User talk:GhostInTheMachine

This user knows that it can be a challenge to keep AGF in mind.

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Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #258: Abstract Wikipedia at Wikimania

There is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!

In this issue, we discuss the presentations and workshops at Wikimania, including a features feedback request based on what we heard there, and highlight new features shipped this week including diffs for Wikifunctions.

Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!

Enjoy the reading! Quiddity (WMF) 19:05, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

Downcasing in a short description

Referring to the reverted diff , the point is this: {{annotated biography link}} transcludes the content of {{short description}}. What is required on Getty (surname) is "(1956–2011), grandson of J. Paul Getty", not "(1956–2011), Grandson of J. Paul Getty". Charles Matthews (talk) 06:04, 1 August 2026 (UTC)

Short descriptions are sentence case. If the {{Annotated link}} does not produce the desired effect, then just hand-craft the description for the list — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 06:25, 1 August 2026 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia proposals request for comment

Your feedback is requested at Wikipedia talk:Did you know on a "Wikipedia proposals" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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SodiumBot (botop|talk|contribs) 18:30, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

Thank you

just a quick thank you for this - you help make Wikipedia feel good too. ~2026-31242-72 (talk) 18:31, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:Domestic cricket competitions in 2027

A tag has been placed on Category:Domestic cricket competitions in 2027 indicating that it is currently empty, and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion. If it remains empty for seven days or more, it may be deleted under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and removing the speedy deletion tag. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 19:43, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:2027 Indian Premier League

A tag has been placed on Category:2027 Indian Premier League indicating that it is currently empty, and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion. If it remains empty for seven days or more, it may be deleted under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and removing the speedy deletion tag. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 19:46, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

Thanksgiving

Hi! Thank you so much for improving the Pachhunga Hmar article. I really appreciate your help. I have been feeling a bit frustrated lately with some of my Wikipedia experiences, so your kindness and willingness to improve the article instead of just pointing out mistakes meant a lot to me. Thank you for being so helpful and supportive. Vankal (talk) 08:08, 3 August 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-32

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 Reader Experience team has developed a patch demo that wraps the page toolbar onto two lines when there is not enough horizontal space for all the buttons. This aims to reduce crowding in the Vector 2022 toolbar, which can occur on some language Wikipedias at certain screen widths.
• The Reader Experience team is planning to launch Reading Lists, a Community Wishlist item, which is currently available to try in beta, as a full feature in September. Before then, volunteer translator help is needed for string translations into a number of languages. The feature supports reading and learning goals on Wikipedia.
• Next week, the table of contents on Wikimedia Commons file pages will be improved by consolidating the file page table of contents with the page table of contents. This will make it easier to understand a file page’s structure, navigate to specific sections, and share links to individual sections.
• View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where some TIFF images failed to load after clicking their thumbnail, causing a broken image to be displayed instead of the full-size image, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The variable and function selector in AbuseFilter has been updated to support search and autocomplete. It will allow filter maintainers to find the desired variable or function more quickly.
• The MJPEG and VP8 formats are removed from the video player. The MP4 format (MPEG-4 Part 2) is added instead, which provides higher quality videos to older iPhone devices. It may take a few weeks to retroactively update all existing videos. The default format for modern devices stays the same (VP9/WebM).
• 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 19:44, 3 August 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #259: Congratulations Jules*. An apple is a fruit

There is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!

In this issue, we congratulate Wikimedian of the Year and we discuss his favourite article in relation to Abstract Wikipedia, we introduce a new Type of function on Wikifunctions, and we take a look at the latest software developments.

Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!

We also remind you that in the next weeks these newsletter reminders will be paused, and that they will resume in mid-August.

Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 13:19, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – August 2026

News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2026).

Administrator changes

• MCE89
• Staraction

• Danaman5

CheckUser changes

• dbeef

Guideline and policy news

• Following an RfC, the 30-day requirement for extended-confirmed status now begins after an account's first edit instead of its registration (T431060).

Technical news

• Inactive editors can now be removed as mentors at Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship automatically.
• The Suggested Edits' Revise Tone feature is now enabled. It encourages editors to identify and revise non-neutral language in articles.

Miscellaneous

• The Unreferenced articles August 2026 backlog drive is underway. Help to add references to 47,000 articles.
• The Articles for creation August 2026 backlog drive is under way. Help to review 4,500+ drafts.

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• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:51, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-33

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

• A new ChartWizard is now available on Wikimedia Commons for users interested in creating charts from their own data. The wizard makes the Chart extension more beginner-friendly by allowing editors to create charts, such as bar and pie charts, without needing to use JSON. Users can still switch to the JSON editor if they prefer. Feedback on the new tool is welcome on the wish talk page.
• View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the Wikipedia iOS app’s Picture of the Day widget displayed the same image every day instead of updating daily, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• Math formula SVG images will soon be generated in the browser instead of on the server. MathML continues to be generated on the server and renders in the browser without JavaScript. Wikibooks will see this change on 12 August, Wikisource on 19 August and Wikipedia from 20-27 August. You can try this by selecting "MathML with SVG image (client side MathJax rendering)" in your preferences. This change is part of deprecating RESTBase and deprecating Mathoid.
• Category pages will soon support sorting entries by the time they are added to a category. This will make it easier to find recently or long-standing categorized pages. It will also improve workflows for maintenance categories such as deletion backlogs and other time-based review tasks. You can use cldsort=timestamp URL argument in category view to sort the entries.
• Gadgets and user scripts on Wikimedia wikis may now use ES2018 features and ES2019 features in JavaScript code. Previously, the platform only allowed up to ES2017. MediaWiki validates the source code to protect functionality from syntax errors and to ensure scripts are valid in all supported browsers.
• 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 20:43, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Drv source files

Hello, as you are more experienced with Wikipedia processes, may I ask you how you see the situation? Honestly I'm completely hallucinating by what's going on, for me it's disfunctional at every level. AbcSxyZ (talk) 13:25, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

I'm thinking about adding the content in a source file section within source code to follow their absurdity, as they recommend according to the consensus supported by a single commentator, hoping people complain in source code for conceptual inconsistencies in the week (idk how long I can have), then drv. It avoid "OR" from the lead this way.

Edit: maybe no drv, just add the content there to be slowly filled, let people state the absurdity over the time to create a source file page on their own at some point, COI is too much of a weapon against me.

"even renaming the target, if there's consensus to do so on the target's Talk page." AbcSxyZ (talk) 13:52, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

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The Source files article definitely needed more work, but it was gradually improving. The arguments for keeping it to allow further work, although straightforward to you (and me) did not seem straightforward to the closer. I suspect that the votes against just sounded more convincing. So mistakes do happen. We often need to accept them and move on – painful though it can be. I would advise that, for a while at least, you only edit articles unrelated to open source and the like. I would especially advise against copying any content from the old version for some while.

The last version of the article before the switch to a redirect is available at 1368633959, so the content is not lost. That version contained text related to six different example domains, so it may be valid to see if part of that text with the refs might be suitable for adding into articles covering those domains — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 16:52, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

A closure in line with the side providing no coherent arguments and no sources, I genuinely admire the performance 🙃

I will do a basic merge tomorrow while it's hot, raise the talk, and see how it goes from here. I need it for theoretical anchor of source files section in open source anyway as they break conceptual consistency in various ways.

I'm a kind of contributor focused on my field, so may just monitor and eventually disappear for a while!

What an experience... Thanks for your support and understanding btw, appreciable to not always fight alone against the world! AbcSxyZ (talk) 19:59, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #260: Shoutout to User:99of9

There is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!

In this issue, we congratulate our own User:99of9 for his extensive work with the Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia communities, we discuss what happened at Wikimania, we introduce a document for interested communities to join Abstract Wikipedia, and we take a look at the latest software developments.

Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!

Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 15:55, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

mycenean raids

@GhostInTheMachine i am sorry if i annoy you but this source source (https://books.google.com.ly/books?id=MLBJDAAAQBAJ&dq=libu+meshwesh+trade+Mycenaean&pg=PA104&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false) which say this "increase in Meshwesh/Libu activity in the Marmarican region, precipitating the first clashes with the sea traders; this is apparently illustrated by the Amarna papyrus mentioned above, where men with Egyptian and Mycenaean military gear appear in conflict with men in Libyan costume (Parkinson and Schofield 1993; Schofield and Parkinson 1994)." so i dont know should we readd it ? or..something else ? Libyanmilitaryman (talk) 08:19, 14 August 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-34

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 Worklist feature for the Event Registration tool is now live on all Wikimedia wikis. With Worklist, event organizers can add the articles their event will focus on directly to the event page. The Worklist also powers Event Pathways which notifies other editors of the upcoming or ongoing event when they edit an article featured in the event's Worklist. This is the minimum viable version (MVP), and feedback is welcome. Organizers are encouraged to try the feature. A hands-on Worklist Setup Workshop will take place on 18 August at 16:00 UTC and 19 August at 11:00 UTC.

Updates for editors

• Special:ShortPages displays short pages by their size, but in many cases it gets filled with disambiguations and soft redirects, making it harder to find the short articles themselves. Starting this weekend, you will be able to choose not to include an article in the special page by adding the magic word __EXPECTSHORTPAGE__.
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Bole (w:bol:)
• Starting the week of August 17, the page toolbar will wrap onto two lines when there is not enough horizontal space for all the buttons. This is a fully merged patch from the Reader Experience team which aims to reduce crowding in the Vector 2022 toolbar, that may occur on some language Wikipedias at certain screen widths.
• View all 16 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, uploading large files to Wikimedia Commons has become more stable and less prone to failure following some fixes related to the “Could not acquire lock” upload error.

Updates for technical contributors

• Debian Bullseye will reach the end of its Long Term Support on 31 August 2026. Some Cloud VPS projects still have instances running Debian Bullseye. Maintainers of those projects are encouraged to migrate to Debian Bookworm or Debian Trixie. A migration guide is available to help with the process, and users may also want to consider whether their workload is better suited to Toolforge. If you need help or cannot complete the migration by 31 August, please contact the Cloud VPS admins as soon as possible. Read more.
• 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 21:01, 17 August 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #261: Mayors and the North

There is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!

In this issue, we have an essay from Denny about accidental gaps in languages, and we take a look at the latest software developments.

Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!

Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 09:40, 21 August 2026 (UTC)

Landro works moved to draftspace

Thanks for your contributions to Landro works. Unfortunately, I do not think it is ready for publishing as a live article at this time because it needs more sources to establish notability and Current sources are unreliable blogs. I have converted it to a draft which you can improve, undisturbed for a while.

Please see more information at Help:Unreviewed new page. When the article is ready for publication, please click on the "Submit the draft for review!" button at the top of the page OR move the page back. Boynamedsue (talk) 12:27, 24 August 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-35

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 Special:CreateAccount page has been simplified as part of ongoing work to modernize the account creation experience. The panel showing project statistics no longer appears next to the form on desktop and mobile web. Multiple account creation experiments show that a simpler form helps newcomers complete registration.
• In order to improve page performance, images now load when they are viewed. This means images lower down an article will not load if a reader never scrolls to that part of the page, which may affect some image-related metrics.

• View all 42 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where image thumbnails in Abstract Wikipedia could fail to display after the corresponding file was moved on Wikimedia Commons, has now been fixed. Thumbnails will now update correctly when files are moved.

Updates for technical contributors

• User Info card is a feature that helps patrollers see information about user accounts. So far, it has been available only in places such as page history, logs and recent changes. Now, it's possible to place it in the page content as well, using the {{#uic:}} parser function. It can be particularly useful in templates like {{Userlinks}} (or their specialized variants), as it will make it easier to see the context about a user on various noticeboard pages. The card will be displayed only to users who have it enabled in their preferences.
• Due to user security and privacy risks, we have disabled access to Special:MyPage URLs when specifically using action=raw. If you are impacted by this, consider whether you can use an alternative approach. Special:MyPage URLs can still be accessed and used without action=raw. Specified user page URLs (e.g. User:Myusername) can still be used with action=raw.
• Due to an update, the thumbnailing software has been improved. This includes upgrading librsvg to 2.60 and ImageMagick to 7, as well as resolving a number of long-standing thumbnailing bugs like rendering errors.

• 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 20:43, 24 August 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #262: Wikifunctions Object Reference

There is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!

In this issue, we discuss a new Type implemented after a community request, and we take a look at the latest software developments.

Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!

Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 12:31, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

Edit on Latch Wales

Thank you for your edit on Latch Wales. Please note that on Wikipedia, using punctuation marks either in or outside quotation marks is fine, so in future do not change this in articles unless it is inconsistent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style?utm_source=chatgpt.com#Quotations Edlectro28 (talk) 21:58, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

MOS:INOROUT says: Include terminal punctuation within the quotation marks only if it was present in the original material, and otherwise place it after the closing quotation mark. https://www.cclg.org.uk/magazine-articles/celebrating-40-years-care-wales itself places the full stop outside the quote marks. https://cavuhb.nhs.wales/news/latest-news/its-childhood-cancer-awareness-month-and-latch-welsh-childrens-cancer-charity-is-marking-its-40th-anniversary/ treats "40k for 40 years" as the campaign strapline, rather than using "40k for 40 years campaign" as the formal title. — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 09:34, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

Please don't change the article to DMY. Where I come from, MDY is standard. Edlectro28 (talk) 10:00, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

The location of a specific editor is not the point, DMY is standard for Wales. — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 10:11, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

Force of habit. Suppose I didn't wanna get conquered again Edlectro28 (talk) 10:14, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

I’d suggest that we stop making trivial edits to the article out of spite. That’s counterproductive. I want to assume good faith but you do seem to be making these edits for the sake of it. I have nothing against you, can we please be done with this? Edlectro28 (talk) 17:08, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-36

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

• A new format for the Community Wishlist is open for feedback. You can read the proposed ideas on Meta. This new process plans to improve how wishes are triaged, voted on, and prioritized in a way that is transparent and balanced across project families and language editions. This consultation is open for two weeks.

Updates for editors

• The latest release of the Wikipedia Android app includes updates to the Saved feature, bringing the app’s saving experience closer to iOS and Web. The update redesigns the Saved tab with an “All articles” view, removes the default “Saved” reading list, renames reading lists to “Collections,” and modernizes the article-saving experience.
• The Reading Lists feature was enabled for all logged-in users on Bengali, Chinese, Czech and Vietnamese Wikipedias on August 25, after several months as a beta feature. Reading Lists will be available to all logged-in users on Arabic, French and Indonesian Wikipedias on September 1, followed by English Wikipedia on September 14, and all other Wikipedia wikis on September 28.
• At the end of the month, some logged-out readers on Bengali, Czech, Persian, English, and Polish Wikipedias using the Minerva skin on mobile will see an updated navigation bar in an A/B test. The test will compare the current navigation bar with a new version designed to make it easier to find information more quickly. The goal is to determine whether these changes encourage readers to return more often. This experiment will not change the experience for logged-in readers and/or editors.
• Editors who maintain redirects, templates, and categories used on redirect pages now have improved ways for finding and curating redirects. Previously, redirects pages could not be searched. Two new search keywords, onlyredirects: and withredirects:, now allow redirects to be searched directly and can be combined with existing keywords such as incategory:, intitle:, and insource:.
• The ISBN lookup tools for generating citations were recently not working because of external service problems. Developers are working on solutions.
• View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where searching for pages by category using deepcat could return no results or unrelated results has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The domain of URLs for thumbnails is changing from upload.wikimedia.org to thumb.wikimedia.org. The old URLs will continue to work for the foreseeable future but MediaWiki will advertise the new domain instead. URLs to other types of media such as original files, videos and transcodes will still be served from upload.wikimedia.org.
• The Wikimedia Math API is now deprecated. These endpoints will be fully sunset by the end of September 2026. Developers who call these endpoints should transition to alternative math rendering solutions, such as the native MathML or MathJax. Third-party MediaWiki installations that utilize the Math extension for formula rendering are required to upgrade to v1.43+ to avoid disruption of service.

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• Read more about TextMatch in a Diff post titled, Custom edit suggestions for every wiki: How communities are shaping Suggestion Mode with TextMatch.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:51, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #263: 5,000 Functions, passing Z40000

There is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!

In this issue, we mark the 5,000th function on Wikifunction, we explore a new Type for functions, and we take a look at the latest software developments.

Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!

Also, we remind you that if you have questions or ideas to discuss, the next Volunteers' Corner will be held on September 7, at 17:30 UTC (link to the meeting).

Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 11:00, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

Automatically generated

Hey, I saw you cleaned up a short description I made, but your edit summary said it was automatically generated. I'd like to make it clear that is wasn't! Thank you! WikipediholicRat (talk) 22:20, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-37

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

Updates for editors

• Add a Link has been upgraded for English Wikipedia users with improved detection of links that have different capitalization. This will help reduce ambiguous suggestions caused by differences in capitalization in article titles, including articles about cultural goods. A second phase of improvements is planned, which will also prepare the feature for release in other languages.
• The Article guidance feature will be enabled by default for junior editors on Simple English and Turkish Wikipedia starting 10 September 2026 following an experiment. Junior editors with 0 to 99 edits will automatically see the feature when they click a red link or use the "Madde oluşturto" option on Turkish Wikipedia to create a new article. The change is intended to help junior editors create higher-quality articles that meet each Wikipedia’s standards. Additional improvements will continue based on the experiment results and community feedback.
• The Pageviews Analysis tool which allows users to compare pageviews across multiple pages, turns 10 years old this year and several new features have been added. They include WikiNav which provides insights into how readers of Wikipedia explore the content, editing stats in Siteviews, the ability to lookup articles belonging to a WikiProject, and support for dark mode.
• A visually simplified Minerva navigation bar is being tested for logged-out readers using mobile web on the Bengali, Czech, English, Farsi, and Polish Wikipedias. The experiment aims to determine whether simplifying the navigation improves reader retention. The test will run from August 31 to September 28, and no action is required from users.
• WMDE Technical Wishes is working on improving auto-generated reference names in VisualEditor. Editors will only notice a slight change starting this week. When adding automatic reference names the numbering will start at :1 instead of :0. Read more on the project page.
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 23. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
• View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where Parsoid could mishandle nested nowiki tags, causing content to be lost and displaying unwanted text has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• Interface administrators can configure gadgets from MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition. The definition format has been updated and no longer requires the ResourceLoader option, as gadgets are always loaded through ResourceLoader. This simplifies gadget configuration by removing an option that is no longer necessary, making gadget definitions easier for administrators.
• 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 18:42, 7 September 2026 (UTC)

Edit on Kleininger Teran

Hey. What was the purpose of this edit? It didn't actually make any changes whatsoever. If it was simply just a bug with AutoEd that's fine, but I just wanted to ask because it seems odd. Edlectro28 (talk) 21:31, 9 September 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #264: Your code can now call back to the Wikidata fetch functions

There is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!

In this issue, we introduce the possibility of calling Wikidata fetch functions, we present a new Type, we celebrate more than 200 new functions this week, and we take a look at the latest software developments.

Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!

Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 13:13, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

The next Natural Language Generation Special Interest Group meeting is tomorrow!

Hi all! A quick message to inform you that Denny will lead a quick first introduction to syntactic phrase functions in the next Natural Language Generation Special Interest Group meeting, that will be held tomorrow, September 15, at 16:00 UTC (link to the meeting).

See you at the meeting! In case you can't join, the meeting will be recorded and made available on Commons. -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 13:27, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-38

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

Weekly highlight

• The Future Audiences team has started a discussion on English Wikipedia about a proposed new experiment to show a temporary notice about the new Google Preferred Sources feature to Wikipedia readers coming from Google. The experiment is to test whether this notice makes visitors come back to Wikipedia more often. Preferred Sources feature lets users choose websites they trust so Google can highlight content from those sources more prominently in Search and AI experiences. We are interested in testing this on other languages that Google supports and would welcome assistance with starting conversations on other wikis. If interested, please reach out to Future Audiences on the talk page.

Updates for editors

• The chat platform Discord is releasing a new self-service framework that websites can use to specify how their links should look when shared on Discord. The Future Audiences team is planning to start using this new framework to improve how Wikipedia links look when shared on Discord, giving better attribution and credit to contributors. The link appearance and behavior won't change in the first phase of this project as we want to first collect some baseline data to assess the impact of future changes. However, if community members who are active on Discord spot any issues, they can reach out on Phabricator or Metawiki.
• The Reader Growth team will be running an experiment to test whether compacting article lead sections on mobiles with the addition of a "read more" button improves reader retention. The test will begin on September 17 on Arabic, Spanish, French, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Vietnamese, and Chinese Wikipedias and will run for four weeks.
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 23. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming week.
• View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where Wikistats for Wikipedias was returning an HTTP 500 error and could not be reached, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• Developers who maintain a tool that queries the Wikimedia Commons links tables need to update their code to connect to the new x4 database cluster. The links tables have been moved from the s4 cluster to x4, and will no longer receive updates on s4. The page and redirect tables remain available on both clusters. A wiki replica for the x4 cluster will be set up afterwards. The change is being made because the s4 cluster has grown too large to operate efficiently. You can read more.
• 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 15:28, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – September 2026

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2026).

Administrator changes

Dclemens1971

• Lectonar

• Bucketsofg
• Keenan Pepper
• The Wordsmith
• Caknuck

Oversight changes

• Richwales

Guideline and policy news

• Speedy deletion criteria G15 has been renamed from "LLM-generated pages without human review" to "Unambiguously LLM-generated pages" and has an additional sign of detection added to it following a RfC.

Miscellaneous

• The September 2026 New Pages Patrol backlog drive is ongoing. Help tackle the 30,000+ article backlog!
• This week's article for improvement will be added to the Main Page to try converting readers into editors following a RfC.

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• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:36, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

Short description tweak

Hello, fellow Yorkshire person. You recently tweaked a short description I had added to this article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Legrady

I'm new to Wikipedia, could you please clarify why? GreyZoneLife (talk) 23:10, 16 September 2026 (UTC)

On the George Legrady article, I changed the short description from Hungarian-Canadian digital media artist and professor born in 1950 (66 characters) to Canadian digital media artist (born 1950) (41 characters).

My logic was:

1. At 66 characters, the SD was rather long — a short description should be short. The aim is for under 40 characters (hence WP:SD40), although 40 characters is not a solid limit. Shorter than 40 can be good, but a few over 40 can also be OK.
2. He was born in Hungary but left there at 6. Nothing in the article implies that he has retained Hungarian citizenship. — Remove "Hungarian-".
3. He might be a professor, but the article is mainly about his art. — Remove "and professor".
4. Change "born in 1950" to "(born 1950)". It is just more concise and the normal pattern is to use brackets for "(born 1950)" etc.

The result was shorter, without losing the main fact that he is known as an artist.
I suspect that Canadian artist (born 1950) (27 characters) would have been acceptable and it is even shorter, but "digital media" seemed to add something useful.
Does that help to explain my thinking? — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 16:09, 18 September 2026 (UTC)

Yes, it's very helpful - thanks! GreyZoneLife (talk) 20:07, 18 September 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #265: More engaging error messages

There is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!

In this issue, we explain how we reworked error messaging, we talk about our recent and upcoming meetings, and we take a look at the latest software developments.

Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!

Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 12:59, 18 September 2026 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia style and naming request for comment

Your feedback is requested at Talk:The Amazing World of Gumball on a "Wikipedia style and naming" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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SodiumBot (botop|talk|contribs) 11:30, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

MOS:TABLELEFT

Hello, GhostInTheMachine. Where is the embedded anchor of Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Tables#Appearance? I don't see any embedded anchor and/or section in the wikitext. Replace {{R to anchor}} with {{R to section}} template rather than your template that should be changed. In solidarity, KuyaMoHirowo (talk • contribs) 12:41, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

Look in the source: directly under the heading

===Appearance===
{{anchor|TABLELEFT}}{{shortcut|MOS:TABLELEFT}}
In general, styles for tables and other block-level elements...

It is "normal", "good" to match the anchor and shortcut names. Keeping them the exactly same and physically together helps maintenance and future editor. — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 12:46, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

Ah, I can see the embedded anchor directly to the section. I forgot to read first before modifying redirect categories. Thanks for you giving the wikitext. In solidarity, KuyaMoHirowo (talk • contribs) 12:54, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

CS1 error on Cycling at the 2026 Asian Games

Hello, I'm Qwerfjkl (bot). I have automatically detected that this edit performed by you, on the page Cycling at the 2026 Asian Games, may have introduced referencing errors. They are as follows:

• A URL error. References show this error when one of the URL-containing parameters contains an invalid URL. Please edit the article to fix the URL. (Fix | Ask for help). Below are the references causing this error:
  • 20260915発表_アジア競技大会競技プログラム.pdf "Sports Program for the 20th Asian Games" (PDF) (in Japanese). www.aichi-nagoya2026.org. 15 September 2026. Retrieved 19 September 2026. {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help)

Please check this page and fix the errors highlighted. If you think this is a false positive, you can report it to my operator. Thanks, Qwerfjkl (bot) (talk) 17:49, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

CS1 error on Esports at the 2026 Asian Games

Hello, I'm Qwerfjkl (bot). I have automatically detected that this edit performed by you, on the page Esports at the 2026 Asian Games, may have introduced referencing errors. They are as follows:

• A URL error. References show this error when one of the URL-containing parameters contains an invalid URL. Please edit the article to fix the URL. (Fix | Ask for help). Below are the references causing this error:
  • 20260915発表_アジア競技大会競技プログラム.pdf "Sports Program for the 20th Asian Games" (PDF) (in Japanese). www.aichi-nagoya2026.org. 15 September 2026. Retrieved 19 September 2026. {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help)

Please check this page and fix the errors highlighted. If you think this is a false positive, you can report it to my operator. Thanks, Qwerfjkl (bot) (talk) 17:55, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-39

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

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday, 23 September 2026 at 14:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests, which happen twice a year. During the switchover, all Wikimedia website traffic is shifted from one primary data center to the backup data center to test availability and prevent service disruption even in emergencies.

Updates for editors

• The Growth team tested a new post-edit notice designed to encourage Temporary Account holders to register for a permanent account. The new notice replaced multiple dialogs and a simultaneous welcome notification with a single message highlighting the benefits of creating an account. The experiment increased permanent account creation from 1.94% to 3.66%, an 87% relative increase. The change will now be released to all wikis.
• For Wikipedia editors using the "Suggestion mode" Beta Feature, there is a new opt-in user preference for showing "experimental" edit checks and suggestions. These types are listed at Special:EditChecks, and are intended for early developer-testing and for gathering feedback from experienced users. Administrators can change the configuration details for each suggestion as usual. Administrators can also use this feature to help test their community's ideas for locally created checks and suggestions. Experimental types will have a more distinct visual style later this week. Feedback is welcome.
• The CEE Technical Village Pump has been launched as a space for technical discussions and collaboration among Wikimedia communities in Central and Eastern Europe.
• A new tool, Starter Kit, is now available for new and small language Wikipedia communities. It brings together guided tasks, tools, and resources to help communities get started, monitor their progress, and collaborate with the broader Wikimedia community. Starter Kit is hosted on Wikimedia Toolforge and is designed for Wikipedias with fewer than 50,000 articles. Learn more about how Starter Kit works and how communities have been using it in this Diff blog post.
• The Reader Growth team is launching a retest of the image carousel experiment. The retest will use three new versions of the design, updated based on community feedback. The team will assess results and determine with communities whether or not to proceed with the feature. The experiment will begin the week of September 28 and will run on Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Czech, English, Farsi, French, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
• After successful rollouts to Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Czech, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias, the Reading Lists feature from the Reader Experience team will be available to all logged-in users on all Wikipedia wikis starting September 28.
• View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the mentor status script repeatedly updated mentors’ status even when nothing had changed, creating unnecessary Recent Changes entries, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The abusefilters list query API, used to retrieve specific details about active or historical abuse filters configured on a wiki, has been updated to support the formatversion=2 configuration parameter, thereby leading to breaking changes to the API response. All users who maintain user-scripts or other code need to check if they use the abusefilters list query API, and respond to any breaking changes.
• 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 11:54, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #266: Memoization arriving

There is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!

In this issue, we talk about storing a function call's result in a cache for easier recalling, we analyse how quickly one particular fact propagates through different Wikipedia language editions, and we take a look at the latest software developments.

Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!

Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 09:54, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-40

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

Updates for editors

• Users of default skins on desktop and mobile web (Vector 2022 and Minerva respectively) will now be informed if the search suggestions displayed as they type into Search come from page redirects. Previously, users could get confused when the top search suggestions did not match exactly what they had typed. The new redirect notice clarifies that these suggestions are not random, but related to the search. The suggested pages may be redirects to the most relevant destination articles being searched for.
• Logged-out Wikipedia users on mobile web will begin to see a bookmark button for saving articles to their reading lists instead of the current Watchstar button. When clicked, the bookmark button prompts users to log in or create an account to save an article for later. An earlier experiment found that the bookmark icon was four times more likely than the Watchstar button to encourage logged-out users to create an account. This change is part of efforts to encourage more readers to become account holders and use features that help them save and return to content.
• An experiment will begin on September 29 on Spanish, Arabic, English, and French Wikipedias to simplify the experience users encounter immediately after account creation. The test will explore whether removing friction from the current Welcome Survey helps new users understand what to do next more easily. The experiment will run through the end of October.

• The Product and Technology Advisory Council has put out a call for the community to suggest topics that it should consider and discuss with the Wikimedia Foundation. Editors and technical contributors are invited to add topics to the council's talk page.
• Later this week, it will be possible for communities to configure Edit Checks and Suggestions so that they are shown within additional namespaces, such as a Draft: namespace. Feedback is welcome.
• A bug in the Global Watchlist is causing the page to fail to load for users that have unseen changes on Wikimedia Commons. Developers are working on a fix. Until then, affected users can follow the workarounds described in the relevant help section.
• New magic words {{CATEGORYSORT:TIMESTAMP}} and {{CATEGORYSORT:RTIMESTAMP}} are now available for use. They are able to change the default sorting of categories to be based on timestamp of categorization.
• View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where Wikistats for Wikipedias was not reachable has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The datacenter switchover, scheduled on September 23, has been postponed. The equinox exercise revealed capacity issues, preventing the switch of all services to the other datacenter. The process has been paused, prioritizing investigating that issue, to ensure that we continue to be able to serve our users reliably. A new exercise will be scheduled. Meanwhile, all traffic and edits continue to work as usual.
• On September 23, a power loss briefly affected all wikis, creating intermittent issues on both reading and editing modes. This also affected Gerrit. This is unrelated to the datacenter switchover postponement.
• Produnto has been deployed to mediawiki.org and some Indic language wikis. We want to hear your feedback on this experimental product. Produnto allows users to use Lua modules hosted in Wikimedia's GitLab. It simplifies the sharing of Lua code between wikis. Instead of copying each individual Lua module from one wiki to another, users will be able to easily share packages across all wikis.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• A Cross-wiki code collaboration workshop will be held online on October 2 at 12:30 UTC, bringing together South Asian technical contributors to learn about Produnto and begin piloting it on Hindi, Punjabi, Odia, Telugu, and Malayalam Wikipedias. Produnto is a package manager for deploying Lua modules hosted on GitLab to Wikimedia wikis, and was recently deployed on some pilot wikis.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 10:47, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #267: Refreshing results

There is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!

In this issue, we talk about two new capabilities addressing the issues of caching and freshness of function call results, we introduce our groundwork to support the first pilot communities for Abstract Wikipedia, we discuss news in Types, and we take a look at the latest software developments.

Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!

Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 09:31, 2 October 2026 (UTC)

Hi!

You think we should add a new section for Kid Rock's upcoming Christian album? Also I would like to notice you have a amazing User Page! (YLZFS) 14:14, 2 October 2026 (UTC)

When the album is released and various people have commented on it, then there may be enough sources to justify an article. It is probably too soon to say much more that the current two sentences. — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 15:21, 2 October 2026 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – October 2026

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2026).

Administrator changes

• Cleared as filed
• Dante Alighieri
• Doug Weller
• Gentgeen
• Vacant0

Oversight changes

• Doug Weller
• ToBeFree

Guideline and policy news

• Following an RfC, the good article criteria have been amended to add accessibility requirements.
• Following an RfC, late signatures added to administrator recall petitions after 720 hours from opening are reverted or struck and do not count towards the threshold, even if the petition has not yet been formally closed.
• The post-May 2026 administrator elections RfCs concluded with consensus for election monitors to curate blatantly inappropriate questions after posting, and to remove or merge true duplicates, clearly marking merged questions. Calls for candidates will include advisory guidance that users with less than one year’s experience or 5,000 edits generally lack a realistic chance of success.

Technical news

• Interface administrators no longer need to specify the ResourceLoader option in the definitions for gadgets on MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition as gadgets are always loaded through ResourceLoader. (T298199)
• The list=abusefilters API module now supports formatversion=2 and includes breaking changes to its responses. In particular, the actions property is now a JSON array rather than a string, regardless of the format version. Maintainers of user scripts and other code using this module should check compatibility and update their code as needed. (T435828)

Arbitration

• The arbitration case Gun control 2 has been closed.

Obituaries

• Doug Weller passed away on 30 September 2026. Doug Weller began editing Wikipedia in 2006 and became an administrator in 2008, making nearly 275,000 edits over two decades. He served on the Arbitration Committee from 2015 through 2018 and was also a longtime CheckUser and Oversighter.

Miscellaneous

• The October 2026 administrator elections are scheduled to run from September 29 to October 19. The call for candidates ends October 5.
• Self-nominations for the electoral commission for the 2026 Arbitration Committee elections is opened and closes on 8 October.
• The Good Article Nominations backlog drive has begun and is scheduled to end on November 3.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:31, 3 October 2026 (UTC)

CS1 error on Padel at the 2026 Asian Games

Hello, I'm Qwerfjkl (bot). I have automatically detected that this edit performed by you, on the page Padel at the 2026 Asian Games, may have introduced referencing errors. They are as follows:

• A URL error. References show this error when one of the URL-containing parameters contains an invalid URL. Please edit the article to fix the URL. (Fix | Ask for help). Below are the references causing this error:
  • 20260915発表_アジア競技大会競技プログラム.pdf "Sports Program for the 20th Asian Games" (PDF) (in Japanese). www.aichi-nagoya2026.org. 15 September 2026. Retrieved 16 September 2026. {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help)

Please check this page and fix the errors highlighted. If you think this is a false positive, you can report it to my operator. Thanks, Qwerfjkl (bot) (talk) 09:44, 4 October 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-41

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 process for this year’s Community Wishlist has been published, incorporating community feedback. The wish submission process will end on November 8. This year, a working group (open for volunteering) that includes community members familiar with the technical aspect of our wikis alongside Wikimedia Foundation staff, will take care of the triage process. The triage is expected to be completed by late November. Votes for wishes will start in January.

Updates for editors

• Editors using the visual editor will now see a warning when they paste text that is likely to have initially been copied from one of five external generative AI chatbots into Wikipedia. This feature is known as LLM Paste Check. It is a type of Edit Check that is community configurable. The check looks for markers in the copied HTML and is not using content watermark detection. Edits will also be tagged so that patrollers can review them more closely. The feature helps newcomers add content that respects Wikipedia’s policies and makes it easier for experienced editors to identify problematic edits. Communities with local policies about LLM usage can adjust the wording and policy that is linked. The team apologizes that this was rolled out without a delay for translations.
• Editors can now easily access the web visual editor directly from the iOS and Android apps. When opening the editor, users will be given a choice between visual editing and source editing. If they choose visual editing, they will be sent to a mobile web window in their phone's browser. After completing their edit, a banner will give them the option to return to the app. This enables readers to make quick contributions while casually reading.
• Users of the Wikipedia Android and iOS apps will now see a one-time account creation prompt after they have used the app for two consecutive weeks. This prompt explains the benefits of having an account. It is intended to help more casual readers become logged-in users who return to the apps regularly.
• Editors on group1 wikis, including Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikivoyage, and Wikisource, will no longer see notifications on Recent Changes and Watchlist when a link to another language version of a page is added, removed, or changed in its Wikidata item. This change will begin on October 5 at 07:00 UTC as a two-week trial to reduce high-volume, low-value notifications and make important changes easier to identify. Editors who rely on these notifications can read more on the project page and share feedback or concerns on the talk page.
• View all 36 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where mentors who removed themselves from the mentorship program could still have mentees assigned to them and receive questions, has now been fixed. Mentees will now be reassigned when a mentor leaves the program.

Updates for technical contributors

• Wikimedia Brasil has published its Development Best Practices Framework (ABPD). It is a guide for staff, contractors and volunteers building technical tools and projects. It covers the project lifecycle, security, accessibility, personal data protection and responsible AI use, and explains how movement-wide guidelines were adapted to a local context. They encourage other affiliates to reuse it and adapt it. Read more in the Diff post.
• A new, canonical base URL for Wikimedia APIs will soon be introduced. The new canonical route follows a {projectName}/api/ pattern and will act as an alternative path for current REST APIs (for example: {projectName}/w/rest.php/). Both versions will be callable for all existing APIs, but the new structure will be the preferred path for newly created API modules. This change will be non-breaking for most users. The existing pathways will remain available for all existing endpoint requests. However, some endpoints may return URLs following the new pattern in response bodies. Changes will be available on test wiki first, with the rollout expected to cover all wikis by the end of October.
• 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.

18:49, 5 October 2026 (UTC)