User talk:RoySmith

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Earth Day 2022 Edit-a-thon - April 22nd - 2PM EST

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You're invited! NYC Earth Day 2022 Edit-a-thon! April 22nd!

Sure We Can and the Environment of New York City Task Force invite you to join us for:

This Edit-a-Thon is part of a larger Earth Day celebration, hosted by Brooklyn based recycling and community center Sure We Can, that runs from 1PM-7PM and is open to the public! See this flyer for more information: https://www.instagram.com/p/CcGr4FyuqEa/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

-- Environment of New York City Task Force

How adverse is DYK...

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Moved to Template:Did you know nominations/David Yong

Understandability guideline workshop

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Hi RoySmith! I was wondering if you had time to give feedback on the workshop text for the understandability guideline (comparison with the existing text). I notice you often comment on MTAU at FACs. My hope is that the new text offers more practical guidance, but want to make sure that the examples and new guidance all work before moving on to an RfC stage. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 08:57, 28 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'll take a look, thanks for the ping. And since I'm here, I wonder if you have any thoughts on the advice I recently left for the Intraproboscis FAC. RoySmith (talk) 00:09, 31 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Femke I've read through the diff quickly and so far I like what I see. I'll give it a closer read when I get a chance.
One thing that occurs to me is that most people in technical fields are used to writing journal articles, which have a very different goal from encyclopedia articles. Encyclopedia articles are meant to educate. Journal articles are meant to demonstrate to your peers (and thesis advisors, tenure committees, hiring committees, funding agencies, etc) what wonderful work you've done. And once you've fallen into that style of writing, it's hard to do anything else. RoySmith (talk) 00:25, 31 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Absolutely. Even those who aren't used to writing like that, are using sources in that style. I've put this observation in the workshop text, as I see many folks emulating the style of their HQRSs. Looking forward to your feedback :). —Femke 🐦 (talk) 06:41, 31 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Promotion of Louis Abramson

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Congratulations, RoySmith! The article you nominated, Louis Abramson, has been promoted to featured status, recognizing it as one of the best articles on Wikipedia. The nomination discussion has been archived.
This is a rare accomplishment and you should be proud. If you would like, you may nominate it to appear on the Main page as Today's featured article. Keep up the great work! Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) via FACBot (talk) 00:06, 31 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
story · music · places

Congratulations! I meant to review, but was distracted. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 05:59, 31 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

On top of my talk: birthday of a great violinist and Requiem for a great friend. We sang Paradisi gloria from the Stabat Mater in the end. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:03, 31 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-36

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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 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. [1]
  • 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. [2]
  • 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. [3][4]
  • 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]

September music

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story · music · places

My story today is about a composer and his ballerina wife, pictured as I saw them in 2009. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:53, 2 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Gerda Arendt Hi. I don't mean to be impolite, but you could kindly unsubscribe me from these announcements? Thanks. RoySmith (talk) 15:12, 2 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

DYK for Morris Park Aerodrome

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On 4 September 2025, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Morris Park Aerodrome, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that an airshow at a Bronx airport may have been the inspiration for the first serious artistic work to depict flight by aircraft? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Morris Park Aerodrome. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, Morris Park Aerodrome), and the hook may be added to the statistics page after its run on the Main Page has completed. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

RoySmith (talk) 00:03, 4 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

September 10: Wikimedia NYC Annual Election Meeting

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September 10: Annual Election & Members Meeting

You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our Annual Election & Members Meeting, in-person at Prime Produce in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan and also via Zoom.

The Members' Meeting is similar to other WikiWednesday meetups, except that its primary function is to elect new members to the Board of Directors. We will elect three board seats – half of the elected seats on the board – and the elected board can appoint up to five more board members. As part of the Members Meeting, we will also focus on the Wikimedia NYC Programs Plan for the coming year, our Financial Report, and Annual and Monthly event teams for the coming year.

Election info:

  • To run for election or to vote, you must be a dues-paying member of Wikimedia New York City, having renewed in the past 12 months.
  • Voting will be both online, via emailed ballots from the ElectionBuddy service, and in-person.
  • The poll will be open for the 48 hours between 8pm EDT on September 8 and 8pm EDT on September 10.
  • For additional information, please consult the Election FAQ.

Meeting info:

All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct and Photography Policy.

P.S. Next event, September 19 — NYC 400 Edit-A-Thon: Nueva Yol

(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)

--Wikimedia New York City Team via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:47, 5 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) 17:16, 6 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 9 September 2025

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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) 01:06, 9 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-37

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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 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. [5]
  • 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. [6]
  • 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. [7]
  • 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. [8][9]
  • 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. [10]
  • 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 01:11, 9 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Crystal Springs Dam GA

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Hey! Reaching out because you were the one who initially reviewed my article on the Crystal Springs Dam back in January. I know it's been a while (I've been busy with high school) but I've just renominated the article and would truly appreciate any further feedback. Thanks! 3602kiva (talk) 18:32, 9 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]