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Administrators' newsletter – June 2025

[edit]

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

Administrator changes

removed

Interface administrator changes

added 0xDeadbeef

CheckUser changes

readded L235

Oversight changes

readded L235

Guideline and policy news

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

Technical news

Arbitration

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

Miscellaneous

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

Administrators' newsletter – July 2025

[edit]

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

Administrator changes

removed NuclearWarfare

Interface administrator changes

added L235

Guideline and policy news

Miscellaneous

  • The 2025 Developing Countries WikiContest will run from 1 July to 30 September. Sign up now!
  • Administrator elections will take place this month. Administrator elections are an alternative to RFA that is a gentler process for candidates due to secret voting and multiple people running together. The call for candidates is July 9–15, the discussion phase is July 18–22, and the voting phase is July 23–29. Get ready to submit your candidacy, or (with their consent) to nominate a talented candidate!
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:47, 7 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-28

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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

  • Temporary accounts have been rolled out on 18 large and medium-sized Wikipedias, including German, Japanese, French, and Chinese. Now, about 1/3 of all logged-out activity across wikis is coming from temporary accounts. Users involved in patrolling may be interested in two new documentation pages: Access to IP, explaining everything related to access to temporary account IP addresses, and Repository with a list of new gadgets and user scripts.

Updates for editors

  • Anyone can play an experimental new game, WikiRun, that lets you race through Wikipedia by clicking from one article to another, aiming to reach a target page in as few steps and in as little time as possible. The project's goal is to explore new ways of engaging readers. Try playing the game and let the team know what you think on the talk page.
  • Users of the Wikipedia Android app in some languages can now play the new trivia game. Which came first? is a simple history game where you guess which of two events happened earlier on today's date. It was previously available as an A/B test. It is now available to all users in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, and Chinese. The goal of the feature is to help engage with new generations of readers. [1]
  • Users of the iOS Wikipedia App in some languages may see a new tabbed browsing feature that enables you to open multiple tabs while reading. This feature makes it easier to explore related topics and switch between articles. The A/B test is currently running in Arabic, English, and Japanese in selected regions. More details are available on the Tabbed Browsing project page.
  • Bureaucrats on Wikimedia wikis can now use Special:VerifyOATHForUser to check if users have enabled two-factor authentication. [2]
  • Wishlist item A new feature related to Template Recall and Discovery will be deployed later this week to all Wikimedia projects: a template category browser will be introduced to assist users in finding templates to put in their “favourite” list. The browser will allow users to browse a list of templates which have been organised into a given category tree. The feature has been requested by the community through the Community Wishlist.
  • It is now possible to access watchlist preferences from the watchlist page. Also the redundant button to edit the watchlist has been removed. [3]
  • Recurrent item View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • As part of MediaWiki 1.44 there is now a unified built-in Notifications system that makes it easier for developers to send, manage, and customize notifications. Check out the updated documentation at Manual:Notifications, information about migration in T388663 and details on deprecated hooks in T389624.
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

  • WikidataCon 2025, the conference dedicated to Wikidata is now open for session proposals and for registration. This year's event will be held online from October 31 – November 02 and will explore on the theme of "Connecting People through Linked Open Data".

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:01, 8 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wikimedia Apps newsletter – Second quarter of 2025

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Hello, and welcome to the second newsletter of 2025! In this edition, we’ll walk you through exciting experiments, features, and improvements that took place in the Wikipedia mobile apps during March, April, and May.

iOS

[edit]

Tabbed Browsing Work Begins

Tabbed browsing is one of the most requested features, and we’ve made major progress this quarter:

Activity Tab Experiment

We launched a 30-day experiment on Chinese, French, Spanish, and Turkish Wikipedias to explore whether a centralized "Activity" space could increase user engagement.

The experiment shows the Suggested Edit “Add an image” feature to newcomers, and we hope to learn if it helps them activate and begin editing. We also hope to learn what users think about an early “Activity tab” prototype that summarizes their weekly editing, reading, and saving activity.

We’ll evaluate outcomes after 30 days.

Personalized Wikipedia Year in Review

We began backend improvements to support the next version of the Year in Review:

  • The 2024 version showed strong engagement. We’re planning to integrate improved stats, collective movement insights, and recognition for donors.
  • We added support for insights about reading time, link follows, and categories.

Navigation Refresh & Article Search A/B Test

We completed our test of a more prominent article search bar on four Wikipedias—French, Arabic, German, and Japanese.

  • The A/B test showed a +23.8% increase in article-view search usage.
  • While retention didn't shift significantly, the test gave us confidence to scale this UI improvement to all languages.

Temporary Accounts Support

We released support for Temporary Accounts to Wikipedias where the feature is currently enabled. This helps protect IP addresses of unregistered editors.

Bug Fixes & Enhancements

Thanks to internal and volunteer efforts, we resolved:

  • Incorrect date formats on Talk pages
  • Alt Text keyboard overlap
  • Inactive cursor on search
  • Broken insert-link suggestions

Android

[edit]

WikiGames & WikiTrivia Expansion

We expanded WikiGames and continued work on WikiTrivia:

  • New enhancements: game archive, calendar view, score sharing, sound control to the game.
  • 81.5% of players complete the game, and over half replay it on another day.
  • Bug fixes include language mismatches and game crashes.

Jetpack Compose Migration

We continued migrating our UI to Jetpack Compose, including:

  • MessageCardView
  • LangLinksActivity
  • SearchEmptyView
  • WikiCardView and more

This helps modernize the app and improves long-term performance.

Rabbit Holes & Personalized Reading Lists

We completed our Rabbit Holes experiment, and began work on a permanent version of Personalized Reading Lists, tracked in this Epic ticket.

Early designs aim to make suggested reading lists more useful, personalizable, and persistent.

Bug Fixes & Improvements

We addressed:

  • Talk page crashes
  • Search-related language issues
  • OATHAuth hyperlink bug
  • On This Day incorrect year
  • Samsung Galaxy S25 editing toolbar bug
  • UI bugs with Picture of the Day
  • Language display issues

Other Updates

  • A 50-edit requirement was added to use Article Descriptions on English Wikipedia.
  • We fixed pageview analytics and updated reading list icons.

Looking Ahead

From long-requested features like tabbed browsing to smarter personalization and more engaging games, this quarter was packed with progress. Your feedback continues to guide our path forward.

Make sure you’re subscribed to this newsletter to stay in the loop — and thank you for being part of the journey!


~~ARamadan-WMF15:34, 14 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-29

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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

  • Featured templates, a new feature related to Template Recall and Discovery will be deployed this week to all Wikimedia projects: With this feature, editors will be able to quickly access a list of templates that are likely to be useful. These templates will be displayed in a list, under the "featured" tab of the template discovery interface. Administrators can define the list via the Community Configuration interface. The feature fulfills a request by the community through the Community Wishlist. [4][5]
  • Recurrent item View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the request to add Malayalam fonts in the Wikisource Book Export Tool was resolved and now, the rendering of Malayalam letters in exported Wikisource books are accurate. [6]

Updates for technical contributors

  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

Meetings and events

  • WikiIndaba 2025 scholarship application and program submission is open until 23:59 GMT on July 20. WikiIndaba is a regional conference for African Wikimedians both on the continent and in the diaspora to unite and grow together. Submit your scholarship application and program proposal now!
  • WikiCon Brasil 2025 will take place on July 19-20 in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. The Brazilian community members are encouraged to register and attend!

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:05, 14 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 18 July 2025

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Endowment tax form, Wikimania, elections, U4C, fundraising and a duck!
And how do we know?
Five-year journey comes to healthy fruition.
Wikimedians from around the world will gather in person and online at the twentieth annual meeting of Wikimania.
As well as "hermeneutic excursions" and other scientific research findings.
The report covers the Foundation's operations from July 2023 - June 2024
A step towards objective and comprehensive coverage of a project nearly too big to follow.
Drawn this century!
How data from the Wikipedia "necessary articles" lists can shed new light on the gender gap
Annual plans, external trends, infrastructure, equity, safety, and effectiveness. What does it all mean?
Rest in peace.
Wouldn't it be nice without billionaires, scandals, deaths, and wars?
If you are too blasé for Mr. Blasé and don't give a FAC.
* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:48, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-30

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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 Translation Suggestions feature in the Content Translation tool now has another level of article filters added to the "... More" category. Translators who use the Suggestions feature can now select and receive article suggestions that are customized to geographical locations of their interest using the new "Regions" filter. [7]
  • Administrators can now limit "Add a Link" to newcomers. The "Add a Link" Structured Task helps new account holders start editing, but some communities have requested the ability to restrict it to its intended audience: newcomers. Administrators can configure this setting within the Community Configuration feature.
  • Recurrent item View all 29 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • For AbuseFilter editors on some wikis, it is now possible to filter edits based on the RevertRisk score of the edit being attempted. It is only populated if the action being evaluated is an edit. For more information, please see the ORES/AbuseFilter variables documentation.
  • The Beta Cluster wikis have been moved from beta.wmflabs.org to beta.wmcloud.org. Users may need to update URLs in any tools, or in their password managers. Any related issues can be reported in the task.
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

  • WikiCite 2025 will take place from 29–31 August, both online and in-person in Bern, Switzerland. The event's goals are to reconnect communities, institutions, and individuals working with open citations, bibliographic data, and the Wikidata/Wikibase ecosystem. Registration is open and the call for proposals will be announced soon. [8]

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, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-31

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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 Community Tech team will be focusing on wishes related to Watchlists and Recent Changes pages, over the next few months. They are looking for feedback. Please read the latest update, and if you have ideas, please submit a wish on the topic.

Updates for editors

  • The Wikimedia Commons community has decided to block cross-wiki uploads to Wikimedia Commons, for all users without autoconfirmed rights on that wiki, starting on August 16. This is because of widespread problems related to files that are uploaded by newcomers. Users who are affected by this will get an error message with a link to the less restrictive UploadWizard on Commons. Please help translating the message or give feedback on the message text. Please also update your local help pages to explain this restriction. [9]
  • On wikis with temporary accounts enabled and Meta-Wiki, administrators may now set up a footer for the Special:Contributions pages of temporary accounts, similar to those which can be shown on IP and user-account pages. They may do it by creating the page named MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer-temp. [10]
  • Recurrent item View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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 00:22, 29 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from Ben Tedonang (18:08, 29 July 2025)

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Hello, when editing, what are the most important things to consider? And also, how to create a citation. --Ben Tedonang (talk) 18:08, 29 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hello @Ben Tedonang and welcome to Wikipedia!
For the first question ("rules"-wise), I would probably say the core content policies, which are the basic policies involving neutrality, verifiability, and no original research. As for citations, the basic wikitext markup syntax is <ref>...</ref>. The Cite button in the editing toolbar provides a form for generating citations.
I recommend you check out the introduction to Wikipedia, which covers all of these, as well as some other basics. —2NumForIce (speak|edits) 20:31, 29 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from Morganrhobbs (00:20, 1 August 2025)

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Morganrhobbs's mentor CFA is away.

Hi CFA, I'm just getting started on Wikipedia editing, and I was wondering the best way to navigate my current situation. I'm an artist and curator who would like to establish some Wikipedia pages for notable Philadelphia and Kansas City artists (two towns I've lived and worked in museums and galleries.) I currently run a business providing support services to artists, and one of my clients hired me to add a page for her late husband, an artist who showed in a gallery where I later worked.

He's definitely notable and has works in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and many other prestigious collections. I've began drafting an article using good sources: books, interviews, reviews, etc. He's a great candidate for an article, and I don't think it will be a problem to create something accurate, thorough and well-connected to existing content.

My only concern is my relationship to the project. What is the best avenue for publishing this article? It's essentially already drafted, so I could add it. Or would it be better if I ask another user to review and add the article? Is there a chance that I'm totally barking up the wrong tree with all of this?? I hope not.

Looking forward to hearing what you think.

Morganrhobbs --Morganrhobbs (talk) 00:20, 1 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from Susurrusunraveled (14:52, 1 August 2025)

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Hi! I've been trying to update a professor of mine's article because he went through a name and pronoun change in June, but I can't figure out how to change the title of the article and its link to reflect the new name? --Susurrusunraveled (talk) 14:52, 1 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-32

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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 can now enable the User Info card. This feature adds an icon next to usernames on history pages and similar user-contribution log pages. When you tap or click on the icon, it displays data related to that user account such as the number of edits, reverted edits, blocks, and more. It's part of a broader project to make it easier for moderators to evaluate account trustworthiness. The feature can be enabled in your global preferences, and later this week it will be available in local preferences. [11]
  • Everybody is invited to share comments on Collaborative Contributions, a project recently launched by the Connection team. The project aims to create a new way to display the impact of collaborative editing activities (such as edit-a-thons, backlog drives, and WikiProjects) on the wikis. Post your comments on the project talk page. [12]
  • Administrators can now define the default block duration for temporary accounts. To do that, they need to create a page named MediaWiki:Ipb-default-expiry-temporary-account and use a value defined in MediaWiki:Ipboptions. This allows administrators to easily block temporary accounts for 90 days, which is functionally equivalent to an indefinite block. The advantage of this solution is that it does not clutter Special:BlockList. More documentation is available. [13]
  • Recurrent item View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Gadgets can now include .vue files. This makes it easier to develop modern user interfaces using Vue.js, in particular using Codex, the official design system of Wikimedia. Codex icons can be loaded through the gadget definition. The documentation has examples. For user scripts that use Vue.js, an API module now exists to load Codex icons. [14][15]
  • Module developers can now use a Lua interface to simplify the preparation of Lua modules for translation on Meta-Wiki. This improvement makes it easier for translators to find and edit module strings without dealing with raw Lua code. It helps prevent mistakes that could break the module during translation. Module developers and translators are invited to watch the demo video, read more about translatable modules to understand how it works, refer to Meta-Wiki's Module:User Wikimedia project for example usage, and share their feedback on how well it addresses the challenges in their workflow. The interface still has some performance issues, so it should not be used in widely used modules yet. [16]
  • Developers of external tools that connect to Wikimedia pages must set a user-agent that complies with the user-agent policy. This policy will start to be more strongly enforced in August because of external crawlers that are overusing Wikimedia's resources. Tools that are hosted on Wikimedia's Toolforge or Cloud VPS will not be affected by this for now, but should still set a user-agent. More technical details are available, and related questions are welcome in that task.
  • Parsoid Read Views is going to be rolling out to some smaller Wikipedias over the next few weeks, following the successful transition of Wikivoyages and Wiktionaries to Parsoid Read Views. For more information, see the Parsoid/Parser Unification project page. [17]
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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 03:36, 5 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – August 2025

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

Guideline and policy news

  • Following a request for comment, a new speedy deletion criterion, G15, has been enacted. It applies to pages generated by a large language model (LLM) without human review.
  • Following a request for comment, there is a new policy outlining the granting of permissions to view the IP addresses of temporary accounts. Temporary account deployment on the English Wikipedia is currently scheduled for September 2025, and editors can request access to the permission ahead of time. Admins are encouraged to keep an eye on the request page; there will likely be a flood of editors requesting the permission when they realize they can no longer see IP addresses.

Technical news

Arbitration

  • The arbitration case Indian military history has been closed.
    • South Asia (WP:CT/SA) is designated a contentious topic. The topic area is specifically defined as All pages related to the region of South Asia (India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal), broadly construed, including but not limited to history, politics, ethnicity, and social groups.
    • The contentious topic designations for Sri Lanka (SL) and India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan (IPA) are folded into this new contentious topic.
    • The community-authorized general sanctions regarding South Asian social groups (GS/CASTE) are rescinded and folded into this new contentious topic.
  • The arbitration case Article titles and capitalisation 2 has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case closed on 31 July.
  • The arbitration case Transgender healthcare and people has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case will close on 11 August.

Miscellaneous

  • Wikimania 2025 is happening in Nairobi, Kenya, and online from August 6 to August 9. This year marks 20 years of Wikimania. Interested users can join the online event. Registration for the virtual event is free and will remain open throughout Wikimania. You can register here now.
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:55, 7 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 9 August 2025

[edit]
Plus a mysterious CheckUser incident, and the news with Wikinews.
A review of June, July and August.
Who is this guy?
Threads since June.
And slop.
It's not a conlang, it's a crossword puzzle.
gang aft agley, an' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, for promis'd joy!
Everybody's Somebody's Fool.
* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:21, 9 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-33

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

Updates for editors

  • The WikiEditor toolbar now includes its keyboard shortcuts in the tooltips for its buttons. This will help to improve the discoverability of this feature. [18]
  • The Product and Technology Advisory Council published a set of proposed experiments the Wikimedia Foundation can try to improve communication with community. Feedback on the proposals are welcomed until August 22 on this talk page.
  • The search bar on the Minerva skin (mobile) has been updated to use the same type-ahead search component that is used on the Vector 2022 skin. There are no changes in search functionality but there are minor visual changes. Specifically, the close-search button has been changed from an "X" to a back arrow. This helps to distinguish it from the other "X" button that is used to clear any text. [19]
  • Editors on some wikis will see a new toggle for "Group results by page" on watchlist, related changes, and recent changes pages. This is an A/B experiment that is planned to start on August 11, and will run for 3–6 weeks on the Bengali, Chinese, Czech, French, Greek, Portuguese, and Urdu Wikipedias. The experiment will examine how making this feature more discoverable might affect editors' ability to find the edits they are looking for. [20]
  • Recurrent item View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • The multiwiki datasets of Unicode data have been moved to Category:Unicode Module Datasets on Wikimedia Commons, to follow the idea of "One common data source, multiple local wikis". Most wikis have been updated to use the Commons version. You can ask questions at the talkpage. [21]
  • Lua code can add warnings when something is wrong, by using the mw.addWarning() function. It is now possible to add more than one warning, instead of new warnings replacing old ones. If you maintain a Lua module that used warnings, you should check it still works as expected. [22]
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:25, 11 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-34

[edit]

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

Updates for editors

  • Later this week, people who are logged-in and have the "Discussion tools" Beta Feature enabled will gain the ability to "Thank" individual comments directly from talk pages, rather than needing to navigate to page history. Learn more about this feature. [23]
  • An A/B test comparing two versions of the desktop donate link launched on testwiki on 12 August and on English Wikipedia 14 August for 0.1% of logged out users on the desktop site. The experiment will run for three weeks, ending on 12 September. [24]
  • An A/A test to measure the baseline for reader retention was launched 12 August using Experimentation Lab. This measures the percentage of users who revisit a wiki after their initial visit over a 14-day period. No visual changes are expected. The experiment will run through 31 August. [25]
  • Five new wikis have been created:
  • Recurrent item View all 46 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:33, 19 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-35

[edit]

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

  • Wishlist item Advanced item Template authors can now use additional CSS properties, since the CSS sanitizer used by TemplateStyles was updated. For example: width: fit-content; ruby-align; relative units such as lh; and custom strings in list-style-type. These improvements are a Community Wishlist wish. [31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40]
  • On large wikis, the default time period to display edits from, within the Special:RecentChanges page, has been changed from 7 days to 1 day. This is part of a performance improvement project. This should have no user-facing impact due to the quantity of edits on these wikis. [41]
  • Administrators can now access the Special:BlockedExternalDomains page from the Special:CommunityConfiguration list page. This makes it easier to find. [42]
  • Wikimedia Commons videos were not shown in the Videos tab in Google Search. The problem was investigated and reported to Google who have now fixed the issue. [43][44]
  • One new wiki has been created: a Wiktionary in Betawi (wikt:bew:) [45]
  • Recurrent item View all 39 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Two fields of the recentchanges database table are being removed. rc_new and rc_type are being removed in favor of rc_source. Queries to these older fields will start to fail starting this week and developers should use rc_source instead. These older fields were deprecated over 10 years ago and should not be in use. This is part of work to improve the performance and stability of queries to the recentchanges table. [46]
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

  • The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: support for new languages in MediaWiki and translatewiki; the start of the Language Onboarding and Development project to help support the growth of new and small wikis; updates on research projects; and more.

Meetings and events

  • The next Language Community Meeting is happening soon, August 29th at 15:00 UTC. This week's meeting will cover: the Avro keyboard developers from Wikimedia Bangladesh, who were recently awarded a national award for their contributions to this keyboard; and other topics.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:08, 26 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from Holly Morse (11:33, 1 September 2025)

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How do I add my own Wikipedia page? --Holly Morse (talk) 11:33, 1 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hello @Holly Morse and welcome to Wikipedia!
Creating a new article is a complicated process. Before creating your first article, you should learn editing and rules of Wikipedia and complete smaller tasks at the Task Center.
First, is the subject you are editing closely related to yourself, family, friends, clients, employers, financial or other relationships (having a conflict of interest or COI)? If so, see my standard COI advice.
Before creating a new article, you must make sure that the subject is notable enough for inclusion. Text on Wikipedia must be cited by reliable sources so that information is verifiable. Also, an article about yourself isn't necessarily a good thing, as you don't "own" what you write on Wikipedia.
When you're ready to create a new article, go to Help:Your first article, which will guide you through creating a new article. You should go through the entire page before proceeding to the Article Wizard. After creating a new article draft, it will be reviewed by an Articles for creation volunteer. Be patient; there are currently 2,827 pending submissions, and they are not reviewed in any specific order. In the meantime, you might want to do some basic copyediting so that the article is more likely to be approved. —2NumForIce (speak|edits) 23:55, 2 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-36

[edit]

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

Weekly highlight

  • The Editing team wants to compile a list of templates, jargon terms, and policies used in edit summaries when a copyright violation is removed. This will help them identify the number of edits reverted due to copyright issues. We invite community members from the following Wikis to list these terms in T402601, or to share their list with Trizek_(WMF): Arabic Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, Persian Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Vietnamese Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia. This project is open until September 9th 2025.

Updates for editors

  • The CampaignEvents extension has been enabled for all Wikisources. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. The extension has three features: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List. To request the extension for your wiki, visit the Deployment information page. [47]
  • The lists in the footer of the editing interface, such as "Templates used on this page," will now be organized into columns when there is enough space. This enhancement minimizes scrolling when editing lengthy articles on Wikipedia. [48]
  • On September 3rd, 2025 we will increase the sampling percentages of our group by toggle experiment of the Special:RecentChanges, Special:Watchlist, and Special:RelatedChanges pages on the Chinese, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias to 100 percent, allowing more editors to be part of this experiment. This adjustment is intended to ensure we have sufficient data to make informed decisions when evaluating the experiment results. [49][50]
  • Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users will see suggestions of articles for further reading on English Wikipedia beginning the week of September 22. The feature will be available on both desktop and mobile. All non-English wikis received this change in June and July. The goal is to make it easier for users to find articles. Learn more.
  • Recurrent item View all 37 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

  • Wikifunctions now has a new capability called "lightweight enumeration types", an enumeration type is simply a fixed set of values that's in the type's definition. This capability makes it quick and easy to define such a type, and allows for the reuse of values that are already present in Wikidata. Here is a newsletter to learn more.
  • The latest Readers Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: the formation of two new teams — Reader Growth and Reader Experience; insights into declining pageviews and account creations; highlights from the Wikimania Nairobi panel on improving the reading experience; upcoming experiments to engage new and existing readers; and more.

Meetings and events

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:46, 1 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from Prin300 on User:Prin300 (15:07, 2 September 2025)

[edit]

Hello, l create it myself --Prin300 (talk) 15:07, 2 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Jesus

[edit]

DAILY PROPHETIC DECLARATIONS. 2 Chronicles33 : 24 (AMPC): And his servants conspired against him and killed him in his own house. Dearly Beloved, I decree in the name above all names, every conspiracy against your marriage, fortune, glory, destiny, career, business, ministry and your present position shall be divinely frustrated in Jesus name. Whoever knows you inside out and is doing you, shall be exposed, disgraced and destroyed beyond redemption in Jesus name. Every weapon prepared to terminate your life, shall be used to waste the lives of those plotting to waste your life and destiny in Jesus name. I prophesy every satanic bullet and wicked arrows fired at your glory shall return to senders by fire in Jesus name . The Blood of Jesus will speak for your safety, success, prosperity , protection and peace in Jesus name. DECLARE: I SHALL NOT DIE BEFORE MY APPOINTED TIME!!! Good morning/Day. Prin300 (talk) 15:09, 2 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – September 2025

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

Administrator changes

readded Euryalus
removed

Interface administrator changes

readded Ragesoss

CheckUser changes

readded AmandaNP
removed SQL

Oversight changes

readded AmandaNP

Guideline and policy news

  • An RfC is open on whether use of emojis with no encyclopedic value in mainspace and draftspace (e.g., at the start of paragraphs or in place of bullet points) should be added as a criterion under G15.

Technical news

Arbitration

  • The arbitration case Article titles and capitalisation 2 has been closed.
  • An RfC is in progress to amend the structure, rules, and procedures of the Arbitration Committee election and resolve any issues not covered by existing rules.
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:15, 6 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 9 September 2025

[edit]
UK Online Safety Act remains undefeated.
Plus Wiki rules, Wiki Spin, and physicists get street cred!
The price of Liberty is eternal vigilance.
And other new research findings.
Tis true: there's magic in the web of it.
With the usual mix of war, death, super heroes, a belt, and Wednesday.
It's an easy one.
* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:02, 9 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-37

[edit]

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

Weekly highlight

  • The Editing team is working on a new check: Paste check. This check informs newcomers who paste text into Wikipedia that the content might not be accepted. This check is an effort to increase the likelihood that the new content people are adding to Wikipedia is aligned with the Movement's commitment to offering information under a free content license. This check will soon be tested at a few wikis. If your community is interested in this test, please tell us in this task, or contact the team.

Updates for editors

  • Advanced item Later this week, users of the "Improved Syntax Highlighting" beta feature will be able to use a linting tool to see errors or other potential problems in wikitext in real time. See the help page for more information. [51]
  • Advanced item When browsing a wiki (like en.wikipedia.org), the software responds in one of two ways: a desktop page, or a redirect to a mobile version on an "m" domain (like en.m.wikipedia.org). Over the next three weeks, MediaWiki will start displaying the mobile version to mobile devices directly on the standard domain, without this redirect. This change does not affect existing m-dot URLs, or the "Desktop view" opt-out. Learn more. [52]
  • When an edit changes the categories of a page, the changes to the category membership counts are now happening asynchronously. This improves the speed of saving edits, especially when moving many pages to or from the same category, and reduces the risk of site outages, but it means that the counts can show outdated information for a few minutes. [53]
  • Edits on Wikidata to qualifiers (properties and values) and references (properties and values) in a Wikidata item statement will now not add entries to the RecentChanges or Watchlist pages on all other Wikis. This is a temporary change to improve performance while other solutions are created. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. Learn more. [54][55]
  • Japanese-language wikis have had a major upgrade to the way that search works. The new search should generally give more accurate and more relevant search results. [56]
  • Recurrent item View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:10, 9 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from Distrigency (13:10, 9 September 2025)

[edit]

Hello mentor, how are you today. What’s your take on my method of edits so far? How do I retain being a pro editor --Distrigency (talk) 13:10, 9 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Cite Unseen September 2025 updates

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Hello! Thank you for using Cite Unseen. We are excited to share details about a big update we just deployed. With grant support from Wikimedia CH, we've added several new features, including a citation filtering dashboard, settings dialog, support for localization, and the ability to easily suggest domain categorizations. Cite Unseen now also lives on Meta Wiki, as part of our effort to serve all Wikimedia projects. Our source lists are now also on Meta-Wiki, where they can be collaboratively edited by the community.

Please see our newsletter on Meta-Wiki for full details. If you have feature ideas, notice any issues with our new updates, or have any questions, please get in touch via our project talk page. Thank you!

From SuperHamster and SuperGrey, 05:43, 14 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This message was sent via global message delivery. You received this message as you've been identified as a user of Cite Unseen. If you are not a Cite Unseen user, or otherwise don't want to receive updates in the future, you can remove yourself from our mailing list here.

Question from MaksPiPl (11:04, 14 September 2025)

[edit]

Good afternoon! I am a beginner and I need some help. I would like to publish articles related to the professional female football players of the women’s football club Vorskla (Poltava). I understand that I first need to do something before that. Could you please advise me what exactly? Thank you in advance for your reply! --MaksPiPl (talk) 11:04, 14 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hello @MaksPiPl and welcome to Wikipedia! Creating a new article is a more complicated process. Before creating your first article, you should learn editing and rules of Wikipedia and complete smaller tasks at the Task Center.
First, is the subject you are editing closely related to yourself, family, friends, clients, employers, financial or other relationships (having a conflict of interest or COI)? If so, see my standard COI advice.
Before creating a new article, you must make sure that the subject is notable enough for inclusion. Text on Wikipedia must be cited by reliable sources so that information is verifiable. Also, an article about yourself isn't necessarily a good thing, as you don't "own" what you write on Wikipedia.
When you're ready to create a new article, go to Help:Your first article, which will guide you through creating a new article. You should go through the entire page before proceeding to the Article Wizard. After creating a new article draft, it will be reviewed by an Articles for creation volunteer. Be patient; there are currently 2,827 pending submissions, and they are not reviewed in any specific order. In the meantime, you might want to do some basic copyediting so that the article is more likely to be approved. —2NumForIce (speak|edits) 17:10, 14 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-38

[edit]

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

Updates for editors

  • References lists that are made using the <references/> tag will now automatically display with columns in Vector 2022 when readers are using its 'standard' settings for text-size and page-width. [57]
  • Starting in the week of October 6, on small wikis and medium wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled, all autoconfirmed users will be able to use Event Registration as an organizer. No changes will be made for large wikis unless requested in Phabricator. This change is being made to make it easier for more people to use Event Registration, especially on wikis that are less likely to have policies related to the Event Organizer right. Learn more.
  • Users that search using regular expressions (regex) can now use additional features including:
    • for the intitle: keyword: metacharacters for start-of-line (^) and end-of-line ($) anchors [58]
    • for both intitle: and insource: keywords: shorthand character classes for digits (\d), whitespace (\s), and word characters (\w); and escape codes for line feed (\r), newline (\n), tab (\t), and unicode (e.g. \uHHHH). [59]
  • When you search for text that looks like an IP, the system will now show search results. It used to take you to the contributions for that IP instead of showing search results. [60]
  • All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 24. This is planned at 15:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests which happen twice a year. You can read more about the background and details of this process on the Diff blog.
  • Recurrent item View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that affected users who used the page-tabs to switch from wikitext editing of a section into the visualeditor. [61]

Updates for technical contributors

  • The MediaWiki Interfaces team is redesigning the Wikimedia REST API Sandbox with Codex. If you have feedback on improvements for the API documentation or what makes developer experiences smooth (or frustrating), you’re invited to join an upcoming discovery interview, or leave feedback onwiki. Learn more.
  • Edits to Wikidata aliases (an alternative name for an item or a property) will now be shown in RecentChanges and Watchlist entries on other wikis less often, reducing unnecessary notifications. This will reduce the overall quantity of 'noisy' entries. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. Learn more. [62]
  • The new Unicode 17.0 version has been released. The datasets on Commons for the Module:Unicode data have been updated. Wikipedias that do not use the Commons datasets should either update their own data or switch to the Commons datasets.
  • Users of the Wikimedia Enterprise Structured Contents endpoints can now access Parsed Tables. The new Parsed Tables feature extracts and represents Wikipedia tables in structured JSON. This improves machine accessibility as part of the Structured Contents initiative. Structured Contents output is freely available through the On-demand API, or through Wikimedia Cloud Services.
  • A dataset of English Wikipedia biographical information from Wikimedia Enterprise has been published on Kaggle, for evaluation and research. This provides structured data from more than 1.5 million biographies, including birth and death dates, education, affiliations, careers, awards, and more (from a June 2024 snapshot).
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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 17:02, 15 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-39

[edit]

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

Weekly highlight

  • On September 24th at 15:00 UTC, all Wikimedia sites users will experience a brief read-only period due to a scheduled datacenter server switchover. The Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team will redirect all traffic from one primary server to its backup. You can listen to the switchover using the "Listen to Wikipedia" tool, where you will hear edits stop for a few minutes during the read-only phase, then resume. This twice-yearly datacenter server switchover ensures reliability by testing the backup datacenter, so that our sites can stay online even if the primary datacenter fails. You can read more about the process on the Diff blog.

Updates for editors

  • Editors of 60 more Wiktionaries will soon be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them into their pages. A function takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, like adding numbers, converting miles to meters, calculating elapsed time, or declining a word into a case. They will join the other 65 Wiktionary language editions, which already have access to embedded Wikifunctions calls. Later this year, plans are in place to expand to more Wiktionaries and the Incubator.
  • A new parser function has been added: {{#contentmodel}}. Template editors and admins can use it to get the localized or canonical name of the content model of a specific page. The function makes it easier to create and edit system messages, such as MediaWiki:editinginterface, even when you switch types of pages, like wiki, JavaScript, CSS or JSON page. [63]
  • Adding or editing a DISPLAYTITLE for an article using VisualEditor will no longer be broken. Editors who use VisualEditor mode to modify the {{DISPLAYTITLE}} would no longer have the literal text "DISPLAYTITLE" or its localized variant added to their articles. A list of pages that may have been affected and might need cleanup is documented in this ticket.
  • Beta users of the Wikipedia Android app can now try the redesigned Activity tab, which replaces the Edits tab. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging.
  • Recurrent item View all 12 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

  • Wikifunctions users can now import many essential facts involving geo-coordinates, quantities and time values from Wikidata. This is made possible by the creation of Wikifunctions types for these values, which makes them available for use by functions in Wikifunctions. Learn more about how this works in this video and Wikifunctions' August 1 newsletter (for quantities) and August 22 newsletter (for geo-coordinates).

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:51, 22 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from Trenton2010 (14:30, 25 September 2025)

[edit]

Hello, I am trying to make a Wikipedia page but got denied and added some more sources and resubmitted it but wondering if there are any good options. --Trenton2010 (talk) 14:30, 25 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I left them my carefully crafted and incredibly helpful deletion notice to help guide them. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 15:25, 25 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I also left a comment while declining the draft at AfC which was pretty specific in identifying the exact problems as well as identified a starting point for writing in the future. Bobby Cohn 🍁 (talk) 17:58, 25 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from LIUCleonardo8 (20:03, 25 September 2025)

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hello Mr or Mrs, i'am Leonardo and i'm working on a group project. how could i improve my user page? I feel like there is no order and I'd like to move the picture to the right side and not at the bottom. Thank you so much, LC --LIUCleonardo8 (talk) 20:03, 25 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hello and welcome to Wikipedia @LIUCleonardo8! User pages are mainly a personal space to provide info about your editing. See the user page guidelines for what you can put there.
For images in articles, the convention is to place the image's code (like [[File:Example.svg|thumb]]) before the paragraph.
User pages are not the best place for drafts; use draft pages for them. —2NumForIce (speak|edits) 03:33, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from Thato Nqisa on User:Thato Nqisa (19:59, 28 September 2025)

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How can I elaborate my story better from all sides. --Thato Nqisa (talk) 19:59, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-40

[edit]

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

Weekly highlight

  • A major software upgrade has been made to Phabricator. The update introduces performance improvements, a refreshed search interface, enhancements to Maniphest task search, updates to user profile pages and project workboards, new Herald automation features, as well as general text input, mobile experience improvements and more. [64]

Updates for editors

  • The Community Tech team will release the new Community Wishlist extension on October 1, that will improve the way wishes will be submitted. The new extension will allow users to add tags to their wishes to better categorise them, and (in a future iteration) to filter them by status, tags and focus areas. It will also be possible to support individual wishes again, as requested by the community in many instances. The old system will be retired. There will be a brief period of downtime while the extension is deployed and wishes are migrated to the new system. You can read more about this in the latest update or you can consult the current documentation on MediaWiki.
  • As announced on Diff blog, the production trial of the hCaptcha service for bot detection has begun. The trial is currently using hCaptcha to protect account creation on Chinese, Persian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, and Turkish Wikipedias, where it will replace our existing CAPTCHA (FancyCaptcha). The goal with the trial is to better block bots while also improving usability and accessibility for users who encounter CAPTCHA challenges.
  • The CampaignEvents extension has been deployed to Wikimedia Commons. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. On Commons, anyone who is a registered user can use it as an event participant. To use it as an organizer, someone needs to have the event organizer right.
  • Sub-referencing, a new feature to re-use references with different details has been released to German Wikipedia. You can test the feature on testwiki or on betawiki as well. Please share your thoughts on using templates in sub-references or volunteer to become a pilot wiki.
  • On wikis using the Mentorship system, communities can now opt experienced editors out of Mentorship through Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship. Within this setting, communities may define thresholds, based on edit count and account age, to decide when an editor is considered experienced enough to no longer receive Mentorship. [65]
  • The Editing Team and the Machine Learning Team are working on a new check for newcomers: Tone check. Using a prediction model, this check will encourage editors to improve the tone of their edits, using artificial intelligence. We invite volunteers to review the first version of the Tone language model for the following languages: Arabic, Czech, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Farsi, Italian, Norwegian, Romanian and Latvian. Users from these wikis interested in reviewing this model are invited to sign up at MediaWiki.org. The deadline to sign up is on October 3, which will be the start date of the test.
  • The rollout of multiblocks had the side effect that non-active block logs may have been shown on Special:Contributions and on blocked users' user and user_talk pages. This issue will be fully resolved in a few days. As part of the fix, messages prefixed with sp-contributions-blocked-notice will be removed and replaced with those prefixed with blocked-notice-logextract in a few weeks. Please help translate the new messages and update any local overrides if needed.
  • There was a bug with links added using visual editor if they included characters such as [ ] | after the fragment identifier (#). They were not encoded properly creating an incorrect link. This has been fixed. [66]
  • One new wiki has been created: a Wikiquote in Malay (q:ms:) [67]
  • Recurrent item View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the User Info Card now displays currently active global lock/blocks. [68]

Updates for technical contributors

  • Later this week, editors using Lua modules will be able to use the mw.title.newBatch function to look up the existence of up to 25 pages at once, in a way that only increases the expensive function count once.
  • A new Unsupported Tools Working Group has been formed as part of ongoing efforts to collectively determine technical work priorities, similar to the Product & Technology Advisory Council (PTAC). The working group will help prioritize and review requests for support of unmaintained extensions, gadgets, bots, and tools. For the first cycle, the group will be prioritizing an unsupported Wikimedia Commons tool.
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:48, 29 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]