User talk:TheSandDoctor

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If you have any questions about another WMF wiki or my actions on such edition, please leave it on my talk page on that wiki and I will see it as a notification/get back to you. enwiki is not the appropriate place to discuss concerns from other WMF wikis

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No RfXs since 14:16, 11 July 2025 (UTC).—^{cyberbot I}_{Talk to my owner:Online}

This user dreams that their talk page will be full of cookies, cake, pie, and every other delicious delicacy

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Article policies

This user talk page might be watched by friendly talk page stalkers, which means that someone other than me might reply to your query. Their input is welcome and their help with messages that I cannot reply to quickly is appreciated.

Archives

If you feel that I have reverted an edit or issued a warning in error, please let me know. I am human, and I do make mistakes. Please don't interpret an error on my part as a personal attack on you. It's not, I promise. I ask you to simply bring it to my attention; I am always open to civil discussion. Thank you. TheSandDoctor (talk) 04:52, 30 March 2017 (UTC)]][reply]

If I see something such as a box, template, image, etc., on another user/user talk page that catches my eye, I will "borrow" it. More than likely without asking. ;) TheSandDoctor (talk) 04:52, 30 March 2017 (UTC)]][reply]

chef Patrick Jamon

Hi there,this is AriJamon I hope you have been well, I have the link to the social media page with a great picture of the Chef with the royalties release explained at bottom of page like explained.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DNboU6yRbKi/?igsh=NTUyaTVobTYzZ2kx

I can also send you a picture on email if you would like, thank you for your help and come visit in Costa Rica and try Chefs amazing food Arijamon (talk) 23:57, 16 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi again Arijamon! It's good to hear from you. Would it be possible to have the photographer (Maria?) use the interactive release generator to email the image file to permissions-commons

wikimedia.org? TheSandDoctor ^Talk 23:39, 17 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Awesome we did the email and waiting on answer for the Wikipedia commons and this is our ticket number [Ticket#2025081810007032] Chef Patrick jamon thank you Arijamon (talk) 00:36, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hopefully we did it correctly I’m sure you are busy w many other things and I hope you have a great day, let me know how I should proceed when You get a chance. Pura Vida Arijamon (talk) 12:41, 3 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

We have correctly uploaded the photos to Wikipedia commons thank you for your help Arijamon (talk) 18:34, 26 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from Sajeda Emad 08 on Wikipedia:WikiProject Anime and manga/Assessment (12:42, 29 August 2025)

مرحباً كيف حالكم ، كيف اكتب قصه انمي ناروتو عدلت فيها قليلاً --Sajeda Emad 08 (talk) 12:42, 29 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Original anime isn't suitable for Wikipedia, Sajeda Emad 08. You additionally are probably looking for the Arabic Wikipedia as all content on the English Wikipedia should be in English, especially articles.

من المحتمل أيضًا أنك تبحث عن ويكيبيديا العربية حيث أن كل المحتوى على ويكيبيديا الإنجليزية يجب أن يكون باللغة الإنجليزية، وخاصة المقالات. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 16:02, 30 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from JEISKING TOURS (19:53, 29 August 2025)

Hi, I am so interested in wildlife articles how do I get them to look through and edit types --JEISKING TOURS (talk) 19:53, 29 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@JEISKING TOURS: That is a very good question. Perhaps try looking through categories like Category:Wildlife and its sub-categories? Or just pick an article and start clicking through to related ones linked within it. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 16:04, 30 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from 007Editor of History on Bhairodev Dakav Sonchuri (21:13, 30 August 2025)

Hello sir, I create my first page. Pls can you explain how do I add titles (for eg for page India titles are ETYMOLOGY, HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, REFERENCES) in the page. I want to add the title REFERENCES in my page. Thank you in advance. --007Editor of History (talk) 21:13, 30 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@007Editor of History: Please see Help:Section for more info on those.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to let me know. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 01:03, 1 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-36

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.
View all 37 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

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

Spotlight on some Wikimania 2025 Sessions:
- Identifying AI-generated text by searching for ISBNs whose checksums fail: Mathias Schindler of WMDE shared tools to help communities search for these.
- La durabilité du mouvement Wikimedia face aux défis actuels et futurs: This session explored how Wikimedia can stay a trusted source of knowledge in the age of generative AI, information overload, and disinformation.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:47, 1 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from Alfie T Hopton (02:16, 3 September 2025)

Hey Doctor, how do I change the name of a page? I found a page that has incorrect grammar in the title but I could not figure out how to capitalise the company's name. Thanks. --Alfie T Hopton (talk) 02:16, 3 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Alfie T Hopton: Please see Help:move. I gather that you are referring to Follow this (organisation)? I think the confusion here stems from wanting to comply with the policy on naming articles where sentence case is generally used, except for proper names, and that Follow This appears to refer to themselves in both cases (their site icon is "Follow this" but in prose they use "Follow This" when referring to themselves). However, given the confusion that, while currently avoided, can appear with those two words together in a sentence, I would agree with you on the rename and have conducted it. Thank you for pointing this out!

If, on the other hand, that isn't the page you were referring to and you've spotted another, please do let me know and I will look at that one as well.

TheSandDoctor ^Talk 15:36, 6 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – September 2025

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

Administrator changes

Euryalus

Interface administrator changes

Ragesoss

CheckUser changes

AmandaNP

SQL

Oversight changes

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

Administrators can now access the Special:BlockedExternalDomains page from the Special:CommunityConfiguration list page. This makes it easier to find. T393240

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]

Tech News: 2025-37

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

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

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]
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]
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

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 01:11, 9 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Map images

I've just responded to your encouraging posting at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bots/Work_requests#Donating_map_images. Maybe we could discuss things further here? I rarely visit Commons. Maproom (talk) 08:07, 9 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from KyleTheFox18 (04:38, 10 September 2025)

Hi SandDoctor, I recently made a pretty major rewrite on the Wikipedia Page for Super Animal Royale. The article had flaws, it was not written neutrally, and I believe it may still be biased. (I also added some info, as I play the game.) My first question is, what qualifies as a biased article, enough so to get tagged? My second question is, how do you find reliable sources for things that are verifiably true (for example, the gameplay mechanics of a game small enough it only has limited coverage) but have no sources written about the topic? Should you just not write about that part of the game? Thanks for your help! :) --KyleTheFox18 (talk) 04:38, 10 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@KyleTheFox18: Super Animal Royale isn't tagged as being biased, so I gather that this is a more general question? No matter who you ask you will probably get a slightly different answer in terms of biases in a given article. Wikipedia also inherits the biases of the sources that cover a topic and that is largely unavoidable. The goal of the English Wikipedia is to have as neutral a point of view as possible, within the bounds of what sources have covered. That does lead to a historical bias against women etc that is often rather hard to crack thanks to many just simply not getting the coverage required to demonstrate notability in any substantial way. (see Wikipedia:Systemic bias#External factors).

As long as a reasonable person would consider the article to be from a neutral POV then the tag can generally be removed. In practice that means watching out for promotional language and such.

To your second question: this is a little nuanced. I am going to assume that even though it is a smaller game there is enough coverage for WP:GNG. You can use Template:Cite video game, though I urge caution about over use of it. Generally speaking, Wikipedia makes very limited use of primary sources and is built on reliable secondary sources (see WP:V and WP:RSPRIMARY). In the event that there are not enough reliable secondary sources period or the game has no coverage whatsoever, then it should not be covered by Wikipedia (see WP:3SOURCES for a baseline/rough standard). TheSandDoctor ^Talk 13:53, 11 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

thanks! sorry, i was being a bit unclear of what i mean about the bias. I read the article and it was not tagged as biased but read as not from a neutral POV and strangely to me ("which include weapons from simple and easy to use SMG's and Shotguns to complex ones such as Miniguns and the Legendary Dogna's Dartfly Gun", "The game has complex and violent lore", "The map features diverse biomes and locations"). There were also run-on sentences, so I felt the article needed a bit of a rewrite. Thank you for explanation of how I should be careful with sources, and avoid primary sources! :) KyleTheFox18 (talk) 08:42, 12 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Voting for WikiProject Military history coordinators is now open!

Voting for the Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history coordinators is now open! A team of up to ten coordinators will be elected for the next coordination year. Voting closes at 23:59 UTC on 29 September. If you have any questions, you can contact any member of the current coord team. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:26, 15 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-38

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

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. [11]
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 [12]
- 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). [13]
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. [14]
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.
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. [15]

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. [16]
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).
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

Scholarship applications for Wikimania 2026 in Paris, France, are open until October 31.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 17:03, 15 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from NizamPottery (04:38, 17 September 2025)

Hello, I am worried that there is no page on Wikipedia about Multani Blue Pottery of Pakistan. How can you help me to add information about this ancient work? --NizamPottery (talk) 04:38, 17 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi NizamPottery! Please see this guide. In order for there to be an article on a given subject, there must be multiple reliable, published sources covering the topic in depth; these can be things like news articles, peer-reviewed scientific papers, or books published by a publisher (but generally NOT self-published books). The sources don't necessarily have to be in English, but they do need to exist and be used to decide what is included in the entry etc. If a source doesn't talk of it, it doesn't get included.

Creating a brand new Wikipedia article can also one of the hardest things to get a handle on. I am probably not the best to assist as I do not understand Urdu and know very little about pottery. I would recommend either reaching out to an active member of WP:WikiProject Pakistan or maybe WP:WikiProject Craft or asking for assistance at the Teahouse. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 17:24, 20 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from ShyGuyFalls (21:48, 20 September 2025)

Hello, I know something that desperately needs a Wikipedia page, but I'm honestly not sure how to properly write an article.

I'm wondering if I should begin writing it and then allow other users to make it better by editing it --ShyGuyFalls (talk) 21:48, 20 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi ShyGuyFalls! What's the topic? Please see this guide to creating your first article. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 03:52, 22 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Digital Facial Composite software called "FACES". I believe its notable enough and covered by enough sources to deserve its own article. The wikipedia article for Facial Composites even mention it.

Ill check out the guide! Thank you! ShyGuyFalls (talk) 18:29, 22 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4032098/ mention it as well! ShyGuyFalls (talk) 18:32, 22 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@ShyGuyFalls: That article is more of what I would say is a passing mention for a study that used the software rather than being about the software itself. Unfortunately for google results, "Faces" is waaayyy too common of a search term to get good results; to be clear: not your fault or anything, just makes the topic annoying to research. If you are aware of other sources etc I am happy to take a look. Ideally we are looking for at least your 3 best sources for a starting point. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 02:18, 23 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Gotcha, Ill look into it more and if the source arent good or they're lacking in quantity than I think it should be a subsection of the Facial Composite page. Just me though.

Thanks! ShyGuyFalls (talk) 18:01, 23 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-39

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

Weekly highlight

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. [17]
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.
View all 12 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

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 22:52, 22 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Requesting undeletion of some articles

Hi, I need the page histories undeleted for some articles so that they can be reused and attributed appropriately, like on Wikibooks (where I've ported some stuff in the past) and the English Vikidia (where I'm an administrator). For now, I'll start with Pokédex, Pokémon types, Legendary Pokémon, Pokémon evolution, and Pokémon battle.

Having these preserved is important, especially because there's been a 2-decade long problem with Bulbapedia and their CC-BY-NC-SA license. Hope you understand. Thank you! 2005-Fan (talk) 15:36, 27 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Legendary Pokémon has no deleted history so I am confused as to why it was listed. For the others, I would like to get deleting admin Liz's thoughts. These were all (with the exception of Legendary Pokémon) caught up in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gameplay of Pokémon as redirects automatically deleted but did have, at times, longer edit histories dating back to 2008. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 02:52, 29 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I might've listed it by mistake. Feel free to ask Liz; at some point, though, I could just get some 4TB SSD to unpack 2006-08 WP dumps on archive.org to go through the process of doing it myself, though it'd be a lot more time-consuming .2005-Fan (talk) 03:44, 29 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from Alexius Derlone Jehu Appiah (09:25, 29 September 2025)

Hello, how do I great my autobiography --Alexius Derlone Jehu Appiah (talk) 09:25, 29 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-40

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

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. [18]

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. [19]
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. [20]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikiquote in Malay (q:ms:) [21]
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the User Info Card now displays currently active global lock/blocks. [22]

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.
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 20:49, 29 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]