This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump.
This is a redesign of the current Community Portal.
It is expected to be ready to replace the current one by the end of this month. Nothing above this line will eventually make it onto the redesign.
For help on reading and editing Wikipedia see the Help menu.
For technical discussions, assistance, policy, proposals and other news see the Village pump - Wikipedia's discussion forum.
How to add to the community bulletin board
The community bulletin board has 2 sections that can be used by Wikipedians for announcements: "Events and projects" and "WikiProject notices". In general, keep it concise (under 2 lines), refrain from fancy formatting, and new entries should be placed at the top of their section.
Events and projects: In this section, only organized events, projects, and/or competitions should be listed. These are organized by how often they occur:
The Yearly section is for uncommon events, like events that only occur every year, once, or irregularly. The Monthly section is for events that occur each month, or are always ongoing.
WikiProject notices: In this section, any announcement, request for help or other notice from a WikiProject should be listed here.
Entries should be signed, and ordered from newest to oldest.
Entries are to be removed after a period of 6 months.
Welcome to the community bulletin board, which is a page used for announcements from WikiProjects and other groups. Included here are coordinated efforts, events, projects, and other general announcements.
Monthly contest, WikiProject Military history. The contest department of the Military history WikiProject aims to motivate increased quality in military history articles by offering a form of friendly competition for project members making improvements to them. The primary contest available is a simple rolling competition that awards points for improving articles. The contest runs from the first to last day of each month.
Also consider posting WikiProject, Task Force, and Collaboration news at The Signpost's WikiProject Report page.Please include your signature when adding a listing here.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Improvements and Maintenance
Editors interested in templates can help by reading the latest Wishlist focus area, Template recall and discovery, and share your feedback on the talkpage. This input helps the Community Tech team to decide the right technical approach to build. Everyone is also encouraged to continue adding new wishes.
The new automated Special:NamespaceInfo page helps editors understand which namespaces exist on each wiki, and some details about how they are configured. Thanks to DannyS712 for these improvements. [1]
References Check is a feature that encourages editors to add a citation when they add a new paragraph to a Wikipedia article. For a short time, the corresponding tag "Edit Check (references) activated" was erroneously being applied to some edits outside of the main namespace. This has been fixed. [2]
It is now possible for a wiki community to change the order in which a page’s categories are displayed on their wiki. By default, categories are displayed in the order they appear in the wikitext. Now, wikis with a consensus to do so can request a configuration change to display them in alphabetical order. [3]
Tool authors can now access ToolsDB's public databases from both Quarry and Superset. Those databases have always been accessible to every Toolforge user, but they are now more broadly accessible, as Quarry can be accessed by anyone with a Wikimedia account. In addition, Quarry's internal database can now be queried from Quarry itself. This database contains information about all queries that are being run and starred by users in Quarry. This information was already public through the web interface, but you can now query it using SQL. You can read more about that, and 20 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Any pages or tools that still use the very old CSS classes mw-message-box need to be updated. These old classes will be removed next week or soon afterwards. Editors can use a global-search to determine what needs to be changed. It is possible to use the newer cdx-message group of classes as a replacement (see the relevant Codex documentation, and an example update), but using locally defined onwiki classes would be best. [4]
Technical project updates
Next week, all Wikimedia wikis will be read-only for a few minutes. This will start on September 25 at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. This maintenance process also targets other services. The previous switchover took 3 minutes, and the Site Reliability Engineering teams use many tools to make sure that this essential maintenance work happens as quickly as possible. [5]
Tech in depth
The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes details about: research about hook handlers to help simplify development, research about performance improvements, work to improve the REST API for end-users, and more.
To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
Hackathon Showcase (45 mins) - 19 short presentations by some of the Hackathon participants, describing some of the projects they worked on, such as automated testing of maintenance scripts, a video-cutting command line tool, and interface improvements for various tools. There are more details and links available in the Phabricator task.
Co-Creating a Sustainable Future for the Toolforge Ecosystem (40 mins) - a roundtable discussion for tool-maintainers, users, and supporters of Toolforge about how to make the platform sustainable and how to evaluate the tools available there.
You can help improve the articles listed below! This list updates frequently, so check back here for more tasks to try. (See Wikipedia:Maintenance or the Task Center for further information.)
WikiProjects are ongoing collaborations to improve articles having to do with a particular subject. Hundreds exist; find one that interests you! There are also many other fine projects listed below.
List of WikiProjects - Topics include art, business and economics, games, geography, history, humanities, law, literature, mathematics, music, politics, science, sports, technology, transportation, and more.
Lee Arthur Smith (born December 4, 1957 in Shreveport, Louisiana) was a pitcher in Major Leagues. Smith played for eight teams in both the NL and AL in his 18-year career, beginning with the Cubs in 1980. Smith led the league in saves four times during his career and by the time of his retirement in 1997 (with the Expos), he was the all-time leader with 478 saves. Smith used his fastball and size (he stood 6'6") to intimidate batters during the late innings of the game and became one of the premier closers of the 1980's and early 1990's.
Twelve-year-old Aang is the last surviving Airbender, a monk of the Air Nomads' Southern Air Temple, and is a supercentenarian at the incarnation age of 112.[1] He is the current incarnation of the Avatar, the spirit of the planet manifested in human form. Aang, as the Avatar, controls the elements and is tasked with keeping the Four Nations at peace.
Elvis Aaron Presley began his career as one of the first performers of rockabilly, an uptempo fusion of country and rhythm and blues with a strong back beat. His novel versions of existing songs, mixing "black" and "white" sounds, made him popular—and controversial—as did his uninhibited stage and television performances. He recorded songs in the rock and roll genre, with tracks like "Hound Dog" and "Jailhouse Rock" later embodying the style. Presley had a versatile voice and had unusually wide success encompassing other genres, including gospel, blues, ballads and pop. To date, he is the only performer to have been inducted into four separate music halls of fame.
Wikipedia is written by volunteer editors and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that also hosts a range of other volunteer projects: