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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
Technical documentation contributors can find updated resources, and new ways to connect with each other and the Wikimedia Technical Documentation Team, at the Documentation hub on MediaWiki.org. This page links to: resources for writing and improving documentation, a new #wikimedia-techdocs IRC channel on libera.chat, a listing of past and upcoming documentation events, and ways to request a documentation consultation or review. If you have any feedback or ideas for improvements to the documentation ecosystem, please contact the Technical Documentation Team.
Updates for editors
Layout change for the Edit Check feature
Later this week, Edit Check will be relocated to a sidebar on desktop. Edit check is the feature for new editors to help them follow policies and guidelines. This layout change creates space to present people with new Checks that appear while they are typing. The initial results show newcomers encountering Edit Check are 2.2 times more likely to publish a new content edit that includes a reference and is not reverted.
The Chart extension, which enables editors to create data visualizations, was successfully made available on MediaWiki.org and three pilot wikis (Italian, Swedish, and Hebrew Wikipedias). You can see a working examples on Testwiki and read the November project update for more details.
Translators in wikis where the mobile experience of Content Translation is available, can now discover articles in Wikiproject campaigns of their interest from the "All collection" category in the articles suggestion feature. Wikiproject Campaign organizers can use this feature, to help translators to discover articles of interest, by adding the <page-collection> </page-collection> tag to their campaign article list page on Meta-wiki. This will make those articles discoverable in the Content Translation tool. For more detailed information on how to use the tool and tag, please refer to the step-by-step guide. [1]
The Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, now has a multiselect filter for namespace selection. This enables users to select multiple specific namespaces, instead of only one or all, when fetching pages for deletion.
The Nuke feature also now provides links to the userpage of the user whose pages were deleted, and to the pages which were not selected for deletion, after page deletions are queued. This enables easier follow-up admin-actions. Thanks to Chlod and the Moderator Tools team for both of these improvements. [2]
The Editing Team is working on making it easier to populate citations from archive.org using the Citoid tool, the auto-filled citation generator. They are asking communities to add two parameters preemptively, archiveUrl and archiveDate, within the TemplateData for each citation template using Citoid. You can see an example of a change in a template, and a list of all relevant templates. [3]
Last week, all wikis had problems serving pages to logged-in users and some logged-out users for 30–45 minutes. This was caused by a database problem, and investigation is ongoing. [5]
View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug in the Add Link feature has been fixed. Previously, the list of sections which are excluded from Add Link was partially ignored in certain cases. [6][7]
Updates for technical contributors
Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, now has an early-stage implementation in PHP. It is available for general use in MediaWiki extensions and Toolforge apps through Composer, with use in MediaWiki core coming soon. More information is available in the documentation. Thanks to Doğu for the inspiration and many contributions to the library. [8]
Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. On December 4, the MediaWiki Interfaces team began rerouting page/revision metadata and rendered HTML content endpoints on testwiki from RESTbase to comparable MediaWiki REST API endpoints. The team encourages active users of these endpoints to verify their tool's behavior on testwiki and raise any concerns on the related Phabricator ticket before the end of the year, as they intend to roll out the same change across all Wikimedia projects in early January. These changes are part of the work to replace the outdated RESTBase system.
The 2024 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 3 January 2025, and has an associated privacy statement.
@News India Group If he is on the news, it is possible. However, you must first change your username, as we do not allow "group" accounts. Accounts may be accessed by one person only. Follow the directions on your talk page for more information. Rusty🐈15:51, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Question from WikiLearner73 (23:49, 11 December 2024)
@WikiLearner73: We don't have the concept of "rank", but yes, there are "user groups"/"rights", and you can see them in your preferences. You can get to preferences by a dropdown in the top right. Rusty🐈03:21, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
November 2024 WikiProject Unreferenced articles backlog drive – award
This award is given in recognition to Rusty Cat for collecting more than 1.0 point during the WikiProject Unreferenced articles's NOV24 backlog drive. Your contributions played a crucial role in sourcing over 8,000 unsourced articles during the drive. Thank you so much for participating and helping to reduce the backlog! – DreamRimmer Alt (talk) 18:18, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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
Interested in improving event management on your home wiki? The CampaignEvents extension offers organizers features like event registration management, event/wikiproject promotion, finding potential participants, and more - all directly on-wiki. If you are an organizer or think your community would benefit from this extension, start a discussion to enable it on your wiki today. To learn more about how to enable this extension on your wiki, visit the deployment status page.
Updates for editors
Users of the iOS Wikipedia App in Italy and Mexico on the Italian, Spanish, and English Wikipedias, can see a personalized Year in Review with insights based on their reading and editing history.
Users of the Android Wikipedia App in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia can see the new Rabbit Holes feature. This feature shows a suggested search term in the Search bar based on the current article being viewed, and a suggested reading list generated from the user’s last two visited articles.
The global reminder bot is now active and running on nearly 800 wikis. This service reminds most users holding temporary rights when they are about to expire, so that they can renew should they want to. See the technical details page for more information.
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 13 January 2025 because of the end of year holidays. Thank you to all of the translators, and people who submitted content or feedback, this year.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed in the Android Wikipedia App which had caused translatable SVG images to show the wrong language when they were tapped.
Updates for technical contributors
There is no new MediaWiki version next week. The next deployments will start on 14 January. [10]
@ThatWolfDog: Not sure, but you probably want to make sure that the code for the infobox ({{infobox person|...}} is below all the other templates (such as short description, more citations needed, etc) at the top and directly above the lead section.
@Leha243312: Using text from a large language model without verification or disclosure is strongly discouraged on Wikipedia (there's a whole project page on this; Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-06-08/Recent research). I don't know much about how LLMs have impacted Wikipedia's content directly, but the advent of LLMs could have been limiting Wikipedia's growth as more people turn to AI for information. Rusty🐈14:54, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Question from The2gingerman (16:19, 24 December 2024)
I've noticed an article that I don't think meets the Notability Guideline. I can't find any sources which do NOT use Wikipedia as a source. For this reason, I believe that I have reason to start a deletion discussion on Kent, Kansas (apologies if this is broken, I'm not great at source editing). How would I do that, I can't find it on the articles relating to deletion. --The2gingerman (talk) 16:19, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
--HirowoWiki (talk | contribs) is wishing you a MerryChristmas! This greeting (and season) promotes WikiLove and hopefully this note has made your day a little better. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Happy New Year!
Spread the cheer by adding {{subst:Xmas5}} to their talk page with a friendly message.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 26th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 1 August 2024. At press time, over 94% of the world has legally fallen prey to the merry celebrations of "Christmas", and so shall you soon. It's been a quiet 4 months, and we hope to see you with way more new scripts next year. Happy holidays! Aaron Liu (talk) 05:06, 25 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
Very useful for changelist patrollers, DiffUndo, by Nardog, is this edition's featured script. Taking inspiration from WP:AutoWikiBrowser's double-click-to-undo feature, it adds an undo button to every line of every diff from "show changes", optimizing partial reverts with your favorite magic spell and nearly fulfilling m:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Partial revert undo.
Doğu/Adiutor, a recent WP:Twinkle/WP:RedWarn-like userscript that follows modern WMF UI design, is now an extension. However, its sole maintainer has left the project, which still awaits WMF mw:code stewardship (among some audits) to be installed on your favorite WMF wikis.
DannyS712, our former chief editor, has ascended to MediaWiki and the greener purpley pastures of PHP with commits creating Special:NamespaceInfo and the __EXPECTUNUSEDTEMPLATE__ magic word to exclude a template from Special:UnusedTemplates! I wonder if Wikipedia has a templaters' newsletter...
BilledMammal/Move+ needs updating to order list of pages handle lists of pages to move correctly regardless of the discussion's page, so that we may avoid repeating fiasco history.
Andrybak/Unsigned helper forks Anomie/unsignedhelper to add support for binary search, automatic edit summaries after generating the {{unsigned}} template, support for {{undated}}, and support for generating while syntax highlighting is on.
Polygnotus/Move+ updates BilledMammal's classic Move+ to add automattic watchlisting of all pages—except the target page(s)—changed while processing a move.
@Mister.Early: It seems you have published your "article" to your user page, which is a space to provide information about yourself to other editors. It is not meant to be a profile page like on Facebook or other social media.
Hi Rusty I'm Pam from Australia. I am planning to participate in an event to learn more about wikipedia and how to edit etc. It's not for another month or so what do you suggest Ai do in tge meantime to prepare? --PamjMeson (talk) 10:28, 27 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hello. I saw a link where, first of all,
The link did not exist in the source.
When purged, the link stayed.
When deleted via visual editor, it stayed after publishing.
When null-edited, it stayed.
When clearing my browser cookies, it stayed.
What should I do? --The2gingerman (talk) 11:09, 27 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hello Rusty Cat (and Ixtal) - thank you for kindly mentoring me. I have wanted to serve as a Wikipedia editor for quite some time - tonight I've finally started the process. The proximal cause is that I want to undo an edit which I think violates BLP and NPOV policy. I've read these policies carefully, and I think I can do this properly - if there are pitfalls to this kind of thing that a beginner like me should avoid, though, please let me know. Thank you! I hope to become an increasingly active editor in the coming year. --31nyou851r (talk) 08:46, 31 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Happy New Year and Happy New WikiCup! The 2025 competition has just begun and all article creators, expanders, improvers and reviewers are welcome to take part. Even if you are a novice editor, we hope the WikiCup will give you a chance to improve your editing skills as you go. If you have already signed up, your submissions page can be found here. If you have not yet signed up, you can add your name here and the judges will set up your submissions page ready for you to take part. Any questions on the scoring, rules or anything else should be directed to one of the judges, or posted to the WikiCup talk page.
For the 2025 WikiCup, we've implemented several changes to the scoring system. The highest-ranking contestants will now receive tournament points at the end of each round, and final rankings are decided by the number of tournament points each contestant has. If you're busy and can't sign up in January, don't worry: Signups are now open throughout the year. To make things fairer for latecomers, the lowest-scoring contestants will no longer be eliminated at the end of each round.
Afternoon, I was wondering is it possible to get back my article page that was deleted/removed from Wikipedia? My name is Carlton Ubaezuonu and I’m a professional football player but I noticed my article with my history etc has been deleted? I’ve tried to contact who I believe may be responsible but I haven’t heard back. I’m not sure what steps to take? Thanks --Carltonuba38 (talk) 12:37, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, I feel that I am ready to create my first article and have found a notable subject that I am interested in which has yet to have a Wikipedia article.
A request for comment is open to discuss whether admins should be advised to warn users rather than issue no-warning blocks to those who have posted promotional content outside of article space.
Technical news
The Nuke feature also now provides links to the userpage of the user whose pages were deleted, and to the pages which were not selected for deletion, after page deletions are queued. This enables easier follow-up admin-actions.
Not anyone can just publish about themselves on Wikipedia – not only is doing so strongly discouraged, but there are strict inclusion criteria. In the words of the autobiography policy (linked above under the words "strongly discouraged"), [i]f your life and achievements are verifiable and genuinely notable, someone else will probably create an article about you sooner or later, but creating an article about yourself is strongly discouraged[...]
I'm sorry if you're trying to get yourself published or "make a page," as you put it, about yourself on Wikipedia, but this isn't the right place for you.
View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug in the Add Link feature has been fixed. Previously, the list of sections which are excluded from Add Link was partially ignored in certain cases. [6][7]
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