User talk:TheSandDoctor
No RfXs since 19:36, 23 April 2025 (UTC).—cyberbot ITalk to my owner:Online |
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Article policies
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![]() | 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. |
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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)]] |
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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)]] |
Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment
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Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment
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I do not understand a thing about wikipedia editing, help --Ma89eo1 (talk) 10:46, 1 May 2025 (UTC)
- @Ma89eo1: Please see the Wikipedia Adventure interactive tutorial. It should help show you the basics. Please let me know if you have any further questions.
TheSandDoctor Talk 13:36, 1 May 2025 (UTC)
- @TheSandDoctor Thanks, what should i do now? Ma89eo1 (talk) 17:56, 1 May 2025 (UTC)
- @Ma89eo1: I am sorry for my delayed response; this somehow slipped through the cracks. Now that you've done the Wikipedia adventure and learned a little bit about editing, I would just look at articles that interest you or use the random article button to find articles. Once you have, just see if there are typos or small clarifications that you can add etc. Just please keep in mind that if you add new information, you need cite your references (that link is a guide) and only reference reliable sources. If you have any questions, please do let me know and I will try my best to respond more promptly; we're just all volunteers here and sometimes offline life gets in the way/slows us down. TheSandDoctor Talk 04:53, 14 May 2025 (UTC)
- @TheSandDoctor Thanks, what should i do now? Ma89eo1 (talk) 17:56, 1 May 2025 (UTC)
Question from Blackeye Uganda (05:47, 5 May 2025)
[edit]hey, i am super excited to have u as ma mentor on this new move in life. its my first time doing this and i have much love for it, how should i get to understanding Wikipedia better --Blackeye Uganda (talk) 05:47, 5 May 2025 (UTC)
- @Blackeye Uganda: I am sorry for my delayed response. I would recommend starting off with The Wikipedia Adventure. It's a good interactive tutorial to help you learn the basics of editing. Once that is done feel free to pop by here if you have any questions! TheSandDoctor Talk 04:54, 14 May 2025 (UTC)
Hi there sand doctor, I would like to add a person I know, master chef who brought French fine dinning to Los Angeles in 1981 from France, he is a key player in French food in Los Angeles and cooking for many presidents as well thru out the 80s 90s, thank you for your help setting this up --Arijamon (talk) 15:19, 7 May 2025 (UTC)
- @Arijamon: Welcome to Wikipedia! Articles need to satisfy the notability guideline for people, which is accomplished by there being multiple reliable secondary sources (that are independent of each other) that have covered that chef extensively (think news stories, non-fiction books etc). If you can provide me with a name that would be a good start, as well as possibly what you believe to be the 3 strongest sources covering that chef. They don't have to be online sources (e.g. they can predate the internet, don't have to be in English etc.), but that does help if they are online. Let's see what we can figure out here! TheSandDoctor Talk 04:47, 14 May 2025 (UTC)
- The Master Chefs name is Chef Patrick Jamon and some
- of the latest articles online are from New York Times, Tico times, and Los Angeles times, also I have countless Los Angeles times news paper articles from back in the late 80s and 90s as well as pictures with every president since 1980, thank you Arijamon (talk) 17:16, 18 May 2025 (UTC)
Hi, Can you tell me, if I'm allowed to link my blog in the "about me" box in my user's page? --Fslozano (talk) 14:32, 8 May 2025 (UTC)
- @Fslozano: You could as that would be in compliance with the user page guidelines, though keep in mind this specific passage: "You are also welcome to include a simple link to your personal home page, although you should not surround it with any promotional language. However, if a link to your home page is the only thing on your userpage, this may be seen as an attempt at self-promotion."
- I hope that helps! TheSandDoctor Talk 04:49, 14 May 2025 (UTC)
- It helps. Fslozano (talk) 15:35, 14 May 2025 (UTC)
Question from BoiledChickenScranwich (03:51, 10 May 2025)
[edit]Hi --BoiledChickenScranwich (talk) 03:51, 10 May 2025 (UTC)
- Hello BoiledChickenScranwich! Welcome to Wikipedia. If you have any questions, please do feel free to let me know or ask at the Teahouse.
TheSandDoctor Talk 04:50, 14 May 2025 (UTC)
hello how do i change images while editing? some articles have wrong images that do not mat h the description thank you --12asim (talk) 08:09, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
- Hi @12asim: Do you have any examples that you could link me? TheSandDoctor Talk 04:43, 14 May 2025 (UTC)
- thank you, i figured it out after some learning.
- another question is can we report editors that spam wrong information during political edit wars and vandalise pages?
- 12asim (talk) 19:21, 15 May 2025 (UTC)
- @12asim: If it is obvious vandalism/spam that you are spotting, then WP:AIV is the venue to report it. Otherwise please see the breakdown at Wikipedia:Requests for administrator attention. TheSandDoctor Talk 05:57, 17 May 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-20
[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 "Get shortened URL" link on the sidebar now includes a QR code. Wikimedia site users can now use it by scanning or downloading it to quickly share and access shared content from Wikimedia sites, conveniently.
Updates for editors
- The Wikimedia Foundation is working on a system called Edge Uniques, which will enable A/B testing, help protect against distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks), and make it easier to understand how many visitors the Wikimedia sites have. This is to help more efficiently build tools which help readers, and make it easier for readers to find what they are looking for. Tech News has previously written about this. The deployment will be gradual. Some might see the Edge Uniques cookie the week of 19 May. You can discuss this on the talk page.
- Starting May 19, 2025, Event organisers in wikis with the CampaignEvents extension enabled can use Event Registration in the project namespace (e.g., Wikipedia namespace, Wikidata namespace). With this change, communities don't need admins to use the feature. However, wikis that don't want this change can remove and add the permitted namespaces at Special:CommunityConfiguration/CampaignEvents.
- The Wikipedia project now has a Wikipedia in Nupe (
w:nup:
). This is a language primarily spoken in the North Central region of Nigeria. Speakers of this language are invited to contribute to new Wikipedia. View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Developers can now access pre-parsed Dutch Wikipedia, amongst others (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese) through the Structured Contents snapshots (beta). The content includes parsed Wikipedia abstracts, descriptions, main images, infoboxes, article sections, and references.
- The
/page/data-parsoid
REST API endpoint is no longer in use and will be deprecated. It is scheduled to be turned off on June 7, 2025. Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The IPv6 support is a newly introduced Cloud virtual network that significantly boosts Wikimedia platforms' scalability, security, and readiness for the future. If you are a technical contributor eager to learn more, check out this blog post for an in-depth look at the journey to IPv6.
Meetings and events
- The 2nd edition of 2025 of Afrika Baraza, a virtual platform for African Wikimedians to connect, will take place on May 15 at 17:00 UTC. This edition will focus on discussions regarding Wikimedia Annual planning and progress.
- The MENA Connect Community Call, a virtual meeting for MENA Wikimedians to connect, will take place on May 17 at 17:00 UTC. You can register now 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 22:35, 12 May 2025 (UTC)
Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment
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Your feedback is requested at Wikipedia:Fringe theories/Noticeboard on a "All RFCs" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Question from Secretnavy20 on Sutton Foster (12:34, 17 May 2025)
[edit]I want this to be Published
“Sutton Foster had always been a strong advocate for LGBTQ rights, but little did she know that her passion for the cause would take on a whole new meaning in her own life.
It all started when Sutton began to question her own identity and feelings towards the same sex. She had always been open-minded and accepting of others, but now she found herself facing a truth she had been avoiding for years - she was a member of the LGBTQ community.
At first, Sutton was hesitant to come out publicly. She was afraid of how her friends, family, and fans would react. But as she delved deeper into her own self-discovery, she realized that she couldn't continue to live in fear and denial.
So, one day, Sutton took a deep breath and made the decision to come out as a proud member of the LGBTQ community. She shared her story with the world, explaining how her journey of self-acceptance had led her to this moment.
The response was overwhelmingly positive. Sutton's fans rallied around her, showing their support and admiration for her courage. Her friends and family embraced her with open arms, proud of the person she had become.
From that day on, Sutton Foster became not only a talented actress and singer, but also a powerful voice for the LGBTQ community. She used her platform to advocate for equality and acceptance, spreading a message of love and understanding wherever she went.
And as she continued on her journey of self-discovery, Sutton found a new sense of purpose and fulfillment in being true to herself and standing up for what she believed in. She had finally found her place in the world, and she was determined to make a difference for others who were struggling with their own identities.
Sutton Foster's story was a powerful reminder that it's never too late to embrace who you are and stand up for what you believe in. And as she continued to inspire others with her courage and strength, she knew that she was exactly where she was meant to be --Secretnavy20 (talk) 12:34, 17 May 2025 (UTC)
- @Secretnavy20: Content in Wikipedia articles needs to be written from a neutral point of view and supported by reliable sources. We also don't publish original research. That is why you've been blocked for a week by another administrator. TheSandDoctor Talk 17:30, 17 May 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-21
[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 and the Machine Learning Team are working on a new check for newcomers: Peacock 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 Peacock language model for the following languages: Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Japanese. Users from these wikis interested in reviewing this model are invited to sign up at MediaWiki.org. The deadline to sign up is on May 23, which will be the start date of the test.
Updates for editors
- From May 20, 2025, oversighters and checkusers will need to have their accounts secured with two-factor authentication (2FA) to be able to use their advanced rights. All users who belong to these two groups and do not have 2FA enabled have been informed. In the future, this requirement may be extended to other users with advanced rights. Learn more.
Multiblocks will begin mass deployment by the end of the month: all non-Wikipedia projects plus Catalan Wikipedia will adopt Multiblocks in the week of May 26, while all other Wikipedias will adopt it in the week of June 2. Please contact the team if you have concerns. Administrators can test the new user interface now on your own wiki by browsing to Special:Block?usecodex=1, and can test the full multiblocks functionality on testwiki. Multiblocks is the feature that makes it possible for administrators to impose different types of blocks on the same user at the same time. See the help page for more information. [1]
- Later this week, the Special:SpecialPages listing of almost all special pages will be updated with a new design. This page has been redesigned to improve the user experience in a few ways, including: The ability to search for names and aliases of the special pages, sorting, more visible marking of restricted special pages, and a more mobile-friendly look. The new version can be previewed at Beta Cluster now, and feedback shared in the task. [2]
- The Chart extension is being enabled on more wikis. For a detailed list of when the extension will be enabled on your wiki, please read the deployment timeline.
- Wikifunctions will be deployed on May 27 on five Wiktionaries: Hausa, Igbo, Bengali, Malayalam, and Dhivehi/Maldivian. This is the second batch of deployment planned for the project. After deployment, the projects will be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in their pages. A function is something that takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, such as adding up two numbers, converting miles into metres, calculating how much time has passed since an event, or declining a word into a case. Wikifunctions will allow users to do that through a simple call of a stable and global function, rather than via a local template.
- Later this week, the Wikimedia Foundation will publish a hub for experiments. This is to showcase and get user feedback on product experiments. The experiments help the Wikimedia movement understand new users, how they interact with the internet and how it could affect the Wikimedia movement. Some examples are generated video, the Wikipedia Roblox speedrun game and the Discord bot.
View all 29 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a bug with creating an account using the API, which has now been fixed. [3]
Updates for technical contributors
- Gadgets and user scripts that interact with Special:Block may need to be updated to work with the new manage blocks interface. Please review the developer guide for more information. If you need help or are unable to adapt your script to the new interface, please let the team know on the talk page. [4]
- The
mw.title
object allows you to get information about a specific wiki page in the Lua programming language. Starting this week, a new property will be added to the object, namedisDisambiguationPage
. This property allows you to check if a page is a disambiguation page, without the need to write a custom function. [5] User script developers can use a new reverse proxy tool to load javascript and css from gitlab.wikimedia.org with
mw.loader.load
. The tool's author hopes this will enable collaborative development workflows for user scripts including linting, unit tests, code generation, and code review on gitlab.wikimedia.org without a separate copy-and-paste step to publish scripts to a Wikimedia wiki for integration and acceptance testing. See Tool:Gitlab-content on Wikitech for more information.Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- The 12th edition of Wiki Workshop 2025, a forum that brings together researchers that explore all aspects of Wikimedia projects, will be held virtually on 21-22 May. Researchers can register now.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:10, 19 May 2025 (UTC)
Question from Economist erick (13:41, 21 May 2025)
[edit]PLEASE GIVE THE BRIEF EXPLANATION ABOUT THE USE OF WIKIPEDIA, ADVANTAGES AND HOW IT STIMULATE SUCCESS ON PUBLICATIONS --e.ladslaus (talk) 13:41, 21 May 2025 (UTC)
- Hi Economist erick. Please see what Writ Keeper wrote on your talk page. I couldn't have said it better myself, TheSandDoctor Talk 22:18, 21 May 2025 (UTC)
Hi Sand Doctor, I am really struggling with adding page categories. Specifically on the page Jeanie Tomaini, I have added three categories, but the ‘category box’ is not appearing and she is not coming up on any of those category lists. Do you have any advice? --ApronMars (talk) 22:27, 21 May 2025 (UTC)
- @ApronMars: I am sorry for the delayed response, though it does look like it was fixed. You had it almost right re categories. They need two square brackets, the word "Category" followed by a colon, the category name itself, and then two more square brackets. So it looks like [[Category:Name of the category]]. Don't copy it from the page source here as I had to do some tricks to get it to render and not put my talk page in that category...just copy it visually and it'll work, but change the category name. When it is a blue link you know it is an existing category, if it's red link that means a category by that name doesn't exist (yet). I hope that helps! Please let me know if you have any questions. The page Help:Category is also worth a read. TheSandDoctor Talk 15:33, 24 May 2025 (UTC)
Question from Abdul Ahad Mehrabi 2002 on CAFA U-17 Championship 2025 (18:11, 25 May 2025)
[edit]CAFA U-17 Championship 2025 --Abdul Ahad Mehrabi 2002 (talk) 18:11, 25 May 2025 (UTC)
- @Abdul Ahad Mehrabi 2002: I am sorry but I do not understand the question. TheSandDoctor Talk 05:46, 27 May 2025 (UTC)
Question from Osuekwe on Uzbek Wikipedia (18:04, 26 May 2025)
[edit]I haven't understand how this app works --Osuekwe (talk) 18:04, 26 May 2025 (UTC)
- @Osuekwe: I would recommend checking out this interactive tutorial to help get you started. I noticed that you asked this question from the article on the Uzbek Wikipedia. If you are looking for the Uzbek Wikipedia specifically, you need to go to uz.wikipedia.org. I am unable to assist you with that wiki as I don't speak the language or contribute there (and have no familiarity with it), but if you have any questions about the English Wikipedia I am more than happy to try and assist.
TheSandDoctor Talk 05:48, 27 May 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-22
[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 community-wide discussion about a very delicate issue for the development of Abstract Wikipedia is now open on Meta: where to store the abstract content that will be developed through functions from Wikifunctions and data from Wikidata. The discussion is open until June 12 at Abstract Wikipedia/Location of Abstract Content, and every opinion is welcomed. The decision will be made and communicated after the consultation period by the Foundation.
Updates for editors
- Since last week, on all wikis except the largest 20, people using the mobile visual editor will have additional tools in the menu bar, accessed using the new
+
toolbar button. To start, the new menu will include options to add: citations, hieroglyphs, and code blocks. Deployment to the remaining wikis is scheduled to happen in June. The
#ifexist
parser function will no longer register a link to its target page. This will improve the usefulness of Special:WantedPages, which will eventually only list pages that are the target of an actual red link. This change will happen gradually as the source pages are updated. [6]- This week, the Moderator Tools team will launch a new filter to Recent Changes, starting at Indonesian Wikipedia. This new filter highlights edits that are likely to be reverted. The goal is to help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic edits. Other wikis will benefit from this filter in the future.
- Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users will see suggestions of articles for further reading. The feature will be available on both desktop and mobile. Readers of Catalan, Hebrew, and Italian Wikipedias and some sister projects will receive the change between May 21 and mid-June. Readers of other wikis will receive the change later. The goal is to encourage users to read the wikis more. Learn more.
- Some users of the Wikipedia Android app can use a new feature for readers, WikiGames, a daily trivia game based on real historical events. The release has started as an A/B test, available to 50% of users in the following languages: English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Turkish.
- The Newsletter extension that is available on MediaWiki.org allows the creation of various newsletters for global users. The extension can now publish new issues as section links on an existing page, instead of requiring a new page for each issue. [7]
View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- The previously deprecated
ipblocks
views in Wiki Replicas will be removed in the beginning of June. Users are encouraged to query the newblock
andblock_target
views instead. Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- Wikidata and Sister Projects is a multi-day online event that will focus on how Wikidata is integrated to Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects. The event runs from May 29 – June 1. You can read the Program schedule and register.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 20:02, 26 May 2025 (UTC)
Red (Taylor Swift album) scheduled for TFA
[edit]This is to let you know that the above article has been scheduled as today's featured article for 21 July 2025. Please check that the article needs no amendments. Feel free to amend the draft blurb, which can be found at Wikipedia:Today's featured article/July 2025, or to make comments on other matters concerning the scheduling of this article at Wikipedia talk:Today's featured article/July 2025. Please keep an eye on that page, as notifications of copy edits to or queries about the draft blurb may be left there by user:JennyOz, who assists the coordinators by reviewing the blurbs, or by others. I also suggest that you watchlist Wikipedia:Main Page/Errors from two days before it appears on the Main Page. Thanks, and congratulations on your work! SchroCat (talk) 14:27, 2 June 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-23
[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 Chart extension is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. Editors can use this new extension to create interactive data visualizations like bar, line, area, and pie charts. Charts are designed to replace many of the uses of the legacy Graph extension.
Updates for editors
- It is now easier to configure automatic citations for your wiki within the visual editor's citation generator. Administrators can now set a default template by using the
_default
key in the local MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json page (example diff). Setting this default will also help to future-proof your existing configurations when new item types are added in the future. You can still set templates for individual item types as they will be preferred to the default template. [8] View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Starting the week of June 2, bots logging in using
action=login
oraction=clientlogin
will fail more often. This is because of stronger protections against suspicious logins. Bots using bot passwords or using a loginless authentication method such as OAuth are not affected. If your bot is not using one of those, you should update it; usingaction=login
without a bot password was deprecated in 2016. For most bots, this only requires changing what password the bot uses. [9] - From this week, Wikimedia wikis will allow ES2017 features in JavaScript code for official code, gadgets, and user scripts. The most visible feature of ES2017 is
async
/await
syntax, allowing for easier-to-read code. Until this week, the platform only allowed up to ES2016, and a few months before that, up to ES2015. [10] Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- Scholarship applications to participate in the GLAM Wiki Conference 2025 are now open. The conference will take place from 30 October to 1 November, in Lisbon, Portugal. GLAM contributors who lack the means to support their participation can apply here. Scholarship applications close on June 7th.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:52, 2 June 2025 (UTC)
Hello Sand Doctor,
I just made a small edit in an article and I am not sure how to post a source reference (its a YouTube video). I also would like to hyperlink my edit to another Wikipedia article.
Thank you for any help you can provide. --Eteamp0ps (talk) 00:54, 5 June 2025 (UTC)
- @Eteamp0ps: YouTube videos generally aren't good sources with a few exceptions. YouTube videos may fall under self-published sources or have other copyright concerns that would preclude linking in an article. Is there a text based article or resource that might fit what you want to add? If not, could you say which channel the video came from or a bit more context?
- I am not sure what you mean by hyperlinking an edit in another Wikipedia article. That isn't something we do. We don't link edits in articles, rather we link articles together where relevant using internal links called wikilinks, with certain caveats. TheSandDoctor Talk 06:11, 5 June 2025 (UTC)
Administrators' newsletter – June 2025
[edit]News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2025).
- An RfC is open to determine whether the English Wikipedia community should adopt a position on AI development by the WMF and its affiliates.
- A new feature called Multiblocks will be deployed on English Wikipedia on the week of June 2. See the relevant announcement on the administrators' noticeboard.
- History merges performed using the mergehistory special page are now logged at both the source and destination, rather than just the source as previously, after this RFC and the resolution of T118132.
- An arbitration case named Indian military history has been opened. Evidence submissions for this case close on 8 June.
- Voting for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) election is open until 17 June 2025. Read the voting page on Meta-Wiki and cast your vote here!
- An Articles for Creation backlog drive is happening in June 2025, with over 1,600 drafts awaiting review from the past two months. In addition to AfC participants, all administrators and new page patrollers can help review using the Yet Another AFC Helper Script, which can be enabled in the Gadgets settings. Sign up here to participate!
- The Unreferenced articles backlog drive is happening in June 2025 to reduce the backlog of articles tagged with {{Unreferenced}}. You can help reduce the backlog by adding citations to these articles. Sign up to participate!
Problem with SPI archiving
[edit]Thanks for your work on SPIs. I noticed that one archiving (Special:Diff/1294407736) only had the deletion without a copy being placed in the archive. Don’t know if the SPI helper script malfunctioned or what happened, but wanted to make sure you knew. — rsjaffe 🗣️ 15:13, 7 June 2025 (UTC)
- @Rsjaffe: You're welcome. Archiving is what I do at SPI, for the most part. You can generally tell when life has gotten busy for me because the number of unarchived cases becomes a mile long. Thanks for pointing out that issue! I've corrected it and confirmed that it went into the archive now. Yes, it appears that SPI Helper malfunctioned there or something. Looking (in two passes) at the others I've done today, that appears to be the only one that experienced the issue. I suspect maybe my internet had a hiccup at that moment or something and I didn't notice the failure before coming back to close the tab. Thanks for flagging! TheSandDoctor Talk 15:33, 7 June 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-24
[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 Trust and Safety Product team is finalizing work needed to roll out temporary accounts on large Wikipedias later this month. The team has worked with stewards and other users with extended rights to predict and address many use cases that may arise on larger wikis, so that community members can continue to effectively moderate and patrol temporary accounts. This will be the second of three phases of deployment – the last one will take place in September at the earliest. For more information about the recent developments on the project, see this update. If you have any comments or questions, write on the talk page, and join a CEE Catch Up this Tuesday.
Updates for editors
The watchlist expiry feature allows editors to watch pages for a limited period of time. After that period, the page is automatically removed from your watchlist. Starting this week, you can set a preference for the default period of time to watch pages. The preferences also allow you to set different default watch periods for editing existing pages, pages you create, and when using rollback. [11]

- The appearance of talk pages will change at almost all Wikipedias (some have already received this design change, a few will get these changes later). You can read details about the changes on Diff. It is possible to opt out of these changes in user preferences ("Show discussion activity"). [12][13]
- Users with specific extended rights (including administrators, bureaucrats, checkusers, oversighters, and stewards) can now have IP addresses of all temporary accounts revealed automatically during time-limited periods where they need to combat high-speed account-hopping vandalism. This feature was requested by stewards. [14]
- This week, the Moderator Tools and Machine Learning teams will continue the rollout of a new filter to Recent Changes, releasing it to several more 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: Afrikaans Wikipedia, Belarusian Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Welsh Wikipedia, Hawaiian Wikipedia, Icelandic Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia. The rollout will continue in the coming weeks to include the rest of the Wikipedias in this project. [15]
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- AbuseFilter editors active on Meta-Wiki and large Wikipedias are kindly asked to update AbuseFilter to make it compatible with temporary accounts. A link to the instructions and the private lists of filters needing verification are available on Phabricator.
- Lua modules now have access to the name of a page's associated thumbnail image, and on some wikis to the WikiProject assessment information. This is possible using two new properties on mw.title objects, named
pageImage
andpageAssessments
. [16][17] Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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