User talk:Hmlarson
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Hello. You're invited to participate in The World Destubathon. We're aiming to destub a lot of articles and also improve longer stale articles. It will be held from Monday June 16 - Sunday July 13. There is over $3300 going into it, with $500 the top prize. If you are interested in winning something to save you money in buying books for future content, or just see it as a good editathon opportunity to see a lot of articles improved for subjects which interest you, sign up on the page in the participants section if interested. Even if you can only manage a few articles they would be very much appreciated and help towards making the content produced as diverse and broad as possible!♦ Dr. Blofeld 13:08, 15 June 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-25
[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
- You can nominate your favorite tools for the sixth edition of the Coolest Tool Award. Nominations are anonymous and will be open until June 25. You can re-use the survey to nominate multiple tools.
View all 33 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- Foundation staff and technical volunteers use Wikimedia APIs to build the tools, applications, features, and integrations that enhance user experiences. Over the coming years, the MediaWiki Interfaces team will be investing in Wikimedia web (HTTP) APIs to better serve technical volunteer needs and protect Wikimedia infrastructure from potential abuse. You can read more about their plans to evolve the APIs in this Techblog post.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:35, 16 June 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-26
[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
- This week, the Moderator Tools and Machine Learning teams will continue the rollout of a new filter to Recent Changes, releasing it to the third and last batch of Wikipedias. This filter utilizes the Revert Risk model, which was created by the Research team, to highlight edits that are likely to be reverted and help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic contributions. The feature will be rolled out to the following Wikipedias: Azerbaijani Wikipedia, Latin Wikipedia, Macedonian Wikipedia, Malayalam Wikipedia, Marathi Wikipedia, Norwegian Nynorsk Wikipedia, Punjabi Wikipedia, Swahili Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Tagalog Wikipedia. The rollout will continue in the coming weeks to include the rest of the Wikipedias in this project. [1]
Updates for editors
- Last week, temporary accounts were rolled out on Czech, Korean, and Turkish Wikipedias. This and next week, deployments on larger Wikipedias will follow. Share your thoughts about the project. [2]
- Later this week, the Editing team will release Multi Check to all Wikipedias (except English Wikipedia). This feature shows multiple Reference checks within the editing experience. This encourages users to add citations when they add multiple new paragraphs to a Wikipedia article. This feature was previously available as an A/B test. The test shows that users who are shown multiple checks are 1.3 times more likely to add a reference to their edit, and their edit is less likely to be reverted (-34.7%). [3]
- A few pages need to be renamed due to software updates and to match more recent Unicode standards. All of these changes are related to title-casing changes. Approximately 71 pages and 3 files will be renamed, across 15 wikis; the complete list is in the task. The developers will rename these pages next week, and they will fix redirects and embedded file links a few minutes later via a system settings update.
- View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that had caused pages to scroll upwards when text near the top was selected. [4]
Updates for technical contributors
- Editors can now use Lua modules to filter and transform tabular data for use with Extension:Chart. This can be used for things like selecting a subset of rows or columns from the source data, converting between units, statistical processing, and many other useful transformations. Information on how to use transforms is available. [5]
- The
all_linksvariable in AbuseFilter is now renamed tonew_linksfor consistency with other variables. Old usages will still continue to work. [6] - Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: the recent updates for the "Add a Link" Task, two new Newcomer Engagement Features, and updates to Community Configuration.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:18, 23 June 2025 (UTC)
The Signpost: 24 June 2025
[edit]- News and notes: Happy 7 millionth!
Admins arrested in Belarus.
- In the media: Playing professor pong with prosecutorial discretion
Pardon our alliteration!
- Disinformation report: Pardon me, Mr. President, have you seen my socks?
A get-out-of-jail card!
- Recent research: Wikipedia's political bias; "Ethical" LLMs accede to copyright owners' demands but ignore those of Wikipedians
And other new research publications.
- Traffic report: All Sinners, a future, all Saints, a past
Holy men and not-as-holy movies.
Get your self-nomination in by July 2nd!
After two years RuWiki fails to thrive.
- Debriefing: EggRoll97's RfA2 debriefing
With some sweet-and-sour sauce!
- Community view: A Deep Dive Into Wikimedia (part 3)
Every thing you need to know about the Wikimedia Foundation?
- Comix: Hamburgers
Egad!
Women in Red July 2025
[edit]
Announcements:
Progress ("moving the needle"):
Tip of the month:
Other ways to participate:
|
--Lajmmoore (talk 09:20, 30 June 2025 (UTC) via MassMessaging
Tech News: 2025-27
[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 CampaignEvents extension has been enabled on all Wikipedias. 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.
Updates for editors
- AbuseFilter maintainers can now match against IP reputation data in AbuseFilters. IP reputation data is information about the proxies and VPNs associated with the user's IP address. This data is not shown publicly and is not generated for actions performed by registered accounts. [7]
- Hidden content that is within collapsible parts of wikipages will now be revealed when someone searches the page using the web browser's "Find in page" function (Ctrl+F or ⌘F) in supporting browsers. [8][9]
A new feature, called Favourite Templates, will be deployed later this week on all projects (except English Wikipedia, which will receive the feature next week), following a piloting phase on Polish and Arabic Wikipedia, and Italian and English Wikisource. The feature will provide a better way for new and experienced contributors to recall and discover templates via the template dialog, by allowing users to put templates on a special "favourite list". The feature works with both the visual editor and the wikitext editor. The feature is a community wishlist focus area.- View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that had caused some Notifications to be sent multiple times. [10]
Updates for technical contributors
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:38, 30 June 2025 (UTC)
Books & Bytes – Issue 69
[edit]
The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 69, May–June 2025
Issue 69, May–June 2025
In this issue we highlight a new partnership, Citation Watchlist and, as always, a roundup of news and community items related to libraries and digital knowledge.
Read the full newsletterSent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team – 13:11, 1 July 2025 (UTC)
Administrators' newsletter – July 2025
[edit]News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2025).
Administrator changes
Interface administrator changes
Guideline and policy news
- Following a talk page discussion, speedy deletion criterion G13 has been amended to remove "Userspace with no content except the article wizard placeholder text."
- WP:Manual of Style/Superscripts and subscripts was upgraded to a guideline following a RfC discussion.
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!
Tech News: 2025-28
[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
- 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. [11]
- 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. [12]
- 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. [13]
- 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.
- 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 00:02, 8 July 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-29
[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
- 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. [14][15]
- 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. [16]
Updates for technical contributors
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- Developers, designers, and all Wikimedians are invited to submit a project idea for the Wikimania Hackathon 2025. Read this Diff blog post for more details.
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 20:06, 14 July 2025 (UTC)
The Signpost: 18 July 2025
[edit]- News and notes: Is no WikiNews good WikiNews? — Election season returns!
Endowment tax form, Wikimania, elections, U4C, fundraising and a duck!
- In the media: How bad (or good) is Wikipedia?
And how do we know?
- WikiProject report: WikiProject Medicine reaches milestone of zero unreferenced articles
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.
- Recent research: Knowledge manipulation on Russia's Wikipedia fork; Marxist critique of Wikidata license; call to analyze power relations of Wikipedia
As well as "hermeneutic excursions" and other scientific research findings.
- News from the WMF: Form 990 released for the Wikimedia Foundation’s fiscal year 2023-2024
The report covers the Foundation's operations from July 2023 - June 2024
- Discussion report: Six thousand noticeboard discussions in 2025 electrically winnowed down to a hundred
A step towards objective and comprehensive coverage of a project nearly too big to follow.
- Comix: Divorce
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.
- Traffic report: God only knows
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.
Tech News: 2025-30
[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
- 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. [17]
- 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.
- 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.orgtobeta.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. - 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. [18]
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)
Tech News: 2025-31
[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 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. [19]
- 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. [20] - View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- Wikimania 2025 will run from August 6–9. The program is available for you to plan which sessions you want to attend. Most sessions will be live-streamed, with exceptions for those that show the "no camera" icon. If you are joining online to watch live-streams and use the interactive features, please register for a free virtual ticket. For example, you may be interested in technical sessions such as:
- The MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference, Fall 2025 will be held 28–30 October 2025 in Hanover, Germany. This event is organized by and for the third-party MediaWiki community. You can propose sessions and register to attend.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 00:23, 29 July 2025 (UTC)
Women in Red August 2025
[edit]
Announcements:
Tip of the month:
Other ways to participate:
|
--Rosiestep (talk) 14:49, 30 July 2025 (UTC) via MassMessaging
Tech News: 2025-32
[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
- 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. [21]
- 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. [22]
- 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-accountand use a value defined inMediaWiki: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. [23] - View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Gadgets can now include
.vuefiles. 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. [24][25] - 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. [26]
- 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. [27]
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- Wikimania 2025 will run from August 6–9. The program is available for you to plan which sessions you want to attend. Most sessions will be live-streamed, with exceptions for those that show the "no camera" icon. If you are joining online to watch live-streams and use the interactive features, please register for a free virtual ticket. For example, you may be interested in technical sessions such as:
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)
Administrators' newsletter – August 2025
[edit]News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2025).
Administrator changes
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
- Administrators can now restrict the "Add a Link" feature to newcomers. The "Add a Link" Structured Task helps new account holders get started with editing. Administrators can configure this setting in the Community Configuration page.
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.
- South Asia (WP:CT/SA) is designated a contentious topic. The topic area is specifically defined as
- 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.
The Signpost: 9 August 2025
[edit]- News and notes: Court order snips out part of Wikipedia article, editors debate whether to frame shreds or pulp them
Plus a mysterious CheckUser incident, and the news with Wikinews.
- Discussion report: News from ANI, AN, RSN, BLPN, ELN, FTN, and NPOVN
A review of June, July and August.
- Disinformation report: The article in the most languages
Who is this guy?
- Community view: News from the Village Pump
Threads since June.
And slop.
- Crossword: Accidental typography
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!
- Traffic report: I'm not the antichrist or the Superman
Everybody's Somebody's Fool.