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How to add to the community bulletin board
The community bulletin board has 2 sections that can be used by Wikipedians for announcements: "Events and projects" and "WikiProject notices". In general, keep it concise (under 2 lines), refrain from fancy formatting, and new entries should be placed at the top of their section.
Events and projects: In this section, only organized events, projects, and/or competitions should be listed. These are organized by how often they occur:
The Yearly section is for uncommon events, like events that only occur every year, once, or irregularly. The Monthly section is for events that occur each month, or are always ongoing.
WikiProject notices: In this section, any announcement, request for help or other notice from a WikiProject should be listed here.
Entries should be signed, and ordered from newest to oldest.
Entries are to be removed after a period of 6 months.
Welcome to the community bulletin board, which is a page used for announcements from WikiProjects and other groups. Included here are coordinated efforts, events, projects, and other general announcements.
Monthly contest, WikiProject Military history. The contest department of the Military history WikiProject aims to motivate increased quality in military history articles by offering a form of friendly competition for project members making improvements to them. The primary contest available is a simple rolling competition that awards points for improving articles. The contest runs from the first to last day of each month.
Guild of Copy Editors' editing blitz. The December 2024 editing blitz is a one-week-long effort by the Guild of Copy Editors to reduce its backlog. The themes are: articles on the GOCE Requests page from November to December 2024, and articles on the backlog from July 2023 and August 2023. It will begin on 15 December, 00:00 (UTC), and end on 21 December, 23:59 (UTC).
Also consider posting WikiProject, Task Force, and Collaboration news at The Signpost's WikiProject Report page.Please include your signature when adding a listing here.
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
Technical documentation contributors can find updated resources, and new ways to connect with each other and the Wikimedia Technical Documentation Team, at the Documentation hub on MediaWiki.org. This page links to: resources for writing and improving documentation, a new #wikimedia-techdocs IRC channel on libera.chat, a listing of past and upcoming documentation events, and ways to request a documentation consultation or review. If you have any feedback or ideas for improvements to the documentation ecosystem, please contact the Technical Documentation Team.
Updates for editors
Layout change for the Edit Check feature
Later this week, Edit Check will be relocated to a sidebar on desktop. Edit check is the feature for new editors to help them follow policies and guidelines. This layout change creates space to present people with new Checks that appear while they are typing. The initial results show newcomers encountering Edit Check are 2.2 times more likely to publish a new content edit that includes a reference and is not reverted.
The Chart extension, which enables editors to create data visualizations, was successfully made available on MediaWiki.org and three pilot wikis (Italian, Swedish, and Hebrew Wikipedias). You can see a working examples on Testwiki and read the November project update for more details.
Translators in wikis where the mobile experience of Content Translation is available, can now discover articles in Wikiproject campaigns of their interest from the "All collection" category in the articles suggestion feature. Wikiproject Campaign organizers can use this feature, to help translators to discover articles of interest, by adding the <page-collection> </page-collection> tag to their campaign article list page on Meta-wiki. This will make those articles discoverable in the Content Translation tool. For more detailed information on how to use the tool and tag, please refer to the step-by-step guide. [1]
The Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, now has a multiselect filter for namespace selection. This enables users to select multiple specific namespaces, instead of only one or all, when fetching pages for deletion.
The Nuke feature also now provides links to the userpage of the user whose pages were deleted, and to the pages which were not selected for deletion, after page deletions are queued. This enables easier follow-up admin-actions. Thanks to Chlod and the Moderator Tools team for both of these improvements. [2]
The Editing Team is working on making it easier to populate citations from archive.org using the Citoid tool, the auto-filled citation generator. They are asking communities to add two parameters preemptively, archiveUrl and archiveDate, within the TemplateData for each citation template using Citoid. You can see an example of a change in a template, and a list of all relevant templates. [3]
Last week, all wikis had problems serving pages to logged-in users and some logged-out users for 30–45 minutes. This was caused by a database problem, and investigation is ongoing. [5]
View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug in the Add Link feature has been fixed. Previously, the list of sections which are excluded from Add Link was partially ignored in certain cases. [6][7]
Updates for technical contributors
Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, now has an early-stage implementation in PHP. It is available for general use in MediaWiki extensions and Toolforge apps through Composer, with use in MediaWiki core coming soon. More information is available in the documentation. Thanks to Doğu for the inspiration and many contributions to the library. [8]
Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. On December 4, the MediaWiki Interfaces team began rerouting page/revision metadata and rendered HTML content endpoints on testwiki from RESTbase to comparable MediaWiki REST API endpoints. The team encourages active users of these endpoints to verify their tool's behavior on testwiki and raise any concerns on the related Phabricator ticket before the end of the year, as they intend to roll out the same change across all Wikimedia projects in early January. These changes are part of the work to replace the outdated RESTBase system.
The 2024 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 3 January 2025, and has an associated privacy statement.
You can help improve the articles listed below! This list updates frequently, so check back here for more tasks to try. (See Wikipedia:Maintenance or the Task Center for further information.)
WikiProjects are ongoing collaborations to improve articles having to do with a particular subject. Hundreds exist; find one that interests you! There are also many other fine projects listed below.
List of WikiProjects - Topics include art, business and economics, games, geography, history, humanities, law, literature, mathematics, music, politics, science, sports, technology, transportation, and more.
Lee Arthur Smith (born December 4, 1957 in Shreveport, Louisiana) was a pitcher in Major Leagues. Smith played for eight teams in both the NL and AL in his 18-year career, beginning with the Cubs in 1980. Smith led the league in saves four times during his career and by the time of his retirement in 1997 (with the Expos), he was the all-time leader with 478 saves. Smith used his fastball and size (he stood 6'6") to intimidate batters during the late innings of the game and became one of the premier closers of the 1980's and early 1990's.
Twelve-year-old Aang is the last surviving Airbender, a monk of the Air Nomads' Southern Air Temple, and is a supercentenarian at the incarnation age of 112.[1] He is the current incarnation of the Avatar, the spirit of the planet manifested in human form. Aang, as the Avatar, controls the elements and is tasked with keeping the Four Nations at peace.
Elvis Aaron Presley began his career as one of the first performers of rockabilly, an uptempo fusion of country and rhythm and blues with a strong back beat. His novel versions of existing songs, mixing "black" and "white" sounds, made him popular—and controversial—as did his uninhibited stage and television performances. He recorded songs in the rock and roll genre, with tracks like "Hound Dog" and "Jailhouse Rock" later embodying the style. Presley had a versatile voice and had unusually wide success encompassing other genres, including gospel, blues, ballads and pop. To date, he is the only performer to have been inducted into four separate music halls of fame.
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