on Met Office

Hey @AmandaNP I'm a Wikimedian in Residence working on climate change info. Yesterday I was at the UK Met Office to run an editathon but my group was unable to edit for most of the session due to your IP block on the Met Office. I'm sure there's a reason the block is in place. I wanted to ask if that reason has been resolved and the block can be lifted? Alternatively, would it be possible to lift the block for one day on Friday the 10th of May 2024 (UK time) so that I can do a follow up session with the participants?

Much appreciated! TatjanaClimate (talk) 08:32, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

@TatjanaClimate: I would of course need to know which block this is related too (aka the IP address) but I can understand you not posting it openly. If you could email it to me for review, I can check to see what possibilities exist. -- Amanda (she/her) 12:01, 8 May 2024 (UTC)
Email sent! Thanks! TatjanaClimate (talk) 13:43, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
@TatjanaClimate: This IP does not directly belong to the Met Office. It belongs to IBOSS, which essentially acts as a proxy for many people which is something we have to keep strictly blocked. Can you advise participants to create one from home before they come? That or we might be able to see what ACC could do in real time - but day before the event is really not the time to be organizing this :/ especially since I work 10+ hours days right now. @Stwalkerster and FastLizard4: for additional guideance & help outside hours i'm avail. -- Amanda (she/her) 13:57, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
@AmandaNP is it an anononly block?
ACC might be able to help with this if it's just accounts that are needed, especially if we know a time window where most requests will be coming in so we can keep a closer eye on the queue. The best approach at this point is indeed to get participants to pre-create if possible, or maybe to use something like the Programs and Events dashboard to create the accounts as needed for you. This is all contingent on what type of block is in place though as to whether you'll be able to edit through the block while logged in. stwalkerster (talk) 14:51, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
@Stwalkerster: Global hard block that I just converted to a soft block, but still going to have issues with account creation even for logged in users last I checked. -- Amanda (she/her) 03:25, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
That's fine, P&E dashboard does account creations via OAuth just like ACC as I understand it. stwalkerster (talk) 05:06, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

Happy Adminship Anniversary!

Have a Happy Adminship Anniversary!

Hey there AmandaNP, I'd like to wish you a happy adminship anniversary! Congratulations on your special day, and thank you for all the contributions you've made.

Finch (talk) 16:13, 19 May 2024 (UTC) On behalf of the Birthday Committee

Administrators' newsletter – June 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2024).

Administrator changes

readded Graham Beards
removed

Bureaucrat changes

removed

Oversight changes

removed Dreamy Jazz

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • The Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, will now correctly delete pages which were moved to another title. T43351

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:43, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

SPI colors and User:AmandaNP/SPI case list

As a heads up, I moved the SPI colors to TemplateStyles invoked in Template:SPIstatusheader, which leaves your custom SPI list colorless. I think that makes your list look nicer since it's pre-separated, but either way, this is to let you know to make an adjustment in the bot to add the stylesheet if you want them back. Izno (talk) 20:51, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

Blocking of Japan

Can I request a reason as why you have blocked Japanese mobile services from creating an account?  Augu  Maugu ♨ 04:12, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

i had a friend try to create an account the other day and a “This IP address range has been globally blocked” message appeared.  Augu  Maugu ♨ 04:15, 15 June 2024 (UTC)
@AuguMaugu: I can't give comment without knowing the IP range you speak of. "Japanese mobile services" is a major surface for IPs. -- Amanda (she/her) 17:21, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

DQB and usernames (not) longer than 40 chars

Minor bug report: DQB probably shouldn't consider "attempting to skip filter" for the 40 chars rule. (Example.) jlwoodwa (talk) 07:02, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

@Jlwoodwa: I don't get involved in the day to day administration of the blacklist used for the bot. You are looking for User talk:AmandaNP/UAA/Blacklist and the instructions are on that page. -- Amanda (she/her) 17:20, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
Ah, sorry, and thanks for the directions. jlwoodwa (talk) 17:26, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

Bot error

Hi, It seems like your bot User:DeltaQuadBot made an error in WP:AIU. The name JustaFictionalGoogologist is fine, but your bot marked it as inappropriate. Thanks! Martintalk 02:34, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

@Martinc021: Please see the section above for instructions as I don't handle any of the day to day management of the filters it uses. -- Amanda (she/her) 02:45, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
ok, sorry Martintalk 02:47, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – July 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2024).

Administrator changes

added
removed

Technical news

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:58, 6 July 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-30

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

Feature News

  • Stewards can now globally block accounts. Before the change only IP addresses and IP ranges could be blocked globally. Global account blocks are useful when the blocked user should not be logged out. Global locks (a similar tool logging the user out of their account) are unaffected by this change. The new global account block feature is related to the Temporary Accounts project, which is a new type of user account that replaces IP addresses of unregistered editors that are no longer made public.
  • Later this week, Wikimedia site users will notice that the Interface of FlaggedRevs (also known as "Pending Changes") is improved and consistent with the rest of the MediaWiki interface and Wikimedia's design system. The FlaggedRevs interface experience on mobile and Minerva skin was inconsistent before it was fixed and ported to Codex by the WMF Growth team and some volunteers. [9]
  • Wikimedia site users can now submit account vanishing requests via GlobalVanishRequest. This feature is used when a contributor wishes to stop editing forever. It helps you hide your past association and edit to protect your privacy. Once processed, the account will be locked and renamed. [10]
  • Have you tried monitoring and addressing vandalism in Wikipedia using your phone? A Diff blog post on Patrolling features in the Mobile App highlights some of the new capabilities of the feature, including swiping through a feed of recent changes and a personal library of user talk messages for use when patrolling from your phone.
  • Wikimedia contributors and GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) organisations can now learn and measure the impact Wikimedia Commons is having towards creating quality encyclopedic content using the Commons Impact Metrics analytics dashboard. The dashboard offers organizations analytics on things like monthly edits in a category, the most viewed files, and which Wikimedia articles are using Commons images. As a result of these new data dumps, GLAM organisation can more reliably measure their return on investment for programs bringing content into the digital Commons. [11]

Project Updates

  • Come share your ideas for improving the wikis on the newly reopened Community Wishlist. The Community Wishlist is Wikimedia’s forum for volunteers to share ideas (called wishes) to improve how the wikis work. The new version of the wishlist is always open, works with both wikitext and Visual Editor, and allows wishes in any language.

Learn more

  • Have you ever wondered how Wikimedia software works across over 300 languages? This is 253 languages more than the Google Chrome interface, and it's no accident. The Language and Product Localization Team at the Wikimedia Foundation supports your work by adapting all the tools and interfaces in the MediaWiki software so that contributors in our movement who translate pages and strings can translate them and have the sites in all languages. Read more about the team and their upcoming work on Diff.
  • How can Wikimedia build innovative and experimental products while maintaining such heavily used websites? A recent blog post by WMF staff Johan Jönsson highlights the work of the WMF Future Audience initiative, where the goal is not to build polished products but test out new ideas, such as a ChatGPT plugin and Add a Fact, to help take Wikimedia into the future.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. You can also get other news from the Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin.

MediaWiki message delivery 00:01, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-32

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

Feature news

  • Advanced item Two new parser functions will be available this week: {{#dir}} and {{#bcp47}}. These will reduce the need for Template:Dir and Template:BCP47 on Commons and allow us to drop 100 million rows from the "what links here" database. Editors at any wiki that use these templates, can help by replacing the templates with these new functions. The templates at Commons will be updated during the Hackathon at Wikimania. [12][13]
  • Communities can request the activation of the visual editor on entire namespaces where discussions sometimes happen (for instance Wikipedia: or Wikisource: namespaces) if they understand the known limitations. For discussions, users can already use DiscussionTools in these namespaces.
  • The tracking category "Pages using Timeline" has been renamed to "Pages using the EasyTimeline extension" in TranslateWiki. Wikis that have created the category locally should rename their local creation to match.

Project updates

  • Editors who help to organize WikiProjects and similar on-wiki collaborations, are invited to share ideas and examples of successful collaborations with the Campaigns and Programs teams. You can fill out a brief survey or share your thoughts on the talkpage. The teams are particularly looking for details about successful collaborations on non-English wikis.
  • Advanced item The new parser is being rolled out on Wikivoyage wikis over the next few months. The English Wikivoyage and Hebrew Wikivoyage were switched to Parsoid last week. For more information, see Parsoid/Parser Unification.

Learn more

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:40, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – August 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2024).

Administrator changes

readded Isabelle Belato
removed

Interface administrator changes

readded Izno

CheckUser changes

removed Barkeep49

Technical news

  • Global blocks may now target accounts as well as IP's. Administrators may locally unblock when appropriate.
  • Users wishing to permanently leave may now request "vanishing" via Special:GlobalVanishRequest. Processed requests will result in the user being renamed, their recovery email being removed, and their account being globally locked.

Arbitration

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:59, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

Why have you blocked me?

I want to know why you have blocked me when I haven't done anything wrong.

Toppmoller Toppmoller (talk) 22:44, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

I assume you are talking about one of my global blocks about a proxy or VPN. I would need the IP address to be able to review anything. -- Amanda (she/her) 01:04, 8 August 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-34

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

Feature news

  • Editors who want to re-use references but with different details such as page numbers, will be able to do so by the end of 2024, using a new sub-referencing feature. You can read more about the project and how to test the prototype.
  • Editors using tracking categories to identify which pages use specific extensions may notice that six of the categories have been renamed to make them more easily understood and consistent. These categories are automatically added to pages that use specialized MediaWiki extensions. The affected names are for: DynamicPageList, Kartographer, Phonos, RSS, Score, WikiHiero. Wikis that have created the category locally should rename their local creation to match. Thanks to Pppery for these improvements. [14]
  • Advanced item Technical volunteers who edit modules and want to get a list of the categories used on a page, can now do so using the categories property of mw.title objects. This enables wikis to configure workflows such as category-specific edit notices. Thanks to SD001 for these improvements. [15][16]

Bugs status

  • Advanced item Your help is needed to check if any pages need to be moved or deleted. A maintenance script was run to clean up unreachable pages (due to Unicode issues or introduction of new namespaces/namespace aliases). The script tried to find appropriate names for the pages (e.g. by following the Unicode changes or by moving pages whose titles on Wikipedia start with Talk:WP: so that their titles start with Wikipedia talk:), but it may have failed for some pages, and moved them to Special:PrefixIndex/T195546/ instead. Your community should check if any pages are listed there, and move them to the correct titles, or delete them if they are no longer needed. A full log (including pages for which appropriate names could be found) is available in phab:P67388.
  • Editors who volunteer as mentors to newcomers on their wiki are once again able to access lists of potential mentees who they can connect with to offer help and guidance. This functionality was restored thanks to a bug fix. Thank you to Mbch331 for filing the bug report. You can read about that, and 18 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Project updates

  • The application deadline for the Product & Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) has been extended to September 16. Members will help by providing advice to Foundation Product and Technology leadership on short and long term plans, on complex strategic problems, and help to get feedback from more contributors and technical communities. Selected members should expect to spend roughly 5 hours per month for the Council, during the one year pilot. Please consider applying, and spread the word to volunteers you think would make a positive contribution to the committee.

Learn more

  • The 2024 Coolest Tool Awards were awarded at Wikimania, in seven categories. For example, one award went to the ISA Tool, used for adding structured data to files on Commons, which was recently improved during the Wiki Mentor Africa Hackathon. You can see video demonstrations of each tool at the awards page. Congratulations to this year's recipients, and thank you to all tool creators and maintainers.
  • The latest Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin is available, and includes some highlights from Wikimania, an upcoming Language community meeting, and other news from the movement.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:50, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

DeltaQuadBot reporting 3+ year stale account?

Hi. I came across Meddemfund (talk · contribs) today having been reported on the bot listing at WP:UAA. DeltaQuadBot reported it with this diff. I examined the account, saw it was problematic as a group/organization account and that it had edited on behalf of the organization it appears to represent. So, I blocked it. Then... I happened to notice the only edit the account ever made was in January 2021, 3+ years ago. There's no deleted edits, no edit filter log entries. There's nothing to indicate current activity. How is the bot picking up on this account? Stale accounts shouldn't be reported. Thoughts? --Hammersoft (talk) 02:21, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) My guess is that it saw the log entry when that account created a second account ten minutes before DQB reported it. stwalkerster (talk) 17:39, 22 August 2024 (UTC)
That's a good bet. Interesting they would do that. --Hammersoft (talk) 18:40, 22 August 2024 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – September 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2024).

Administrator changes

removed Pppery

Interface administrator changes

removed Pppery

Oversighter changes

removed Wugapodes

CheckUser changes

removed

Guideline and policy news

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

Question about DQB

Hi! Over at ANI, Liz pointed out that usernames with the string 'truth' often belong to accounts of problematic editors. Does DQB current send such usernames to UAA like it does with 'yolo' (drawing attention to editors whose usernames aren't themselves violations but are high risk of being disruptive based on the username)? QwertyForest (talk) 20:39, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

User:AmandaNP/UAA/Blacklist contains all the filtering rules, and I haven't maintained the list for a long time, I leave it to those active at UAA per the talkpage on that user page. -- Amanda (she/her) 02:57, 5 September 2024 (UTC)
I've made an edit request on the talk page of the blacklist. Best regards, QwertyForest (talk) 06:53, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-37

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

Feature news

  • Starting this week, the standard syntax highlighter will receive new colors that make them compatible in dark mode. This is the first of many changes to come as part of a major upgrade to syntax highlighting. You can learn more about what's to come on the help page. [17][18]
  • Editors of wikis using Wikidata will now be notified of only relevant Wikidata changes in their watchlist. This is because the Lua functions entity:getSitelink() and mw.wikibase.getSitelink(qid) will have their logic unified for tracking different aspects of sitelinks to reduce junk notifications from inconsistent sitelinks tracking. [19]

Project updates

  • Users of all Wikis will have access to Wikimedia sites as read-only for a few minutes on September 25, starting at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [20]
  • Contributors of 11 Wikipedias, including English will have a new MOS namespace added to their Wikipedias. This improvement ensures that links beginning with MOS: (usually shortcuts to the Manual of Style) are not broken by Mooré Wikipedia (language code mos). [21]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 18:48, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

UAA NO_SIM_MATCH bug?

The username "TaxandRealEstateExpert" was recently reported by the bot to UAA because of the reason: "Used x instead of cks attempting to skip filter: long username without spaces. Violating string: tacksandrealestateeckspert". This is despite the fact that the filter in question has had NO_SIM_MATCH attached to it since June, which should have prevented the username from being reported. Is this a bug or is there something I'm missing? Helpful Raccoon (talk) 03:29, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

You aren't missing anything. This is fixed. -- Amanda (she/her) 05:20, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-38

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

Improvements and Maintenance

  • Wishlist item Editors interested in templates can help by reading the latest Wishlist focus area, Template recall and discovery, and share your feedback on the talkpage. This input helps the Community Tech team to decide the right technical approach to build. Everyone is also encouraged to continue adding new wishes.
  • The new automated Special:NamespaceInfo page helps editors understand which namespaces exist on each wiki, and some details about how they are configured. Thanks to DannyS712 for these improvements. [22]
  • References Check is a feature that encourages editors to add a citation when they add a new paragraph to a Wikipedia article. For a short time, the corresponding tag "Edit Check (references) activated" was erroneously being applied to some edits outside of the main namespace. This has been fixed. [23]
  • It is now possible for a wiki community to change the order in which a page’s categories are displayed on their wiki. By default, categories are displayed in the order they appear in the wikitext. Now, wikis with a consensus to do so can request a configuration change to display them in alphabetical order. [24]
  • Advanced item Tool authors can now access ToolsDB's public databases from both Quarry and Superset. Those databases have always been accessible to every Toolforge user, but they are now more broadly accessible, as Quarry can be accessed by anyone with a Wikimedia account. In addition, Quarry's internal database can now be queried from Quarry itself. This database contains information about all queries that are being run and starred by users in Quarry. This information was already public through the web interface, but you can now query it using SQL. You can read more about that, and 20 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
  • Any pages or tools that still use the very old CSS classes mw-message-box need to be updated. These old classes will be removed next week or soon afterwards. Editors can use a global-search to determine what needs to be changed. It is possible to use the newer cdx-message group of classes as a replacement (see the relevant Codex documentation, and an example update), but using locally defined onwiki classes would be best. [25]

Technical project updates

  • Next week, all Wikimedia wikis will be read-only for a few minutes. This will start on September 25 at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. This maintenance process also targets other services. The previous switchover took 3 minutes, and the Site Reliability Engineering teams use many tools to make sure that this essential maintenance work happens as quickly as possible. [26]

Tech in depth

  • Advanced item The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes details about: research about hook handlers to help simplify development, research about performance improvements, work to improve the REST API for end-users, and more.
  • Advanced item To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
    • Hackathon Showcase (45 mins) - 19 short presentations by some of the Hackathon participants, describing some of the projects they worked on, such as automated testing of maintenance scripts, a video-cutting command line tool, and interface improvements for various tools. There are more details and links available in the Phabricator task.
    • Co-Creating a Sustainable Future for the Toolforge Ecosystem (40 mins) - a roundtable discussion for tool-maintainers, users, and supporters of Toolforge about how to make the platform sustainable and how to evaluate the tools available there.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:58, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

DeltaQuadBot UAA

Hello, DeltaQuadBot has not reported any usernames on the UAA page for the last five days. The last report it posted was on 16 September. Maybe the bot needs a fix. – DreamRimmer (talk) 15:31, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

That's my bad. When I made the above fix, I had a tab error. A full run is running now. -- Amanda (she/her) 22:53, 21 September 2024 (UTC)
Thanks :) – DreamRimmer (talk) 09:44, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-39

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

Weekly highlight

  • All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday September 25 at 15:00 UTC. Reading the wikis will not be interrupted, but editing will be paused. These twice-yearly processes allow WMF's site reliability engineering teams to remain prepared to keep the wikis functioning even in the event of a major interruption to one of our data centers.

Updates for editors

A screenshot of the interface for the Alt Text suggested-edit feature
  • Editors who use the iOS Wikipedia app in Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Chinese, may see the Alt Text suggested-edit experiment after editing an article, or completing a suggested edit using "Add an image". Alt-text helps people with visual impairments to read Wikipedia articles. The team aims to learn if adding alt-text to images is a task that editors can be successful with. Please share any feedback on the discussion page.
  • The Codex color palette has been updated with new and revised colors for the MediaWiki user interfaces. The most noticeable changes for editors include updates for: dark mode colors for Links and for quiet Buttons (progressive and destructive), visited Link colors for both light and dark modes, and background colors for system-messages in both light and dark modes.
  • Advanced item It is now possible to include clickable wikilinks and external links inside code blocks. This includes links that are used within <syntaxhighlight> tags and on code pages (JavaScript, CSS, Scribunto and Sanitized CSS). Uses of template syntax {{…}} are also linked to the template page. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements. [27]
  • Two bugs were fixed in the GlobalVanishRequest system by improving the logging and by removing an incorrect placeholder message. [28][29]
  • View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Advanced item From Wikimedia Enterprise:
    • The API now enables 5,000 on-demand API requests per month and twice-monthly HTML snapshots freely (gratis and libre). More information on the updates and also improvements to the software development kits (SDK) are explained on the project's blog post. While Wikimedia Enterprise APIs are designed for high-volume commercial reusers, this change enables many more community use-cases to be built on the service too.
    • The Snapshot API (html dumps) have added beta Structured Contents endpoints (blog post on that) as well as released two beta datasets (English and French Wikipedia) from that endpoint to Hugging Face for public use and feedback (blog post on that). These pre-parsed data sets enable new options for researchers, developers, and data scientists to use and study the content.

In depth

  • Advanced item The Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) is used to get answers to questions using the Wikidata data set. As Wikidata grows, we had to make a major architectural change so that WDQS could remain performant. As part of the WDQS Graph Split project, we have new SPARQL endpoints available for serving the "scholarly" and "main" subgraphs of Wikidata. The query.wikidata.org endpoint will continue to serve the full Wikidata graph until March 2025. After this date, it will only serve the main graph. For more information, please see the announcement on Wikidata.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:32, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-40

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

Updates for editors

  • Readers of 42 more wikis can now use Dark Mode. If the option is not yet available for logged-out users of your wiki, this is likely because many templates do not yet display well in Dark Mode. Please use the night-mode-checker tool if you are interested in helping to reduce the number of issues. The recommendations page provides guidance on this. Dark Mode is enabled on additional wikis once per month.
  • Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor as their default can access features from the 2017 wikitext editor by adding ?veaction=editsource to the URL. If you would like to enable the 2017 wikitext editor as your default, it can be set in your preferences. [30]
  • For logged-out readers using the Vector 2022 skin, the "donate" link has been moved from a collapsible menu next to the content area into a more prominent top menu, next to "Create an account". This restores the link to the level of prominence it had in the Vector 2010 skin. Learn more about the changes related to donor experiences. [31]
  • The CampaignEvents extension provides tools for organizers to more easily manage events, communicate with participants, and promote their events on the wikis. The extension has been enabled on Arabic Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Swahili Wikipedia, and Meta-Wiki. Chinese Wikipedia has decided to enable the extension, and discussions on the extension are in progress on Spanish Wikipedia and on Wikidata. To learn how to enable the extension on your wiki, you can visit the CampaignEvents page on Meta-Wiki.
  • View all 22 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Developers with an account on Wikitech-wiki should check if any action is required for their accounts. The wiki is being changed to use the single-user-login (SUL) system, and other configuration changes. This change will help reduce the overall complexity for the weekly software updates across all our wikis.

In depth

  • The server switch was completed successfully last week with a read-only time of only 2 minutes 46 seconds. This periodic process makes sure that engineers can switch data centers and keep all of the wikis available for readers, even if there are major technical issues. It also gives engineers a chance to do maintenance and upgrades on systems that normally run 24 hours a day, and often helps to reveal weaknesses in the infrastructure. The process involves dozens of software services and hundreds of hardware servers, and requires multiple teams working together. Work over the past few years has reduced the time from 17 minutes down to 2–3 minutes. [32]

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 22:16, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – October 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2024).

Administrator changes

added
removed

CheckUser changes

readded
removed

Guideline and policy news

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:58, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

The Admin's Barnstar
Dear AmandaNP, thanks for all you do as an administrator. Keep up the good work! You are making a difference here! With regards, AnupamTalk 01:50, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-41

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

Weekly highlight

  • Communities can now request installation of Automoderator on their wiki. Automoderator is an automated anti-vandalism tool that reverts bad edits based on scores from the new "Revert Risk" machine learning model. You can read details about the necessary steps for installation and configuration. [33]

Updates for editors

Updates for technical contributors

  • It is now possible for <syntaxhighlight> code blocks to offer readers a "Copy" button if the copy=1 attribute is set on the tag. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements. [35]
  • Customized copyright footer messages on all wikis will be updated. The new versions will use wikitext markup instead of requiring editing raw HTML. [36]
  • Advanced item Later this month, temporary accounts will be rolled out on several pilot wikis. The final list of the wikis will be published in the second half of the month. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 11 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts. Guidance on how to update the code is available.
  • Advanced item Rate limiting has been enabled for the code review tools Gerrit and GitLab to address ongoing issues caused by malicious traffic and scraping. Clients that open too many concurrent connections will be restricted for a few minutes. This rate limiting is managed through nftables firewall rules. For more details, see Wikitech's pages on Firewall, GitLab limits and Gerrit operations.
  • Five new wikis have been created:

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:38, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-42

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

Updates for editors

  • The Structured Discussion extension (also known as Flow) is starting to be removed. This extension is unmaintained and causes issues. It will be replaced by DiscussionTools, which is used on any regular talk page. A first set of wikis are being contacted. These wikis are invited to stop using Flow, and to move all Flow boards to sub-pages, as archives. At these wikis, a script will move all Flow pages that aren't a sub-page to a sub-page automatically, starting on 22 October 2024. On 28 October 2024, all Flow boards at these wikis will be set in read-only mode. [42][43]
  • WMF's Search Platform team is working on making it easier for readers to perform text searches in their language. A change last week on over 30 languages makes it easier to find words with accents and other diacritics. This applies to both full-text search and to types of advanced search such as the hastemplate and incategory keywords. More technical details (including a few other minor search upgrades) are available. [44]
  • View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, EditCheck was installed at Russian Wikipedia, and fixes were made for some missing user interface styles.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Editors who use the Toolforge tool Earwig's Copyright Violation Detector will now be required to log in with their Wikimedia account before running checks using the "search engine" option. This change is needed to help prevent external bots from misusing the system. Thanks to Chlod for these improvements. [45]
  • Phabricator users can create tickets and add comments on existing tickets via Email again. Sending email to Phabricator has been fixed. [46]
  • Advanced item Some HTML elements in the interface are now wrapped with a <bdi> element, to make our HTML output more aligned with Web standards. More changes like this will be coming in future weeks. This change might break some tools that rely on the previous HTML structure of the interface. Note that relying on the HTML structure of the interface is not recommended and might break at any time. [47]

In depth

  • The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes: updates on Wikimedia's authentication system, research to simplify feature development in the MediaWiki platform, updates on Parser Unification and MathML rollout, and more.
  • The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition include: research about improving topic suggestions related to countries, improvements to PHPUnit tests, and more.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 21:17, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-43

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

Weekly highlight

  • The Mobile Apps team has released an update to the iOS app's navigation, and it is now available in the latest App store version. The team added a new Profile menu that allows for easy access to editor features like Notifications and Watchlist from the Article view, and brings the "Donate" button into a more accessible place for users who are reading an article. This is the first phase of a larger planned navigation refresh to help the iOS app transition from a primarily reader-focused app, to an app that fully supports reading and editing. The Wikimedia Foundation has added more editing features and support for on-wiki communication based on volunteer requests in recent years.
iOS Wikipedia App's profile menu and contents

Updates for editors

  • Wikipedia readers can now download a browser extension to experiment with some early ideas on potential features that recommend articles for further reading, automatically summarize articles, and improve search functionality. For more details and to stay updated, check out the Web team's Content Discovery Experiments page and subscribe to their newsletter.
  • Later this month, logged-out editors of these 12 wikis will start to have temporary accounts created. The list may slightly change - some wikis may be removed but none will be added. Temporary account is a new type of user account. It enhances the logged-out editors' privacy and makes it easier for community members to communicate with them. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 12 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts. Guidance on how to update the code is available. Read more about the deployment plan across all wikis.
  • View all 33 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the South Ndebele, Pannonian Rusyn, Obolo, Iban and Tai Nüa Wikipedia languages were created last week. [48][49][50][51][52]
  • It is now possible to create functions on Wikifunctions using Wikidata lexemes, through the new Wikidata lexeme type launched last week. When you go to one of these functions, the user interface provides a lexeme selector that helps you pick a lexeme from Wikidata that matches the word you type. After hitting run, your selected lexeme is retrieved from Wikidata, transformed into a Wikidata lexeme type, and passed into the selected function. Read more about this in the latest Wikifunctions newsletter.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Advanced item Users of the Wikimedia sites can now format dates more easily in different languages with the new {{#timef:…}} parser function. For example, {{#timef:now|date|en}} will show as "12 November 2024". Previously, {{#time:…}} could be used to format dates, but this required knowledge of the order of the time and date components and their intervening punctuation. #timef (or #timefl for local time) provides access to the standard date formats that MediaWiki uses in its user interface. This may help to simplify some templates on multi-lingual wikis like Commons and Meta. [53][54]
  • Advanced item Commons and Meta users can now efficiently retrieve the user's language using {{USERLANGUAGE}} instead of using {{int:lang}}. [55]
  • The Product and Tech Advisory Council (PTAC) now has its pilot members with representation across Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America. They will work to address the Movement Strategy's Technology Council initiative of having a co-defined and more resilient technological platform. [56]

In depth

  • The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: an upcoming Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module, new Community Configuration options, and details on new projects.
  • The Wikimedia Foundation is now an official partner of the CVE program, which is an international effort to catalog publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities. This partnership will allow the Security Team to instantly publish common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) records that are affecting MediaWiki core, extensions, and skins, along with any other code the Foundation is a steward of.
  • The Community Wishlist is now testing machine translations for Wishlist content. Volunteers can now read machine-translated versions of wishes and dive into discussions even before translators arrive to translate content.

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 20:49, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-44

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

Updates for editors

Updates for technical contributors

  • Wikis can use the Guided Tour extension to help newcomers understand how to edit. The Guided Tours extension now works with dark mode. Guided Tour maintainers can check their tours to see that nothing looks odd. They can also set emitTransitionOnStep to true to fix an old bug. They can use the new flag allowAutomaticBack to avoid back-buttons they don't want. [58]
  • Administrators in the Wikimedia projects who use the Nuke Extension will notice that mass deletions done with this tool have the "Nuke" tag. This change will make reviewing and analyzing deletions performed with the tool easier. [59]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:53, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Invitation to participate in a research

Hello,

The Wikimedia Foundation is conducting a survey of Wikipedians to better understand what draws administrators to contribute to Wikipedia, and what affects administrator retention. We will use this research to improve experiences for Wikipedians, and address common problems and needs. We have identified you as a good candidate for this research, and would greatly appreciate your participation in this anonymous survey.

You do not have to be an Administrator to participate.

The survey should take around 10-15 minutes to complete. You may read more about the study on its Meta page and view its privacy statement .

Please find our contact on the project Meta page if you have any questions or concerns.

Kind Regards,

WMF Research Team

BGerdemann (WMF) (talk) 19:22, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – November 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2024).

Administrator changes

readded
removed

CheckUser changes

removed Maxim

Oversighter changes

removed Maxim

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • Mass deletions done with the Nuke tool now have the 'Nuke' tag. This change will make reviewing and analyzing deletions performed with the tool easier. T366068

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:20, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

WP:UAA/Bot again

Hi Amanda, It looks like the bot has stopped updating the page could you take a look? Thanks Nobody (talk) 08:13, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

@1AmNobody24: Thanks for letting me know. Sorry I got busy during the week. An addition to the blacklist shut it down.
@TTWIDEE and Ahecht: Please do not throw unicode into the script. It's regex dependent even for the comments. Please also make sure that you see a successful report after your changes are implemented or watch my talkpage to know to revert. We are now mass dumping a weeks worth of reports on UAA for admins to handle. -- Amanda (she/her) 19:16, 2 November 2024 (UTC)
@AmandaNP Sorry about that, and thanks for the tips. When I had looked at the bot code I had though that the colons were being used to split off the other flags before they were treated as a regex, but I guess I read it incorrectly. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 21:40, 2 November 2024 (UTC)
@AmandaNP Looking at the code a bit more, I think it was the semicolon that was messing it up since as the code treated that as the start of a new line. However, it's easier to just leave special characters out of the text rather than experiment further. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 21:44, 2 November 2024 (UTC)
I doubt it's the colon, because the code uses it as a splitter and then it would crash on every other line. I debugged it live and those three lines is the one it stopped on and crashed in a regex search. With it changed, it's fully running now. That said, I did not read that deep into it. -- Amanda (she/her) 21:51, 2 November 2024 (UTC)
You might also want to consider adding the task to WP:BAM so you get notified when the bot hasn't edited the page for a certain amount of time. Nobody (talk) 12:10, 3 November 2024 (UTC)
@AmandaNP I haven't actually run it, but from my interpretation of the code it's crashing because it split the line at the semicolon, assumed everything after the semicolon was the regex at the beginning of a new line, and then choked on trying to parse that. It doesn't fail on every other line because the text after those semicolons is a valid regex. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 15:20, 3 November 2024 (UTC)
@AmandaNP OK, sorry about that. Thanks for the info. I won't make edit requests to the blacklist with HTML entities in future. There's an editnotice for the blacklist that says "Do not add wikilinks to this list. The bot is very syntax sensitive.". Maybe we could change it to "Do not add wikilinks or HTML entities to this list. The bot is very syntax-sensitive.". I imagine they'll probably be lots more people who'll notice the dash issue in the notes and want to add proper dashes, so I think a notice like that would be very helpful. Maybe we could add a notice about it on the blacklist talk page as well. TTWIDEE (talk) 20:55, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-45

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

  • Stewards can now make global account blocks cause global autoblocks. This will assist stewards in preventing abuse from users who have been globally blocked. This includes preventing globally blocked temporary accounts from exiting their session or switching browsers to make subsequent edits for 24 hours. Previously, temporary accounts could exit their current session or switch browsers to continue editing. This is an anti-abuse tool improvement for the Temporary Accounts project. You can read more about the progress on key features for temporary accounts. [60]
  • Wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled can now use the Collaboration List feature. This list provides a new, easy way for contributors to learn about WikiProjects on their wikis. Thanks to the Campaign team for this work that is part of the 2024/25 annual plan. If you are interested in bringing the CampaignEvents extension to your wiki, you can follow these steps or you can reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for help.
  • The text color for red links will be slightly changed later this week to improve their contrast in light mode. [61]
  • View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, on multilingual wikis, users can now hide translations from the WhatLinksHere special page.

Updates for technical contributors

  • XML data dumps have been temporarily paused whilst a bug is investigated. [62]

In depth

  • Temporary Accounts have been deployed to six wikis; thanks to the Trust and Safety Product team for this work, you can read about the deployment plans. Beginning next week, Temporary Accounts will also be enabled on seven other projects. If you are active on these wikis and need help migrating your tools, please reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for assistance.
  • The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New languages supported in translatewiki or in MediaWiki; New keyboard input methods for some languages; details about recent and upcoming meetings, and more.

Meetings and events

  • MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2024 is happening in Vienna, Austria and online from 4 to 6 November 2024. The conference will feature discussions around the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies in different industries and will inspire and onboard new users.

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MediaWiki message delivery 20:47, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

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