User talk:Pine/Archive 16

Tech News: 2019-31

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

Problems

• Wikidata will be in read-only mode on 30 July from 05:00 to 05:30 UTC because of a server switch. [1]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 July. It will be on all wikis from 1 August (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 31 July at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

21:42, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

This Month in Education: July 2019

This Month in Education Volume 8 • Issue 7 • July 2019 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue First WikiEducation gathering in Mexico SEABA school in India has hired a Wikimedian to teach Wikimedia project in their school. Selet WikiSchool: results of first half of 2019 Students Use Archival Documents in a Competition, WMIL Stepanakert WikiClub: Meeting with the Speaker of the Artsakh Parliament - Ashot Ghoulian Collaboration with American University of Armenia Finalizing the Collaboration with Armenian Education Foundation Wikimedia Education SAARC Conference Journey

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 09:53, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-32

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

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 August. It will be on all wikis from 8 August (calendar).

Problems

• A change in RelatedArticles extension accidentally enabled it for everyone, not just for mobile users. This has been fixed. [2][3]

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 7 August at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Today everyone can see IP addresses if someone edits without an account. In the future this could be more hidden. This is to protect unregistered editors so fewer can see their IP address. This would only happen after we make sure the tools for vandal fighting can still be effective. You can read more and comment.

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

13:24, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: July 2019

This Month in GLAM – Volume IX, Issue VII, July 2019 Headlines Armenia report: Members of the National Assembly of Armenia Australia report: Staying warm over winter Germany report: Heidelberg symposium Indonesia report: Cultural Gardener Summer Project in Indonesia Ireland report: Collaboration with the PhotoIreland Foundation Italy report: Archeology in alpine valleys Norway report: Sámi place names – collaboration with the Sámi Várdobáiki Language Center Sweden report: More bibliographic data on Wikidata; National Library of Sweden; GLAM activities Wikimania UK report: Oxford and Coventry Updates Uganda report: #1Lib1Ref Uganda 2019 USA report: Summer meetups and Picnics Map the GLAM report: Visualising the status and the spread of a cultural collection in Wikipedia Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report: Other statements; Wikimania; blog posts on SDC Wikipedia Library report: Books & Bytes–Issue 34, May–June 2019 Wikidata report: I ain't no square with my corkscrew hair WMF GLAM report: OpenGLAM, Wikimania and Structured Commons Calendar: August's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 08:20, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

Seattle Wiknic 2019

In the Seattle area? You are invited to the Seattle Wiknic 2019 on Saturday, August 24, 2019, noon to 3pm at the Washington Park Arboretum, in the meadow area to the south of the Graham Visitors Center, approximately at 47.637435°N 122.293986°W / 47.637435; -122.293986. Click here for more details!

04:28, 12 August 2019 (UTC) To unsubscribe from future messages from Wikipedia:Meetup/Seattle, please remove your name from this list.

Tech News: 2019-33

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

Recent changes

• Editors using the mobile website on Wikipedia can opt-in to new advanced features via your settings page. This will give access to more interface links, special pages, and tools. Feedback on the discussion page is appreciated. [4]
• Due to the absence of volunteer maintenance of Cologne Blue skin, the link to activate it will be hidden. The skin will still work, but editors using it are encouraged to switch to another skin. [5]

Changes later this week

• Due to Wikimania, there is no deployment this week. [6]

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 August at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The "Wikidata item" link will be moved from "Tools" to "In other projects" section on all Wikimedia projects, starting on August 21. Full announcement, Phabricator task.

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

18:19, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-34

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

Tech News

• There will be no Tech News issue next week. The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 2 September 2019.

Problems

• Some abuse filters stopped working because of a code change. Only variables for the current action will work. Variables defined inside a branch may not work outside of that branch. You can read more to see how to fix the filters.
• Only six accounts can be created from one IP address per day. Between 12 August and August 15 this was two accounts per day. This was because of a security issue. It is now six accounts per day again. [7]

Changes later this week

• Only a limited number of accounts can be created from one IP address. An IP address can be whitelisted so that it can create as many accounts as needed. This is useful at events where many new persons learn to edit. IP addresses that are whitelisted for this reason will also not show CAPTCHAs when you create accounts. This will happen on Wednesday. [8]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 August. It will be on all wikis from 22 August (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 21 August at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• There is an RFC about creating a new global user group with the right to edit abuse filters. This will be used to fix broken filters and make sure all filters will still work when software changes happen. You can read more and comment.
• Special:Contributions/newbies will no longer be working. This is because of performance reasons. It showed edits by new accounts. You can see this in the recent changes feed instead. [9]

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

15:21, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

WikiCup 2019 September newsletter

The fourth round of the competition has finished in a flurry of last minute activity, with 454 points being required to qualify for the final round. It was a hotly competitive round with two contestants with over 400 points being eliminated, and all but two of the finalists having achieved an FA during the round. Casliber, our 2016 winner, was the highest point-scorer, followed by Enwebb and Lee Vilenski, who are both new to the competition. In fourth place was SounderBruce, a finalist last year. But all those points are swept away as we start afresh for the final round.

Round 4 saw the achievement of 11 featured articles. In addition, Adam Cuerden scored with 18 FPs, Lee Vilenski led the GA score with 8 GAs while Kosack performed 15 GA reviews. There were around 40 DYKs, 40 GARs and 31 GAs overall during round 4. Even though contestants performed more GARs than they achieved GAs, there was still some frustration at the length of time taken to get articles reviewed.

As we start round 5, we say goodbye to the eight competitors who didn't quite make it; thank you for the useful contributions you have made to the Cup and Wikipedia, and we hope you will join us again next year. Remember that any content promoted after the end of round 4 but before the start of round 5 can be claimed in round 5. Remember too that you must claim your points within 14 days of "earning" them (some people have fallen foul of this rule and the points have been removed).

If you are concerned that your nomination, whether it be for a good article, a featured process, or anything else, will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed (remember to remove your listing when no longer required). If you want to help out with the WikiCup, please do your bit to help keep down the review backlogs! Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Godot13, Sturmvogel 66, Vanamonde and Cwmhiraeth MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:44, 1 September 2019 (UTC)

Canoe launch moved to draftspace

An article you recently created, Canoe launch, does not have enough sources and citations as written to remain published. It needs more citations from reliable, independent sources. (?) Information that can't be referenced should be removed (verifiability is of central importance on Wikipedia). I've moved your draft to draftspace (with a prefix of "Draft:" before the article title) where you can incubate the article with minimal disruption. When you feel the article meets Wikipedia's general notability guideline and thus is ready for mainspace, please click on the "Submit your draft for review!" button at the top of the page. Jmertel23 (talk) 15:01, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

Well-intentioned but somewhat inaccurate discussion regarding Canoe launch

Original messages

Your submission at Articles for creation: Canoe launch (September 3) Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed! Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. The reason left by 78.26 was: Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit when they have been resolved. If you would like to continue working on the submission, go to Draft:Canoe launch and click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window. If you now believe the draft cannot meet Wikipedia's standards or do not wish to progress it further, you may request deletion. Please go to Draft:Canoe launch, click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window, add "{{db-self}}" at the top of the draft text and click the blue "publish changes" button to save this edit. If you do not make any further changes to your draft, in 6 months, it will be considered abandoned and may be deleted. If you need any assistance, you can ask for help at the Articles for creation help desk, on the reviewer's talk page or use Wikipedia's real-time chat help from experienced editors. 78.26 (spin me / revolutions) 16:55, 3 September 2019 (UTC) Hello, Pine! Having an article declined at Articles for Creation can be disappointing. If you are wondering why your article submission was declined, please post a question at the Articles for creation help desk. If you have any other questions about your editing experience, we'd love to help you at the Teahouse, a friendly space on Wikipedia where experienced editors lend a hand to help new editors like yourself! See you there! 78.26 (spin me / revolutions) 16:55, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

Hello @Jmertel23, Eastmain, and 78.26:, I'd like to get all of us a little better coordinated here. I originally created Canoe launch with the intention of expanding it later. Thought that there was no harm in leaving it in mainspace. Jmertel23 moved the article to draft space, and I am okay with that. Eastmain then kindly added some references, which was nice of that user to do. However, Eastmain also submitted the draft at AfC and attributed the draft to me, which led to the somewhat inaccurate message from 78.26 above on my talk page which referred to my "submission at Articles for creation" when I made no such submission. I think that 78.26's decline of the AfC was fine, but the message on my talk page could have used improvement. In the future I would like to request that Eastmain not send a draft through AfC that was started by someone else and which the user did not intend to submit to AfC unless Eastmain first consults with that user to request their collaboration regarding possibly submitting the draft to AfC.

I thank each of you for your efforts to improve the encyclopedia.

After doing further research, I am going to integrate the content that is currently in Draft:Canoe launch into the main Canoe article, and I will create a redirect at Canoe launch to the new section in the Canoe article.

Regards, --Pine (✉) 01:11, 6 September 2019 (UTC)

• @78.26: Now that the content of Draft:Canoe launch has been integrated into the Canoe article, what should be done with the draft page? Thanks, --Pine (✉) 01:22, 6 September 2019 (UTC)

Well, you made it easy. Since you gave attribution in your edit summary, I merely redirected from the draft to the canoe article. That should take care of things. Many thanks! 78.26 _{(spin me / revolutions)} 11:43, 6 September 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, 78.26. --Pine (✉) 19:41, 6 September 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-36

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

Recent changes

• You can use the new termbox interface if you edit Wikidata on a mobile device. This is to edit labels, descriptions and aliases easier on the mobile pages. [10]
• The new version of MediaWiki has been deployed during the last week.
• The previously announced change of positions of the "Wikidata item" link on all wikis has been rollbacked due to unexpected cache issues. [11]
• The limit for rollbacks has been increased from 10 to 100 rollbacks per minute. [12]
• The advanced version of the edit review pages (Recent Changes, Watchlist, and Related Changes) now include two new filters. These filters are for "All contents" and "All discussions". They will filter the view to just those namespaces. However the "All discussions" filter does not include pseudo talk pages, like discussions that are in the Project: or Wikipedia: namespaces. But it will include changes happening on Project talk: or the Wikipedia talk:. [13]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 September. It will be on all wikis from 5 September (calendar).
• When you log in, the software checks your password to see if it follows the Password policy. From this week, it will also complain if your password is one of the most common passwords in the world. If your password is not strong enough, please consider to change your password for a stronger password. [14]

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 September at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You will be able to read but not to edit Wikidata for up to 30 minutes on September 10 at 05:00 (UTC). [15]
• You will be able to read but not to edit some mid-sized wikis for up to 30 minutes September 17 at 05:00 (UTC). You can see which wikis. [16]
• You will be able to read but not to edit some mid-sized wikis for up to 30 minutes September 24 at 05:00 (UTC). You can see which wikis. [17]
• You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for up to 30 minutes on September 26 at 05:00 (UTC). [18]

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

09:07, 4 September 2019 (UTC)

This Month in Education: August 2019

This Month in Education Volume 8 • Issue 8 • August 2019 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue Summer WikiCamp for secondary school students 2019 in Armenia Together, we can create an environment that promotes Quality Education International Days and pop culture motivate primary and secondary education students to write on Wikipedia and Wikidata Quality learning and recruiting students at Edu Wiki camp We spend such wonderful days in WikiCamps that noone wants to return home

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 01:00, 5 September 2019 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: August 2019

This Month in GLAM – Volume IX, Issue VIII, August 2019 Headlines Côte d'Ivoire report: Strategic salon around GLAM perspectives Finland report: Continuing our work with the Saami communities Indonesia report: Digitization of banknotes and introduction to structured data on Commons (continued) Netherlands report: Wikidata map making workshop Norway report: Women in Red: collaboration with The National Library in Norway and Oslo Metropolitan University Sweden report: GLAM communities of practice; Problematic data UK report: New and old collaborations USA report: Wikimania 2019 Special story: Wikimania GLAM Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report: Recent presentations, workshops and blog posts Wikidata report: Work for us, or just tell us what you think of us WMF GLAM report: Updates on OpenGLAM Calendar: September's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 07:20, 11 September 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Video of a humpback whale singing and diving

Your Featured picture candidate has been promoted Your nomination for featured picture status, File:Humpbackwhale singing.webm, gained a consensus of support, and has been promoted. If you would like to nominate another image, please do so at Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates. Armbrust The Homunculus 07:49, 17 September 2019 (UTC)

September 2019 GOCE Newsletter

Guild of Copy Editors September 2019 Newsletter Hello and welcome to the September newsletter, a brief update of Guild activities since June 2019. June election: Reidgreg was chosen as lead coordinator, and is being assisted by Baffle gab1978, Miniapolis, Tdslk, and first-time coordinator Twofingered Typist. Jonesey95 took a respite after serving for six years. Thanks to everyone who participated! June Blitz: From 16 to 22 June, we copy edited articles on the themes of nature and the environment along with requests. 12 participating editors completed 35 copy edits. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here. July Drive: The year's fourth backlog-elimination drive was a great success, clearing all articles tagged in January and February, and bringing the copy-editing backlog to a low of five months and a record low of 585 articles while also completing 48 requests. Of the 30 people who signed up, 29 copyedited at least one article, a participation level last matched in May 2015. Final results and awards are listed here. August Blitz: From 18 to 24 August, we copy edited articles tagged in March 2019 and requests. 12 participating editors completed 26 copy edits on the blitz. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here. Progress report: As of 03:00, 23 September 2019 (UTC), GOCE copyeditors had processed 413 requests since 1 January. The backlog of tagged articles stood at 599 articles, close to our record month-end low of 585. Requests page: We are experimenting with automated archiving of copy edit requests; a discussion on REQ Talk (permalinked) initiated by Bobbychan193 has resulted in Zhuyifei1999 writing a bot script for the Guild. Testing is now underway and is expected to be completed by 3 October; for this reason, no manual archiving of requests should be done until the testing period is over. We will then assess the bot's performance and discuss whether to make this arrangement permanent. September Drive: Our current backlog-elimination drive is open until 23:59 on 30 September (UTC) and is open to all copy editors. Sign up today! Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators, Baffle gab1978, Miniapolis, Reidgreg, Tdslk and Twofingered Typist. To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:58, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 35, July – August 2019

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 35, July – August 2019

• Wikimania
• We're building something great, but..
• Wikimedia and Libraries User Group update
• A Wikibrarian's story
• Bytes in brief

Read the full newsletter

On behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:58, 27 September 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-40

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

Problems

• Last week's Tech News had delivery problems. Some did not get the newsletter. Some got it more than one time. The problem where some pages got it three times should now be fixed. [19]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 October. It will be on all wikis from 3 October (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 2 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Wikimedia Foundation Community Tech team is working on a watchlist expiry feature. This means you can put things on your watchlist for a period of time instead of forever. They are looking for feedback on the questions they have.
• Special:Contributions will get the standard OOUI look. This makes it easier to use on mobile and makes it look like other Special: pages. There is a script you can use to make the form smaller if you want to. [20]

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

16:50, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

This Month in Education: September 2019

This Month in Education Volume 8 • Issue 9 • September 2019 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue Learning history by expanding articles about novels Organizing the Education space at Wikimania 2019 - A conversation with Shani Evenstein Wiki Goes to School is back in three cities in Indonesia Wikipedia workshop at the Summer IT School for Teachers WikiChallenge Ecoles d'Afrique 2019 is over Wikipedia Education Program held at Netrokona Government College, Bangladesh Stepanakert WikiClub turns 4! Wikimedia Indonesia trained the trainers through WikiPelatih 2019 Students learning Wikipedia editing by attending Wikicamp at Nabran What is happening at Wikimedia Space?

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 19:34, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

Growth team updates #10

Welcome to the tenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

General news

• Growth team features are now fully deployed in Arabic Wikipedia and Basque Wikipedia (along with Czech, Korean, and Vietnamese Wikipedias). If your community is enthusiastic about welcoming newcomers, we encourage you to contact us so that we can verify together if your wiki is eligible. Then, go through the checklist to start the process of configuring the features.
• We have deployed features that help newcomers find their newcomer homepage. These features were successful, and more than doubled the number of newcomers who find their homepage. In Czech Wikipedia, 72% of newcomers visit their homepage and in Korean Wikipedia, 49% of newcomers visit their homepage.
• You can now join the Growth discussion space on the Wikimedia Space. This space has been created during Wikimania, to coordinate initiatives around welcoming newcomers. Please come and say hello!

Growth at Wikimania

Opening panel in the Community Growth space

• Several members of the Growth team attended Wikimania in Stockholm. We helped organize a conference track around Community Growth, presented about our team's work, and had many conversations with community members from around the world.
• Here are the most important links:
  • Notes and learnings from Wikimania
  • Video of Growth team presentation about our work and learnings from the past year
  • Slides from Growth team presentation
• These are some of our topline notes:
  • Alignment on newcomer retention: It seems like Wikimania attendees generally believe that newcomer retention is an important problem.
  • Connecting offline to online: Enthusiasm for ideas that connect our features better to offline events, such as making homepage mentors correspond to offline mentors.
  • Mentor dashboard: Experienced users requested a dashboard with which they could monitor newcomers who may need help.

Newcomer tasks -- feedback needed!

Mockup of newcomer tasks

• The Growth team's main project right now is newcomer tasks, which will suggest easy edits for newcomers. It will be built as a new module for the newcomer homepage.
• We hope that this project will help newcomers build their skills before attempting more difficult edits, such as creating new articles or adding images.
• These are the three main challenges we've been working on:
  • Where to find the tasks? After considering many different sources for tasks, we've decided to start by using maintenance templates, which are applied by editors on most wikis, and including tasks like copy editing, adding links, and adding references.
  • How to match to interests? Research shows that users are more likely to work on articles that are related to their interests. We are currently prototyping methods to ask newcomers their interests and then find articles that match.
  • How to guide the newcomer? Once a newcomer has selected a recommended article, they will need guidance on how to complete the edit. We have decided to use the help panel to provide that guidance while the newcomer edits.
• We are currently engineering on this feature, and we recently published notes from user tests that give mostly positive feedback.
• You can explore the design for newcomer tasks in these interactive mockups. We hope to hear from you about your thoughts on the project talk page. Do you think this could be helpful for newcomers? What are we missing?

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:49, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-41

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

Recent changes

• The abuse filter function now has a faster parser. This is to shorten the waiting time when you save an edit. [21]

Problems

• There is a problem in the visual editor when you copy or delete text with footnotes. It will be fixed soon. [22]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 October. It will be on all wikis from 10 October (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 9 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Community Wishlist Survey has a new format. It will focus on wikis that typically get less support. It will probably go back to the normal format next year. It is not decided exactly how it will work this year. You can leave feedback.
• The URL of the Wikimedia wiki main pages could be changed. This is because the current URLs cause several problems. For example http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page would be http://www.wikidata.org/ instead. You can tell the developers if this would cause problems for your wiki.
• There is a new technical community newsletter. You can read more about the work of Wikimedia's technical community. Subscribe to get the information in the future.
• Outreachy is an internship program for groups who are underrepresented in free and open-source software. There are seven Wikimedia projects about coding, documentation and quality assurance in the next round. Persons who fit the criteria can apply. The last day to apply is 5 November.

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

15:35, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: September 2019

This Month in GLAM – Volume IX, Issue IX, September 2019 Headlines Colombia report: The GLAM team from Wikimedia Colombia in OpenConLatAm Finland report: Photographs and events France report: European Heritage Days Indonesia report: Image donation by Indonesian Air Force Italy report: Wikimedia Italia Summer School Sweden report: Open cultural heritage; More libraries in Africa on Wikidata; Global MIL Week 2019 Feature Conference; Kulturhistoria som gymnasiearbete; Wiki Loves Monuments UK report: Oxford, Khalili Collections and Endangered Archives USA report: Hispanic Heritage and Disability Awareness Month Special story: Help the Movement Learn about Content Campaigns & Supporting newcomers in Wikidata training courses! Wikidata report: Tie a knot in your handkerchief WMF GLAM report: GLAM Manager Role Announced! Calendar: October's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 17:31, 8 October 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-42

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

Recent changes

• You can now use more advanced editing tools on the mobile web. You can turn them on and off in your preferences in the mobile version. [23]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 October. It will be on all wikis from 17 October (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 16 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Internet Explorer 6 and 7 are no longer supported. This means the browsers might start looking a bit weird. They will not get security support. You can't read Wikimedia wikis in Internet Explorer on Windows XP or Windows versions that are older than Windows XP. This is because almost no one uses the browsers anymore. Supporting them made the wikis less secure for everyone else. [24]
• In the future section headings might have a share link. This is to make it easier to link to the section. You can read more and discuss.

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

23:55, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

Editing as Activism: Edit-A-Thon to Correct Systemic Bias in Wikipedia

Allen Library, location of the Research Commons, University of Washington. Photo by Joe Mabel

Main page: Wikipedia:Meetup/Seattle § Editing as Activism: Edit-A-Thon to Correct Systemic Bias in Wikipedia Help address the systematic biases relating to gender, race, and social class that lead to under-representation of topics, people, and organizations on Wikipedia. When: Saturday, November 2, 2019 at 9am–1pm Where: UW Libraries Research Commons, 4000 15th Ave NE, Seattle, Washington 98195 Hosted by: Labor Archives of Washington, UW Special Collections, and Cascadia Wikimedians User Group Facebook event page Please register here To unsubscribe from future messages from Wikipedia:Meetup/Seattle, please remove your name from this list. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:54, 18 October 2019 (UTC)

Cascadia Wikimedians User Group

Tech News: 2019-43

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

Recent changes

• The API sandbox and help pages now show more clearly when API modules are marked as internal. API modules marked as internal were probably internal before. It was easier to miss. You should look for non-internal alternatives. [25]

Problems

• There is a translation tool we use on wikis with more than one language. For a few days it did not create pages for new languages when someone translated a page. The languages did not show in the language bar. This has been fixed. [26]
• The history and diffs can show wrong content. This is because of a cache problem. It will soon be fixed. [27]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 October. It will be on all wikis from 24 October (calendar).
• Reference Previews will be a beta feature on all Wikipedias and some Wikivoyages. It shows you a preview of the footnote when you hover over or click on the number. It has been a beta feature on German and Arabic Wikipedia since April.

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 23 October. See how to join.

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

14:38, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

This Month in Education: October 2019

This Month in Education Volume 8 • Issue 10 • October 2019 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue Wikimedia Chile launched its new online course for school teachers Wikimedia Norway is developing an education program for Sámi students and universities teaching Sámi subjects Teachers Association of the Republic of Indonesia (PGRI) Keeps Improving Teachers’ Digital Literacy Through the Use of Wikipedia Lectures on Wikipedia at the the University of Warsaw Wikicamp in Armenia through the Eyes of Foreigners New Wiki Education evaluation report of Wikidata courses published courses. Wikimedia 2030 Strategoy Youth Salon by VVIT WikiConnect Wikimedia & Education Greenhouse – Highlights from the first unit of the online courses. What is happening at Wikimedia Space?

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 08:30, 25 October 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-44

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

Recent changes

• You can post proposals for the Community Wishlist Survey. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals until 11 November. You can vote on proposals from 20 November to 2 December. This year the wishlist will focus on Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikivoyage and Wikinews. You can read more about the format for this year.
• Mobile users now have a specific design for their Watchlist. [28][29]
• You can share feedback and ideas on the Desktop Improvements project. The goal is to make the interface easier to use for readers and editors without removing any functionality. The Foundation's Readers Web team will work on this over the next two years.
• OOUI now allows using px (pixels) instead of em (em) for some specific cases. [30][31]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 October. It will be on all wikis from 31 October (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 30 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• There will be no software changes from 19 December to 2 January. The first MediaWiki version next year will come the week of 6 January. [32]
• Gadgets and user scripts can access variables about the current page in JavaScript. In 2015, this information was moved from global variables named wg* to mw.config. The old global variables will be removed later this year. You can know more about it and tell the developers if you want to try this out on your wiki first.

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

16:16, 28 October 2019 (UTC)

Editing News #2 – Mobile editing and talk pages

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

Inside this newsletter, the Editing team talks about their work on the mobile visual editor, on the new talk pages project, and at Wikimania 2019.

Help

What talk page interactions do you remember? Is it a story about how someone helped you to learn something new? Is it a story about how someone helped you get involved in a group? Something else? Whatever your story is, we want to hear it!

Please tell us a story about how you used a talk page. Please share a link to a memorable discussion, or describe it on the talk page for this project. The team wants your examples. These examples will help everyone develop a shared understanding of what this project should support and encourage.

Talk pages project

The Talk Pages Consultation was a global consultation to define better tools for wiki communication. From February through June 2019, more than 500 volunteers on 20 wikis, across 15 languages and multiple projects, came together with members of the Foundation to create a product direction for a set of discussion tools. The Phase 2 Report of the Talk Page Consultation was published in August. It summarizes the product direction the team has started to work on, which you can read more about here: Talk Page Project project page.

The team needs and wants your help at this early stage. They are starting to develop the first idea. Please add your name to the "Getting involved" section of the project page, if you would like to hear about opportunities to participate.

Mobile visual editor

The Editing team is trying to make it simpler to edit on mobile devices. The team is changing the visual editor on mobile. If you have something to say about editing on a mobile device, please leave a message at Talk:VisualEditor on mobile.

Edit Cards

What happens when you click on a link. The new Edit Card is bigger and has more options for editing links.

• On 3 September, the Editing team released version 3 of Edit Cards. Anyone could use the new version in the mobile visual editor.
• There is an updated design on the Edit Card for adding and modifying links. There is also a new, combined workflow for editing a link's display text and target.
• Feedback: You can try the new Edit Cards by opening the mobile visual editor on a smartphone. Please post your feedback on the Edit cards talk page.

Toolbar

The editing toolbar is changing in the mobile visual editor. The old system had two different toolbars. Now, all the buttons are together. Tell the team what you think about the new toolbar.

• In September, the Editing team updated the mobile visual editor's editing toolbar. Anyone could see these changes in the mobile visual editor.
  • One toolbar: All of the editing tools are located in one toolbar. Previously, the toolbar changed when you clicked on different things.
  • New navigation: The buttons for moving forward and backward in the edit flow have changed.
  • Seamless switching: an improved workflow for switching between the visual and wikitext modes.
• Feedback: You can try the refreshed toolbar by opening the mobile VisualEditor on a smartphone. Please post your feedback on the Toolbar feedback talk page.

Wikimania

The Editing Team attended Wikimania 2019 in Sweden. They led a session on the mobile visual editor and a session on the new talk pages project. They tested two new features in the mobile visual editor with contributors. You can read more about what the team did and learned in the team's report on Wikimania 2019.

Looking ahead

• Talk Pages Project: The team is thinking about the first set of proposed changes. The team will be working with a few communities to pilot those changes. The best way to stay informed is by adding your username to the list on the project page: Getting involved.
• Testing the mobile visual editor as the default: The Editing team plans to post results before the end of the calendar year. The best way to stay informed is by adding the project page to your watchlist: VisualEditor as mobile default project page.
• Measuring the impact of Edit Cards: This study asks whether the project helped editors add links and citations. The Editing team hopes to share results in November. The best way to stay informed is by adding the project page to your watchlist: Edit Cards project page.

– PPelberg (WMF) (talk) & Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

11:11, 29 October 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 October 2019

• In the media: How to use or abuse Wikipedia for fun or profit

• Special report: “Catch and Kill” on Wikipedia: Paid editing and the suppression of material on alleged sexual abuse

• In focus: The BBC looks at Chinese government editing

• Interview: Carl Miller on Wikipedia Wars

• Community view: Observations from the mainland

• Arbitration report: October actions

• Traffic report: Wrestling with a couple of teenagers, a Nobelist, and a lot of jokers

• Gallery: Wiki Loves Broadcast

• Recent research: Research at Wikimania 2019: More communication doesn't make editors more productive; Tor users doing good work; harmful content rare on English Wikipedia

• Essay: Wikipedia is in the real world

• News from the WMF: Welcome to Wikipedia! Here's what we're doing to help you stick around

• On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:12, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

WikiCup 2019 November newsletter

The WikiCup is over for another year! Our Champion this year is Adam Cuerden (submissions), who over the course of the competition has amassed 91 featured pictures, including 32 in the final round. Our finalists this year were:

1. Adam Cuerden (submissions) with 964 points
2. Lee Vilenski (submissions) with 899 points
3. Casliber (submissions) with 817 points
4. Kosack (submissions) with 691 points
5. SounderBruce (submissions) with 388 points
6. Enwebb (submissions) with 146 points
7. Usernameunique (submissions) with 145 points
8. HaEr48 (submissions) with 74 points

All those who reached the final will win awards. The following special awards will be made based on high performance in particular areas of content creation. So that the finalists do not have an undue advantage, these prizes are awarded to the competitor who scored the highest in any particular field in a single round, or in the event of a tie, to the overall leader in this field. Awards will be handed out in the coming weeks. Please be patient!

• Casliber (submissions) wins the featured article prize, for a total of 7 FAs during the course of the competition.
• Lee Vilenski (submissions) wins the good article prize, for 14 GAs in round 5.
• Yashthepunisher (submissions) wins the featured list prize, for 4 FLs overall.
• Adam Cuerden (submissions) wins the featured picture prize, for 91 FPs overall.
• MPJ-DK (submissions) wins the topic prize, for 7 articles in good topics in round 2.
• Lee Vilenski (submissions) wins the DYK prize, for 14 did you know articles in round 5.
• Muboshgu (submissions) wins the ITN prize, for 7 in the news articles in round 1.
• Ed! (submissions) wins the reviewer prize, for 56 good article reviews in round 1.

Congratulations to everyone who participated in this year's WikiCup, whether you made it to the final rounds or not, and particular congratulations to the newcomers to the WikiCup who have achieved much this year. Thanks to all who have taken part and helped out with the competition, not forgetting User:Jarry1250, who runs the scoring bot.

We have opened a scoring discussion on whether the rules and scoring need adjustment. Please have your say. Next year's competition will begin on 1 January. You are invited to sign up to participate; the WikiCup is open to all Wikipedians, both novices and experienced editors, and we hope to see you all in the 2020 competition. Until then, it only remains to once again congratulate our worthy winners, and thank all participants for their involvement! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Godot13, Sturmvogel 66, Vanamonde and Cwmhiraeth 14:18, 2 November 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-45

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

Recent changes

• At Special:Contributions you could see up to 5000 edits at the same time if you edited the URL. This has been lowered to 500. This is to stop requests which break the sites. [33]

Changes later this week

• MediaWiki:ipb-default-expiry can set the default length to block a user for your wiki. You will be able to use MediaWiki:ipb-default-expiry-ip to set a different default block length for IP editors. [34]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 November. It will be on all wikis from 7 November (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 6 November at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:48, 4 November 2019 (UTC)

Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon: Womxn Artists of the Pacific Northwest

Calendar page Jacob Lawrence Gallery — Calendar | School of Art + Art History + Design | University of Washington When Saturday, Nov. 16, 2019, 1 – 5 p.m. Campus location Art Building (ART) Campus room Jacob Lawrence Gallery Event types Special Events, Student Activities, Workshops Event sponsors Jacob Lawrence Gallery, School of Art + Art History + Design with support from Wikipedia and Art+Feminism Facebook event page www.facebook.com/events/2475807515865167/ Description Free parking is normally available on campus after 12pm on Saturdays. Check the Gallery's website for information about getting there. The ‘Big Four,’ or the four white male artists that comprised the Northwest School, were the subject of the famous 1953 LIFE magazine article, "Mystic Painters of the Northwest": Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves, and Mark Tobey. Each of these artists have robust pages on Wikipedia. However, key female-identifying artists from this time such as Margaret Gove Cafferman — who Mark Tobey cited as an influence on his work — lack Wikipedia articles. To help address the imbalance of representation on Wikipedia, the Jacob Lawrence Gallery is organizing an Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon focused on female-identifying artists of the Pacific Northwest. Childcare, snacks from local businesses, editing tutorials, books, and lists of artists will be provided. All you need to bring is your laptop, power cord, and ideas. No previous Wikipedia experience required! Everyone is welcome. Access to UW wifi will be provided for non-UW affiliated participants. Please create a Wikipedia account before the event. To unsubscribe from future messages from Wikipedia:Meetup/Seattle, please remove your name from this list. -MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:34, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-46

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

Recent changes

• MediaWiki2LaTeX can put different pages from a Wikimedia wiki into a PDF. It can now make a PDF with around 5000 pages. Previously this was 800 pages.

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Wikimedia will take part in Google Code-in. This is for young students who want to help with open source software. You can read more. Experienced technical Wikimedians can mentor students.

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

22:03, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: October 2019

This Month in GLAM – Volume IX, Issue X, October 2019 Headlines Australia report: WikiD at the Design Museum Colombia report: Wikimedia Colombia in Argentinean event Czech Republic report: Wikipedia Week of Libraries in Broumov Estonia report: Nordic cooperation + Wikisource + library information Finland report: Collaborative histories France report: GLAM working group at WMFr; Partnership with AAF Indonesia report: Numismatic items from Sumatran Numismatic Museum Malaysia report: Wikipedia Penang Meetup 2 @ Tuanku Fauziah Museum and Gallery, University of Science Malaysia Netherlands report: Share Your Data master classes for GLAMs; New project manager WMNL; Images from Africa Norway report: Radio Cinema at the National Library in Oslo Sweden report: Nordic Museum publications on Wikidata and Commons; Wikipedia training in Härnösand; Open cultural heritage data in focus in Visby UK report: Khalili; Museums + Tech; Oxford WIR placement ends USA report: Spooky Autumn meetups Special story: #WikiForHumanRights Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report: Getting started, Tool highlights, Blog posts and presentations about SDC Wikipedia Library report: Books & Bytes–Issue 35, July–August 2019 Wikidata report: We Are Seven Wikimedia and Libraries User Group report: October 16th meeting minutes Wikisource report: Community Wishlist Survey 2020 and Wiki Advanced Training 2019 WMF GLAM report: 1Lib1Ref, Wikimedia Sweden Research and other updates Calendar: November's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 09:01, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

A survey to improve the community consultation outreach process

Hello!

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking to improve the community consultation outreach process for Foundation policies, and we are interested in why you didn't participate in a recent consultation that followed a community discussion you’ve been part of.

Please fill out this short survey to help us improve our community consultation process for the future. It should only take about three minutes.

The privacy policy for this survey is here. This survey is a one-off request from us related to this unique topic.

Thank you for your participation, Kbrown (WMF) 10:45, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

• Hello Kbrown (WMF), I think that Google has plenty of data about Wikimedians already and I don't think it's a great idea to have a third party, particularly Google, handling any more information than necessary. There are some service providers that I trust more than others but Google is increasingly not an organization that I trust. Also, given the countless other tasks that I have on my agenda, and how many communications I get every day, I rarely take the time to fill out surveys any more. Thanks for your interest. ↠Pine (✉) 08:02, 15 November 2019 (UTC)

Growth team updates #11

Welcome to the eleventh newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

General news

• Expanding to more wikis: the team is preparing to deploy Growth features to Ukrainian and Hungarian Wikipedias. Wikis that already have the features are Czech, Korean, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Basque Wikipedias. If your community is enthusiastic about welcoming newcomers, we encourage you to contact us so that we can verify together if your wiki is eligible. Then you can go through the checklist to start the process of configuring the features.
• Mentor training: we tried out our first training for mentors with the Czech community, so that experienced users can build skills that help them retain newcomers.
• The guide for mentors has been updated. Translations are welcomed!

Help panel results

Mockup of guidance while doing a suggested edit, using the help panel

The help panel was first deployed to newcomers in January 2019, and we have now finished analyzing data to determine its impact. A brief summary is below, and more in-depth information can be found here (in English).

• In summary, although we have seen a good amount of usage of the help panel, the help panel has not shown an increase in activation (whether a user makes their first edit) or retention (whether a user returns to edit again).
• This is a disappointing result, and our team has discussed potential reasons for the result and ideas for the future. Although we have many ideas for how to improve the help panel, we have decided to keep our attention on the newcomer homepage and newcomer tasks projects for the coming months.
• We'll be using the help panel as part of the newcomer tasks project: using it to guide newcomers while they complete suggested edits.
• We welcome questions and thoughts about this on the project's talk page.

Newcomer tasks deployment

Mockup of topic matching in newcomer tasks

• The first version of the newcomer tasks workflow (V1.0) will be deployed in the next weeks on our 4 priority wikis. This version will suggest articles to edit based on maintenance templates. In this first version, we expect many newcomers to initiate the workflow, but not many to select articles to edit or complete edits. We expect future versions of the feature to increase those behaviors.
• We're excited about this project because the majority of newcomers visit their newcomer homepage, and this will be the first element of the homepage that clearly asks the newcomer to start editing.
• These are the next two versions of the feature, which are already being planned:
  • V1.1 (topic matching): will allow newcomers to choose topics of interest (such as Art, Music, Sports, or Technology) to personalize their suggestions. After evaluating several approaches, we have decided to use a new ORES model built by the WMF Scoring team. The model will automatically identify the topic area of each article. We expect this to increase how often newcomers select articles to edit.
  • V1.2 (guidance): once newcomers arrive on an article to edit, we will use the help panel to provide guidance about how to complete the editing task. We expect this to increase how many newcomers actually complete productive edits.
• The project page includes links to the designs of the workflow, and we welcome questions and thoughts on the talk page.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:02, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-47

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

Problems

• You will be able to read but not to edit some wikis for up to 30 minutes on 26 November at 06:00 (UTC). You can see which wikis. It will probably last much shorter than 30 minutes. This will also affect the centralauth database. This could for example affect changing passwords, logging in to new wikis, changing emails or global renames. [35]

Changes later this week

• You can soon vote on proposals for the Community Wishlist Survey. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can vote on proposals from 20 November to 2 December. This year the wishlist will focus on Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikivoyage and Wikinews. You can read more about the format for this year.
• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 20 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

20:17, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

ArbCom 2019 election voter message

Hello! Voting in the 2019 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 on Monday, 2 December 2019. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate in the 2019 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:14, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 36

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 36, September – October 2019

• #1Lib1Ref January 2020
• #1Lib1Ref 2019 stories and learnings

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:21, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-48

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

Changes later this week

• The mobile beta mode will be disabled to have less maintenance. The developers will focus on the desktop improvements project. You can turn on advanced mobile contributions mode if you want to see the categories. You could also jump back to the top. This can instead be done with a gadget or user script. [36]
• Parsoid is software we use for the visual editor, content translation, Flow and the Android app. This has been rewritten. It will come to the wikis gradually over the next two weeks. It has been tested, but there could be some diffs or previews that don't look right. If you see any you can report them. [37]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 November. It will be on the other wikis next week (calendar). This is because of holidays.

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 27 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You will switch between the article and the talk page in a new way in the mobile view in the future. It will use tabs. This is more like in the desktop view. [38]

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

16:52, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

Essay

Wikipedia:Diffusing_conflict. EEng 18:16, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

• Hi @EEng: thanks for sharing that essay. I made revisions. I haven't looked at all of the links yet. I felt that some of the essay should be revised to be more respectful, and I think that my changes accomplish that while retaining the humorous elements of the essay. Please let me know what you think of the changes. ↠Pine (✉) 22:48, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

  Um, but you removed half of the material. What was disrespectful, and of whom? EEng 23:12, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

  Hi @EEng: much of my revisions consisted of changing formatting or content rather than completely removing content. The size of a diff of -1,027‎ bytes may look large at first, but much of that is due to replacements or reformatting instead of complete removal. I removed relatively little. I had two principal motivations. First, where I live, referring to people as non-human primates carries associations with racism, so I replaced one image for that reason. I don't think that the intention of the essay was to insult anyone, but I also didn't think that use of that type of reference is a good idea. I think that the image that I substituted makes the point regarding "unevolved administrators" as well as the previous image without the problematic connotation. Second, I didn't appreciate some of the content's references to sexuality. I'm not trying to imply "no one shall discuss sexuality on Wikipedia", and there is a time and place for that subject, but I didn't like the essay's use of that type of humor. After reading this explanation and reading the revised essay, what do you think? Thanks, ↠Pine (✉) 23:29, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

  I appreciate your efforts, but you're too worried about avoiding even the possibility of unintentional offense to someone, somewhere. Associating Michelle Obama with a gorilla would be racist; vaguely comparing (some) WP admins to gorillas is not, and while your T Rex image maintains the "unevolved" idea, it loses the 800-pound gorilla overtone, which is there intentionally (even if it's unstated). And I don't apologize for a bit of ribaldry; sex is a rich source of humor, the time and place for it is wherever it tickles the funny bone, and Shakespeare's full of such stuff (not that I'm comparing myself to Shakespeare). Finally, I have no idea why you removed "Effluent neighborhood", "Inciteful comments" and "Breeches of civility".

  I've restored the removed material, though I did use your gallery idea. If the essay can't be run as is, so be it, but perhaps you can consult other Signpost editors and let me know what they think. EEng 03:11, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

This Month in Education: November 2019

This Month in Education Volume 8 • Issue 11 • November 2019 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue Wikimedians aim to make a difference in the lives of students in Ghana with support from the Wikimedia & Education Greenhouse The Third "Editatón WikiUNAM" Spreading Free Knowledge in the Land of Minangkabau What can we learn from the Open Education movement about attaining educational SDG in the digital age? We are highlighting the work of User:Ixocactus this month‎ “Olympic sports through history” on Serbian Wikipedia courses. Workshops with Wiki Club members "Learning about other Culture" SEABA School, Lehragaga. What is happening at Wikimedia Space?

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 03:15, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 November 2019

• From the editor: Put on your birthday best

• News and notes: How soon for the next million articles?

• In the media: You say you want a revolution

• On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

• Arbitration report: Two requests for arbitration cases

• Traffic report: The queen and the princess meet the king and the joker

• Technology report: Reference things, sister things, stranger things

• Gallery: Winter and holidays

• Recent research: Bot census; discussions differ on Spanish and English Wikipedia; how nature's seasons affect pageviews

• Essay: Adminitis

• From the archives: WikiProject Spam, revisited

• In focus: An update on the Wikimedia Movement 2030 Strategy

• Special report: How many people edit in your favorite language? Where are they from?

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:24, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

Signpost WikiProject Report

Hello, Pine. Thanks for the note. I've been away for a while, but might be able to jumpstart the old WikiProject Report for a second look at WP:Spam or a few other projects. I wouldn't be able to commit to doing it weekly like I used to, but perhaps once or twice a month. Finding projects and writing the questions tended to be the easy part (and the most fun). It was actually getting people to respond and then the editing/cleanup that took up a bit of time, so help with that would be appreciated. Of course, the best performing articles tended to not be about a project at all, but rather some deep dive into a topic that impacted projects, which I'd love to do but don't really have the time for right now.

–Mabeenot (talk) 16:55, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

• Hi @Mabeenot: The Signpost is currently publishing once per month, which appears to fit your availability. A Signpost piece about WikiProject Spam is in the current issue. If you are willing to work on future issues of the WikiProject Report then please let Smallbones know in Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom. Thank you very much. ↠Pine (✉) 06:25, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-49

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

Recent changes

• Mix'n'match is a tool to connect Wikidata items to information in other databases. It can be used to find subjects that are missing in a Wikipedia. It now has more than 3000 datasets. Before it was closer to 2000.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 December. It will be on all wikis from 5 December (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• There will be a new schema for XML dumps. Scripts and apps that use them will need to be updated. If they are not updated they will no longer work. [39]
• The {{REVISIONID}} magic word will no longer work in the content namespaces. This is for performance reasons. When you preview a page it returns "" (empty string). When you read a page it returns "-" (dash). In the future this will also affect other namespaces. The next ones are file and category namespaces. [40]

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

16:58, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

GOCE December 2019 Newsletter

Guild of Copy Editors December 2019 Newsletter Hello and welcome to the December 2019 GOCE newsletter, an update of Guild happenings since the September edition. Our Annual Report should be ready in late January. Election time: Nominations for the election of a new tranche of Guild coordinators to serve for the first half of 2020 will be open from 1 to 15 December. Voting will then take place and the election will close on 31 December at 23:59 UTC. Positions for Guild coordinators, who perform the important behind-the-scenes tasks that keep our project running smoothly, are open to all Wikipedians in good standing. We welcome self-nominations so please consider nominating yourself if you've ever thought about helping out; it's your Guild and it doesn't run itself! September Drive: Of the thirty-two editors who signed up, twenty-three editors copy edited at least one article; they completed 39 requests and removed 138 articles from the backlog, bringing the backlog to a low of 519 articles. October Blitz: This event ran from 13 to 19 October, with themes of science, technology and transport articles tagged for copy edit, and Requests. Sixteen editors helped remove 29 articles from the backlog and completed 23 requests. November Drive: Of the twenty-eight editors who signed up for this event, twenty editors completed at least one copy edit; they completed 29 requests and removed 133 articles from the backlog. Our December Blitz will run from 15 to 21 December. Sign up now! Progress report: From September to November 2019, GOCE copy editors processed 154 requests. Over the same period, the backlog of articles tagged for copy editing was reduced by 41% to an all-time low of 479 articles. Request archiving: The archiving of completed requests has now been automated. Thanks to Zhuyifei1999 and Bobbychan193, YiFeiBot is now archiving the Requests page. Archiving occurs around 24 hours after a user's signature and one of the templates {{Done}}, {{Withdrawn}} or {{Declined}} are placed below the request. The bot uses the Guild's standard "purpose codes" to determine the way it should archive each request so it's important to use the correct codes and templates. Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators; Reidgreg, Baffle gab1978, Miniapolis, Tdslk and Twofingered Typist. >>> Sign up for the December blitz! <<< >>> Participate in the Coordinator elections! <<< To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:05, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-50

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

Recent changes

• Wikimedia projects use Translatewiki to translate the wiki interface. You can now use WatchTranslations to watch projects there. You would get an email if there are missing translations to your language. [41]
• There is a new dataset you can use. It shows the number of editors per country per month for a number of countries. You can read the documentation and download the dataset.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 December. It will be on all wikis from 12 December (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 11 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You can test a new reference tool. It makes it possible to reference different parts of a source without repeating all information. You can test it on the beta cluster. You can see an example article. [42]

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

16:38, 9 December 2019 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: November 2019

This Month in GLAM – Volume IX, Issue XI, November 2019 Headlines Australia report: Wiki Loves Monuments Finland report: Combining the old and the new France report: Wikimedia training workshops; Conference in the city of Arles Netherlands report: IHLIA starts monthly Wikipedia writing sessions, Wiki Techstorm 2019 New Zealand report: Wellington talks and edit-a-thons Poland report: Transgressing the boundaries of internal academic discourse Sweden report: Minor grants and Library training USA report: A busy conference season, a new Caribbean community and introducing a tool for adding artwork metadata Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report: Continued development, documentation, and blog posts Wikipedia Library report: Books & Bytes-Issue 36, September–October 2019 Wikidata report: Research published Wikisource report: Results of Community Wishlist Survey 2020 Calendar: December's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 14:04, 10 December 2019 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for December 13

Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Admiral of the Navy (United States), you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page National Portrait Gallery (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are usually incorrect, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of unrelated topics with similar titles. (Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.)

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 07:45, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

• Fixed. ↠Pine (✉) 22:39, 15 December 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-51

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

Problems

• The Linter extension helps you find technical errors in articles. It did not show new changes last week. This was because of an API problem. It is now working again. [43]
• Special:Watchlist can show the wrong information again. It does not always show which edits are read and which are unread. This is because of a database problem. The developers are working on solving the problem. [44]

Changes later this week

• You can get email notifications. You can get them immediately, a summary every day or a summary once every week. If you choose a summary you can soon choose not to get notifications you have already marked as read on the wiki. [45]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 December. It will be on all wikis from 19 December (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 18 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The partial blocks feature is now stable. It will come to most wikis on 6 January. Your wiki can ask to wait. Contact NKohli (WMF) if you don't want it now. [46]

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

00:16, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

Please join us for our Cascadia Wikimedians annual meeting, Monday, December 23, 5:30pm PST

Please join us for our Cascadia Wikimedians annual meeting, Monday, December 23, 5:30pm PST. You can join us virtually from your PC, Mac, Linux, iOS, or Android at this link: https://virginia.zoom.us/my/wikilgbt. If your are in Seattle, the address of the physical meeting is: Capitol Hill Meeting Room at Capitol Hill Library (425 Harvard Ave. E., Seattle, WA 98102) 47.622928°N 122.322912°W / 47.622928; -122.322912 The event page is here. You do not have to be a member to attend, but only members can vote in board elections. New members may join in person by completing the membership registration form onsite or (to be posted) online and paying $5 for a calendar year / $0.50 per month for the remainder of a year. Current members may renew for 2019 at the meeting as well.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:20, 18 December 2019 (UTC) To unsubscribe from future messages from Wikipedia:Meetup/Seattle, please remove your name from this list.

―Buster7 ☎ 14:49, 24 December 2019 (UTC)== Tech News: 2019-52 ==

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

Tech News

• Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 6 January 2020.

Recent changes

• All mobile site users now have new features. Features include: tabs for page/discussion; an expanded user-menu; direct access to history pages. These features were initially part of the "advanced mode".

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.

Future changes

• You can use setlang in the URL to change the user interface language. This will no longer happen automatically. When you open the link you will be asked to confirm the language change. This will not happen if Javascript is not working in your browser. [47]

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

20:06, 23 December 2019 (UTC)

Peace Dove

Peace is a state of balance and understanding in yourself and between others, where respect is gained by the acceptance of differences, tolerance persists, conflicts are resolved through dialog, peoples rights are respected and their voices are heard, and everyone is at their highest point of serenity without social tension. Happy Holidays to you and yours. ―Buster7 ☎ 14:49, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

• Thank you very much. ↠Pine (✉) 02:46, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

Merry Christmas!

Hello Pine: Enjoy the holiday season, and thanks for your work to maintain, improve and expand Wikipedia. Cheers, Everedux ^(talk) 20:14, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

Spread the WikiLove; use {{subst:Season's Greetings1}} to send this message

• Thank you very much. ↠Pine (✉) 02:47, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

Cheers, Pine, thank you for your festive greetings. I wish to you that 2020 will be better than 2019 for you. Happy Holidays! (also, I hope I didn't forget to tell you that I have returned :O) starship.paint (talk) 10:38, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 December 2019

• From the editors: Caught with their hands in the cookie jar, again

• News and notes: What's up (and down) with administrators, articles and languages

• Special report: Are reputation management operatives scrubbing Wikipedia articles?

• In the media: "The fulfillment of the dream of humanity" or a nightmare of PR whitewashing on behalf of one-percenters?

• Discussion report: December discussions around the wiki

• Arbitration report: Announcement of 2020 Arbitration Committee

• Traffic report: Queens and aliens, exactly alike, once upon a December

• Technology report: User scripts and more

• Gallery: Holiday wishes

• Recent research: Acoustics and Wikipedia; Wiki Workshop 2019 summary

• From the archives: The 2002 Spanish fork and ads revisited (re-revisited?)

• On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

• Op-Ed: Why we need to keep talking about Wikipedia's gender gap

• WikiProject report: Wikiproject Tree of Life: A Wikiproject report

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:38, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

                                                 

• 
• 
• 

Happy New Year!

• 
  MMXX Lunar Calendar

Pine,
Have a great 2020 and thanks for your continued contributions to Wikipedia.

---

   – 2020 is a leap year – news article.
   – Background color is Classic Blue (#0F4C81), Pantone's 2020 Color of the year

Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year 2020}} to user talk pages.

– North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 22:37, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

• Thanks, Northamerica1000, and happy new year to you also. ↠Pine (✉) 20:41, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

Welcome to the 2020 WikiCup!

Happy New Year, Happy New Decade and Happy New WikiCup! The competition begins today and all article creators, expanders and improvers are welcome to take part. 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. We are relaxing the rule that only content on which you have completed significant work during 2020 will count; now to be eligible for points in the competition, you must have completed significant work on the content at some time! Any questions on the rules or on anything else connected to the Cup should be directed to one of the judges, or posted to the WikiCup talk page. Signups will close at the end of January, and the first round will end on 26 February; the 64 highest scorers at that time will move on to round 2. Good luck! The judges for the WikiCup are Sturmvogel 66 (talk · contribs · email), Godot13 (talk · contribs · email), Vanamonde93 (talk · contribs · email) and Cwmhiraeth (talk) 11:43, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – January 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (December 2019).

Administrator changes

Dreamy Jazz • Newslinger • Rosguill

Deor • Spartaz • Xeno

Angusmclellan • clpo13 • Edgar181 • Matthewedwards • NCurse

CheckUser changes

Bradv • Casliber • David Fuchs • Maxim • Newyorkbrad • SoWhy • Xeno

Oversight changes

Bradv • Casliber • DGG • David Fuchs • Maxim • Newyorkbrad • SoWhy • Xeno

Someguy1221

Guideline and policy news

• A request for comment asks whether partial blocks should be enabled on the English Wikipedia. If enabled, this functionality would allow administrators to block users from editing specific pages or namespaces, rather than the entire site.
• A proposal asks whether admins who don't use their tools for a significant period of time (e.g. five years) should have the toolset procedurally removed.
• Following a successful RfC, a whitelist is now available for users whose redirects will be autopatrolled by a bot, removing them from the new pages patrol queue. Admins can add such users to Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Redirect whitelist after a discussion following the guidelines at Wikipedia talk:New pages patrol/Redirect whitelist.

Arbitration

• The fourth case on Palestine-Israel articles was closed. The case consolidated all previous remedies under one heading, which should make them easier to understand, apply, and enforce. In particular, the distinction between "primary articles" and "related content" has been clarified, with the former being the entire set of articles whose topic relates to the Arab-Israeli conflict, broadly interpreted rather than reasonably construed.
• Following the 2019 Arbitration Committee elections, the following editors have been appointed to the Arbitration Committee: Beeblebrox, Bradv, Casliber, David Fuchs, DGG, KrakatoaKatie, Maxim, Newyorkbrad, SoWhy, Worm That Turned, Xeno.

Miscellaneous

• This issue marks three full years of the Admin newsletter. Thanks for reading!

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:06, 4 January 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-02

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

Changes later this week

• When trying to move a page, if the target title already exists then a warning message is shown. The warning message will now include a link to the target title. [48]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 January. It will be on all wikis from 9 January (calendar).

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

21:21, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: December 2019

This Month in GLAM – Volume IX, Issue XII, December 2019 Headlines Armenia report: GLAM+Wikidata Collaboration between Armenia and Albania Czech Republic report: Edit-a-thon Prachatice 2 Kosovo report: Transitional Justice edit-a-thon held in Prishtina New Zealand report: A Wikipedian in Residence and a Wikipedian writes Norway report: Plaintext Wikipedia dumps for the National Library Sweden report: Swedish Performing Arts Agency; Bibliographic data about Swedish periodicals USA report: White Elephant; WikiWednesday Salon; Cascadia Wikimedians annual meeting Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report: New blog posts Wikidata report: Job vacancies and item 80 million WMF GLAM report: Mapping GLAM-Wiki collaborations Calendar: January's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 16:24, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-03

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

Recent changes

• You can no longer read Wikimedia wikis if your browser use very old TLS. This is because it is a security problem for everyone. It can lead to downgrade attacks. Since 9 December you just see a warning. Soon the browser will not connect to the wikis at all. Most are users on Android systems older than 4.4. You can read the browser recommendations. [49]
• Special:LinkSearch has been moved from the "Redirecting special pages" section on Special:SpecialPages to the "Lists of pages" section. [50]

Changes later this week

• Wikis can protect pages so that only some users can edit them. The standard protection levels are Require autoconfirmed or confirmed access and Require administrator access. If your wiki use more protection levels the technical name might be renamed for standardisation. This doesn't affect what users see. [51]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 January. It will be on all wikis from 16 January (calendar).

Future changes

• Deepcat and Catgraph will stop working. This will happen at the end of January. This is because you can now use the normal search function instead. [52]
• You can use <ref follow="…"> to merge footnotes that follow each other. It is meant to be used for digitised books on Wikisource. If the order of the footnotes is wrong no error was shown but the bad <ref> was shown outside the <references /> list. This will change and you will see an error message instead. [53]

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

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:40, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-04

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

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 January. It will be on all wikis from 23 January (calendar).

Future changes

• There is a new suggestion for what to show when someone edits without registering an account. This is to give unregistered editors better privacy and make some anti-vandalism work go faster. You can give feedback.
• Pywikibot is a Python library to automate work on wikis. It will no longer support Python 2. Use the python2 tag if you need to continue running Python 2 scripts. The Pywikibot team strongly recommends to migrate to Python 3. You can get help to do so. [54]
• The weekly MediaWiki branch cut will soon become automated. The timing for this cut may change. You can discuss in Phabricator if this affects you. [55]
• You can read about coming technical events and mentoring interns.

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

19:41, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 January 2020

• From the editor: Reaching six million articles is great, but we need a moratorium

• News and notes: Six million articles on the English language Wikipedia

• Special report: The limits of volunteerism and the gatekeepers of Team Encarta

• In the media: Turkey's back up, but what's happening with Dot-org and a new visual identity?

• Arbitration report: Three cases at ArbCom

• Traffic report: The most viewed articles of 2019

• Gallery: Wiki Loves Monuments 2019, we're all winners

• News from the WMF: Capacity Building: Top 5 Themes from Community Conversations

• Community view: Our most important new article since November 1, 2015

• In focus: Cryptos and bitcoins and blockchains, oh no!

• Recent research: How useful is Wikipedia for novice programmers trying to learn computing concepts?

• From the archives: A decade of The Signpost, 2005-2015

• On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

• WikiProject report: WikiProject Japan: a wikiProject Report

• Humour: Predicting the 6,000,000th article

• Obituary: Remembering Wikipedia contributor Brian Boulton

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:09, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-05

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

Problems

• Some mobile diffs have problems. A couple of buttons are not shown. Structured data diffs on Commons are confusing. The developers are working on fixing it. [56][57]
• Administrators on wikis that use Structured Discussions can't move discussion pages. This is a bug. The developers are working on fixing it. [58]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

• There is JavaScript code on Special:Undelete for administrators that makes it possible to automatically select multiple checkboxes by holding the "Shift" key and clicking. This code is also loaded by accident on other special pages and on articles. This makes pages slower to load. This will be fixed. If you know of other special pages where this is useful please tell the developers at phab:T232688.

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

18:53, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

Category:Depression (psychology) has been nominated for discussion

Category:Depression (psychology), which you created, has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Marcocapelle (talk) 15:07, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 37

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 37, November – December 2019

• #1Lib1Ref
• Wikimedia and Libraries User Group

Read the full newsletter

On behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:10, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – February 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2020).

Administrator changes

Ergo Sum • Nick Moyes • QEDK • Wugapodes

Dennis Brown

Aude • BrownHairedGirl • CALR • Jengod • John Reaves • J.smith • Kim Dent-Brown • K1Bond007 • MECU • Refdoc • RHaworth

CheckUser changes

Opabinia regalis • Premeditated Chaos

Interface administrator changes

Ragesoss

Guideline and policy news

• Following a request for comment, partial blocks are now enabled on the English Wikipedia. This functionality allows administrators to block users from editing specific pages or namespaces rather than the entire site. A draft policy is being workshopped at Wikipedia:Partial blocks.
• The request for comment seeking the community's sentiment for a binding desysop procedure closed with wide-spread support for an alternative desysoping procedure based on community input. No proposed process received consensus.

Technical news

• Twinkle now supports partial blocking. There is a small checkbox that toggles the "partial" status for both blocks and templating. There is currently one template: {{uw-pblock}}.
• When trying to move a page, if the target title already exists then a warning message is shown. The warning message will now include a link to the target title. [59]

Arbitration

• Following a recent arbitration case, the Arbitration Committee reminded administrators that checkuser and oversight blocks must not be reversed or modified without prior consultation with the checkuser or oversighter who placed the block, the respective functionary team, or the Arbitration Committee.

Miscellaneous

• Voting in the 2020 Steward elections will begin on 08 February 2020, 14:00 (UTC) and end on 28 February 2020, 13:59 (UTC). The confirmation process of current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.
• The English Wikipedia has reached six million articles. Thank you everyone for your contributions!

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:06, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

This Month in Education: January 2020

This Month in Education Volume 9 • Issue 1 • January 2020 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue Meet this month's featured Wikimedia & Education community member: User:Parvathisri Alva's college collaboration EtnoWiki strikes again in Poland! Internship program: Engaging New Volunteers to Join the Community Joint translations as language studying tool in Karvachar’s Wikiclub Selet WikiSchool introduces Wikinews and other Wikimedia projects Training of Trainers for Teachers in South Sulawesi Was Organized For the First Time Twenty video tutorials in Serbian language on editing Wikipedia Updates from Wikimedia Education database edit-a-thon Wiki Club Ohrid grows Wiki Masuk Sekolah (Wiki Goes to School) Involved the Students in Producing and Sharing Knowledge Through Wikipedia Wikiclassroom as a New Means of Gaining Knowledge Wikimedia & Education Greenhouse – Highlights from the second unit of the online course WoALUG collaboration with educational institution BONEVET in Prishtina

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 07:26, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-06

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

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 February. It will be on all wikis from 6 February (calendar).

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

20:05, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Growth team updates #12

Welcome to the twelfth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

General news

• A training for mentors has been published. The training was first tried with the Czech community, and went well.
• Growth team features have been deployed to Hungarian, Ukrainian, and Armenian Wikipedias. If your community is enthusiastic about welcoming newcomers, we encourage you to contact us so that we can verify together whether your wiki is eligible. Then you can go through the checklist to start the process of configuring the features.

Productive edits from newcomer tasks

We deployed the basic workflow for newcomer tasks to our target wikis on November 20, and the early results are exciting.

Suggested edits by type of edit.
Graph captions (top to bottom):
■ Copyedits
■ Add links
■ Expand article
■ Add reference
■ Advanced edits

• About 1.5% of newcomers who visit their homepage complete the workflow and save a suggested edit. So far, this has amounted to over 450 edits, on all wikis, coming from both desktop and mobile users.
• When we look at the edits that newcomers make, we see that they are largely positive! We are pleased to see that this feature does not appear to encourage vandals.
  • 75% of the edits are productive and unreverted.
  • 95% of the edits appear to be in good faith.
• Most of the edits include copyedits and adding links, with some newcomers also adding content and references. Copyedits are suggested most strongly.
• Click here to learn more specifics about the results so far.

Topic matching deployed

The results from our user tests showed us that newcomers are likely to do more suggested edits if they can choose articles related to a topic that they're interested in, such as "science", "music", or "sports".

• On January 21, we deployed topic matching on our pilot wikis. Newcomers are now using it. We expect it to cause more newcomers to try suggested edits, and to keep making more of them.
• In the coming weeks, we will be making improvements to the accuracy of the algorithm used to topic matching, which is part of the ORES project.

Next steps for newcomer tasks

Prototype of how the help panel will "peek" from the bottom of the page to offer guidance on mobile.

Because we are seeing positive results from newcomer tasks, the Growth team plans to concentrate our efforts on improving the workflow and encouraging more newcomers to use it.

• Guidance: next, we will be using the help panel to provide guidance to newcomers as they do suggested edits, and to prompt them to do another edit after completing their first one. In user tests for this feature, demo videos were one of the favorite features, and we will think about how these might be added.
• Starting the workflow: only about 20% of newcomer who visit their homepage begin the newcomer tasks workflow. We are going to be trying out different layouts of the homepage to encourage more newcomers to try newcomer tasks.
• Additional task types: we are researching methods to recommend more specific tasks to newcomers, such as specific links to add, or images that could be added to articles from Commons.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:39, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors 2019 Annual Report

Guild of Copy Editors 2019 Annual Report Our 2019 Annual Report is now ready for review. Highlights: Overview of Backlog-reduction progress (a record low backlog!); Summary of Drives, Blitzes, and the Requests page; Automated archiving of requests; Membership news and results of elections; Annual leaderboard; Plans for 2020. – Your Guild coordinators: Jonesey95, Baffle gab1978, Reidgreg, Tdslk and Twofingered Typist. To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:10, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-07

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

Recent changes

• There is a new version of the Wikimedia Commons app for Android. It should fix the failed uploads problem. [60]

Problems

• There was a problem with the new MediaWiki version last week. It deleted some messages by accident. The new version was late because it was stopped to fix things. [61]

Changes later this week

• The MediaWiki action API is used by various tools like bots and gadgets. Some error codes will change. Some parameter values that do not follow the standard will no longer work. [62]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 February. It will be on all wikis from 13 February (calendar).

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

19:12, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: January 2020

This Month in GLAM – Volume X, Issue I, January 2020 Headlines Australia report: Burning Finland report: Wikiviews from Benin: Wikipedia in the Tower of Babel France report: Paris musées; Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève Indonesia report: 1st PD Day in Indonesia; visitation to GLAM institutions Italy report: Brand new and old faithful wikimedian in residence! New Zealand report: Macrons and museums Norway report: Sámi cultural heritage Sweden report: FindingGLAMs Challenge; Art by Edvard Munch from the Thiel Gallery; More European archives on Wikidata; OpenGLAM now! – watch the presentations; Wikipedia in Libraries Switzerland report: Wikidata for Libraries Hackday Series USA report: Knowledge Graphs and Meetups Special story: New Book Calendar: February's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 19:29, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-08

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

Recent changes

• Pages on Wikidata and Commons now load faster. You can read more about page load performance. [63][64]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 February. It will be on all wikis from 20 February (calendar).

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

16:17, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-09

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

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 February. It will be on all wikis from 27 February (calendar).

Future changes

• There will be a reply button after each post on a talk page if you want one. This will soon be a beta feature on the Arabic, French, Dutch and Hungarian Wikipedias. You will have to turn it on if you want to use it. It will come to more wikis later. You can test the reply button. It was briefly shown earlier than planned by mistake on the four first wikis last week.

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

21:00, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

WikiCup 2020 March newsletter

And so ends the first round of the competition. Everyone with a positive score moves on to Round 2, with 57 contestants qualifying. We have abolished the groups this year, so to qualify for Round 3 you will need to finish Round 2 among the top thirty-two contestants.

Our top scorers in Round 1 were:

• Epicgenius, a WikiCup newcomer, led the field with a featured article, five good articles and an assortment of other submissions, specialising on buildings and locations in New York, for a total of 895 points.
• Gog the Mild came next with 464 points, from a featured article, two good articles and a number of reviews, the main theme being naval warfare.
• Raymie was in third place with 419 points, garnered from one good article and an impressive 34 DYKs on radio and TV stations in the United States.
• Harrias came next at 414, with a featured article and three good articles, an English civil war battle specialist.
• CaptainEek was in fifth place with 405 points, mostly garnered from bringing Cactus wren to featured article status.
• The top ten contestants at the end of Round 1 all scored over 200 points; they also included L293D, Kingsif, Enwebb, Lee Vilenski and CAPTAIN MEDUSA. Seven of the top ten contestants in Round 1 are new to the WikiCup.

These contestants, like all the others, now have to start scoring points again from scratch. In Round 1 there were four featured articles, one featured list and two featured pictures, as well as around two hundred DYKs and twenty-seven ITNs. Between them, contestants completed 127 good article reviews, nearly a hundred more than the 43 good articles they claimed for, thus making a substantial dent in the review backlog. Contestants also claimed for 40 featured article / featured list reviews, and most even remembered to mention their WikiCup participation in their reviews (a requirement).

Remember that any content promoted after the end of Round 1 but before the start of Round 2 can be claimed in Round 2. Some contestants made claims before the new submissions pages were set up, and they will need to resubmit them. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews.

If you want to help out with the WikiCup, please do your bit to keep down the review backlogs! Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Godot13 (talk), Sturmvogel 66 (talk), Vanamonde (talk) and Cwmhiraeth (talk). MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:47, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 1 March 2020

• From the editor: The ball is in your court

• News and notes: Alexa ranking down to 13th worldwide

• Special report: More participation, more conversation, more pageviews

• In the media: Mapping IP editors, Smithsonian open-access, and coronavirus disinformation

• Discussion report: Do you prefer M or P?

• Arbitration report: Two prominent administrators removed

• By the numbers: How many actions by administrators does it take to clean up spam?

• Community view: The Incredible Invisible Woman

• In focus: History of The Signpost, 2015–2019

• Recent research: Wikipedia generates $50 billion/year consumer surplus in the US alone

• From the archives: Is Wikipedia for sale?

• Traffic report: February articles, floating in the dark

• Gallery: Feel the love

• On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

• Op-Ed: What I learned as Wikimedia UK Communications Coordinator

• Opinion: Wikipedia is another country

• Humour: The Wilhelm scream

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:45, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

WikiCup newsletter correction

There was an error in the WikiCup 2020 March newsletter; L293D should not have been included in the list of top ten scorers in Round 1 (they led the list last year), instead, Dunkleosteus77 should have been included, having garnered 334 points from five good articles on animals, living or extinct, and various reviews. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:30, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – March 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2020).

Administrator changes

Money emoji

Athaenara • DeltaQuad

Fishhead64 • Kudpung • Mikaey

Bureaucrat changes

DeltaQuad

CheckUser changes

DeltaQuad

Oversight changes

DeltaQuad

Guideline and policy news

• Following an RfC, the blocking policy was changed to state that sysops must not undo or alter CheckUser or Oversight blocks, rather than should not.
• A request for comment confirmed that sandboxes of established but inactive editors may not be blanked due solely to inactivity.

Technical news

• Following a discussion, Twinkle's default CSD behavior will soon change, most likely this week. After the change, Twinkle will default to "tagging mode" if there is no CSD tag present, and default to "deletion mode" if there is a CSD tag present. You will be able to always default to "deletion mode" (the current behavior) using your Twinkle preferences.

Miscellaneous

• Following the 2020 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: BRPever, Krd, Martin Urbanec, MusikAnimal, Sakretsu, Sotiale, and Tks4Fish. There are a total of seven editors that have been appointed as stewards, the most since 2014.
• The 2020 appointees for the Ombudsman commission are Ajraddatz and Uzoma Ozurumba; they will serve for one year.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:20, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Sorry for bothering you, but...

New Page Patrol needs experienced volunteers

• New Page Patrol is currently struggling to keep up with the influx of new articles. We could use a few extra hands on deck if you think you can help.
• Reviewing/patrolling a page doesn't take much time but it requires a good understanding of Wikipedia policies and guidelines; Wikipedia needs experienced users to perform this task and there are precious few with the appropriate skills. Even a couple reviews a day can make a huge difference.
• If you would like to join the project and help out, please see the granting conditions and review our instructions page. You can apply for the user-right HERE. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 19:56, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-10

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

Problems

• Readers who were not logged in briefly saw the interface in a language decided by their browser. It should normally be in the language of the wiki. This happened for a short period of time last week. This was because of a bug. [65]

Changes later this week

• If you forget your password you can ask for a new one to be sent to your email address. You need to know your email address or your username. You will now be able to choose that you need to enter both your email address and your username. This will be a preference. This is to get fewer password reset emails someone else asked for. [66]
• When you asked for a new password you could see if the username didn't exist on Special:PasswordReset. Now the page will show the username you entered and tell you an email has been sent if the username exists. This is for better security. [67]
• On Special:WhatLinksHere you can see what other pages link to a page. You can see if the link is from a redirect. You can now see which section the redirect links to. [68]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 March. It will be on all wikis from 5 March (calendar).

Future changes

• The developers are working on a new interface to solve edit conflicts on talk pages. You can give feedback. [69]
• There is a vote on the creation of a new user group called abuse filter manager. The vote runs from March 1 to March 31 on Meta.
• wgMFSpecialCaseMainPage was used for the mobile site. It was deprecated in 2017. It will stop working in April. Wikis should see if they use it. If they do they should fix it. You can read more and ask for help. This affects 183 wikis. There is a list. [70]

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

00:36, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

This Month in Education: February 2020

This Month in Education Volume 9 • Issue 1 • February 2020 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue Featured education community member of February 2020 Wikipedia in Mayan Language Open Education Week - events with Wikimedia Poland Youngest wikimedians ever editing Txikipedia Fashion and digital citizenship at Bath Spa University WoALUG and REC Albania continue their collaboration in Wikimedia Education Respati Project

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 22:06, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-11

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

Recent changes

• There is a new search word called articletopic. You can use it to search for articles on a specific topic. It is available on the Arabic, Czech, English and Vietnamese Wikipedias. It will come to more Wikipedias soon. [71][72][73]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 March. It will be on all wikis from 12 March (calendar).

Future changes

• There is a plan for new requirements for user signatures. You can give feedback.
• The Wikipedia Android app will do push notifications if users want them. This could help you see for example when someone wrote on your talk page or your edit was reverted. This will come later this year. [74]

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

17:15, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: February 2020

This Month in GLAM – Volume X, Issue II, February 2020 Headlines Armenia report: Wiki project on Museums with My Armenia Brazil report: Moreira Salles Institute GLAM initiative in Brazil Finland report: The Helsinki then and now exhibition France report: GLAM related blogposts Indonesia report: Proposing collaboration with museums in Bali; First Wikisource training in the region Netherlands report: Students write articles about Media artists, Public Domain Day 2020, Wiki Goes Caribbean, WikiFridays at Ihlia - Wikimedia Nederland in January & February 2020 Norway report: Wikipedia editing workshop with the Norwegian Network for Museums Serbia report: Great dedication of librarians Sweden report: Historic photos; Support for international Wikimedia community; Library training tour; Many GLAMs improved on Wikidata UK report: Kimonos and Khalili Ukraine report: Winning photos Wiki Loves Monuments shown in different cities; Libraries Lead an All-Ukrainian Challenge USA report: Black History Month and Open Access Anniversaries Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report: Summary of pilot projects, and what's next Wikidata report: Leap into Wikidata! WMF GLAM report: New Team Leadership, GLAM-Focused Grants Review, OpenGLAM Declaration Research Calendar: March's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 02:02, 10 March 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-12

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

Recent changes

• There is a new API module for changing the content model of existing pages. Use action=changecontentmodel to specify the new model. You can read the documentation on mediawiki.org. [75]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 March. It will be on all wikis from 19 March (calendar).

Future changes

• If you edit a page at the same time as someone else you can get an edit conflict. There is a new two-column interface to make it easier to solve this. It will soon be active by default on the German, Arabic, and Farsi Wikipedias. It will be on by default on more wikis within the next months. You will be able to opt out of the new interface. [76][77]
• You can see a proposed design for replying to comments in an easier way.

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

21:16, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

GOCE March newsletter

Guild of Copy Editors March 2020 Newsletter Hello and welcome to the March newsletter, a brief update of Guild activities since December 2019. All being well, we're planning to issue these quarterly in 2020, balancing the need to communicate widely with the avoidance of filling up talk pages. Don't forget you can unsubscribe at any time; see below. Election results: There was little changeover in the roster of Guild Coordinators, with Miniapolis stepping down with distinction as a coordinator emeritus while Jonesey95 returned as lead coordinator. The next election is scheduled for June 2020 and all Wikipedians in good standing may participate. January Drive: Thanks to everyone for the splendid work, completing 215 copy edits including 56 articles from the Requests page and 116 backlog articles from the target months of June to August 2019. At the conclusion of the drive there was a record low of 323 articles in the copy editing backlog. Of the 27 editors who signed up for the drive, 21 copyedited at least one article. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here. February Blitz: Of the 15 editors who signed up for this one-week blitz, 13 completed at least one copy edit. A total of 32 articles were copy edited, evenly split between the twin goals of requests and the oldest articles from the copy-editing backlog. Full results are here. March Drive: Currently underway, this event is targeting requests and backlog articles from September to November 2019. As of 18 March, the backlog stands at a record low of 253 articles and is expected to drop further as the drive progresses. Awards will be given to everyone who copyedits at least one article from the backlog. Help set a new record and sign up now! Progress report: As of 18 March, GOCE copyeditors have completed 161 requests in 2020 and there was a net reduction of 385 articles from the copy-editing backlog – a 60% decrease from the beginning of the year. Well done and thank you everyone! Election reminder: It may only be March but don't forget our mid-year Election of Coordinators opens for nominations on 1 June. Coordinators normally serve a six-month term and are elected on an approval basis. Self-nominations are welcome. If you've thought of helping out at the Guild, or know of another editor who would make a good coordinator, please consider standing for election or nominating them here. Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators Jonesey95, Baffle gab1978, Reidgreg, Tdslk and Twofingered Typist To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:52, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-13

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

Problems

• Some development will be slower than planned. This is because of the current pandemic. You can see the new deployment guidelines. This is to avoid risks when some persons could be unavailable.
• There was a problem when adding interwiki links. The tool you use to add interwiki links could suggest the wrong project to link to. This has now been fixed. [78][79]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 March. It will be on all wikis from 26 March (calendar).

Future changes

• There is a project to make editing easier for newcomers. The developers are trying to understand what initiatives different Wikipedias have to welcome newcomers. They also want to know which templates are often used for maintenance activities. You can help this project by checking if your wiki's pages are listed on Wikidata.

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

17:08, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

Your signature

Please be aware that your signature uses deprecated <font> tags, which are causing Obsolete HTML tags lint errors.

You are encouraged to change

<span style="white-space:nowrap;">[[User:Pine|<span style="color:#01796f;text-shadow:#00BFFF 0 0 1.0em">↠Pine</span>]] [[User talk:Pine|<font color="DeepSkyBlue">(<span style="color:#FFDF00 ;text-shadow:#FFDF00 0 0 1.0em"><b>✉</b></span>)</font>]]</span> : ↠Pine (✉)

to

<span style="white-space:nowrap;">[[User:Pine|<span style="color:#01796f; text-shadow:#00BFFF 0 0 1.0em">↠Pine</span>]] [[User talk:Pine|<span style="color:DeepSkyBlue">(<b style="color:#FFDF00;text-shadow:#FFDF00 0 0 1.0em">✉</b>)</span>]]</span> : ↠Pine (✉)

—Anomalocaris (talk) 00:13, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

• @Anomalocaris: thanks for taking the time to update the code. I made the change. ↠Pine (✉) 07:12, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks! —Anomalocaris (talk) 07:32, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 March 2020

• From the editors: The bad and the good

• News and notes: 2018 Wikipedian of the year blocked

• WikiProject report: WikiProject COVID-19: A WikiProject Report

• Special report: Wikipedia on COVID-19: what we publish and why it matters

• In the media: Blocked in Iran but still covering the big story

• Discussion report: Rethinking draft space

• Arbitration report: Unfinished business

• In focus: "I have been asked by Jeffrey Epstein …"

• Community view: Wikimedia community responds to COVID-19

• Recent research: Disease outbreak uncertainties, AfD forecasting, auto-updating Wikipedia

• From the archives: Text from Wikipedia good enough for Oxford University Press to claim as own

• Traffic report: The only thing that matters in the world

• Gallery: Visible Women on Wikipedia

• News from the WMF: Amid COVID-19, Wikimedia Foundation offers full pay for reduced hours, mobilizes all staff to work remote, and waives sick time

• On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:42, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

This Month in Education: March 2020

This Month in Education Volume 9 • Issue 3 • March 2020 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue An Update on Wikimedia Indonesia’s Education Program Education Program in CUC Sur, Jalisco, México Meet this month's featured Wikimedia & Education community member: Amber Berson Enhancing Armenian Wikipedia with professional articles How collaborations and perseverance contributed to an especially impactful educational project Wikimedia Argentina carried out the first training program in education and Human Rights for the Wikimedia Movement

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 15:30, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-14

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

Recent changes

• The beta version of the Wikipedia app for Android can now help users add tags on Commons. These tags are called depicts. [80]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 April. It will be on all wikis from 2 April (calendar).

Future changes

• The video player will change to be simpler and more modern. The current beta feature will become the video player for everyone. The old player will be removed. [81]
• There is a project to make templates easier to use. The next few weeks the developers will present ideas on the project page. You can watch that page if you are interested in giving feedback. [82]

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

17:25, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – April 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2020).

Administrator changes

Cabayi • Lee Vilenski

Boing! said Zebedee

Jonny-mt • MarkGallagher • PeaceNT

Money emoji → Moneytrees

Bureaucrat changes

SilkTork • WereSpielChequers

CheckUser changes

NativeForeigner

Oversight changes

Someguy1221

Daniel Case

Guideline and policy news

• There is an ongoing request for comment to streamline the source deprecation and blacklisting process.

Technical news

• There is a plan for new requirements for user signatures. You can give feedback.

Arbitration

• Following the banning of an editor by the WMF last year, the Arbitration Committee resolved to hold a Arbcom RfC regarding on-wiki harassment. A draft RfC has been posted at Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Anti-harassment RfC (Draft) and not open to comments from the community yet. Interested editors can comment on the RfC itself on its talk page.

Miscellaneous

• The WMF has begun a pilot report of the pages most visited through various social media platforms to help with anti-vandalism and anti-disinformation efforts. The report is updated daily and will be available through the end of May.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:00, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

Congrats

		The Signpost Barnstar
		for an outstanding article in the March 2020 issue

Smallbones_(smalltalk) 00:24, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

• @Smallbones: thanks. I think that this issue of OTBS was about the same as any other OTBS issue, but given all of the bad news of the world in the past month, OTBS may get greater interest from readers than it has previously. I think that The Signpost as a whole has been doing well in the past few months. ↠Pine (✉) 01:13, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Jump in traffic for On The Bright Side

I thought I should let you know that according to this [83], there was a relatively large jump in traffic for On The Bright Side. It went from around 80-100 pageviews a day to 873 just for yesterday. I usually don't pay attention to the page traffic that much, since it's more about knowing that people read what we write and the occasional comment that really makes my day. Also, writing and collaborating with you is fun in itself :). Anyways, it is sort of interesting that there's that jump in traffic. P.S. sorry about the delay in responding on meta. I recieved on-wiki notifications, but no emails about the pings. I think that's something I need to enable in my preferences for each wiki. Clovermoss (talk) 22:47, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

@Clovermoss: thanks for the notification. I wonder what caused that increase in page traffic. I hope that the readers like OTBS.

By the way, you can set global preferences by going to Special:GlobalPreferences.

Sorry that this comment was misplaced. I think that there is a bug in the advanced mobile editing mode. ↠Pine (✉) 01:53, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

You're welcome! I've set global preferences before, but I've noticed that certain local ones don't always show up. As for advanced mobile editing, I've had some issues with it before. Every time I've used it on a talk page it ended up duplicating sections, so I just stick with editing via desktop view. Clovermoss (talk) 01:58, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-15

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

Problems

• There was a problem with user pages not being shown properly on desktop. This was because of a bug. It will soon be fixed. [84]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 April. It will be on all wikis from 9 April (calendar).

Future changes

• MediaWiki will use a newer version of Unicode. Some characters that did not have an upper case equivalent before do now. Titles beginning with one of these characters will be moved. A list of these titles can be seen on Phabricator. The titles will be renamed by the user Maintenance script. This will start on 13 April 2020. You can rename them before this if you wish and the new title can be different from the one the script would rename it to. [85]

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

19:02, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

Editing news 2020 #1 – Discussion tools

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

This early version of the Reply tool automatically signs and indents comments.

The Editing team has been working on the talk pages project. The goal of the talk pages project is to help contributors communicate on wiki more easily. This project is the result of the Talk pages consultation 2019.

In a future update, the team plans to test a tool for easily linking to another user's name, a rich-text editing option, and other tools.

The team is building a new tool for replying to comments now. This early version can sign and indent comments automatically. Please test the new Reply tool.

• On 31 March 2020, the new reply tool was offered as a Beta Feature editors at four Wikipedias: Arabic, Dutch, French, and Hungarian. If your community also wants early access to the new tool, contact User:Whatamidoing (WMF).
• The team is planning some upcoming changes. Please review the proposed design and share your thoughts on the talk page. The team will test features such as:
  • an easy way to mention another editor ("pinging"),
  • a rich-text visual editing option, and
  • other features identified through user testing or recommended by editors.

To hear more about Editing Team updates, please add your name to the "Get involved" section of the project page. You can also watch these pages: the main project page, Updates, Replying, and User testing.

– PPelberg (WMF) (talk) & Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

19:05, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: March 2020

This Month in GLAM – Volume X, Issue III, March 2020 Headlines Australia report: Know My Name; Public libraries of Queensland join Wikidata Colombia report: Gender gap, Wikipedia and Libraries from the GLAM team France report: WikiGoths; WikiTopia Archives Indonesia report: Volunteers' meet-up; Wiki Cinta Budaya 2020 structured data edit-a-thon Ireland report: Video tutorials; Celtic Knot Conference 2020 Kosovo report: WoALUG and NGO Germin call Albanian Diaspora to contribute to Wikipedia Netherlands report: Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen contributes to Wikimedia Commons again; Student research on GLAM-Wiki at Erasmus University Rotterdam Serbia report: March Highlights - Everything is postponed Sweden report: FindingGLAMs; Wikipedia in libraries; Art from the Thiel Gallery Collections; Kulturhistoria som gymnasiearbete UK report: Colourful Kimonos from Khalili USA report: Women & Editing in the time of virus Special story: COVID-19 Wikidata report: Lockdown Levellings WMF GLAM report: Mapping GLAM-Wiki collaborations Calendar: April's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 08:24, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-16

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

Recent changes

• You can now use the articletopic search word on all Wikipedias. It searches articles by topic. [86]
• You can see wiki tools in the new Tools Gallery. [87]
• You can see edits from the Wikimedia Cloud Services in a new dashboard.
• When you use filters on a history page you sometimes don't see any edits. There is a text explaining this now. Before it was just empty. [88]
• There is a new Wikimedia Technical Blog. [89]

Problems

• There was a problem with the Wikidata database last week. Some wikis went down for twenty minutes. Wikidata and other projects showed error messages. Interwiki links were not shown, some tools did not work and other problems. Some of this was fixed quickly. The developers are working on fixing the rest. [90][91][92]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from April 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from April 15. It will be on all wikis from April 16 (calendar).

Future changes

• Some graphs have not worked on mobile. This will soon be fixed. [93]
• The article tab on talk pages of redirects links to the target of the redirect. It could link to the redirect page itself instead. You can leave feedback on this.
• For pages using syntax highlighting, the use of the deprecated <source> tag, as well as the use of the deprecated enclose parameter, will add tracking categories.

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

15:30, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-17

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

Tech News

• The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 4 May 2020.

Recent changes

• The small wiki toolkits is to help smaller wikis that need technical skills. They can learn and share technical skills. [94]
• Over-qualified CSS selectors in Wikimedia skins have been removed. div#content is now .mw-body. div.portal is now .portal. div#footer is now #footer. This is so the skins can use HTML5 elements. If your gadgets or user styles used them you will have to update them. [95]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

• Some things on the wikis might look weird or not work in Internet Explorer 8 in the future. Internet Explorer 8 was replaced in 2011. [96]
• The font in the diffs will change. [97]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 April next week. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 April next week. It will be on all wikis from 30 April next week (calendar).

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

18:45, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 26 April 2020

• News and notes: Unbiased information from Ukraine's government?

• In the media: Coronavirus, again and again

• Discussion report: Redesigning Wikipedia, bit by bit

• Featured content: Featured content returns

• Arbitration report: Two difficult cases

• Traffic report: Disease the Rhythm of the Night

• Gallery: Roy is doing fine and sending more photos

• Recent research: Trending topics across languages; auto-detecting bias

• Essay: Wikipedia:An article about yourself isn't necessarily a good thing

• By the numbers: Open data and COVID-19: Wikipedia as an informational resource during the pandemic

• Opinion: Trusting Everybody to Work Together

• On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

• Interview: Health and RfA's: An interview with Guy Macon

• In focus: Multilingual Wikipedia

• WikiProject report: The Guild of Copy Editors

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:18, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

Issue 38, January – April 2020

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 38, January – April 2020

• New partnership
• Global roundup

Read the full newsletter

On behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --15:58, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

WikiCup 2020 May newsletter

The second round of the 2020 WikiCup has now finished. It was a high-scoring round and contestants needed 75 points to advance to round 3. There were some very impressive efforts in round 2, with the top ten contestants all scoring more than 500 points. A large number of the points came from the 12 featured articles and the 186 good articles achieved in total by contestants, and the 355 good article reviews they performed; the GAN backlog drive and the stay-at-home imperative during the COVID-19 pandemic may have been partially responsible for these impressive figures.

Our top scorers in round 2 were:

• Epicgenius, with 2333 points from one featured article, forty-five good articles, fourteen DYKs and plenty of bonus points
• Gog the Mild, with 1784 points from three featured articles, eight good articles, a substantial number of featured article and good article reviews and lots of bonus points
• The Rambling Man, with 1262 points from two featured articles, eight good articles and a hundred good article reviews
• Harrias, with 1141 points from two featured articles, three featured lists, ten good articles, nine DYKs and a substantial number of featured article and good article reviews
• Lee Vilenski with 869 points, Hog Farm with 801, Kingsif with 719, SounderBruce with 710, Dunkleosteus77 with 608 and MX with 515.

The rules for featured article reviews have been adjusted; reviews may cover three aspects of the article, content, images and sources, and contestants may receive points for each of these three types of review. Please also remember the requirement to mention the WikiCup when undertaking an FAR for which you intend to claim points. Remember also that DYKs cannot be claimed until they have appeared on the main page. As we enter the third round, any content promoted after the end of round 2 but before the start of round 3 can be claimed now, and anything you forgot to claim in round 2 cannot! Remember too, that you must claim your points within 14 days of "earning" them. When doing GARs, please make sure that you check that all the GA criteria are fully met.

If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article nominations, a featured process, or anything else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed (remember to remove your listing when no longer required). Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Godot13 (talk), Sturmvogel 66 (talk), Vanamonde (talk) and Cwmhiraeth. - MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:44, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – May 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2020).

Administrator changes

Gnangarra • Kaisershatner • Malcolmxl5

CheckUser changes

Callanecc

Oversight changes

HJ Mitchell

Guideline and policy news

• Discretionary sanctions have been authorized for all pages and edits related to COVID-19, to be logged at WP:GS/COVID19.
• Following a recent discussion on Meta-Wiki, the edit filter maintainer global group has been created.
• A request for comment has been proposed to create a new main page editor usergroup.
• A request for comment has been proposed to make the bureaucrat activity requirements more strict.

Technical news

• The Editing team has been working on the talk pages project. You can review the proposed design and share your thoughts on the talk page.
• Enterprisey created a script that will show a link to the proper Special:Undelete page when viewing a since-deleted revision, see User:Enterprisey/link-deleted-revs.

Miscellaneous

• A request for comment closed with consensus to create a Village Pump-style page for communication with the Wikimedia Foundation.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:19, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-19

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

Problems

• Some wikis will be on read-only for a few minutes on 5 May. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [98]
• Some wikis will be on read-only for a few minutes on 7 May. This will also affect CentralAuth. This can for example affect global renames, password changes, changing or confirming your email address and logging in to new wikis. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [99]

Changes later this week

• You can get a notification when someone links to a page you created. You can soon turn these notifications off for individual pages. [100]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 May. It will be on all wikis from 7 May (calendar).

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

16:59, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

This Month in Education: April 2020

This Month in Education Volume 9 • Issue 4 • April 2020 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue Wikipedia Reveals New Sides of Translation Education Webinars organized by Wikimedia México Fact checking tool with library under cc-license Fast help for schools: An interactive platform for Open Educational Resources Meet this month's featured Wikimedia & Education community member Wiki Club Ashesi Welcomes Onboard a New Patron Wiki-school. A new program for teachers in Poland Wikimedia Serbia was organized action on improving students assignments on Wikipedia

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 10:45, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: April 2020

This Month in GLAM – Volume X, Issue IV, April 2020 Headlines Brazil report: GLAMce at Museu Paulista: making things machine-readable Czech Republic report: WikiGap 2020 in Czech Republic; International event; support for Wikimedia community; edit-a-thon run with the US embassy and the Swedish Embassy France report: Association des Archivistes Francais; Palladia, a museum collection portal based on Wikimedia resources Indonesia report: Wikisource Competition 2020 Ireland report: Hunt Museum image donation; Livesteaming and video demonstrations Italy report: Archivio Ricordi, webinars and videos Kosovo report: One Village, One Article for each village in Albania and Kosovo Netherlands report: Photo collections Afrika-Studiecentrum Leiden; meetup and media donations for Wiki goes Caribbean; first online WikiFriday Sweden report: Skrivstuga (edit-a-thon) online – Wikipedia in libraries Switzerland report: More women on Wikipedia UK report: Japanese silk and Spanish iron USA report: Earth Day Wikidata report: Seven Million People Can't Be Wrong Calendar: May's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 15:49, 11 May 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-20

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

Recent changes

• Everyone can now import photos from Flickr to Commons with the UploadWizard. Before this only autopatrollers on Commons could import photos from Flickr. [101]

Problems

• Commons will be on read-only for a few minutes on 12 May. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [102]
• Several wikis including Wikidata will be on read-only for a few minutes on 19 May. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. English Wikipedia will be on read-only for a few minutes on 21 May 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [103][104]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 May. It will be on all wikis from 14 May (calendar).

Future changes

• JavaScript scripts and gadgets can no longer check multiple keys at once via mw.config.exists() or mw.user.tokens.exists(). You can use exists() or get() to check one at a time instead. [105]

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

20:41, 11 May 2020 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #13

Welcome to the thirteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Join the conversation: structured tasks

Sketch of an idea for a structured workflow for adding links to an article. The goal is to help newcomers edit at high volume.

We are looking for community input on a new project to make it easy for newcomers to make real article edits.

In our previous newsletter, we talked about the productive edits coming from the newcomer tasks feature. Those good results have continued: about 900 newcomers made over 5,000 suggested edits so far. We've learned that newcomers are interested in receiving suggested edits.

Now, we are thinking about how to supply them a feed of easy edits that will help more of them be successful quickly. We have a new idea called "structured tasks". This would aim to break down edits into steps that are easy for newcomers and easy on mobile devices.

In the past, certain kinds of editing tasks have been structured. For instance, adding categories through HotCat. Now, we are thinking about how to structure the editing of articles. The goal is to allow newcomers can make large content additions, especially from their mobile devices.

Please visit the project page and respond to the discussion questions listed on the talk page. You are welcome to show this project to others in your community. You can help by translating the materials to your language so that more voices can join in. We will be having this conversation until June 18.

Expanding to more wikis

We have expanded to six new wikis, and are looking for more interested communities.

In the last two months, we deployed Growth features to six new wikis: Ukrainian, Serbian, Hungarian, Armenian, and Basque Wikipedias, and French Wiktionary. Newcomers from these wikis have already contributed over 600 edits through Growth features.

We want to expand to more wikis in the coming months, and we are looking for interested communities. French Wikipedia already agreed and will be the next one to join the experiment. We will contact several other wikis in the coming weeks to offer them to participate.

Do you think the Growth Team features would be a good addition to your wiki? Please see this translatable summary of Growth features. You can share with your communities and start a discussion. Then, please contact us to begin the process!

Other updates

39 topics are now available for newcomer tasks

Work continues on improving newcomer tasks and the homepage.

• In March, we deployed an upgrade to the topic matching in newcomer tasks. The current version offers 39 different topics using new ORES models.
• In April, we completed an A/B test of two homepage configurations. We learned that more newcomers will attempt suggested edits if the module is made more prominent. We are implementing those learnings in our next test. See the full results here.
• We are currently working on guidance for newcomer tasks. It will use the help panel to guide newcomers through completing easy edits.
• Our next step is to create new configurations of the homepage. The goal is to encourage more newcomers to begin doing suggested edits.

As usual, we are still welcoming your feedback and questions about our features. Please contact us on the project talk page!

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

14:29, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-21

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

Recent changes

• If you forget your password you can ask for a new one to be sent to your email address. You need to know your email address or your username. You can choose that you need to enter both your email address and your username. This is a preference. This is to get fewer password reset emails someone else asked for. This is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. [106][107]

Problems

• There is a bug that creates problems for iPhone users with iOS 13 and Safari. If you use an iPhone to read or edit Wikipedia and see bugs on the mobile site you can report them. [108]
• Several wikis including Wikidata will be on read-only for a few minutes on 19 May. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. English Wikipedia will be on read-only for a few minutes on 21 May 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [109][110]

Changes later this week

• The Wikipedia app for Android can let users add depicts on Commons. The beta version used computer-aided tagging. This was removed to get more specific depicts. [111]
• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

• Graphs will be rendered in the reader's browser. This will use Javascript. Graphs will hopefully work better for everyone who uses Javascript. It will not work for users who don't use Javascript. This will not affect diagrams in image files. [112]
• Some CSS for the skins has been simplified. This affects div#p-personal, div#p-navigation, div#p-interaction, div#p-tb, div#p-lang, div#p-namespaces, div#p-variants and div#footer. They will have to remove div. You will have to update your gadgets, scripts or user styles. This is so we can use HTML5. [113]
• Some CSS for the Vector skin has been changed. This affects #p-variants, #p-namespaces, #p-personal, #p-views and #p-cactions. They can no longer use > ul. You might need to update your gadgets, scripts or user styles. See how.

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

17:19, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

Questionnaire invitation (a new tool to be developed, to verify media data)

Hi there, I'm developing a tool to assist users in verifying (structured) data of media on commons.

To understand the community's needs, I would like to invite you to participate in this questionnaire: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScbNdJdQYN1yBvEeKne48eWDU6SBsdlUfNBAmZyvUEBkCR1Gg/viewform?usp=sf_link. It should take ~2 minutes.

Thanks a lot. :D

(You received this message as you seems to have experience with structured data on Wikimedia projects.)

-- Gabrielchl (talk) 00:04, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-22

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

Changes later this week

• The visual editor will now work in the Modern skin. The changes that needed to happen for this to work could cause problems for some scripts or gadgets. [114]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 26. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 27. It will be on all wikis from May 28 (calendar).

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

14:18, 25 May 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 May 2020

• From the editor: Meltdown May?

• News and notes: 2019 Picture of the Year, 200 French paid editing accounts blocked, 10 years of Guild Copyediting

• In the media: CBS on COVID-19, Sanger on bias, false noses, and five prolific editors

• Discussion report: WMF's Universal Code of Conduct

• Special report: The sum of human knowledge? Not in one Wikipedia language edition

• Featured content: Weathering the storm

• Arbitration report: Board member likely to receive editing restriction

• Traffic report: Come on and slam, and welcome to the jam

• Op-Ed: Where Is Political Bias Taking Us?

• Gallery: Wildlife photos by the book

• News from the WMF: WMF Board announces Community Culture Statement

• Recent research: Automatic detection of covert paid editing; Wiki Workshop 2020

• Community view: Transit routes and mapping during stay-at-home order downtime

• On video: COVID-19 spurs innovations in Wikimedia video and virtual programming

• WikiProject report: Revitalizing good articles

• On the bright side: 500,000 articles in the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia

• Obituaries: Dmitrismirnov, Kattenkruid, Muidlatif, Ronhjones, Tsirel

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:06, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – June 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2020).

Administrator changes

CaptainEek • Creffett • Cwmhiraeth

Anna Frodesiak • Buckshot06 • Ronhjones • SQL

CheckUser changes

SQL

Guideline and policy news

• A request for comment asks whether the Unblock Ticket Request System (UTRS) should allowed any unblock request or just private appeals.
• The Wikimedia Foundation announced that they will develop a universal code of conduct for all WMF projects. There is an open local discussion regarding the same.

Arbitration

• A motion was passed to enact a 500/30 restriction on articles related to the history of Jews and antisemitism in Poland during World War II (1933–45), including the Holocaust in Poland. Article talk pages where disruption occurs may also be managed with the stated restriction.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:27, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-23

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

Recent changes

• There is a new beta version of the Wikimedia Commons app for Android. It has a new zoom function when you look at images. It can also suggest places when you upload geotagged photos. [115]

Problems

• There was a problem with the Commons database on 27 May. Commons could not be edited for eight minutes. Because of this problem the database was moved. This caused another short read-only time on 29 May. [116][117][118]
• The Vector skin had a problem where you couldn't add links to the article in other languages. You couldn't see the section if there were no links to other languages already. It also removed content translation links and links to language settings. This has now been fixed. [119]

Changes later this week

• You can get a notification when someone links to a page you created. You can turn these notifications off for individual pages. You can soon turn them off also in the notifications you get. [120]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 June. It will be on all wikis from 4 June (calendar).

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

22:31, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

File:The brown-eared bulbul after playing with water.jpg scheduled for POTD

Hi Pine,

This is to let you know that the featured picture File:The brown-eared bulbul after playing with water.jpg, which you uploaded or nominated, has been selected as the English Wikipedia's picture of the day (POTD) for June 18, 2020. A preview of the POTD is displayed below and can be edited at Template:POTD/2020-06-18. If you have any concerns, please place a message at Wikipedia talk:Picture of the day. Thank you! Cwmhiraeth (talk) 09:27, 3 June 2020 (UTC)

The brown-eared bulbul (Hypsipetes amaurotis) is a medium-sized bulbul native to eastern Asia. Reaching a length of about 28 cm (11 in), it is grayish-brown, with brown cheeks (the "brown ears" of the common name), a small spiky crest and a long tail. A bird of the forest canopy, it is also found in plantations, parks and gardens. During the summer, the bird feeds primarily on insects, but in the winter the diet consists mainly of fruits and seeds. In addition, it feeds on nectar from Camellia flowers, becoming dusted with pollen in the process. This brown-eared bulbul was photographed in Tennōji Park in Osaka, Japan.

Photograph credit: Laitche

Recently featured:

• Charles Gounod
• Bever–Scuol-Tarasp railway
• Baselios Cleemis

GOCE June newsletter

Guild of Copy Editors June 2020 Newsletter Hello and welcome to the June newsletter, a brief update of Guild activities since March 2020. You can unsubscribe from our mailings at any time; see below. All times and dates stated are in UTC. Current events Election time: Nomination of candidates in our mid-year Election of Coordinators opened on 1 June, and voting will take place from 00:01 on 16 June. GOCE coordinators normally serve a six-month term and are elected on an approval basis. Self-nominations are welcome. If you've thought about helping out at the Guild, or you know of another editor who would make a good coordinator, please consider standing for election or nominating them here. June Blitz: This blitz begins at 00:01 on 14 June and ends at 23:59 on 20 June, with themes of articles tagged for copyedit in May 2020 and requests. Drive and blitz reports March Drive: Self-isolation from coronavirus may have played a hand in making this one of our most successful backlog elimination drives. The copy-editing backlog was reduced from 477 to a record low of 118 articles, a 75% reduction. The last four months of 2019 were cleared, reducing the backlog to three months. Fifty requests were also completed, and the total word count of copy-edited articles was 759,945. Of the 29 editors who signed up, 22 completed at least one copy edit. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here. April Blitz: This blitz ran from 12 to 18 April with a theme of Indian military history. Of the 18 people who signed up, 14 copyedited at least one article. Participants claimed a total of 60 copyedits. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here. May Drive: This event marked the 10th anniversary of the GOCE's copy-editing drives, and set a goal of diminishing the backlog to just one month of articles, as close to zero articles as possible. We achieved the goal of eliminating all articles that had been tagged prior to the start of the drive, for the first time in our history! Of the 51 editors who signed up, 43 copyedited at least one article. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here. Other news Progress report: as of 2 June, GOCE participants had processed 328 requests since 1 January, which puts us on pace to exceed any previous year's number of requests. As of the end of the May drive, the backlog stood at just 156 articles, all tagged in May 2020. Outreach: To mark the 10th anniversary of our first Backlog Elimination Drive, The Signpost contributor and GOCE participant Puddleglum2.0 interviewed project coordinators and copy-editors for the journal's April WikiProject Report. The Drive and the current Election of Coordinators have also been covered in The Signpost's May News and Notes page. Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators Jonesey95, Baffle gab1978, Reidgreg, Tdslk and Twofingered Typist. To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) at 15:46, 5 June 2020 (UTC).

Tech News: 2020-24

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

Recent changes

• Some articles have tables that can be sorted in different ways. For example a list of countries can be sorted alphabetically but you can click on the size column to sort them by size. If you clicked on the column a second time it would sort the countries from the bottom to the top instead. A third click will now take you back to the original sorting. [121]
• Self-closed tags now work as in the HTML5 specifications. This means you should stop using some of them. <b/> is an example of a self-closed tag that won't work. area, base, br, col, embed, hr, img, input, keygen, link, meta, param, source, track, wbr can be self-closed. Pages with tags that should not be self-closed have been listed in a tracking category since 2016. They will be listed in Special:LintErrors/self-closed-tag. This doesn't affect <references /> or <ref />. [122]
• There is a banner called WikidataPageBanner. It is for example used by the Wikivoyages, Wikimedia Russia and the Catalan, Basque, Galician and Turkish Wikipedias. It will now been seen by mobile visitors too. Before this it was only seen on desktop. The wikis should update instructions on MediaWiki:Sitenotice so that editors know to test and style for mobile too. [123][124]

Changes later this week

• You can now edit MassMessage descriptions through the API. This is useful for tools and gadgets. [125]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 June. It will be on all wikis from 11 June (calendar).

Future changes

• A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. It will not work after 13 July. Wikis should use TemplateStyles instead. 118 wikis need to fix this. You can read more and see if your wiki is affected. [126]

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

21:12, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

This Month in Education: May 2020

This Month in Education Volume 9 • Issue 5 • May 2020 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issuse EduWiki challenge México by Wikimedia México Featured education community member of May 2020 Sharing Wikimedia Education Projects in the Philippines Turkish professors are giving Wikipedia assignments during Covid-19 days Wikidata introduced in Faculty of Economics, University of Belgrade Wikipedia as career counseling tool for teenagers

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 16:39, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: May 2020

This Month in GLAM – Volume X, Issue V, May 2020 Headlines Armenia report: Edit-a-thon dedicated to International Museum Day Colombia report: A #1Lib1Ref to close the gender gap Côte d'Ivoire report: #1Lib1Ref 2020 from 26 to 28 May in Côte d'Ivoire France report: WikiArchives; IMD 2020: Cross-Chapter Collaboration Indonesia report: Wikisource Competition 2020 recap; International Museum Day 2020 Italy report: New collaborations and contents! Netherlands report: Analysis of Dutch GLAM-Wiki projects in relation to the Dutch Digital Heritage Reference Architecture, Content donation from Utrecht Archives, Detecting Wikipedia articles strongly based on single library collections and Collection highlights of the KB Sweden report: Free music on Wikipedia; NHB webinars; Wikipedia in libraries – Projekt HBTQI Switzerland report: International Museum Day 2020 UK report: Japanese art USA report: Workshops & COVID-19 Symposium Special story: Content partnership category - your help is needed WMF GLAM report: GLAM metadata standards and Wikimedia projects Calendar: June's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 17:21, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 39, May – June 2020

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 39, May – June 2020

• Library Card Platform
• New partnerships
  • ProQuest
  • Springer Nature
  • BioOne
  • CEEOL
  • IWA Publishing
  • ICE Publishing
• Bytes in brief

Read the full newsletter

On behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:13, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-25

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

Recent changes

• Toolforge hosts several tools created by the Wikimedia community like edit counters or enhanced editors. It is changing the domain from tools.wmflabs.org to toolforge.org. The routing scheme is moving from tools.wmflabs.org/toolname to toolname.toolforge.org. You can read the details. Tools that use OAuth will have to be updated to keep working. You can ask for help.

Problems

• There is a Wikidata item link in the sidebar on many pages. This disappeared for a couple of days for users who have the Monobook skin. This was because of a bug. It has now been fixed. [127]
• Editing, logging in and logging out didn't work properly for a short period of time last week. It was soon fixed. [128]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 June. It will be on all wikis from 18 June (calendar).

Future changes

• Pywikibot is a Python library to automate work on wikis. It will not support Python 2 after the new version in July. Support for Python 3.4 and MediaWiki below 1.19 will also be dropped. You should migrate to Python 3. You can ask for help. [129]
• The selectors .menu and .vectorMenu will no longer work in the Vector skin. This can affect gadgets and user scripts. .menu should be replaced by ul. .vectorMenu should be replaced by .vector-menu. [130]

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

21:38, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

Editing news 2020 #2

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

The new features include a toolbar. What do you think should be in the toolbar?

This issue of the Editing newsletter includes information the Talk pages project, an effort to help contributors communicate on wiki more easily.

• Reply tool: This is available as a Beta Feature at the four partner wikis (Arabic, Dutch, French, and Hungarian Wikipedias). The Beta Feature is called "Discussion tools". The Beta Feature will get new features soon. The new features include writing comments in a new visual editing mode and pinging other users by typing @. You can test the new features on the Beta Cluster now. Some other wikis will have a chance to try the Beta Feature in the coming months.
• New requirements for user signatures: Soon, users will not be able to save invalid custom signatures in Special:Preferences. This will reduce signature spoofing, prevent page corruption, and make new talk page tools more reliable. Most editors will not be affected.
• New discussion tool: The Editing team is beginning work on a simpler process for starting new discussions. You can see the initial design on the project page.
• Research on the use of talk pages: The Editing team worked with the Wikimedia research team to study how talk pages help editors improve articles. We learned that new editors who use talk pages make more edits to the main namespace than new editors who don't use talk pages.

– Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

20:29, 17 June 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-26

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

Problems

• There are some new tools to make it easier for newcomers to start editing. They are available on some wikis. These wikis had a problem with the visual editor for a short period of time last week. This was because of a bug in the new tools. It was soon fixed. [131]
• Some user scripts and gadgets stopped working because of a change to CSS selectors. .vectorTabs should be replaced with .vector-menu-tabs to fix this. [132]

Changes later this week

• The developers are working on a new interface to solve edit conflicts on talk pages. This will be released on 24 June. You can give feedback. [133]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 June. It will be on all wikis from 25 June (calendar).

Future changes

• A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. It will not work after 13 July. Wikis should use TemplateStyles instead. 91 wikis still need to fix this. You can read more and see if your wiki is affected. [134]

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

18:49, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

This Month in Education: June 2020

This Month in Education Volume 9 • Issue 6 • June 2020 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issuse Understanding Wikimedia Affiliates Evaluation in Education Report Understanding Wikimedia Community as Research Fellows Participants of Wiki/Ponder online workshop in Kosovo edit Wikipedia Wikimedia & Education Greenhouse – Celebrating the final unit of the online course! Wikipedia in schools competing for innovations in teaching award Meet this month's featured Wikimedia & Education community member: Oleh Kushch

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 03:54, 24 June 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 June 2020

• News and notes: Progress at Wikipedia Library and Wikijournal of Medicine

• Community view: Community open letter on renaming

• Gallery: After the killing of George Floyd

• In the media: Part collaboration and part combat

• Discussion report: Community reacts to WMF rebranding proposals

• Featured content: Sports are returning, with a rainbow

• Arbitration report: Anti-harassment RfC and a checkuser revocation

• Traffic report: The pandemic, alleged murder, a massacre, and other deaths

• News from the WMF: We stand for racial justice

• Recent research: Wikipedia and COVID-19; automated Wikipedia-based fact-checking

• Interview: What is wrong with rebranding to "Wikipedia Foundation"?

• Humour: Cherchez une femme

• Opinion: Trying to find COI or paid editors? Just read the news

• On the bright side: For what are you grateful this month?

• In focus: Edit Loud, Edit Proud: LGBTIQ+ Wikimedians and Global Information Activism

• WikiProject report: WikiProject Black Lives Matter

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:53, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-27

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

Problems

• Everyone was logged out. This was because a few users saw the wikis as if they were logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now. [135]
• Some readers didn't see new edits to pages. If the page had been recently changed they saw an older version of the page instead. This only affected readers who were logged out. It lasted for ten days. It has been fixed. [136]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 July. It will be on all wikis from 1 July (calendar).

Future changes

• The Modern and Monobook skins use the ID searchGoButton for the go button. This is searchButton for Vector. To have the same ID for all skins it will change to searchButton in Monobook and Modern too. This will affect gadgets and user scripts. It will happen on 23 July. They should be updated to use searchButton. You can read more and see a list of affected scripts.

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

16:31, 29 June 2020 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – July 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2020).

Administrator changes

Malcolmxl5

John • TheCoffee • Tim!

Creffett → GeneralNotability

DeltaQuad → AmandaNP

CheckUser changes

Bbb23

Interface administrator changes

TonyBallioni

Guideline and policy news

• A request for comment is in progress to remove the T2 (template that misrepresents established policy) speedy deletion criterion.

Technical news

• Protection templates on mainspace pages are now automatically added by User:MusikBot II (BRFA).

Arbitration

• Following the banning of an editor by the WMF last year, the Arbitration Committee resolved to hold an RfC regarding on-wiki harassment. The RfC has been posted at Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Anti-harassment RfC and is open to comments from the community.
• The Medicine case was closed, with a remedy authorizing standard discretionary sanctions for all discussions about pharmaceutical drug prices and pricing and for edits adding, changing, or removing pharmaceutical drug prices or pricing from articles.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:25, 1 July 2020 (UTC)

WikiCup 2020 July newsletter

The third round of the 2020 WikiCup has now come to an end. The 16 users who made it into the fourth round each had at least 353 points (compared to 68 in 2019). It was a highly competitive round, and a number of contestants were eliminated who would have moved on in earlier years. Our top scorers in round 3 were:

• Epicgenius, with one featured article, 28 good articles and 17 DYKs, amassing 1836 points
• The Rambling Man , with 1672 points gained from four featured articles and seventeen good articles, plus reviews of a large number of FACs and GAs
• Gog the Mild, a first time contestant, with 1540 points, a tally built largely on 4 featured articles and related bonus points.

Between them, contestants managed 14 featured articles, 9 featured lists, 3 featured pictures, 152 good articles, 136 DYK entries, 55 ITN entries, 65 featured article candidate reviews and 221 good article reviews. Additionally, MPJ-DK added 3 items to featured topics and 44 to good topics. Over the course of the competition, contestants have completed 710 good article reviews, in comparison to 387 good articles submitted for review and promoted. These large numbers are probably linked to a GAN backlog drive in April and May, and the changed patterns of editing during the COVID-19 pandemic. As we enter the fourth round, remember that any content promoted after the end of round 3 but before the start of round 4 can be claimed in round 4. Please also remember that you must claim your points within 14 days of "earning" them. When doing GARs, please make sure that you check that all the GA criteria are fully met. Please also remember that all submissions must meet core Wikipedia policies, regardless of the review process.

If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article nominations, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed (remember to remove your listing when no longer required). Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Godot13 (talk), Sturmvogel 66 (talk), Vanamonde (talk), Cwmhiraeth (talk) MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:34, 2 July 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-28

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

Problems

• The Score extension has been disabled for now. This is because of a security issue. It will work again as soon as the security issue has been fixed. [137]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 July. It will be on all wikis from 9 July (calendar).

Future changes

• Abstract Wikipedia is a new Wikimedia project. It will collect language-independent information that can be easily read in different languages. It builds on Wikidata. The name is preliminary. You can read more. [138]
• The iOS Wikipedia app developers are thinking about new experimental tools. If you use an iPhone you can help them by answering the survey.
• Some rules for user signatures will soon be enforced. Lint errors and invalid HTML will no longer be allowed in user signatures. Nested substitution will not be allowed. A link to your user page, user talk page or user contributions will be required. You can check if your signature works with the new rules. This is because the signatures can cause problems for tools or other text on the page.

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

20:18, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

Editing news 2020 #3

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

More than 50 million edits have been made using the visual editor on desktop.

Seven years ago this month, the Editing team offered the visual editor to most Wikipedia editors. Since then, editors have achieved many milestones:

• More than 50 million edits have been made using the visual editor on desktop.
• More than 2 million new articles have been created in the visual editor. More than 600,000 of these new articles were created during 2019.
• The visual editor is increasingly popular. The proportion of all edits made using the visual editor has increased every year since its introduction.
• In 2019, 35% of the edits by newcomers (logged-in editors with ≤99 edits) used the visual editor. This percentage has increased every year.
• Almost 5 million edits on the mobile site have been made with the visual editor. Most of these edits have been made since the Editing team started improving the mobile visual editor in 2018.
• On 17 November 2019, the first edit from outer space was made in the mobile visual editor. 🚀 👩‍🚀
• Editors have made more than 7 million edits in the 2017 wikitext editor, including starting 600,000 new articles in it. The 2017 wikitext editor is VisualEditor's built-in wikitext mode. You can enable it in your preferences.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

12:48, 9 July 2020 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: June 2020

This Month in GLAM – Volume X, Issue VI, June 2020 Headlines Albania report: Wikigap 2020 in Albania Australia report: Taking training online Brazil report: Wikimedia in Brazil in times of pandemics France report: Association des archivistes français Mexico report: México free and diverse representation Netherlands report: Wiki goes Caribbean meetup and media donation & Making references to Dutch newspapers in Wikipedia more sustainable North Macedonia report: More than 130 new articles about insects Serbia report: June Highlights - Let’s make new agreements Sweden report: Free music on Wikipedia Switzerland report: Diversity in GLAM Program Taiwan report: Research Case of the White Paper Cooperation Writing Between Taiwan Gallery and Wikidata Taiwan UK report: New project on Islamic art USA report: Juneteenth2020 +Pride Special story: Creative Commons invites Open GLAM stories from underrepresented communities WMF GLAM report: Departure of Sandra Fauconnier Calendar: July's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 15:57, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-29

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

Recent changes

• Users can thank others for their edits. Checkusers can now see user data related to that action. This can help identify sock puppets who harass others using thanks. [139]

Problems

• Everyone was logged out a couple of weeks ago to fix a security problem. The problem was not entirely fixed. Because of this everyone was logged out once again last week. [140][141]

Changes later this week

• Wikis that are not for one specific language can translate pages. Sometimes parts of translations are outdated or missing. Outdated translations are marked with a pink background. Missing translations will also be marked in the future. This markup can sometimes break things. It can soon be disabled by using <translate nowrap></translate> on the source page. [142]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 July. It will be on all wikis from 16 July (calendar).

Future changes

• Wikimedia code review plans to use GitLab. It would be hosted on Wikimedia servers. [143][144][145][146]

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

16:30, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-30

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

Recent changes

• A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. The mobile main page special casing stopped working 14 July. 60 wikis now have main pages that don't work well on mobile. You can see which ones, how to fix it and how to get help in Phabricator. This is the same problem that was reported in Tech News 2020/24 and 2020/26.

Problems

• There is a problem with the interlanguage links. The interlanguage links are the links that help you find a specific page in a different language. The sorting is broken. The developers are working on a solution. [147]
• Some users keep getting the notifications for the same event. Some of these are old events. [148]
• Some users have trouble logging in. This is probably a browser cookie problem. The developers are working on understanding the problem. If you have trouble logging in you can see the details on Phabricator. [149]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 July. It will be on all wikis from 23 July (calendar).

Future changes

• There is a Printable version link. This will disappear. That is because web browsers today can create a printable version or show how it will look in print anyway. [150]

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

19:11, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-31

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

Recent changes

• The Starter kit is now available for wiki communities. This page lists technical resources, tools, and recommendations. These are essential to operate a wiki project. This is mostly useful for smaller wikis where the community has limited experience with this. [151]
• The first features of the Desktop Improvements project are available for logged-in users on all wikis. In order to use them, uncheck Use Legacy Vector in your local or global preferences in section Skin preferences. More improvements are planned. Feedback is welcome.
• On multiple wikis, a UTCLiveClock gadget is available. For wikis that import the gadget directly from mediawiki.org, end users can now choose a different timezone to show instead of UTC.

Problems

• The deployment train for MediaWiki has been blocked this week. [152][153]
• Translation Notification Bot was sending the same message multiple times to every translator. This has been fixed. [154]
• Some users were receiving the same notification multiple times. This has been fixed. [155]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from July 29. It will be on all wikis from JUly 30 (calendar).

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

13:52, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – August 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2020).

Administrator changes

Red Phoenix

Euryalus • SQL

Jujutacular • Monty845 • Rettetast • Madchester

Oversight changes

GB fan

Keegan • Opabinia regalis • Premeditated Chaos

Guideline and policy news

• There is an open request for comment to decide whether to increase the minimum duration a sanction discussion has to remain open (currently 24 hours).
• Speedy deletion criterion T2 (template that misrepresents established policy) has been repealed following a request for comment.
• Speedy deletion criterion X2 (pages created by the content translation tool) has been repealed following a discussion.
• There is a proposal to restrict proposed deletion to confirmed users.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:21, 1 August 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 2 August 2020

• Special report: Wikipedia and the End of Open Collaboration?

• COI and paid editing: Some strange people edit Wikipedia for money

• News and notes: Abstract Wikipedia, a hoax, sex symbols, and a new admin

• In the media: Dog days gone bad

• Discussion report: Fox News, a flight of RfAs, and banning policy

• Featured content: Remembering Art, Valor, and Freedom

• Traffic report: Now for something completely different

• Gallery: Photos of threatened species from iNaturalist

• News from the WMF: New Chinese national security law in Hong Kong could limit the privacy of Wikipedia users

• Recent research: Receiving thanks increases retention, but not the time contributed to Wikipedia

• Essay: Not compatible with a collaborative project

• Obituaries: Hasteur and Brian McNeil

• In focus: WikiLoop DoubleCheck, reviewing edits made easy

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:25, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-32

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

Problems

• All queries to the Wikidata Query Service failed between 17:50 and 17:59 UTC on Thursday 23 July. Some queries failed during a longer period. [156]
• Interlanguage links were ordered incorrectly for the past few weeks. This problem was also mentioned in Tech News two weeks ago. The problem is now fixed. [157]
• There is a problem with the global preferences for the "Use Legacy Vector" option. Developers are working on fixing it. [158]
• A bug in the Wikibase extension had disabled the "move" and "create" types of protection in the main (Gallery) namespace on Wikimedia Commons. New protections could not be added, and existing protections were not enforced, allowing some page moves and page creations that should not have been possible. This has now been fixed. [159]

Changes later this week

• The video player will change to be simpler and more modern. This week, the current beta feature will become the video player for everyone on most non-Wikipedia wikis. The old player will be removed. [160]
• Users' global.js and global.css pages will now also be loaded on the mobile site. You can read documentation for how to avoid applying styles to the mobile skin. [161]
• In the MonoBook skin, the searchGoButton identifier is now searchButton. This may affect CSS and JS gadgets. Migration instructions can be found in T255953. This was previously mentioned in issue 27.
• Bot operators can use Pywikibot to regularly archive discussions. The behavior when the bot uses counter to prevent large archives was changed. [162]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 5. It will be on all wikis from August 6 (calendar).

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

15:43, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

This Month in Education: July 2020

This Month in Education Volume 9 • Issue 7 • July 2020 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issuse About Education at the Wikimedia Polska Conference Featured education community member The importance of having an Education and Human Rights Program The Welsh Wiki-Education project Wikimedia Chile faces the challenge of mandatory virtuality WoALUG and Canadian Institute of Technology write about women in tech

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 05:27, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-33

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

Recent changes

• FileImporter and FileExporter became standard features on all Wikis during the first week of August. They help you transfer files from local wikis to Wikimedia Commons with the original file information and history intact. [163]

Problems

• The mobile skin displays a message at the bottom of the page about who edited last. This message showed raw wikitext. This has now been fixed. Some messages in Structured Discussions and content translation may still appear as raw wikitext. Developers are working on it. [164]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 12. It will be on all wikis from August 13 (calendar).

Future changes

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [165][166]

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

16:06, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Great American Wiknic virtual edition 2020

WALRUS: Wikimedians Active in Local Regions of the United States W.A.L.R.U.S.

You are invited to the Great American Virtual Wiknic on Sunday, August 16, 2020, noon to 2pm 1st hour: National livestream via Streamyard / Youtube / social media (12-1pm Pacific) 2nd hour: Regional breakout rooms via Zoom / Wikimedia Meet, etc (1-2pm Pacific) Click here for more details!

04:28, 12 August 2019 (UTC) To unsubscribe from future messages from Wikipedia:Meetup/Seattle, please remove your name from this list.

This Month in GLAM: July 2020

This Month in GLAM – Volume X, Issue VII, July 2020 Headlines Albania report: Wikimedia CEE Spring 2020 in Albania and Kosova Australia report: New WikiClub and Australian GLAM Research Brazil report: Important records of Brazilian history: images, metadata and edit-a-thons Finland report: Rephotography walks during the pandemic France report: Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève Germany report: Hacking the Arts Netherlands report: October history month East-West, Pictures as a legacy to the world & Photos of Mali Serbia report: Wikimedia Serbia is working on new activities Sweden report: More Swedish music – of all sorts Uganda report: Sensitisation of GLAM institutions in Uganda UK report: The effect of a Commons Picture of the Day USA report: AfroCROWD, AAPB, Philadelphia, Smithsonian Calendar: August's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 05:40, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-34

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

Recent changes

• If you revert an edit using the undo link your edit is marked with an undo tag. This will now only happen if you don't change anything in the edit window before publishing the undo. This is to keep users from marking edits as undos when they actually do something else. [167]
• The new OOUI version will not work with Internet Explorer 8. This means the wikis will look strange and not work well in Internet Explorer 8. This was reported in Tech/News/2020/17. This is because keeping the wikis working with very old browsers creates other problems. [168]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 August. It will be on all wikis from 20 August (calendar).

Future changes

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis next week. This is a reminder. You can help by translating the announcement message. [169][170]

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

20:41, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

File:Albert Bierstadt - Among the Sierra Nevada, California - Google Art Project.jpg scheduled for POTD

Hi Pine,

This is to let you know that the featured picture File:Albert Bierstadt - Among the Sierra Nevada, California - Google Art Project.jpg , which you uploaded or nominated, has been selected as the English Wikipedia's picture of the day (POTD) for September 1, 2020. A preview of the POTD is displayed below and can be edited at Template:POTD/2020-09-01. If you have any concerns, please place a message at Wikipedia talk:Picture of the day. Thank you! Cwmhiraeth (talk) 11:07, 19 August 2020 (UTC)

Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) was a German-American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West, such as this oil-on-canvas painting, entitled Among the Sierra Nevada, California, created in 1868. He painted the landscape in his Rome studio, and exhibited it in Berlin and London before shipping it to the United States. His choice of grandiose subjects was matched by his entrepreneurial flair; his exhibitions of individual works were accompanied by promotion, ticket sales, and, in the words of one critic, a "vast machinery of advertisement and puffery". This work is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Painting credit: Albert Bierstadt

Recently featured:

• Bank myna
• Tooth and Tail
• Buddha Park of Ravangla

This Month in Education: August 2020

This Month in Education Volume 9 • Issue 8 • August 2020 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issuse Collaboration between Karvachar Armath laboratory and Karvachar’s Wikiclub as a new educational platform for the teenagers Education cycle “Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: an instructional strategy for the teaching practice” 3rd edition of Wikipedia Education Program in Hebron, Palestine. (COVID-19 edition) Introductory Wikipedia Workshop with Future Engineers: First Step of Education Program A picture is worth a thousand words: history students research pictures on Commons

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 13:33, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-35

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

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 August. It will be on all wikis from 27 August (calendar).

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

17:59, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 August 2020

• News and notes: The high road and the low road

• In the media: Storytelling large and small

• Featured content: Going for the goal

• Special report: Wikipedia's not so little sister is finding its own way

• Op-Ed: The longest-running hoax

• Traffic report: Heart, soul, umbrellas, and politics

• News from the WMF: Fourteen things we’ve learned by moving Polish Wikimedia conference online

• Recent research: Detecting spam, and pages to protect; non-anonymous editors signal their intelligence with high-quality articles

• Arbitration report: A slow couple of months

• From the archives: Wikipedia for promotional purposes?

• Obituaries: Marcus Sherman, Jerome West, and Pauline van Till

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:33, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

Editing news 2020 #4

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

Reply tool

The number of comments posted with the Reply Tool from March through June 2020. People used the Reply Tool to post over 7,400 comments with the tool.

The Reply tool has been available as a Beta Feature at the Arabic, Dutch, French and Hungarian Wikipedias since 31 March 2020. The first analysis showed positive results.

• More than 300 editors used the Reply tool at these four Wikipedias. They posted more than 7,400 replies during the study period.
• Of the people who posted a comment with the Reply tool, about 70% of them used the tool multiple times. About 60% of them used it on multiple days.
• Comments from Wikipedia editors are positive. One said, أعتقد أن الأداة تقدم فائدة ملحوظة؛ فهي تختصر الوقت لتقديم رد بدلًا من التنقل بالفأرة إلى وصلة تعديل القسم أو الصفحة، التي تكون بعيدة عن التعليق الأخير في الغالب، ويصل المساهم لصندوق التعديل بسرعة باستخدام الأداة. ("I think the tool has a significant impact; it saves time to reply while the classic way is to move with a mouse to the Edit link to edit the section or the page which is generally far away from the comment. And the user reaches to the edit box so quickly to use the Reply tool.")[171]

The Editing team released the Reply tool as a Beta Feature at eight other Wikipedias in early August. Those Wikipedias are in the Chinese, Czech, Georgian, Serbian, Sorani Kurdish, Swedish, Catalan, and Korean languages. If you would like to use the Reply tool at your wiki, please tell User talk:Whatamidoing (WMF).

The Reply tool is still in active development. Per request from the Dutch Wikipedia and other editors, you will be able to customize the edit summary. (The default edit summary is "Reply".) A "ping" feature is available in the Reply tool's visual editing mode. This feature searches for usernames. Per request from the Arabic Wikipedia, each wiki will be able to set its own preferred symbol for pinging editors. Per request from editors at the Japanese and Hungarian Wikipedias, each wiki can define a preferred signature prefix in the page MediaWiki:Discussiontools-signature-prefix. For example, some languages omit spaces before signatures. Other communities want to add a dash or a non-breaking space.

New requirements for user signatures

• The new requirements for custom user signatures began on 6 July 2020. If you try to create a custom signature that does not meet the requirements, you will get an error message.
• Existing custom signatures that do not meet the new requirements will be unaffected temporarily. Eventually, all custom signatures will need to meet the new requirements. You can check your signature and see lists of active editors whose custom signatures need to be corrected. Volunteers have been contacting editors who need to change their custom signatures. If you need to change your custom signature, then please read the help page.

Next: New discussion tool

Next, the team will be working on a tool for quickly and easily starting a new discussion section to a talk page. To follow the development of this new tool, please put the New Discussion Tool project page on your watchlist.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

15:10, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-36

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

Problems

• This is a reminder. All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 14:00 and 15:00 UTC. Please check on the details on the announcement message. [172][173]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

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

20:08, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

WikiCup 2020 September newsletter

The fourth round of the competition has finished, with 865 points being required to qualify for the final round, nearly twice as many points as last year. It was a hotly competitive round with two contestants with 598 and 605 points being eliminated, and all but two of the contestants who reached the final round having achieved an FA during the round. The highest scorers were

• Bloom6132, with 1478 points gained mainly from 5 featured lists, 12 DYKs and 63 in the news items;
• HaEr48 with 1318 points gained mainly from 2 featured articles, 5 good articles and 8 DYKs;
• Lee Vilenski with 1201 points mainly gained from 2 featured articles and 10 good articles.

Between them, contestants achieved 14 featured articles, 14 featured lists, 2 featured pictures, 87 good articles, 90 DYK entries, 75 ITN entries, 95 featured article candidate reviews and 81 good article reviews. Congratulations to all who participated! It was a generally high-scoring and productive round and I think we can expect a highly competitive finish to the competition.

Remember that any content promoted after the end of round 4 but before the start of round 5 can be claimed in round 5. Remember too that you must claim your points within 10 days of "earning" them. If you are concerned that your nomination will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews. It would be helpful if this list could be cleared of any items no longer relevant. If you want to help out with the WikiCup, please do your bit to keep down the review backlogs! Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Godot13 (talk), Sturmvogel 66 (talk), Vanamonde (talk), Cwmhiraeth (talk) MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:52, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – September 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2020).

Administrator changes

Eddie891

Angela • Jcw69 • Just Chilling • Philg88 • Viajero

CheckUser changes

SQL

Guideline and policy news

• Following a request for comment, the minimum length for site ban discussions was increased to 72 hours, up from 24.
• A request for comment is ongoing to determine whether paid editors must or should use the articles for creation process.
• A request for comment is open to resolve inconsistencies between the draftification and alternative to deletion processes.

Arbitration

• A request for comment is open to provide an opportunity to amend the structure, rules, and procedures of the 2020 English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee election and to resolve any issues not covered by existing rules.
• An open request for comment asks whether active Arbitrators may serve on the Trust and Safety Case Review Committee or Ombudsman commission.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:56, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter 14

Welcome to the fourteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Success with guidance

The star on this image is the week we deployed "guidance".

We deployed the "Guidance" feature on June 15.

This feature uses the help panel to explain what to do after selecting a suggested edit. For instance, if a newcomer selects a copyedit task, they are guided on what sorts of errors to look for. They can see examples of how to rewrite the text. You can try this feature on test.wiki.x.io. First enable the homepage and the help panel in your preferences there.

Since we launched "Guidance", the data we collected show good results (see image). Now, we see more users completing suggested edits than before Guidance was deployed.

Structured tasks

Design concept for the "add a link" structured task

Structured tasks is a project that aims to break down editing workflows into a series of steps. We hope newcomers can accomplish these tasks easily.

In the previous newsletter, we asked for feedback from community members on the idea. We had a good discussion in six languages with 35 community members (summary here). We have now posted new design mockups. We hope community members can check the mockups out and react to them (in any language). They are posted along with some of the main questions we are thinking about as we continue to refine our plans.

Other technical updates

Mockup of Variant D of the homepage on desktop.

• We are currently working on Variants C and D (adjacent image) of the homepage. The goal is to increase the number of newcomers who start the newcomer tasks workflow. This is the team's main project at the moment.
• We've made it easier to hide the help panel when not needed. [174]
• The welcome survey has a new question for people who created their account: language skills. The goal is to find out how many newcomers know multiple languages, so that we can learn whether it is a good idea to integrate Content Translation as a newcomer task. To make room for this question, we removed one that is not being used. [175]

Community outreach

• We continue to engage with more communities. We recently deployed the Growth features to Persian, Hebrew, and Russian Wikipedias. Learn more about getting the features.
• If your community is having a remote event, and you are interested in hearing from the Growth team, please contact us! We have already participated to two community events online:
  • The Polish Wikiconference (recording on Google Drive)
  • The Celtic Knot 2020 (video available on Youtube).

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:33, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-37

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

Changes later this week

• Normally pages can be moved to a title that has no existing page yet or to a page that has only one revision, which is a redirect to the page to be moved. A new user right allows editors to move pages over one-revision pages that redirect to anywhere. [176]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 September. It will be on all wikis from 10 September (calendar).
• All MediaWiki API modules will now use watchlist instead of watch. This was inconsistent before. [177]

Future changes

• The Wikipedia Android app team might work on patrolling tools in the future. You can let them know what tools would be useful for you or for less experienced patrollers. See the page on mediawiki.org.
• OTRS will be updated to a new version. This will probably take around two days. OTRS agents will not have access to the system during these days. Emails that come in during the update will be delivered when the update is done. The plan is to start around 08:00 UTC on 14 September. This could change. [178]
• The Wikipedia Android app will send push notifications if users want them. This could help you see for example when someone wrote on your talk page or your edit was reverted. This will need Google Play Services to work. It will also be possible to get the app without Google Play Services but push notifications will not work. Google Play Services is also used to make the app work for Android 4.4 users. [179][180]
• Wikimedia code review could move to GitLab. It would be hosted on Wikimedia servers. You can take part in the consultation.
• Dropdown menus in the Vector skin use a .menu class. This will not work in the future. Scripts can use nav ul instead. .vectorTabs and .vectorMenu will also not work. Some scripts need to be updated. You can read more in Phabricator.

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

15:59, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 40

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 40, July – August 2020

• New partnerships
  • Al Manhal
  • Ancestry
  • RILM
• #1Lib1Ref May 2020 report
• AfLIA hires a Wikipedian-in-Residence

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --10:15, 10 September 2020 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: August 2020

This Month in GLAM – Volume X, Issue VIII, August 2020 Headlines Albania report: Wikivoyage edit-a-thon - Editing Albania and Kosovo’s travel destinations Brazil report: Open innovation and dissemination activities: wrapping up great achievements on a major GLAM in Brazil Czech Republic report: First Prague Wiki Editathon held in Prague Estonia report: Virtual exhibition about Polish-Estonian relations. Rephotography and cultural heritage Germany report: KulTour in Swabia and 8000 documents new online India report: Utilising Occasion for Content donation: A story Netherlands report: WMIN & WMNL collaboration & Japanese propaganda films Serbia report: Enriching Wiki projects in different ways Sweden report: Free music and new recordings of songs in the public domain; Autumn in the libraries; Yes, you can hack the heritage this year – online! Uganda report: Participating in the African Librarians Week (24-30 May 2020) UK report: Spanish metal and ... USA report: Wiknic & Black Artists Matter & Respect Her Crank WMF GLAM report: Wikipedia Library, new WikiCite grant programs, and GLAM office hours Calendar: September's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 21:09, 11 September 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-38

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

Problems

• The Wikipedia apps briefly showed pages without CSS last week. This meant they looked wrong. It was quickly fixed but cached pages without CSS were shown for a few hours. [181][182]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 September. It will be on all wikis from 17 September (calendar).

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

16:18, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

Guild of Copy Editors September 2020 Newsletter

Guild of Copy Editors September 2020 Newsletter Hello and welcome to the September GOCE newsletter, a brief update of Guild activities since June 2020.                  Current and upcoming events September Drive: Our current backlog-elimination drive is open until 23:59 on 30 September (UTC) and is open to all copy editors. Sign up today! Election reminder: our end-of-year Election of Coordinators opens for nominations on 1 December. Coordinators normally serve a six-month term and are elected on an approval basis. Self-nominations are welcome. If you've thought of helping out at the Guild, or know of another editor who would make a good coordinator, please consider standing for election or nominating them here. Drive and Blitz reports June Blitz: An uncorrected typo (even copy editors make copy editing mistakes!) led to an eight-day "leap blitz" from 14 to 21 June, focusing on requests and articles tagged in May. 19 participating editors claimed 54 copy edits. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here. July Drive: Over 750,000 words of articles were copy edited for this event, keeping pace with the previous three self-isolated drives. Of the 38 people who signed up, 30 copyedited at least one article. Final results and awards are listed here. August Blitz: From 16 to 22 August, we copy edited articles tagged in June and July 2020 and requests. 12 participating editors completed 37 copy edits on the blitz. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here. Other news June election: Jonesey95 was chosen to continue as lead coordinator, assisted by Baffle gab1978, Tdslk, Twofingered Typist, and first-time coordinator Puddleglum2.0. Reidgreg took a break after serving for a couple years. Thanks to everyone who participated! Progress report: As of 01:33, 18 September 2020 (UTC), GOCE copyeditors had processed 532 requests since 1 January and there were 38 requests awaiting completion on the Requests page. The backlog of articles tagged for copy-editing stood at 433 (see monthly progress graph above). Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators Jonesey95, Baffle gab1978, Puddleglum2.0, Tdslk and Twofingered Typist. To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:02, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-39

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

Recent changes

• There is a new tag for reverted edits. For example you can see it in the recent changes feed or in the article history. It is added to edits when they have been undone, rollbacked or manually reverted to an older version of the page. [183][184]

Changes later this week

• The number of times you can do something in a period of time on wiki is limited. This could be the number of edits per minute or the number of users you email in a day. Some users are not affected by all limits because of their user rights. They could soon see the limit even if it does not affect them. [185]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 September. It will be on all wikis from 24 September (calendar).

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

21:26, 21 September 2020 (UTC)

This Month in Education: September 2020

This Month in Education Volume 9 • Issue 9 • September 2020 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issuse Active autumn in the Polish wiki-education Cycle "Caminos y voces de la educación con Wikipedia" Featured education community member of September 2020 The Use of Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons as tool for Module Development in the Philippines Wikimedia Indonesia Education Team Launched Their Books About Wikipedia Wikimedia Serbia is organizing the first online Edu Wiki camp

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 12:48, 23 September 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 September 2020

• Special report: Paid editing with political connections

• News and notes: More large-scale errors at a "small" wiki

• In the media: WIPO, Seigenthaler incident 15 years later

• Featured content: Life finds a Way

• Arbitration report: Clarifications and requests

• Traffic report: Is there no justice?

• Recent research: Wikipedia's flood biases

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:47, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 September 2020

• Special report: Paid editing with political connections

• News and notes: More large-scale errors at a "small" wiki

• In the media: WIPO, Seigenthaler incident 15 years later

• Featured content: Life finds a Way

• Arbitration report: Clarifications and requests

• Traffic report: Is there no justice?

• Recent research: Wikipedia's flood biases

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:53, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-40

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

Recent changes

• Admins can now see links to diffs of deleted revisions on Special:AbuseLog. This uses the interface of Special:Undelete. [186]
• Editors are automatically added to some user groups. For example editors are added to autoconfirmed users when they have edited enough times and long enough. Abuse filters can hinder users from automatically getting user rights for a period of time. They can also remove rights user have. Wikis can now ask to change how long this period of time is for their wiki in Phabricator. It is currently five days. [187]

Problems

• Last year some abuse filters stopped working because of a new change. If they tried to use variables that were unavailable for that action they would fail. This has now been fixed. [188]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 September. It will be on all wikis from 1 October (calendar).

Future changes

• You can't see the language links to other language versions from the talk page or history page. They are also not shown when you edit an article. This could change. It is not decided if for example the history page should link to another history page or to the article. You can take part in the discussion in Phabricator.
• The link colours could change. This is to make the difference between links and other text more clear. You can read more in Phabricator.
• In your preferences you can choose to get different notifications on the web or by email. You will see Apps as one of the alternatives later this week. This is because the Android and iOS Wikipedia apps will use push notifications for those who want them. You can see the preferences on the test wiki. The goal is to have push notifications on Android in October and on iOS in early 2021. [189]
• You can soon put pages on your watchlist for a limited time. This could be useful if you want to watch something for a shorter time but don't want it on your watchlist forever. It now works on mediawiki.org and will come to more wikis later. You can read more and see when it will come to other wikis.
• You can see what Wikimedians think are the best new technical tools this year. You can also nominate them.

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

21:23, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – September 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2020).

Administrator changes

Ajpolino • LuK3

Jackmcbarn

Ad Orientem • Harej • Lid • Lomn • Mentoz86 • Oliver Pereira • XJaM

There'sNoTime → TheresNoTime

Guideline and policy news

• A request for comment found consensus that incubation as an alternative to deletion should generally only be recommended when draftification is appropriate, namely 1) if the result of a deletion discussion is to draftify; or 2) if the article is newly created.

Technical news

• The filter log now provides links to view diffs of deleted revisions (phab:T261630).

Arbitration

• The 2020 CheckUser and Oversight appointment process has begun. The community consultation period will take place from September 27th to October 7th.
• Following a request for comment, sitting Committee members may not serve on either the Ombuds Commission or the WMF Case Review Committee. The Arbitration Committee passed a motion implementing those results into their procedures.

Miscellaneous

• The Universal Code of Conduct draft is open for community review and comment until October 6th, 2020.
• Office actions may now be appealed to the Interim Trust & Safety Case Review Committee.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:43, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-41

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

Recent changes

• There is a new tool where you can see which home wiki users have in discussions on Meta. This can help show which communities are not part of the discussion on wikis where we make decisions that affect many other wikis.
• You can now thank users for file uploads or for changing the language of a page. [190]

Problems

• There were many errors with the new MediaWiki version last week. The new version was rolled back. Updates that should have happened last week are late. [191]
• Everyone was logged out. This was because a user reported being logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now. [192]
• Many pages have JavaScript errors. You can read more and now see a list of user scripts with errors.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 October. It will be on all wikis from 8 October (calendar).
• Letters immediately after a link are shown as part of the link. For example the entire word in [[Child]]ren is linked. On Arabic wikis this works at both the start and end of a word. Previously on Arabic wikis numbers and other non-letter Unicode characters were shown as part of the link at the start of a word but not at the end. Now only Latin and Arabic letters will extend links on Arabic wikis. [193]

Future changes

• You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on 27 October around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour. [194]

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

16:24, 5 October 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-42

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

Problems

• Because of the problems with the MediaWiki version two weeks ago last week's updates are also late. [195][196][197]

Changes later this week

• Live previews didn't show the templates used in the preview if you just edited a section. This has now been fixed. You can also test CSS and JavaScript pages even if you have the live preview enabled. Previously this didn't work well. [198][199]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 October. It will be on all wikis from 15 October (calendar).

Future changes

• A new stable version of Pywikibot is coming soon. [200]

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

15:23, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: September 2020

This Month in GLAM – Volume X, Issue IX, September 2020 Headlines Brazil report: Wikidata birthday celebrations, Wiki Loves Monuments, new partnerships and more! Colombia report: GLAM and virtual education France report: AAF training course; Workshops in Strasbourg; European Heritage Days: Rennes; Wiki Loves Monuments Germany report: Ahoy! Wikipedians set sail to document the reality of modern seafaring Indonesia report: New GLAM partnerships on data donation; Commons structured data edit-a-thon Norway report: Students taking on GLAM Wiki women in red Sweden report: Musikverket: more folk music and photos; Hack for Heritage 2020; Wiki Loves Monuments; Wikipedia in the libraries; Digital Book Fair on Wikipedia UK report: National Lottery; Khalili Collections USA report: Virtual events MetFashion, 19SuffrageStories, WikiCari Festival and more Open Access report: New publication about access to digitised cultural heritage WMF GLAM report: Launching Wikisource Pagelist Widget Calendar: ctober's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 02:44, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-43

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

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 October. It will be on all wikis from 22 October (calendar).

Future changes

• You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on 27 October around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour. [201]
• In the AbuseFilter extension, the rmspecials() function will be updated soon so that it does not remove the "space" character. Wikis are advised to wrap all the uses of rmspecials() with rmwhitespace() wherever necessary to keep filters' behavior unchanged. You can use the search function on Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage. [202]
• Some gadgets and user-scripts use the HTML div with the ID #jump-to-nav. This div will be removed soon. Maintainers should replace these uses with either #siteSub or #mw-content-text. A list of affected scripts is at the top of phab:T265373.

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

16:30, 19 October 2020 (UTC)

This Month in Education: October 2020

This Month in Education Volume 9 • Issue 10 • October 2020 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issuse Collegiate Students Fight Historical Revisionism Through Online Wikipedia Edit-a-thon Digital skills using Wikimedia Art + Feminism Editathon “¡No se olvida!” (We don’t forget!) Education news bytes Featured education community member of October 2020 Teaching Wikipedia at University of Tromsø with support from the Sámi Parliament

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 12:59, 25 October 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-44

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

Problems

• You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on October 27 around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour. [203]
• Last week, links to "diffs" from mobile watchlists and recentchanges were linking to page-revisions instead of diffs. This has now been fixed. [204]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

• Since the introduction of the interface administrators user group in 2018, administrators couldn’t view the deleted history of CSS/JS pages. Now they can. [205]
• There was a problem with the Change Tags. The software would apply the "Reverted" tag to any page actions such as page-protection changes if they came directly after a reverted edit. This has now been fixed for new edits. [206]
• The Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in Beta Feature on most Wikipedias in November. Another announcement will be made once the date is finalized. [207]

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

17:37, 26 October 2020 (UTC)

Growth team updates #15

Welcome to the fifteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Variants C and D deployed

Variant D in Portuguese Wikipedia

Variants C and D are two new arrangements of the newcomer homepage. We hope they will increase the number of users using suggested edits. They both make suggested edits the clear place where newcomers should get started on the page. They have some differences in their workflows, because we want to test which design is better. We deployed these variants on October 19; half of newcomers get each variant. After about 5 weeks, we will analyze the data from the tests. The goal is to determine which variant is helping more newcomers to make more suggested edits. We will identify the better variant and then use it with all newcomers.

Structured tasks: add a link

Concept A for add a link.

As we discussed in previous newsletters, the team is working on our first "structured task": the "add a link" task. After community discussion on design ideas, we ran user tests on the mobile designs. We decided on the design concept we want to use moving forward: Concept A. We're now engineering the backend for this feature. Next, we will be running user tests for desktop designs.

Learn more about the findings.

Community news

• We recently deployed the Growth features to Polish, Portuguese, Swedish and Turkish Wikipedias. 18 wikis now have Growth features. Learn more about getting the features.
• Have you recently checked if all interface messages are translated for your language?

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

10:09, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – November 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2020).

Administrator changes

John M Wolfson

Bduke • Nilfanion • Philosopher • Rspeer • Yunshui

Interface administrator changes

Ragesoss

TonyBallioni

CheckUser changes

EdJohnston • Oshwah • Yamla

Yunshui

Oversight changes

Anarchyte

Yunshui

Guideline and policy news

• Community sanctions now authorize administrators to place under indefinite semiprotection any article on a beauty pageant, or biography of a person known as a beauty pageant contestant, which has been edited by a sockpuppet account or logged-out sockpuppet, to be logged at WP:GS/PAGEANT.

Technical news

• Sysops will once again be able to view the deleted history of JS/CSS pages; this was restricted to interface administrators when that group was introduced.
• Twinkle's block module now includes the ability to note the specific case when applying a discretionary sanctions block and/or template.
• Sysops will be able to use Special:CreateLocalAccount to create a local account for a global user that is prevented from auto-creation locally (such as by a filter or range block). Administrators that are not sure if such a creation is appropriate should contact a checkuser.

Arbitration

• The 2020 Arbitration Committee Elections process has begun. Eligible editors will be able to nominate themselves as candidates from November 8 through November 17. The voting period will run from November 23 through December 6.
• The Anti-harassment RfC has concluded with a summary of the feedback provided.

Miscellaneous

• A reminder that standard discretionary sanctions are authorized for all edits about, and all pages related to post-1932 politics of the United States and closely related people. (American Politics 2 Arbitration case).

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:52, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 1 November 2020

• News and notes: Ban on IPs on ptwiki, paid editing for Tatarstan, IP masking

• In the media: Murder, politics, religion, health and books

• Book review: Review of Wikipedia @ 20

• Op-Ed: Anti-vandalism with masked IPs: the steps forward

• Discussion report: Proposal to change board composition, In The News dumps Trump story

• Featured content: The "Green Terror" is neither green nor sufficiently terrifying. Worst Hallowe'en ever.

• Traffic report: Jump back, what's that sound?

• Interview: Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner

• News from the WMF: Meet the 2020 Wikimedian of the Year

• Recent research: OpenSym 2020: Deletions and gender, masses vs. elites, edit filters

• In focus: The many (reported) deaths of Wikipedia

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:52, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-45

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

Recent changes

• You can no longer read Wikimedia wikis if your browser uses very old TLS. This is because it is a security problem for everyone. It could lead to downgrade attacks. Since October 29, 2020, users who use old TLS versions will not be able to connect to Wikimedia projects. A list of browser recommendations is available. All modern operating systems and browsers are always able to reach Wikimedia projects. [208]
• There is a new automatic tracking category available: Pages with non-numeric formatnum arguments. It collects pages which use the {{formatnum}} parser function with invalid (non-numeric) input, e.g. {{formatnum:TECHNEWS}}. Note that {{formatnum:123,456}} is also invalid input: as described in the documentation, the argument should be unformatted so that it can be reliably and correctly localised. The tracking category will help identify problematic usage and double-formatting. The new tracking category's name can be translated at translatewiki. [209]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 4. It will be on all wikis from November 5 (calendar).
• Administrators and stewards will be able to use a special page (Special:CreateLocalAccount) to force local account creation for a global account. This is useful when account creation is blocked for that user (by a block or a filter). [210]
• The Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in Beta Feature on most Wikipedias on November 4. This change excludes the English, Russian, and German-language Wikipedias, plus a few smaller Wikipedias with special circumstances. You can read the help page and the troubleshooting guide for more information. [211]

Future changes

• A discussion has been restarted about using a Unicode minus sign (− U+2212) in the output of {{formatnum}} when it is given a negative argument. [212]
• In the future IP addresses of unregistered users will not be shown for everyone. They will get an alias instead. There will be a new user right or an opt-in function for more vandal fighters to see the IPs of unregistered users. There would be some criteria for who gets the user right or opt-in. There will also be other new tools to help handle vandalism. This is early in the process and the developers are still collecting information from the communities before they suggest solutions.

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

16:08, 2 November 2020 (UTC)

WikiCup 2020 November newsletter

The 2020 WikiCup has come to an end, with the final round going down to the wire. Our new Champion is Lee Vilenski (submissions), the runner-up last year, who was closely followed by Gog the Mild (submissions). In the final round, Lee achieved 4 FAs and 30 GAs, mostly on cue sport topics, while Gog achieved 3 FAs and 15 GAs, mostly on important battles and wars, which earned him a high number of bonus points. The Rambling Man (submissions) was in third place with 4 FAs and 8 GAs on football topics, with Epicgenius (submissions) close behind with 19 GAs and 16 DYK's, his interest being the buildings of New York.

The other finalists were Hog Farm (submissions), HaEr48 (submissions), Harrias (submissions) and Bloom6132 (submissions). The final round was very productive, and besides 15 FAs, contestants achieved 75 FAC reviews, 88 GAs and 108 GAN reviews. Altogether, Wikipedia has benefited greatly from the activities of WikiCup competitors all through the contest. Well done everyone!

All those who reached the final will receive awards and the following special awards will be made, based on high performance in particular areas of content creation. So that the finalists do not have an undue advantage, these prizes are awarded to the competitor who scored the highest in any particular field in a single round, or in the event of a tie, to the overall leader in this field.

• Gog the Mild (submissions) wins the featured article prize, for a total of 14 FAs during the course of the competition.
• Bloom6132 (submissions) win the featured list prize, for 5 FLs in round 4.
• Rhododendrites (submissions) wins the featured picture prize, for 3 FPs in round 3 and 5 overall.
• Lee Vilenski (submissions) wins the featured article reviewer prize, for 23 FAC reviews in round 5.
• Epicgenius (submissions) wins the good article prize, for 45 GAs in round 2 and 113 overall.
• MPJ-DK (submissions) wins the topic prize, for 33 articles in good topics in round 2.
• The Rambling Man (submissions) wins the good article reviewer prize, for 100 good article reviews in round 2.
• Epicgenius (submissions) wins the DYK prize, for 22 Did you know articles in round 4 and 94 overall.
• Bloom6132 (submissions) wins the ITN prize, for 63 In the news articles in round 4 and 136 overall.

Next year's competition will begin on 1 January. You are invited to sign up to participate; the WikiCup is open to all Wikipedians, both novices and experienced editors, and we hope to see you all in the 2021 competition. Until then, it only remains to once again congratulate our worthy winners, and thank all participants for their involvement! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Godot13, Sturmvogel 66, Vanamonde and Cwmhiraeth MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:38, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-46

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

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

• You can see reference previews. This shows a preview of the footnote when you hover over it. This has been a beta feature. It will move out of beta and be enabled by default. There will be an option not to use it. The developers are looking for small or medium-sized wikis to be the first ones. You can let them know if your wiki is interested. [213]
• From November 16 the categories will not be sorted in order for a short time. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the internationalisation library. They will use a script to fix the existing categories. This can take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can read more. [214][215]

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

15:48, 9 November 2020 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: October 2020

This Month in GLAM – Volume X, Issue X, October 2020 Headlines AfLIA Wikipedia in African Libraries report: Wikipedia in African Libraries Project Brazil report: Abre-te Código hackathon, Wikidata related events and news from our partners Finland report: Postponed Hack4FI GLAM hackathon turned into an online global Hack4OpenGLAM France report: Partnership with BNU Strasbourg Germany report: Coding da Vinci cultural data hackathon heads to Lower Saxony India report: Mapping GLAM in Maharashtra, India Indonesia report: Bulan Sejarah Indonesia 2.0; Structured data edit-a-thon; Proofreading mini contest Netherlands report: National History Month: East to West, Dutch libraries and Wikipedia New Zealand report: West Coast Wikipedian at Large Norway report: The Sámi Languages on wiki Serbia report: Many activities are in our way Sweden report: Librarians learn about Wikidata; More Swedish literature on Wikidata; Online Edit-a-thon Dalarna; Applications to the Swedish Innovation Agency; Kulturhistoria som gymnasiearbete; Librarians and Projekt HBTQI; GLAM Statistical Tool UK report: Enamels of the World USA report: American Archive of Public Broadcasting; Smithsonian Women in Finance Edit-a-thon; Black Lunch Table; San Diego/October 2020; WikiWednesday Salon Calendar: November's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 22:36, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-47

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

Recent changes

• Listings on category pages are sorted on each wiki for that language using a library. For a brief period on 16 November, changes to categories will not be sorted correctly for most languages. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the library. They will then use a script to fix the existing categories. This will take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can read more. [216][217]

Changes later this week

• If you merged two pages in a namespace where pages can't redirect this used to break the merge history. This will now be fixed. [218]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 November. It will be on all wikis from 19 November (calendar).

Future changes

• The Community Wishlist Survey is now open for proposals. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals from 16 to 30 November. You can vote on proposals from 8 December to 21 December.

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

15:36, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 41

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 41, September – October 2020

• New partnership: Taxmann
• WikiCite
• 1Lib1Ref 2021

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --10:48, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-48

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

Recent changes

• Timestamps in Special:Log are now links. They go to Special:Log for only that entry. This is how timestamps work on for example the history page. [219]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

• The Wikimedia Cloud VPS hosts technical projects for the Wikimedia movement. Developers need to claim projects they use. This is because old and unused projects are removed once a year. Unclaimed projects can be shut down from 1 December. Unclaimed projects can be deleted from 1 January. [220]

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

17:17, 23 November 2020 (UTC)

ArbCom 2020 Elections voter message

Hello! Voting in the 2020 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 7 December 2020. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate in the 2020 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:25, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 November 2020

• News and notes: Jimmy Wales "shouldn't be kicked out before he's ready"

• Op-Ed: Re-righting Wikipedia

• Opinion: How billionaires re-write Wikipedia

• In the media: Relying on Wikipedia: voters, scientists, and a Canadian border guard

• Featured content: Frontonia sp. is thankful for delicious cyanobacteria

• Traffic report: 007 with Borat, the Queen, and an election

• News from Wiki Education: An assignment that changed a life: Kasey Baker

• GLAM plus: West Coast New Zealand's Wikipedian at Large

• Wikicup report: Lee Vilenski wins the 2020 WikiCup

• Recent research: Wikipedia's Shoah coverage succeeds where libraries fail

• Essay: Writing about women

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:46, 29 November 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-49

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

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 December. It will be on all wikis from 3 December (calendar).

Future changes

• The iOS Wikipedia app will show readers more of the article history. They can see new updates and easier see how the article has changed over time. This is an experiment. It will first be shown only to some iOS app users as a test. [221][222]
• The Wiki Replicas can be used for SQL queries. You can use Quarry, PAWS or other ways to do this. To make the Wiki Replicas stable there will be two changes. Cross-database JOINS will no longer work. You can also only query a database if you connect to it directly. This will happen in February 2021. If you think this affects you and you need help you can post on Phabricator or on Wikitech. [223]

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

17:44, 30 November 2020 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – December 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (November 2020).

Administrator changes

Andrwsc • Anetode • GoldenRing • JzG • LinguistAtLarge • Nehrams2020

Interface administrator changes

Izno

Guideline and policy news

• There is a request for comment in progress to either remove T3 (duplicated and hardcoded instances) as a speedy deletion criterion or eliminate its seven-day waiting period.

Technical news

• Voting for proposals in the 2021 Community Wishlist Survey, which determines what software the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Tech team will work on next year, will take place from 8 December through 21 December. In particular, there are sections regarding administrators and anti-harassment.

Arbitration

• Voting in the 2020 Arbitration Committee Elections is open to eligible editors until Monday 23:59, 7 December 2020 UTC. Please review the candidates and, if you wish to do so, submit your choices on the voting page.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:37, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

Growth team updates #16

Welcome to the sixteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Growth features show impact

Newcomer task experiments results

The team recently published our analysis of the impact of newcomer tasks. We are happy to announce that we found that the Growth features, and particularly newcomer tasks, lead to increased editing from newcomers.

In November 2019, the Growth team added the "newcomer tasks" feature to the newcomer homepage. After six months, we collected data from Arabic, Vietnamese, Czech, and Korean Wikipedias. We analyzed the overall impact of the Growth features, including newcomer tasks.

This analysis finds that the Growth features lead to increases in:

• the probability that newcomers make their first article edit (+11.6%)
• the probability that they are retained as editors
• the number of edits they make during their first couple of weeks on the wiki (+22%)

We also find that the quality of their edits, as measured by revert rate, is comparable to that of a control group.

• 
  The number of suggested edits completed by each wiki each week, going from December 2019 to November 2020, with a line for the total.
• 
  The number of distinct users completing suggested edits by each wiki each week, going from December 2019 to November 2020.

Because of these results, we think all Wikipedias should consider implementing these features. Learn more about how to get them.

You can find more details about this experiment on the report page. Please post any feedback or questions on the talk page

General metrics

As of November 2020, across all wikis where the features have been deployed:

• more than 5,000 newcomers have made more than 40,000 edits using Newcomer tasks.
• more than 14,000 questions have been sent to volunteer mentors by more than 11,000 users.
• more than 2,000 questions have been asked on help desks by more than 1,500 users.

Learn more about Growth results here, and please post any feedback or questions on the talk page.

Variants C and D

Variants C and D are two new arrangements of the newcomer homepage. We deployed them in October. After six weeks of these variants being deployed, we can see that they have led to increased interactions with newcomer tasks. Next, we will determine which variant is best and use that for all newcomers.

News for mentors

A separate list for workshops hosts

During workshops organized by education programs through the communities, workshops hosts like to mentor people they train on wiki. Several wikis requested to have a way to claim their mentees without having other newcomers being randomly being assigned to them. To address this need, a separate list can be created on wiki, for mentors that wish to claim mentees, but prefer not to have random mentees being assigned to them. Learn more about this feature.

Claiming multiple mentees at once

Mentors can use Special:ClaimMentee to claim a newcomer as their mentee. The feature now allows mentors to claim multiple newcomers at once.

Community news

The help panel allows people to post a message to the local help desk while editing. Previously, the tool always posted messages to the bottom of help desks. Wikis are now able to configure it to display new messages at the top of the help desk page. T261714

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

14:22, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-50

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

Recent changes

• You can now put pages on your watchlist for a limited period of time. Some wikis already had this function. [224][225]

Changes later this week

• Information from Wikidata that is used on a wiki page can be shown in recent changes and watchlists on a Wikimedia wiki. To see this you need to turn on showing Wikidata edits in your watchlist in the preferences. Changes to the Wikidata description in the language of a Wikimedia wiki will then be shown in recent changes and watchlists. This will not show edits to languages that are not relevant to your wiki. [226][227]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 December. It will be on all wikis from 10 December (calendar).

Future changes

• You can vote on proposals in the Community Wishlist Survey between 8 December and 21 December. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on.

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

16:14, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

December 2020 Guild of Copy Editors Newsletter

Guild of Copy Editors December 2020 Newsletter Hello and welcome to the December GOCE newsletter, a brief update of Guild activities since September 2020.                  Current and upcoming events Election time: our end-of-year Election of Coordinators opened for nominations on 1 December and will close on 15 December at 23:59 (UTC). Voting opens at 00:01 the following day and will continue until 31 December at 23:59, just before Auld Lang Syne. Coordinators normally serve a six-month term and are elected on an approval basis. Self-nominations are welcome. If you've thought of helping out at the Guild, or know of another editor who would make a good coordinator, please consider standing for election or nominating them here. December Blitz: This will run from 13 to 19 December, and will target all Requests. Sign up now. Drive and Blitz reports September Drive: 67 fewer articles had copy-edit templates by this month's close. Of the 27 editors who signed up, 15 copy-edited at least one article, and 124 articles were claimed for the drive. October Blitz: this ran from 18 to 24 October, and focused on articles tagged for copy-edit in July and August 2020, and all Requests. Of the 13 who signed up, 11 editors copy-edited at least one article. 21 articles were claimed for the blitz. November Drive: Of the 18 editors who signed up, 15 copy-edited at least one article, and together claimed 134 articles. At the close of the drive, 67 fewer articles were in the backlog and we had dealt with 39 requests. Other news Progress report: As of 09:05, 3 December 2020 (UTC), GOCE copyeditors had processed 663 requests (18 from 2019) since 1 January and there were 52 requests awaiting completion on the Requests page. The backlog of articles tagged for copy-editing stood at 494 (see monthly progress graph above). Annual Report for 2020: this roundup of the year's activity at the Guild is planned for publication in late January or early February. Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Seasonal tidings and cheers from your GOCE coordinators: Jonesey95, Baffle gab1978, Puddleglum2.0, Tdslk and Twofingered Typist. To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:47, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: November 2020

This Month in GLAM – Volume X, Issue XI, November 2020 Headlines AfLIA Wikipedia in African Libraries report: Launch of Wikipedia in African Libraries Project Pilot Cohort Brazil report: Accessibility through audio descriptions, GLAM tutorials, WikidataCon 2021 and more updates on Brazilian GLAMs Canada report: Taking a tour of CAPACOA workshops and some recent example sets from commons Germany report: German symphony orchestra releases audio samples under free license India report: Re-licensing of content on water & rivers in India Indonesia report: #WikiSejarah WPWP Campaign Netherlands report: Wikipedia and Education, Funding granted for two projects in 2021, KB completes collection highlights project Serbia report: GLAM in Serbia makes important steps in the digitization of cultural heritage Spain report: Edit-a-thons on women scientists and painters Sweden report: Music, UNESCO and Wikidata UK report: Hundreds of Khalili images USA report: Black Lunch Table & Museum Computer Network Calendar: December's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 14:29, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-51

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

Recent changes

• There is a Wikipedia app for KaiOS phones. It was released in India in September. It can now be downloaded in other countries too. [228]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 December. It will be on all wikis from 17 December (calendar).

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

21:33, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

This Month in Education: November 2020

This Month in Education Volume 9 • Issue 11 • November 2020 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issuse Celebrating 10 years of student editing in the United States and Canada Cooperation in digital education – Wikimedia Polska conference Education Team 2020 Year End Review Featured education community members of 2020 Fifteen years of implementation of the Wikipedia Education Program in Serbia Hablon User Group and UP Internet Freedom Network Wikipedia Edit-a-thon Online trainings on Wikipedia with high school students of Kosova Photographics and free culture training in Cameroon and Switzerland The article about Wiki-education in the science magazine The first Online EduWiki Camp in Serbia Wikimedia Mexico’s Education Program celebrates Open Access Week 2020 Wikipedia as a Tool to Educate and to Be Educated

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 07:14, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-52

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

Tech News

• Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 11 January 2021.

Recent changes

• The {{citation needed}} template shows when a statement in a Wikipedia article needs a source. If you click on it when you edit with the visual editor there is a popup that explains this. Now it can also show the reason and when it was added. [229]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.

Future changes

• You can propose and discuss what technical improvements should be done for geographic information. This could be coordinates, maps or other related things.
• Some wikis use LanguageConverter to switch between writing systems or variants of a language. This can only be done for the entire page. There will be a <langconvert> tag that can convert a piece of text on a page. [230]
• Oversighters and stewards can hide entries in Special:AbuseLog. They can soon hide multiple entries at once using checkboxes. This works like hiding normal edits. It will happen in early January. [231]

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

20:52, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 December 2020

• News and notes: Year-end legal surprises cause concern, but Public Domain Day is imminent

• In the media: Concealment, data journalism, a non-pig farmer, and some Bluetick Hounds

• Arbitration report: 2020 election results

• Opinion: How to make your factory's safety and labor issues disappear

• Featured content: Very nearly ringing in the New Year with "Blank Space" – but we got there in time.

• Traffic report: 2020 wraps up

• News from the WMF: What Wikipedia saw during election week in the U.S., and what we’re doing next

• Recent research: Predicting the next move in Wikipedia discussions

• Essay: Subjective importance

• Op-Ed: An unforgettable year we might wish to forget

• Gallery: Angels in the architecture

• Humour: 'Twas the Night Before Wikimas

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:26, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

Welcome to the 2021 WikiCup!

Happy New Year and Happy New WikiCup! The competition begins today and all article creators, expanders, improvers and reviewers are welcome to take part. 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. Any questions on the rules or on anything else should be directed to one of the judges, or posted to the WikiCup talk page. Signups will close at the end of January, and the first round will end on 26 February; the 64 highest scorers at that time will move on to round 2. We thank Vanamonde93 and Godot13, who have retired as judges, and we thank them for their past dedication. The judges for the WikiCup this year are Sturmvogel 66 (talk · contribs · email) and Cwmhiraeth (talk · contribs · email). Good luck! MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:11, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – January 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (December 2020).

Administrator changes

Hammersoft

Andres • Brion VIBBER • Rkitko • Thatcher

CheckUser changes

Barkeep49 • BDD • CaptainEek • Primefac

Oversight changes

Barkeep49 • BDD • CaptainEek

Joe Roe

Guideline and policy news

• Speedy deletion criterion T3 (duplication and hardcoded instances) has been repealed following a request for comment.

Technical news

• You can now put pages on your watchlist for a limited period of time.

Arbitration

• By motion, standard discretionary sanctions have been temporarily authorized for all pages relating to the Horn of Africa (defined as including Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and adjoining areas if involved in related disputes). The effectiveness of the discretionary sanctions can be evaluated on the request by any editor after March 1, 2021 (or sooner if for a good reason).
• Following the 2020 Arbitration Committee elections, the following editors have been appointed to the Arbitration Committee: Barkeep49, BDD, Bradv, CaptainEek, L235, Maxim, Primefac.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:08, 5 January 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-02

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

Recent changes

• You can choose to be reminded when you have not added an edit summary. This can be done in your preferences. This could conflict with the CAPTCHA. This has now been fixed. [232]
• You can link to specific log entries. You can get these links for example by clicking the timestamps in the log. Until now, such links to private log entries showed no entry even if you had permission to view private log entries. The links now show the entry. [233]
• Admins can use the abuse filter tool to automatically prevent bad edits. Three changes happened last week:
  • The filter editing interface now shows syntax errors while you type. This is similar to JavaScript pages. It also shows a warning for regular expressions that match the empty string. New warnings will be added later. [234]
  • Oversighters can now hide multiple filter log entries at once using checkboxes on Special:AbuseLog. This is how the usual revision deletion works. [235]
  • When a filter matches too many actions after it has been changed it is "throttled". The most powerful actions are disabled. This is to avoid many editors getting blocked when an administrator made a mistake. The administrator will now get a notification about this "throttle".
• There is a new tool to build new skins. You can also see existing skins. You can give feedback. [236]
• Bots using the API no longer watch pages automatically based on account preferences. Setting the watchlist to watch will still work. This is to reduce the size of the watchlist data in the database. [237]
• Scribunto's file metadata now includes length. [238]
• CSS and JavaScript code pages now have link anchors to line numbers. You can use wikilinks like w:en:MediaWiki:Common.js#L-50. [239]
• There was a new version of MediaWiki last week. You can read a detailed log of all 763 changes. Most of them are very small and will not affect you.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 January. It will be on all wikis from 14 January (calendar).

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

15:41, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: December 2020

This Month in GLAM – Volume X, Issue XII, December 2020 Headlines AfLIA Wikipedia in African Libraries report: Wrap up of the Wikipedia in African Libraries project pilot cohort Canada report: Branding Toolkit released by the Canadian Museums Association for GLAMs Finland report: Hundreds of thousands of new photos released Germany report: The Karl-Preusker-Medal 2020 goes to Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. Netherlands report: Documentation of workflows for the ingestion of bibliographic data into Wikidata; Wikipedia & Africa: Why contributing to Wikipedia matters New Zealand report: Māori Women Weavers Edit-a-thon Serbia report: GLAMorous end of 2020 Sweden report: Wiki Loves Monuments submissions livestreamed; Nordiska museet uploads; Sjung med oss, Mamma! UK report: Wales, Women in Leeds, and the Hajj USA report: WikiConference North America and Salons WMF GLAM report: The GLAM & Culture office hours Calendar: January's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 11:42, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: December 2020

This Month in GLAM – Volume X, Issue XII, December 2020 Headlines AfLIA Wikipedia in African Libraries report: Wrap up of the Wikipedia in African Libraries project pilot cohort Canada report: Branding Toolkit released by the Canadian Museums Association for GLAMs Finland report: Hundreds of thousands of new photos released Germany report: The Karl-Preusker-Medal 2020 goes to Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. Netherlands report: Documentation of workflows for the ingestion of bibliographic data into Wikidata; Wikipedia & Africa: Why contributing to Wikipedia matters New Zealand report: Māori Women Weavers Edit-a-thon Serbia report: GLAMorous end of 2020 Sweden report: Wiki Loves Monuments submissions livestreamed; Nordiska museet uploads; Sjung med oss, Mamma! UK report: Wales, Women in Leeds, and the Hajj USA report: WikiConference North America and Salons WMF GLAM report: The GLAM & Culture office hours Calendar: January's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 14:32, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-03

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

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 January. It will be on all wikis from 21 January (calendar).

Future changes

• The Growth team plans to add features to get more visitors to edit to more Wikipedias. You can help translating the interface.
• You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for a short time on 26 January at 07:00 (UTC). [240]
• MassMessage posts could be automatically timestamped in the future. This is because MassMessage senders can now send pages using MassMessage. Pages are more difficult to sign. If there are times when a MassMessage post should not be timestamped you can let the developers know.

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

16:09, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

Editing news 2021 #1

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

Reply tool

Completion rates for comments made with the Reply tool and full-page wikitext editing. Details and limitations are in this report.

The Reply tool is available at most Wikipedias.

• The Reply tool has been deployed as an opt-out preference to all editors at the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedias.
• It is also available as a Beta Feature at almost all Wikipedias except for the English, Russian, and German-language Wikipedias. If it is not available at your wiki, you can request it by following these simple instructions.

Research notes:

• As of January 2021, more than 3,500 editors have used the Reply tool to post about 70,000 comments.
• We have preliminary data from the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedia on the Reply tool. Junior Contributors who use the Reply tool are more likely to publish the comments they start writing than those who use full-page wikitext editing.[241]
• The Editing and Parsing teams have significantly reduced the number of edits that affect other parts of the page. About 0.3% of edits did this during the last month.[242] Some of the remaining changes are automatic corrections for Special:LintErrors.
• A large A/B test will start soon.[243] This is part of the process to offer the Reply tool to everyone. During this test, half of all editors at 24 Wikipedias will have the Reply tool automatically enabled, and half will not. You can still turn it on or off for your own account in Special:Preferences.

New discussion tool

Screenshot of version 1.0 of the New Discussion Tool prototype.

The new tool for starting new discussions (new sections) will join the Discussion tools in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures at the end of January. You can try the tool for yourself.[244] You can leave feedback in this thread or on the talk page.

Next: Notifications

During Talk pages consultation 2019, editors said that it should be easier to know about new activity in conversations they are interested in. The Notifications project is just beginning. What would help you become aware of new comments? What's working with the current system? Which pages at your wiki should the team look at? Please post your advice at notifications-talk.

–Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

18:38, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

This Month in Education: January 2021

This Month in Education Volume 10 • Issue 1 • January 2021 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issuse Featured education community member of January 2021 Open Education Global 2020 Conference Reading Wikipedia in Bolivia The impact of war on young Wikimedians in Stepanakert The Possibility of Open-Access Learning Portals in the Philippines Training Resources about Author’s Rights published by Wiki in Africa

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: ZI Jony 17:25, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

This Month in Education: January 2021

This Month in Education Volume 10 • Issue 1 • January 2021 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issuse Featured education community member of January 2021 Open Education Global 2020 Conference Reading Wikipedia in Bolivia The impact of war on young Wikimedians in Stepanakert The Possibility of Open-Access Learning Portals in the Philippines Training Resources about Author’s Rights published by Wiki in Africa

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 15:34, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

Books & Bytes - Issue 42

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 42, November – December 2020

• New EBSCO collections now available
• 1Lib1Ref 2021 underway
• Library Card input requested
• Libraries love Wikimedia, too!

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --14:00, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-04

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

Problems

• You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for a short time on 26 January at 07:00 (UTC). You will not be able to read or edit Wikitech for a short time on 28 January at 09:00 (UTC). [245][246]

Changes later this week

• Bracket matching will be added to the CodeMirror syntax highlighter on the first wikis. The first wikis are German and Catalan Wikipedia and maybe other Wikimedia wikis. This will happen on 27 January. [247]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 January. It will be on all wikis from 28 January (calendar).

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

18:29, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 January 2021

• News and notes: 1,000,000,000 edits, board elections, virtual Wikimania 2021

• Special report: Wiki reporting on the United States insurrection

• In focus: From Anarchy to Wikiality, Glaring Bias to Good Cop: Press Coverage of Wikipedia's First Two Decades

• Opinion: Wikipedia's war against scientific disinformation

• In the media: The world's press says "Happy Birthday!" with a few twists

• Technology report: The people who built Wikipedia, technically

• Videos and podcasts: Celebrating 20 years

• News from the WMF: Wikipedia celebrates 20 years of free, trusted information for the world

• Recent research: Students still have a better opinion of Wikipedia than teachers

• Humour: Dr. Seuss's Guide to Wikipedia

• Featured content: New Year, same Featured Content report!

• Traffic report: The most viewed articles of 2020

• Obituary: Flyer22 Frozen

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:11, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – February 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2021).

Administrator changes

Hog Farm

Mattflaschen • Nandesuka • Savidan • Wangi

CheckUser changes

Berean Hunter • Xeno

Oversight changes

Someguy1221 • Xeno

Arbitration

• The standard discretionary sanctions authorized for American Politics were amended by motion to cover post-1992 politics of United States and closely related people, replacing the 1932 cutoff.

Miscellaneous

• Voting in the 2021 Steward elections will begin on 05 February 2021, 14:00 (UTC) and end on 26 February 2021, 13:59 (UTC). The confirmation process of current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.
• Wikipedia has now been around for 20 years, and recently saw its billionth edit!

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:10, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-05

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

Problems

• IPv6 addresses were written in lowercase letters in diffs. This caused dead links since Special:Contributions only accepted uppercase letters for the IPs. This has been fixed. [248]

Changes later this week

• You can soon use Wikidata to link to pages on the multilingual Wikisource. [249]
• Often editors use a "non-breaking space" to make a gap between two items when reading but still show them together. This can be used to avoid a line break. You will now be able to add new ones via the special character tool in the 2010, 2017, and visual editors. The character will be shown in the visual editor as a space with a grey background. [250][251]
• Wikis use abuse filters to stop bad edits being made. Filter maintainers can now use syntax like 1.2.3.4 - 1.2.3.55 as well as the 1.2.3.4/27 syntax for IP ranges. [252]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 February. It will be on all wikis from 4 February (calendar).

Future changes

• Minerva is the skin Wikimedia wikis use for mobile traffic. When a page is protected and you can't edit it you can normally read the source wikicode. This doesn't work on Minerva on mobile devices. This is being fixed. Some text might overlap. This is because your community needs to update MediaWiki:Protectedpagetext to work on mobile. You can read more. [253][254]
• Cloud VPS and Toolforge will change the IP address they use to contact the wikis. The new IP address will be 185.15.56.1. This will happen on February 8. You can read more.

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

22:38, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

Teamwork and The Signpost

		The Teamwork Barnstar
		Thank you for being a part of The Bright Side of The Signpost in 2020! DTM (talk) 16:25, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-06

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

Recent changes

• The Wikipedia app for Android now has watchlists and talk pages in the app. [255]

Changes later this week

• You can see edits to chosen pages on Special:Watchlist. You can add pages to your watchlist on every wiki you like. The GlobalWatchlist extension will come to Meta on 11 February. There you can see entries on watched pages on different wikis on the same page. The new watchlist will be found on Special:GlobalWatchlist on Meta. You can choose which wikis to watch and other preferences on Special:GlobalWatchlistSettings on Meta. You can watch up to five wikis. [256]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 February. It will be on all wikis from 11 February (calendar).

Future changes

• When admins protect pages the form will use the OOUI look. Special:Import will also get the new look. This will make them easier to use on mobile phones. [257][258]
• Some services will not work for a short period of time from 07:00 UTC on 17 February. There might be problems with new short links, new translations, new notifications, adding new items to your reading lists or recording email bounces. This is because of database maintenance. [259]
• Last week Tech News reported that the IP address Cloud VPS and Toolforge use to contact the wikis will change on 8 February. This is delayed. It will happen later instead. [260]

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

17:40, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: January 2021

This Month in GLAM – Volume XI, Issue I, January 2021 Headlines Belgium report: The Public Domain Tool; Data Donations; Wiki Loves Heritage Belgium 2020 Brazil report: Heading 2021 with new (and renewed!) GLAM-Wiki projects Colombia report: Public domain day in Colombia Finland report: AvoinGLAM France report: #1lib1ref; Training courses; What's next ?; Wikidata and archaeology vocabulary Germany report: Coding da Vinci Niedersachsen wraps up Serbia report: A month in the spirit of references Sweden report: Record numbers of digital museum visits UK report: Protests & Suffragettes - Wikipedia work in 2020; Khalili Collections USA report: Wiki 20 WMF GLAM report: Digital Public Library of America makes an impact in 2020 Calendar: February's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 07:37, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-07

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

Problems

• There were problems with recent versions of MediaWiki. Because the updates caused problems the developers rolled back to an earlier version. Some updates and new functions will come later than planned. [261][262]
• Some services will not work for a short period of time from 07:00 UTC on 17 February. There might be problems with new short links, new translations, new notifications, adding new items to your reading lists or recording email bounces. This is because of database maintenance. [263]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 February. It will be on all wikis from 18 February (calendar).

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

17:54, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-08

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

Recent changes

• The visual editor will now use MediaSearch to find images. You can search for images on Commons in the visual editor when you are looking for illustrations. This is to help editors find better images. [264]
• The syntax highlighter now works with more languages: Futhark, Graphviz/DOT, CDDL and AMDGPU. [265]

Problems

• Editing a timeline might have removed all text from it. This was because of a bug and has been fixed. You might need to edit the timeline again for it to show properly. [266]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 February. It will be on all wikis from 25 February (calendar).

Future changes

• There is a user group for developers and users interested in working on Wikimedia wikis with the Rust programming language. You can join or tell others who want to make your wiki better in the future.

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

---

00:16, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

Writing Black History of the Pacific Northwest into Wikipedia - Editathon 2021

Writing Black History of the Pacific Northwest into Wikipedia - Editathon 2021 Friday, February 26, 2021, 1:00-5:00 PM PST with Oregon State University, Education Opportunities Program, and AfroCROWD Guest Speaker: Spelman College's Alexandria Lockett "Click here to register directly on OSU's site".

Cascadia Wikimedians placed this banner at 03:53, 24 February 2021 (UTC) by using the Wikipedia:Meetup/Seattle/Invitees list.
To subscribe to or unsubscribe from messages from Wikipedia:Meetup/Seattle, please add or remove your name here.

This Month in Education: February 2021

This Month in Education Volume 10 • Issue 2 • February 2021 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issuse Wikimedia Education news bytes Featured education community member of February 2021 Karvachar Wikiclub continues its activities online Over 4,000 more references added! 1Lib1Ref campaign in Poland Philippines Climate Change Translate-a-thon

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: ZI Jony 07:33, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 February 2021

• News and notes: Maher stepping down

• Disinformation report: A "billionaire battle" on Wikipedia: Sex, lies, and video

• Opinion: The call for feedback on community seats is a distraction

• In the media: Corporate influence at OSM, Fox watching the hen house

• News from the WMF: Who tells your story on Wikipedia

• Recent research: Take an AI-generated flashcard quiz about Wikipedia; Wikipedia's anti-feudalism

• Featured content: A Love of Knowledge, for Valentine's Day

• Traffic report: Does it almost feel like you've been here before?

• Gallery: What is Black history and culture?

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:30, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-09

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

Recent changes

• Wikis using the Growth team tools can now show the name of a newcomer's mentor anywhere through a magic word. This can be used for welcome messages or userboxes.
• A new version of the VideoCutTool is now available. It enables cropping, trimming, audio disabling, and rotating video content. It is being created as part of the developer outreach programs.

Problems

• There was a problem with the job queue. This meant some functions did not save changes and mass messages were delayed. This did not affect wiki edits. [267]
• Some editors may not be logged in to their accounts automatically in the latest versions of Firefox and Safari. [268]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 March. It will be on all wikis from 4 March (calendar).

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

---

19:06, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – March 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2021).

Administrator changes

TJMSmith

Boing! said Zebedee • Hiberniantears • Lear's Fool • Only • WGFinley

Interface administrator changes

AmandaNP

Guideline and policy news

• A request for comment is open that proposes a process for the community to revoke administrative permissions. This follows a 2019 RfC in favor of creating one such a policy.
• A request for comment is in progress to remove F7 (invalid fair-use claim) subcriterion a, which covers immediate deletion of non-free media with invalid fair-use tags.
• A request for comment seeks to grant page movers the delete-redirect userright, which allows moving a page over a single-revision redirect, regardless of that redirect's target. The full proposal is at Wikipedia:Page mover/delete-redirect.
• A request for comment asks if sysops may place the General sanctions/Coronavirus disease 2019 editnotice template on pages in scope that do not have page-specific sanctions?
• There is a discussion in progress concerning automatic protection of each day's featured article with Pending Changes protection.

Technical news

• When blocking an IPv6 address with Twinkle, there is now a checkbox with the option to just block the /64 range. When doing so, you can still leave a block template on the initial, single IP address' talkpage.
• When protecting a page with Twinkle, you can now add a note if doing so was in response to a request at WP:RfPP, and even link to the specific revision.
• There have been a number of reported issues with Pending Changes. Most problems setting protection appear to have been resolved (phab:T273317) but other issues with autoaccepting edits persist (phab:T275322).

Arbitration

• By motion, the discretionary sanctions originally authorized under the GamerGate case are now authorized under a new Gender and sexuality case, with sanctions authorized for all edits about, and all pages related to, any gender-related dispute or controversy and associated people. Sanctions issued under GamerGate are now considered Gender and sexuality sanctions.
• The Kurds and Kurdistan case was closed, authorizing standard discretionary sanctions for the topics of Kurds and Kurdistan, broadly construed.

Miscellaneous

• Following the 2021 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: AmandaNP, Operator873, Stanglavine, Teles, and Wiki13.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:14, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

WikiCup 2021 March newsletter

Round 1 of the competition has finished; it was a high-scoring round with 21 contestants scoring more than 100 points. Everyone with a positive score moves on to Round 2, with 55 contestants qualifying. You will need to finish among the top thirty-two contestants in Round 2 if you are to qualify for Round 3. Our top scorers in Round 1 were:

• Epicgenius led the field with a featured article, nine good articles and an assortment of other submissions, specialising on buildings and locations in New York, for a total of 945 points.
• Bloom6132 was close behind with 896 points, largely gained from 71 "In the news" items, mostly recent deaths.
• ImaginesTigers, who has been editing Wikipedia for less than a year, was in third place with 711 points, much helped by bringing League of Legends to featured article status, exemplifying how bonus points can boost a contestant's score.
• Amakuru came next with 708 points, Kigali being another featured article that scored maximum bonus points.
• Ktin, new to the WikiCup, was in fifth place with 523 points, garnered from 15 DYKs and 34 "In the news" items.
• The Rambling Man scored 511 points, many from featured article candidate reviews and from football related DYKs.
• Gog the Mild, last year's runner-up, came next with 498 points, from a featured article and numerous featured article candidate reviews.
• Hog Farm, at 452, scored for a featured article, four good articles and a number of reviews.
• Le Panini, another newcomer to the WikiCup, scored 438 for a featured article and three good articles.
• Lee Vilenski, last year's champion, scored 332 points, from a featured article and various other sport-related topics.

These contestants, like all the others, now have to start again from scratch. In Round 1, contestants achieved eight featured articles, three featured lists and one featured picture, as well as around two hundred DYKs and twenty-seven ITNs. They completed 97 good article reviews, nearly double the 52 good articles they claimed. Contestants also claimed for 135 featured article and featured list candidate reviews. There is no longer a requirement to mention your WikiCup participation when undertaking these reviews.

Remember that any content promoted after the end of Round 1 but before the start of Round 2 can be claimed in Round 2. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is a good article candidate, a featured process, or something else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews.

If you want to help out with the WikiCup, please do your bit to keep down the review backlogs! Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Sturmvogel 66 (talk) and Cwmhiraeth (talk). MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:27, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #17

Welcome to the seventeenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Structured tasks

Add a link: the team is continuing to engineer on our first "structured task", which will break down the workflow of adding wikilinks to articles, and assist newcomers with an algorithm to identify words and phrases that could be made into links.

Add an image: even as we build our first structured task, we have been thinking about the next one. "Add an image" is a structured task in which newcomers would be recommended images from Wikimedia Commons to add to unillustrated articles. This is an ambitious idea with many details to consider. We have already learned a lot from community members, and we encourage everyone to look at the project page and join the discussion.

Moving forward: more wikis to get the features

Last November, our team published the analysis of the impact of newcomer tasks. We announced that we found that the Growth features, and particularly newcomer tasks, lead to increased editing from newcomers. Because of these results, we believe all Wikipedias should implement these features.

We have started to contact more wikis to deploy the features, including Wikipedias of all sizes. Bengali Wikipedia recently began using Growth features, and Danish, Thai, Indonesian, and Romanian Wikipedias will be coming soon. Please contact us if you have questions regarding deployment.

We are looking for translators who can help by translating the interface. Translating is done on Translatewiki.net (it requires a different account that your Wikimedia one). Communities that already have the Growth features being deployed are invited to check on the translations. Access translations here.

Variant testing

As mentioned in our previous newsletter, we ran a test of two variants of the newcomer homepage, meant to find a version that increases users completing suggested edits. We have completed the experiment, and learned that one of the variants leads to more edits on desktop while the other leads to more edits on mobile. Therefore, we will deploy the strongest variants for each platform to all newcomers.

News for mentors

Mentor dashboard: we have interviewed mentors from several communities as we plan a mentor dashboard feature, which would help mentors track the progress of their mentees. We encourage all mentors to share their thoughts on tools that would help them.

Magic word for mentors: it is now possible to use a magic word, {{#mentor}}, to display the name of a given newcomer's mentor. This can be used on welcome messages, userboxes, etc.

Help panel questions going to mentors: in most wikis, newcomers using the help panel ask questions to the help desk. On Czech Wikipedia, we have experimented with sending these questions to mentors instead. This simplifies the newcomer experience, and only led to a increase in mentorship questions of about 30%. We tried this in Arabic, Bengali, French and Vietnamese Wikipedias, and we are making it the default experience.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:02, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-10

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

Recent changes

• Section translation now works on Bengali Wikipedia. It helps mobile editors translate sections of articles. It will come to more wikis later. The first focus is active wikis with a smaller number of articles. You can test it and leave feedback.
• Flagged revisions now give admins the review right. [269]
• When someone links to a Wikipedia article on Twitter this will now show a preview of the article. [270]

Problems

• Many graphs have JavaScript errors. Graph editors can check their graphs in their browser's developer console after editing. [271]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 March. It will be on all wikis from 11 March (calendar).
• The New Discussion tool will soon be a new discussion tools beta feature for on most Wikipedias. The goal is to make it easier to start new discussions. [272]

Future changes

• There will be a number of changes to make it easier to work with templates. Some will come to the first wikis in March. Other changes will come to the first wikis in June. This is both for those who use templates and those who create or maintain them. You can read more.
• Reference Previews will become a default feature on some wikis on 17 March. They will share a setting with Page Previews. If you prefer the Reference Tooltips or Navigation-Popups gadget you can keep using them. If so Reference Previews won't be shown. [273][274]
• New JavaScript-based functions will not work in Internet Explorer 11. This is because Internet Explorer is an old browser that doesn't work with how JavaScript is written today. Everything that works in Internet Explorer 11 today will continue working in Internet Explorer for now. You can read more.

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

17:50, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: February 2021

This Month in GLAM – Volume XI, Issue II, February 2021 Headlines Albania report: Recruiting two PMs; Budget Report 2020; Wikipedia 20th Bday Australia report: Who do we think we are? Brazil report: New GLAM tutorials in Portuguese Estonia report: WikiMuseum Finland report: Focus on learning Indonesia report: PD Day 2021 in Indonesia, #1lib1ref, Wikisource workshop Netherlands report: Historical Maps; Share your Data on colonial heritage; Knowledge platform for heritage institutions Serbia report: Amazing results of the January #1Lib1Ref campaign Sweden report: Medieval ballads; Project HBTQI Switzerland report: 50 Years Women's Suffrage in Switzerland & More UK report: Khalili Collections USA report: Black History Month and Smithsonian anniversary WMF GLAM report: Project Grants, Analytics for GLAMs, and Shared Citations Calendar: March's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 16:00, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-11

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

Recent changes

• Wikis that are part of the desktop improvements project can now use a new search function. The desktop improvements and the new search will come to more wikis later. You can also test it early.
• Editors who put up banners or change site-wide JavaScript code should use the client error graph to see that their changes has not caused problems. You can read more. [275]

Problems

• Due to database issues the Wikimedia Beta Cluster was read-only for over a day.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 March. It will be on all wikis from 18 March (calendar).

Future changes

• You can add a newline or carriage return character to a custom signature if you use a template. There is a proposal to not allow them in the future. This is because they can cause formatting problems. [276][277]
• You will be able to read but not edit 12 wikis for a short period of time on 23 March at 06:00 (UTC). This could take 30 minutes but will probably be much faster.
• You can use Quarry for SQL queries to the Wiki Replicas. Cross-database JOINS will no longer work from 23 March. There will be a new field to specify the database to connect to. If you think this affects you and you need help you can post on Phabricator or on Wikitech. PAWS and other ways to do SQL queries to the Wiki Replicas will be affected later. [278]

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

23:21, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 42

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 42, January – February 2021

• New partnerships: PNAS, De Gruyter, Nomos
• 1Lib1Ref
• Library Card

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --11:27, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-12

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

Recent changes

• There is a Wikipedia app for KaiOS phones. They don't have a touch screen so readers navigate with the phone keys. There is now a simulator so you can see what it looks like.
• The reply tool and new discussion tool are now available as the "Discussion tools" beta feature in almost all wikis except German Wikipedia.

Problems

• You will be able to read but not edit twelve wikis for a short period of time on 23 March at 06:00 (UTC). This can also affect password changes, logging in to new wikis, global renames and changing or confirming emails. This could take 30 minutes but will probably be much faster.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 March. It will be on all wikis from 25 March (calendar).
• Syntax highlighting colours will change to be easier to read. This will soon come to the first wikis. [279]

Future changes

• Flagged revisions will no longer have multiple tags like "tone" or "depth". It will also only have one tier. This was changed because very few wikis used these features and they make the tool difficult to maintain. [280][281]
• Gadgets and user scripts can access variables about the current page in JavaScript. In 2015 this was moved from wg* to mw.config. wg* will soon no longer work. [282]

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

16:51, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

This Month in Education: March 2021

This Month in Education Volume 10 • Issue 3 • March 2021 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issuse A Wikipedia Webinar for Indonesian Women Teachers Educational program of GLAM Macedonia Filling the Gaps & Open Education Week Meet this month's featured Wikimedia & Education community member: Bara'a Zama'reh Using Wikipedia and Bridging the Gender Gap: In-Service training for Teachers in Philippines

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 11:46, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 March 2021

• News and notes: A future with a for-profit subsidiary?

• Gallery: Wiki Loves Monuments

• In the media: Wikimedia LLC and disinformation in Japan

• News from the WMF: Project Rewrite: Tell the missing stories of women on Wikipedia and beyond

• Recent research: 10%-30% of Wikipedia’s contributors have subject-matter expertise

• From the archives: Google isn't responsible for Wikipedia's mistakes

• Essay: Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia

• Obituary: Yoninah

• From the editor: What else can we say?

• Arbitration report: Open letter to the Board of Trustees

• Traffic report: Wanda, Meghan, Liz, Phil and Zack

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:45, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-13

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

Recent changes

• Some very old web browsers don’t work well with the Wikimedia wikis. Some old code for browsers that used to be supported is being removed. This could cause issues in those browsers. [283]
• IRC recent changes feeds have been moved to a new server. Make sure all tools automatically reconnect to irc.wikimedia.org and not to the name of any specific server. Users should also consider switching to the more modern EventStreams. [284]

Problems

• When you move a page that many editors have on their watchlist the history can be split. It might also not be possible to move it again for a while. This is because of a job queue problem. [285]
• Some translatable pages on Meta could not be edited. This was because of a bug in the translation tool. The new MediaWiki version was delayed because of problems like this. [286][287]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 March. It will be on all wikis from 1 April (calendar).

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

17:29, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – April 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2021).

Administrator changes

Alexandria • Happyme22 • RexxS

Guideline and policy news

• Following a request for comment, F7 (invalid fair-use claim) subcriterion a has been deprecated; it covered immediate deletion of non-free media with invalid fair-use tags.
• Following a request for comment, page movers were granted the delete-redirect userright, which allows moving a page over a single-revision redirect, regardless of that redirect's target.

Technical news

• When you move a page that many editors have on their watchlist the history can be split and it might also not be possible to move it again for a while. This is because of a job queue problem. (T278350)
• Code to support some very old web browsers is being removed. This could cause issues in those browsers. (T277803)

Arbitration

• A community consultation on the Arbitration Committee discretionary sanctions procedure is open until April 25.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:20, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-14

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

Recent changes

• Editors can collapse part of an article so you have to click on it to see it. When you click a link to a section inside collapsed content it will now expand to show the section. The browser will scroll down to the section. Previously such links didn't work unless you manually expanded the content first. [288]

Changes later this week

• The citoid API will use for example 2010-12-XX instead of 2010-12 for dates with a month but no days. This is because 2010-12 could be confused with 2010-2012 instead of December 2010. This is called level 1 instead of level 0 in the Extended Date/Time Format. [289]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 April. It will be on all wikis from 8 April (calendar).

Future changes

• PAWS can now connect to the new Wiki Replicas. Cross-database JOINS will no longer work from 28 April. There is a new way to connect to the databases. Until 28 April both ways to connect to the databases will work. If you think this affects you and you need help you can post on Phabricator or on Wikitech.

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

19:38, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: March 2021

This Month in GLAM – Volume XI, Issue III, March 2021 Headlines AfLIA Wikipedia in African Libraries report: Wikipedia in African Libraries Albania report: Wiki Loves Folklore 2021; I edit Wikipedia Brazil report: The Brazilian House is the theme of new GLAM dissemination activities Finland report: Enriching indigenous items in Wikidata Germany report: A virtual exhibition on 20 years of Wikipedia Netherlands report: Wikimedians in Residence for Media Art Project LIMA, Wikimedia and libraries, Wikimedia training related to shared heritage Sweden report: GLAM in Sweden in March UK report: Leeds Museums & Galleries, the British Library and the Khalili Collections USA report: Women's History Month in the US WMF GLAM report: Media Search, Image Suggestion API, and Project Grants Calendar: April's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 22:52, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-16

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

Recent changes

• Email to the Wikimedia wikis are handled by groups of Wikimedia editors. These volunteer response teams now use Znuny instead of OTRS. The functions and interface remain the same. The volunteer administrators will give more details about the next steps soon. [290][291]
• If you use syntax highlighting, you can see line numbers in the 2010 and 2017 wikitext editors when editing templates. This is to make it easier to see line breaks or talk about specific lines. Line numbers will soon come to all namespaces. [292][293][294]
• Because of a technical change there could be problems with gadgets and scripts that have an edit summary area that looks similar to this one. If they look strange they should use mw.loader.using('mediawiki.action.edit.styles') to go back to how they looked before. [295]
• The latest version of MediaWiki came to the Wikimedia wikis last week. There was no Tech News issue last week.

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

• The user group oversight will be renamed suppress. This is for technical reasons. This is the technical name. It doesn't affect what you call the editors with this user right on your wiki. This is planned to happen in two weeks. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections.

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

16:48, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 25 April 2021

• From the editor: A change is gonna come

• Disinformation report: Paid editing by a former head of state's business enterprise

• In the media: Fernando, governance, and rugby

• Opinion: The (Universal) Code of Conduct

• Op-Ed: A Little Fun Goes A Long Way

• Changing the world: The reach of protest images on Wikipedia

• Recent research: Quality of aquatic and anatomical articles

• Traffic report: The verdict is guilty, guilty, guilty

• News from Wiki Education: Encouraging professional physicists to engage in outreach on Wikipedia

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:33, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

This Month in Education: April 2021

This Month in Education Volume 10 • Issue 4 • April 2021 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issuse Collaboration with Brusov State University Editing contest "Meet Russia" Educational project: Wikipedia at the University with the University Center for Economic-Administrative Sciences (Centro Universitario de Ciencias Económico Administrativas (CUCEA)) of the University of Guadalajara Regional Meeting of Latin American Education by the EWOC Students of the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade have started an internship program

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 22:48, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 25 April 2021

• From the editor: A change is gonna come

• Disinformation report: Paid editing by a former head of state's business enterprise

• In the media: Fernando, governance, and rugby

• Opinion: The (Universal) Code of Conduct

• Op-Ed: A Little Fun Goes A Long Way

• Changing the world: The reach of protest images on Wikipedia

• Recent research: Quality of aquatic and anatomical articles

• Traffic report: The verdict is guilty, guilty, guilty

• News from Wiki Education: Encouraging professional physicists to engage in outreach on Wikipedia

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:30, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-17

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

Recent changes

• Templates have parameters that can have specific values. It is possible to suggest values for editors with TemplateData. You can soon see them as a drop-down list in the visual editor. This is to help template users find the right values faster. [296][297][298]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 April. It will be on all wikis from 29 April (calendar).

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

21:23, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

WikiCup 2021 May newsletter

The second round of the 2021 WikiCup has now finished; it was a high-scoring round and contestants needed 61 points to advance to Round 3. There were some impressive efforts in the round, with the top eight contestants all scoring more than 400 points. A large number of the points came from the 12 featured articles and the 110 good articles achieved in total by contestants, as well as the 216 good article reviews they performed; the GAN backlog drive and the stay-at-home imperative during the COVID-19 pandemic may have been partially responsible for these impressive figures.

Our top scorers in Round 2 were:

• The Rambling Man, with 2963 points from three featured articles, 20 featured article reviews, 37 good articles, 73 good article reviews, as well as 22 DYKs.
• Epicgenius, with 1718 points from one featured article, 29 good articles, 16 DYKs and plenty of bonus points.
• Bloom6132, with 990 points from 13 DYKs and 64 "In the news" items, mostly recent deaths.
• Hog Farm, with 834 points from two featured articles, five good articles, 14 featured article reviews and 15 good article reviews.
• Gog the Mild, with 524 points from two featured articles and four featured article reviews.
• Lee Vilenski, with 501 points from one featured article, three good articles, six featured article reviews and 25 good article reviews.
• Sammi Brie, with 485 points from four good articles, eight good article reviews and 27 DYKs, on US radio and television stations.
• Ktin, with 436 points from four good articles, seven DYKs and 11 "In the news" items.

Please remember that DYKs cannot be claimed until they have appeared on the main page. As we enter the third round, any content promoted after the end of Round 2 but before the start of Round 3 can be claimed now, and anything you forgot to claim in Round 2 cannot! Remember too, that you must claim your points within 14 days of "earning" them (except for at the end of each round, when you must claim them before the cut-off date/time). When doing GARs, please make sure that you check that all the GA criteria are fully met.

If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article nominations, a featured process, or anything else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed (remember to remove your listing when no longer required). Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Judges: Sturmvogel 66 (talk) and Cwmhiraeth MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:28, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-18

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

Recent changes

• Twinkle is a gadget on English Wikipedia. It can help with maintenance and patrolling. It can now be used on other wikis. You can get Twinkle on your wiki using the twinkle-starter GitHub repository.

Problems

• The content translation tool did not work for many articles for a little while. This was because of a bug. [299]
• Some things will not work for about a minute on 5 May. This will happen around 06:00 UTC. This will affect the content translation tool and notifications among other things. This is because of an upgrade to avoid crashes. [300]

Changes later this week

• Reference Previews will become a default feature on a number of wikis on 5 May. This is later than planned because of some changes. You can use it without using Page Previews if you want to. The earlier plan was to have the preference to use both or none. [301][302]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 May. It will be on all wikis from 6 May (calendar).

Future changes

• The CSS classes .error, .warning and .success do not work for mobile readers if they have not been specifically defined on your wiki. From June they will not work for desktop readers. This can affect gadgets and templates. The classes can be defined in MediaWiki:Common.css or template styles instead. [303]

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

15:42, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – May 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2021).

Administrator changes

Enchanter • Carlossuarez46

Interface administrator changes

Ragesoss

Guideline and policy news

• Following an RfC, consensus was found that third party appeals are allowed but discouraged.
• The 2021 Desysop Policy RfC was closed with no consensus. Consensus was found in a previous RfC for a community based desysop procedure, though the procedure proposed in the 2021 RfC did not gain consensus.

Technical news

• The user group oversight will be renamed to suppress. This is for technical reasons. You can comment at T112147 if you have objections.

Arbitration

• The community consultation on the Arbitration Committee discretionary sanctions procedure was closed, and an initial draft based on feedback from the now closed consultation is expected to be released in early June to early July for community review.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:51, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 43

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 43, March – April 2021

• New Library Card designs
• 1Lib1Ref May

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --11:11, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-19

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

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 May. It will be on all wikis from 13 May (calendar).

Future changes

• You can see what participants plan to work on at the online Wikimedia hackathon 22–23 May.

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

15:09, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: April 2021

This Month in GLAM – Volume XI, Issue IV, April 2021 Headlines Albania report: WikiGap 2021; Workshop “When State Security was engaged in Science”; Women in STEM; International Roma Day Edit-a-thon Australia report: A Wealth of Wiki Women Belgium report: Projects by Wikimedia Belgium Brazil report: Festa da Wiki-Lusofonia celebrates Wikipedia 20 Czech Republic report: WikiGap 2021 report DRCongo report: WMDRC - UG report: Wikipedia in library Estonia report: Finding new ways of making art visible + 360° panoramas of Estonian museums Finland report: Saami place names France report: Journée Wikimédia Culture et numérique 2021; French open content report Germany report: Northern Exposure for cultural heritage data India report: Proofread competition on Bengali Wikisource in collaboration with British Library Indonesia report: Wikisource Competition 2021; Museum Daerah Deli Serdang is now on Commons Italy report: A Wikipedian in residence at the Civic Museum of Modena: report Netherlands report: WikiVrijdagen with Atria and IHLIA, Wikimedians in Residence will increase the visibility of media art on Wikipedia, Wikimedia training: shared heritage, Papiamentu and Papiamento: Wikipedia is up and ready to go! New Zealand report: West Coast WikiCon and Performing Arts Aotearoa Serbia report: Great impact of cooperations Spain report: New partnerships Sweden report: More music; Enriching GLAM photos with SDC; Swedish GLAM survey Switzerland report: GLAMhack 2021 & more UK report: University of Edinburgh Library Wikimedia Community of Interest; Khalili Collections; British Library USA report: The Met, Smithsonian, and a busy Edit-a-thon season Wikipedia Library report: Fostering Connections: Wikimedia and Libraries Global Meetup Wikimedia and Libraries User Group report: Extended Date Time Format for Wikibase WMF GLAM report: Wikimedia Hackathon, Product Updates, and Office Hours Calendar: May's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 04:54, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

Clovermoss

Hi Pine. I know it's been a very long time, but I just wanted to let you know that I'm okay now. I feel awful about disappearing last year. A lot of really stressful things happened at the same time in my life, and Wikipedia was the last thing on my mind for a very long time. I should have let you know that I could no longer help with projects instead of just disappearing, though. I want to apologize for that. I hope you're doing alright in these stressful times. I still don't have much time nowadays, especially now that I'm a university student, but I will probrably log on every once in awhile. Sincerely, Clovermoss (talk) 15:31, 16 May 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-20

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

Recent changes

• There is a new toolbar in the Reply tool. It works in the wikitext source mode. You can enable it in your preferences. [304] [305] [306]
• Wikimedia mailing lists are being moved to Mailman 3. This is a newer version. For the character encoding to work it will change from UTF-8 to utf8mb3. [307][308]
• An earlier issue of Tech News said that the citoid API would handle dates with a month but no days in a new way. This has been reverted for now. There needs to be more discussion of how it affects different wikis first. [309]

Changes later this week

• MediaWiki:Pageimages-blacklist will be renamed MediaWiki:Pageimages-denylist. The list can be copied to the new name. It will happen on 19 May for some wikis and 20 May for some wikis. Most wikis don't use it. It lists images that should never be used as thumbnails for articles. [310]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 May. It will be on all wikis from 20 May (calendar).

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

13:48, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Growth Newsletter #18

Welcome to the eighteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Structured tasks

A screenshot of "add a link" feature in development in beta.

"Add a link" is now being tested in production and is nearing release on our four pilot wikis (Arabic, Czech, Vietnamese, and Bengali Wikipedias). We'll be doing final tests this week and next week, and then plan to deploy to the four wikis either during May 24 week, or May 31 week. After two weeks, we will analyze the initial data to identify any problems or trends. We expect that this feature will engage new kinds of newcomers in easy and successful edits. If things are going well after four weeks, we'll progressively deploy it to the wikis with Growth features.

News for mentors

Mockup of the Mentor dashboard.

• We are currently working on a Mentor dashboard. This special page aims to help mentors be more proactive and be more successful at their role. The first iteration will include a table that shows an overview of the mentors current mentees, a module with their own settings, and a module that will allow them to store their best replies to their mentees questions.
• We've conducted our quarterly audit on Growth's four pilot wikis to see the activity of mentors. It appears that the vast majority of mentors are active.

Community configuration

Community configuration editing form under development

We are working on project to allow communities to manage the configuration of the Growth features on their own. In the past, communities have needed to work directly with the Growth team to set up and alter the features. We plan to put this capability in the hands of administrators, through an easy-to-use form, so that the features can be easily tailored to fit the needs of each community. While we developed it initially for Growth features, we think this approach could have uses in other features as well. We'll be trying this on our pilot wikis in the coming weeks, and then we'll bring it to all Growth wikis soon after. We hope you check out the project page and add any of your thoughts to the talk page.

Scaling

• Growth features are now available on 35 wikis. Here is the list of the most recent ones: Romanian Wikipedia, Danish Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Croatian Wikipedia, Albanian Wikipedia, Esperanto Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Malay Wikipedia, Tamil Wikipedia, Greek Wikipedia, Catalan Wikipedia.
• A new group of Wikipedias has been defined for the deployment of Growth features. Please contact us if you have questions about the deployment process, or if your community likes to get the features in advance.
• After discussion with the English Wikipedia community, the Growth features will be tested on a small percentage of new accounts. At the moment, registered users can test the features by turning them on in their preferences.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:23, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-21

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

Recent changes

• The Wikimedia movement has been using IRC on a network called Freenode. There have been changes around who is in control of the network. The Wikimedia IRC Group Contacts have decided to move to the new Libera Chat network instead. This is not a formal decision for the movement to move all channels but most Wikimedia IRC channels will probably leave Freenode. There is a migration guide and ongoing Wikimedia discussions about this.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 May. It will be on all wikis from 27 May (calendar).

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

17:05, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

This Month in Education: May 2021

This Month in Education Volume 10 • Issue 5 • May 2021 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue A Multimedia-Rich Wikiversity MOOC from Brazil Meet this month's featured Wikimedia & Education community member: Maria Weronika Kmoch Offline workshop with Nikola Koperniku High School in Albania Wiki Education Program Organized with the University Students for the First time in Bangladesh Wikimedia Commons workshop with high school students in Kosovo Wikipedia training for the Bearers of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Poland “Writing a Wikipedia article isn’t as difficult and unimaginable as it seems”: A case for Wikipedia Education Program in Ukraine

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 17:37, 27 May 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-22

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

Problems

• There was an issue on the Vector skin with the text size of categories and notices under the page title. It was fixed last Monday. [311]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

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

17:04, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-23

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

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 June. It will be on all wikis from 10 June (calendar).

Future changes

• The Wikimedia movement uses Phabricator for technical tasks. This is where we collect technical suggestions, bugs and what developers are working on. The company behind Phabricator will stop working on it. This will not change anything for the Wikimedia movement now. It could lead to changes in the future. [312][313][314]
• Searching on Wikipedia will find more results in some languages. This is mainly true for when those who search do not use the correct diacritics because they are not seen as necessary in that language. For example searching for Bedusz doesn't find Będusz on German Wikipedia. The character ę isn't used in German so many would write e instead. This will work better in the future in some languages. [315]
• The CSRF token parameters in the action API were changed in 2014. The old parameters from before 2014 will stop working soon. This can affect bots, gadgets and user scripts that still use the old parameters. [316][317]

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

20:01, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – June 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2021).

Administrator changes

Ashleyyoursmile • Less Unless

Husond • MattWade • MJCdetroit • Carioca • Vague Rant • Kingboyk • Thunderboltz • Gwen Gale • AniMate • SlimVirgin (deceased)

Guideline and policy news

• Consensus was reached to deprecate Wikipedia:Editor assistance.
• Following a Request for Comment the Book namespace was deprecated.

Technical news

• Wikimedia previously used the IRC network Freenode. However, due to changes over who controlled the network with reports of a forceful takeover by several ex-staff members, the Wikimedia IRC Group Contacts decided to move to the new Libera Chat network. It has been reported that Wikimedia related channels on Freenode have been forcibly taken over if they pointed members to Libera. There is a migration guide and Wikimedia discussions about this.

Arbitration

• After a Clarification request, the Arbitration Committee modified Remedy 5 of the Antisemitism in Poland case. This means sourcing expectations are a discretionary sanction instead of being present on all articles. It also details using the talk page or the Reliable Sources Noticeboard to discuss disputed sources.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:46, 9 June 2021 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: May 2021

This Month in GLAM – Volume XI, Issue V, May 2021 Headlines AfLIA Wikipedia in African Libraries report: A busy month at AfLIA Argentina report: Museum, Archives and Libraries on May Armenia report: Presence of Museums in Wiki Projects Australia report: Librarians unite across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand for 1Lib1Ref Brazil report: Wiki Loves Bahia: 2021 is the year of Bahia on Wikipedia in Portuguese Côte d'Ivoire report: Glam-wiki 2021 29 May in Côte d'Ivoire India report: Collaboration continues with British Library Indonesia report: #1lib1ref in Indonesia; Online talk show with Wikimedia Nederland Italy report: Conference, webinar and projects Kosovo report: National Gallery of Kosovo Collection now on Wikidata Netherlands report: Over 15,000 images available from Elsinga Collection, 1.9 million records on slavery and slave trade digitally accessible New Zealand report: A busy month in Aotearoa North Macedonia report: GLAM activities of GLAM Macedonia Serbia report: A month in the sign of edit-a-thons Spain report: Viquiprojecte:Muixeranga Sweden report: Working with UN Human Rights; Aftermath to the fiddler competition; Music manuscripts from the 18th century; Digital visions; Should museums work with Wikipedia?; Wikidata project with museums has results Switzerland report: Strengthening GLAM Partnerships Uganda report: Wikipedia for Museums in Uganda UK report: British Library, Khalili Collections USA report: Hackathon outputs, data roundtripping and Asian American heritage Special story: Wikimedia Hackathon report: Upgrading GLAM tech tools and PAWS Wikisource report: Indic Wikisource community online gathering WMF GLAM report: Grants and conferences Wiki World Heritage User Group report: May's report Calendar: June's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 14:09, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-24

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

Recent changes

• Logged-in users on the mobile web can choose to use the advanced mobile mode. They now see categories in a similar way as users on desktop do. This means that some gadgets that have just been for desktop users could work for users of the mobile site too. If your wiki has such gadgets you could decide to turn them on for the mobile site too. Some gadgets probably need to be fixed to look good on mobile. [318]
• Language links on Wikidata now works for multilingual Wikisource. [319]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

• In the future we can't show the IP of unregistered editors to everyone. This is because privacy regulations and norms have changed. There is now a rough draft of how showing the IP to those who need to see it could work.
• German Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage and 29 smaller wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on 22 June. This is planned between 5:00 and 5:30 UTC. [320]
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes in the week of 28 June. More information will be published in Tech News later. It will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [321][322]

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

20:25, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-25

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

Recent changes

• The otrs-member group name is now vrt-permissions. This could affect abuse filters. [323]

Problems

• You will be able to read but not edit German Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage and 29 smaller wikis for a few minutes on 22 June. This is planned between 5:00 and 5:30 UTC. [324]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 June. It will be on all wikis from 24 June (calendar).

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

15:48, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

This Month in Education: June 2021

This Month in Education Volume 10 • Issue 6 • June 2021 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue Can children write articles for a wiki encyclopedia? Editing contest "Biosphere reserves in the world" Training & workshop on Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons with students from Municipal Learning Center, Gurrakoc Wiki for Human Rights Campaign in the Philippines Wikipedia makes children and teachers happy! Workshop with the students of Language Faculty of Philology, University of Prishtina "Hasan Prishtina"

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 19:57, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Editing news 2021 #2

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

When newcomers had the Reply tool and tried to post on a talk page, they were more successful at posting a comment. (Source)

Earlier this year, the Editing team ran a large study of the Reply Tool. The main goal was to find out whether the Reply Tool helped newer editors communicate on wiki. The second goal was to see whether the comments that newer editors made using the tool needed to be reverted more frequently than comments newer editors made with the existing wikitext page editor.

The key results were:

• Newer editors who had automatic ("default on") access to the Reply tool were more likely to post a comment on a talk page.
• The comments that newer editors made with the Reply Tool were also less likely to be reverted than the comments that newer editors made with page editing.

These results give the Editing team confidence that the tool is helpful.

Looking ahead

The team is planning to make the Reply tool available to everyone as an opt-out preference in the coming months. This has already happened at the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedias.

The next step is to resolve a technical challenge. Then, they will deploy the Reply tool first to the Wikipedias that participated in the study. After that, they will deploy it, in stages, to the other Wikipedias and all WMF-hosted wikis.

You can turn on "Discussion tools" in Beta Features now. After you get the Reply tool, you can change your preferences at any time in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion.

–Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

14:12, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

GOCE June 2021 newsletter

Guild of Copy Editors June 2021 Newsletter Hello and welcome to the June newsletter, our first newsletter of 2021, which is a brief update of Guild activities since December 2020. To unsubscribe, follow the link at the bottom of this box. Current events Election time: Voting in our mid-year Election of Coordinators opened on 16 June and will conclude at the end of the month. GOCE coordinators normally serve a six-month term and are elected on an approval basis. Have your say and show support here. June Blitz: Our June copy-editing blitz is underway and will conclude on 26 June. Drive and blitz reports January Drive: 28 editors completed 324 copy edits totalling 714,902 words. At the end of the drive, the backlog had reached a record low of 52 articles. (full results) February Blitz: 15 editors completed 48 copy edits totalling 142,788 words. (full results) March Drive: 29 editors completed 215 copy edits totalling 407,736 words. (full results) April Blitz: 12 editors completed 23 copy edits totalling 56,574 words. (full results) May Drive: 29 editors completed 356 copy edits totalling 479,013 words. (full results) Other news Progress report: as of 26 June, GOCE participants had completed 343 Requests since 1 January. The backlog has fluctuated but remained in control, with a low of 52 tagged articles at the end of January and a high of 620 articles in mid-June. Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators Jonesey95, Dhtwiki, Miniapolis, Tenryuu and Twofingered Typist, and from member Reidgreg. To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors at 12:38, 26 June 2021 (UTC).

The Signpost: 27 June 2021

• News and notes: Elections, Wikimania, masking and more

• In the media: Boris and Joe, reliability, love, and money

• Disinformation report: Croatian Wikipedia: capture and release

• Recent research: Feminist critique of Wikipedia's epistemology, Black Americans vastly underrepresented among editors, Wiki Workshop report

• Traffic report: So no one told you life was gonna be this way

• News from the WMF: Searching for Wikipedia

• Humour: Wikipedia's best articles on the world's strangest things

• WikiProject report: WikiProject on open proxies interview

• Forum: Is WMF fundraising abusive?

• Discussion report: Reliability of WikiLeaks discussed

• Obituary: SarahSV

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:15, 27 June 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-26

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

Recent changes

• Wikis with the Growth features now can configure Growth features directly on their wiki. This uses the new special page Special:EditGrowthConfig. [325]
• Wikisources have a new OCR tool. If you don't want to see the "extract text" button on Wikisource you can add .ext-wikisource-ExtractTextWidget { display: none; } to your common.css page. [326]

Problems

• You will be able to read but not edit the Wikimedia wikis for a few minutes on 29 June. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. [327][328]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 June. It will be on all wikis from 1 July (calendar).

Future changes

• Threshold for stub link formatting, thumbnail size and auto-number headings can be set in preferences. They are expensive to maintain and few editors use them. The developers are planning to remove them. Removing them will make pages load faster. You can read more and give feedback.
• A toolbar will be added to the Reply tool's wikitext source mode. This will make it easier to link to pages and to ping other users. [329][330]

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

16:31, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

WikiCup 2021 July newsletter

The third round of the 2021 WikiCup has now come to an end. Each of the sixteen contestants who made it into the fourth round had at least 294 points, and our top six scorers all had over 600 points. They were:

• The Rambling Man, with 1825 points from 3 featured articles, 44 featured article reviews, 14 good articles, 30 good article reviews and 10 DYKs. In addition, he completed a 34-article good topic on the EFL Championship play-offs.
• Epicgenius, a New York specialist, with 1083 points from 2 featured article reviews, 18 good articles, 30 DYKs and plenty of bonus points.
• Bloom6132, with 869 points from 11 DYKs, all with bonus points, and 54 "In the news" items, mostly covering people who had recently died.
• Gog the Mild, with 817 points from 3 featured articles on historic battles in Europe, 5 featured article reviews and 3 good articles.
• Hog Farm, with 659 points from 2 featured articles and 2 good articles on American Civil War battles, 18 featured article reviews, 2 good articles, 6 good article reviews and 4 DYKs.
• BennyOnTheLoose, a snooker specialist and new to the Cup, with 647 points from a featured article, 2 featured article reviews, 6 good articles, 6 good article reviews and 3 DYKs.

In round three, contestants achieved 19 featured articles, 7 featured lists, 106 featured article reviews, 72 good articles, 1 good topic, 62 good article reviews, 165 DYKs and 96 ITN items. We enter the fourth round with scores reset to zero; any content promoted after the end of round 3 but before the start of round 4 can be claimed in round 4. Please also remember that you must claim your points within 14 days of "earning" them (one contestant in round 3 lost out because of this). When doing GARs, please make sure that you check that all the GA criteria are fully met.

If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article nominations, a featured process, or anything else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed (remember to remove your listing when no longer required). Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Judges: Sturmvogel 66 (talk) and Cwmhiraeth Cwmhiraeth (talk) MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:30, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – July 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2021).

Administrator changes

Trialpears

AGK • Eliz81 • Mulad • ThaddeusB • Vianello • Who

Lacrimosus → Ikuzaf

Interface administrator changes

Ragesoss

CheckUser changes

AGK • DGG

Oversighter changes

AGK

Guideline and policy news

• Consensus has been reached to delete all books in the book namespace. There was rough consensus that the deleted books should still be available on request at WP:REFUND even after the namespace is removed.
• An RfC is open to discuss the next steps following a trial which automatically applied pending changes to TFAs.

Technical news

• IP addresses of unregistered users are to be hidden from everyone. There is a rough draft of how IP addresses may be shown to users who need to see them. This currently details allowing administrators, checkusers, stewards and those with a new usergroup to view the full IP address of unregistered users. Editors with at least 500 edits and an account over a year old will be able to see all but the end of the IP address in the proposal. The ability to see the IP addresses hidden behind the mask would be dependent on agreeing to not share the parts of the IP address they can see with those who do not have access to the same information. Accessing part of or the full IP address of a masked editor would also be logged. Comments on the draft are being welcomed at the talk page.

Arbitration

• The community authorised COVID-19 general sanctions have been superseded by the COVID-19 discretionary sanctions following a motion at a case request. Alerts given and sanctions placed under the community authorised general sanctions are now considered alerts for and sanctions under the new discretionary sanctions.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:27, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-27

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

Tech News

• The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 19 July.

Recent changes

• AutoWikiBrowser is a tool to make repetitive tasks easier. It now uses JSON. Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage has moved to Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPageJSON and Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Config. Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage/Version has moved to Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage/VersionJSON. The tool will eventually be configured on the wiki so that you don't have to wait until the new version to add templates or regular expression fixes. [331]

Problems

• InternetArchiveBot helps saving online sources on some wikis. It adds them to Wayback Machine and links to them there. This is so they don't disappear if the page that was linked to is removed. It currently has a problem with linking to the wrong date when it moves pages from archive.is to web.archive.org. [332]

Changes later this week

• The tool to find, add and remove templates will be updated. This is to make it easier to find and use the right templates. It will come to the first wikis on 7 July. It will come to more wikis later this year. [333][334]
• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

• Some Wikimedia wikis use Flagged Revisions or pending changes. It hides edits from new and unregistered accounts for readers until they have been patrolled. The auto review action in Flagged Revisions will no longer be logged. All old logs of auto-review will be removed. This is because it creates a lot of logs that are not very useful. [335]

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

17:31, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: June 2021

This Month in GLAM – Volume XI, Issue VI, June 2021 Headlines AfLIA Wikipedia in African Libraries report: African Librarians Week 2021 Albania report: CEE Spring Campaign in Albania and Kosovo Argentina report: A course on opening cultural collections Belgium report: Edit-a-thons with Wiki Women Design Brazil report: A metadata roundtripping model for museums France report: European Archaeology Days; Edit-a-thon in Romanity Museum Guinea report: GLAM with Harmattan Guinée 15 June 2021 in Conakry Italy report: Festival and edit-a-thon dedicated to the world of archives Netherlands report: Training at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam; training for Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean has concluded New Zealand report: Making artists visible Serbia report: Wikidata development and culture of Rudnik and Takovo region Spain report: Museums writing challenge and Viquimarató Carmelina Sánchez-Cutillas Sweden report: Free music; Kulturarv som gymnasiearbete; Statistics Sweden – now as open data; KTH library training Switzerland report: Diversity in GLAM Program Uganda report: Wikipedia for Museums in Uganda UK report: British Library and Khalili Collections Ukraine report: #1Lib1Ref in Ukrainian Wikipedia USA report: Meetup/CCCCWI; Vaccine Safety Wikipedia Edit-a-thon; WikiWednesday Salon; San Diego Wiknic; Black Lunch Table / Black visual artists Special story: Play, experiment and cross borders at Hack4OpenGLAM Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report: OpenRefine starts Structured Data on Commons development and is searching for two developers WMF GLAM report: Conferences and Structured data modeling Calendar: July's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 05:46, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-29

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

Recent changes

• The tool to find, add and remove templates was updated. This is to make it easier to find and use the right templates. It was supposed to come to the first wikis on 7 July. It was delayed to 12 July instead. It will come to more wikis later this year. [336][337]
• Special:UnconnectedPages lists pages that are not connected to Wikidata. This helps you find pages that can be connected to Wikidata items. Some pages should not be connected to Wikidata. You can use the magic word __EXPECTED_UNCONNECTED_PAGE__ on pages that should not be listed on the special page. [338]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 July. It will be on all wikis from 22 July (calendar).

Future changes

• How media is structured in the parser's HTML output will soon change. This can affect bots, gadgets, user scripts and extensions. You can read more. You can test it on Testwiki or Testwiki 2.
• The parameters for how you obtain tokens in the MediaWiki API were changed in 2014. The old way will no longer work from 1 September. Scripts, bots and tools that use the parameters from before the 2014 change need to be updated. You can read more.

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

15:30, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 25 July 2021

• News and notes: Wikimania and a million other news stories

• Special report: Hardball in Hong Kong

• In the media: Larry is at it again

• Board of Trustees candidates: See the candidates

• Recent research: Gender bias and statistical fallacies, disinformation and mutual intelligibility

• Traffic report: Football, tennis and marveling at Loki

• News from the WMF: Uncapping our growth potential – interview with James Baldwin, Finance and Administration Department

• Humour: A little verse

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:12, 25 July 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-30

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

Recent changes

• A new version of MediaWiki came to the Wikimedia wikis the week before last week. This was not in Tech News because there was no newsletter that week.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 July. It will be on all wikis from 29 July (calendar).

Future changes

• If you use the Monobook skin you can choose to switch off responsive design on mobile. This will now work for more skins. If ⧼monobook-responsive-label⧽ is unticked you need to also untick the new preference Enable responsive mode. Otherwise it will stop working. Interface admins can automate this process on your wiki. You can read more.

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

21:10, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 45

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 45, May – June 2021

• Library design improvements continue
• New partnerships
• 1Lib1Ref update

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --11:04, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – July 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2021).

Administrator changes

BusterD

Kees08 • Nickshanks • Protonk • Schissel • Ultraexactzz • Wknight94

CheckUser changes

TheresNoTime

Oversighter changes

TheresNoTime

ST47

Guideline and policy news

• An RfC is open to add a delay of one week from nomination to deletion for G13 speedy deletions.

Technical news

• Last week all wikis were very slow or not accessible for 30 minutes. This was due to server lag caused by regenerating dynamic lists on the Russian Wikinews after a large bulk import. (T287380)

Arbitration

• Following an amendment request, the committee has clarified that the Talk page exception to the 500/30 rule in remedy 5 of the Palestine-Israel articles 4 case does not apply to requested move discussions.

Miscellaneous

• You can vote for candidates in the 2021 Board of Trustees elections from 4 August to 17 August. Four community elected seats are up for election.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:18, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-31

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

Recent changes

• If your wiki uses markup like <div class="mw-content-ltr"> or <div class="mw-content-rtl"> without the required dir attribute, then these will no longer work in 2 weeks. There is a short-term fix that can be added to your local wiki's Common.css page, which is explained at T287701. From now on, all usages should include the full attributes, for example: <div class="mw-content-ltr" dir="ltr" lang="en"> or <div class="mw-content-rtl" dir="rtl" lang="he">. This also applies to some other HTML tags, such as span or code. You can find existing examples on your wiki that need to be updated, using the instructions at T287701.
• Reminder: Wikimedia has migrated to the Libera Chat IRC network, from the old Freenode network. Local documentation should be updated.

Problems

• Last week, all wikis had slow access or no access for 30 minutes. There was a problem with generating dynamic lists of articles on the Russian Wikinews, due to the bulk import of 200,000+ new articles over 3 days, which led to database problems. The problematic feature has been disabled on that wiki and developers are discussing if it can be fixed properly. [339][340]

Changes later this week

• When adding links to a page using VisualEditor or the 2017 wikitext editor, disambiguation pages will now only appear at the bottom of search results. This is because users do not often want to link to disambiguation pages. [341]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 August. It will be on all wikis from 5 August (calendar).

Future changes

• The team of the Wikipedia app for Android is working on communication in the app. The developers are working on how to talk to other editors and get notifications. You can read more. They are looking for users who want to test the plans. Any editor who has an Android phone and is willing to download the app can do this.
• The Beta Feature for Discussion tools will be updated in the coming weeks. You will be able to subscribe to individual sections on a talk page at more wikis. You can test this now by adding ?dtenable=1 to the end of the talk page's URL (example).

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

20:45, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

This Month in Education: July 2021

This Month in Education Volume 10 • Issue 7 • July 2021 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue University celebrates 10th anniversary with an Editathon A paper on Students' Attitudes Towards the Use of Wikipedia Announcing the Training of Trainers program for "Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom" MOOC Conocimiento Abierto y Software Libre Updates on the Leamos Wikipedia en Bolivia 2021 Virtual lessons on Wikipedia from Wikimedia Polska for schools

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 19:31, 3 August 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-32

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

Problems

• You can read but not edit 17 wikis for a few minutes on 10 August. This is planned at 05:00 UTC. This is because of work on the database. [342]

Changes later this week

• The Wikimania Hackathon will take place remotely on 13 August, starting at 5:00 UTC, for 24 hours. You can participate in many ways. You can still propose projects and sessions.
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 August. It will be on all wikis from 12 August (calendar).
• The old CSS <div class="visualClear"></div> will not be supported after 12 August. Instead, templates and pages should use <div style="clear:both;"></div>. Please help to replace any existing uses on your wiki. There are global-search links available at T287962.

Future changes

• The Wikipedia Library is a place for Wikipedia editors to get access to sources. There is an extension which has a new function to tell users when they can take part in it. It will use notifications. It will start pinging the first users in September. It will ping more users later. [343]
• Vue.js will be the JavaScript framework for MediaWiki in the future. [344]

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

16:19, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: July 2021

This Month in GLAM – Volume XI, Issue VII, July 2021 Headlines Albania report: Collaboration with the New Vision Organization in Tirana; Summer of Wikivoyage Campaign 2021 Australia report: Representation and erasure: opportunities and risks that Wikipedia presents for First Nations knowledges Brazil report: A wikicontest to celebrate and make visible the state of Bahia India report: Rabimas proofread contest ends on Bengali Wikisource New Zealand report: New Zealand holds its second Wikimedia conference, and a performing arts Wikiproject gathers steam Serbia report: New chances for GLAM success Sweden report: Photos of Childrens theatre UK report: A Thousand Images of Islam, British Library Updates USA report: Smithsonian Wiki Focus: Black Women in Food History; San Diego 73; Black Lunch Table Black artists WMF GLAM report: A conversation about depicts and Structured Data on Commons Calendar: August's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 07:22, 11 August 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-33

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

Recent changes

• You can add language links in the sidebar in the new Vector skin again. You do this by connecting the page to a Wikidata item. The new Vector skin has moved the language links but the new language selector cannot add language links yet. [345]

Problems

• There was a problem on wikis which use the Translate extension. Translations were not updated or were replaced with the English text. The problems have been fixed. [346][347][348]

Changes later this week

• A revision tag will soon be added to edits that add links to disambiguation pages. This is because these links are usually added by accident. The tag will allow editors to easily find the broken links and fix them. If your wiki does not like this feature, it can be hidden. [349]
• Would you like to help improve the information about tools? Would you like to attend or help organize a small virtual meetup for your community to discuss the list of tools? Please get in touch on the Toolhub Quality Signal Sessions talk page. We are also looking for feedback from tool maintainers on some specific questions.
• In the past, edits to any page in your user talk space ignored your mute list, e.g. sub-pages. Starting this week, this is only true for edits to your talk page. [350]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 August. It will be on all wikis from 19 August (calendar).

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

19:25, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-34

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

Recent changes

• The Score extension (<score> notation) has been re-enabled on public wikis and upgraded to a newer version. Some musical score functionality may no longer work because the extension is only enabled in "safe mode". The security issue has been fixed and an advisory published.

Problems

• You will be able to read but not edit some wikis for a few minutes on 25 August. This will happen around 06:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. During this time, operations on the CentralAuth will also not be possible.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 August. It will be on all wikis from 26 August (calendar).

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

21:57, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

Read-only reminder

A maintenance operation will be performed on Wednesday August 25 06:00 UTC. It should only last for a few minutes.

Also during this time, operations on the CentralAuth will not be possible (GlobalRenames, changing/confirming e-mail addresses, logging into new wikis, password changes).

For more details about the operation and on all impacted services, please check on Phabricator.

A banner will be displayed 30 minutes before the operation.

Please help your community to be aware of this maintenance operation. Thank you!

20:33, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

This Month in Education: August 2021

This Month in Education Volume 10 • Issue 8 • August 2021 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue GLAM-wiki Summer in the City: Polish Teachers met in Warsaw Wikipedia for School – our largest article contest for Ukrainian teachers The importance of Social Service: Modality of educational linkage with ITESM, Querétaro campus and Wikimedia Mexico Wikimania 2021 and the unschooling vibes around Wikipedia by Wikimedia Polska, Education team Open Foundation West Africa Introduces KIWIX Offline to the National Association of Graduate Teachers

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 13:37, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 August 2021

• News and notes: Enough time left to vote! IP ban

• In the media: Vive la différence!

• Wikimedians of the year: Seven Wikimedians of the year

• Gallery: Our community in 20 graphs

• News from Wiki Education: Changing the face of Wikipedia

• Recent research: IP editors, inclusiveness and empathy, cyclones, and world heritage

• WikiProject report: WikiProject Days of the Year Interview

• Traffic report: Olympics, movies, and Afghanistan

• Community view: Making Olympic history on Wikipedia

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:44, 29 August 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-35

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

Recent changes

• Some musical score syntax no longer works and may needed to be updated, you can check Category:Pages with score rendering errors on your wiki for a list of pages with errors.

Problems

• Musical scores were unable to render lyrics in some languages because of missing fonts. This has been fixed now. If your language would prefer a different font, please file a request in Phabricator. [351]

Changes later this week

• The parameters for how you obtain tokens in the MediaWiki API were changed in 2014. The old way will no longer work from 1 September. Scripts, bots and tools that use the parameters from before the 2014 change need to be updated. You can read more about this.
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 September. It will be on all wikis from 2 September (calendar).

Future changes

• You will be able to read but not edit Commons for a few minutes on 6 September. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance.
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes in the week of 13 September. More information will be published in Tech News later. It will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [352]

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

15:59, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

WikiCup 2021 September newsletter

The fourth round of the competition has finished with over 500 points being required to qualify for the final round. It was a hotly competitive round with two contestants, The Rambling Man and Epicgenius, each scoring over 3000 points, and six contestants scoring over 1000. All but one of the finalists achieved one or more FAs during the round, the exception being Bloom6132 who demonstrated that 61 "in the news" items produces an impressive number of points. Other contestants who made it to the final are Gog the Mild, Lee Vilenski, BennyOnTheLoose, Amakuru and Hog Farm. However, all their points are now swept away and everyone starts afresh in the final round.

Round 4 saw the achievement of 18 featured articles and 157 good articles. Bilorv scored for a 25-article good topic on Black Mirror but narrowly missed out on qualifying for the final round. There was enthusiasm for FARs, with 89 being performed, and there were 63 GARs and around 100 DYKs during the round. As we start round 5, we say goodbye to the eight competitors who didn't quite make it to the final round; thank you for the useful contributions you have made to the Cup and Wikipedia, and we hope you will join us again next year. For other contestants, remember that any content promoted after the end of round 4 but before the start of round 5 can be claimed in round 5. Remember too that you must claim your points within 14 days of "earning" them.

If you are concerned that your nomination, whether it be for a good article, a featured process, or anything else, will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed (remember to remove your listing when no longer required). If you want to help out with the WikiCup, please do your bit to help keep down the review backlogs! Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Sturmvogel 66 and Cwmhiraeth. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:02, 2 September 2021 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – September 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2021).

Administrator changes

Jake Wartenberg

Emperor • Viridian Bovary

Ashleyyoursmile → Viridian Bovary

Guideline and policy news

• Feedback is requested on the Universal Code of Conduct enforcement draft by the Universal Code of Conduct Phase 2 drafting committee.
• A RfC is open on whether to allow administrators to use extended confirmed protection on high-risk templates.
• A discussion is open to decide when, if ever, should discord logs be eligible for removal when posted onwiki (including whether to oversight them)
• A RfC on the next steps after the trial of pending changes on TFAs has resulted in a 30 day trial of automatic semi protection for TFAs.

Technical news

• The Score extension has been re-enabled on public wikis. It has been updated, but has been placed in safe mode to address unresolved security issues. Further information on the security issues can be found on the mediawiki page.

Arbitration

• A request for comment is in progress to provide an opportunity to amend the structure, rules, and procedures of the Arbitration Committee election and resolve any issues not covered by existing rules. Comments and new proposals are welcome.

Miscellaneous

• The 2021 RfA review is now open for comments.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:45, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-36

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

Recent changes

• The wikis that have Growth features deployed have been part of A/B testing since deployment, in which some newcomers did not receive the new features. Now, all of the newcomers on 21 of the smallest of those wikis will be receiving the features. [353]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

• In 2017, the provided jQuery library was upgraded from version 1 to 3, with a compatibility layer. The migration will soon finish, to make the site load faster for everyone. If you maintain a gadget or user script, check if you have any JQMIGRATE errors and fix them, or they will break. [354][355]
• Last year, the Portuguese Wikipedia community embarked on an experiment to make log-in compulsory for editing.  The impact report of this trial is ready. Moving forward, the Anti-Harassment Tools team is looking for projects that are willing to experiment with restricting IP editing on their wiki for a short-term experiment. Learn more.

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

15:19, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: August 2021

This Month in GLAM – Volume XI, Issue VIII, August 2021 Headlines Albania report: Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos (WPWP) Campaign in Albania and Kosovo Australia report: How Australian libraries are turning to Wikipedia during the global pandemic Brazil report: Transbordados: WikidataCon's preconference for Latin America discusses GLAM and decolonization Côte d'Ivoire report: Glam-wiki 2021 10 Juillet en Côte d'Ivoire France report: Wikimedian in residence; Some projects for this autumn India report: Second proofread competition starts on Bengali Wikisource in collaboration with the British Library Italy report: Summer school in July and two new WiR in August Netherlands report: 50 cool new things you can now do with KB’s collection highlights, and New old photographs of Algeria, Mali and Morocco by Angeline van Achterberg New Zealand report: A Wikimedian at New Zealand Opera Serbia report: Villas and castles of Serbia Sweden report: History, history and future UK report: Khalili Collections reaches 30 articles USA report: Wiki salons and Kearny Mesa Special story: Hack4OpenGLAM is ready to start Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report: OpenRefine starts SDC development WMF GLAM report: GLAM conversations and feedbacks for a better Wikimedia movement Calendar: September's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 00:29, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-37

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

Recent changes

• 45 new Wikipedias now have access to the Growth features. [356]
• A majority of Wikipedias now have access to the Growth features. The Growth team has published an FAQ page about the features. This translatable FAQ covers the description of the features, how to use them, how to change the configuration, and more.

Problems

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on 14 September. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. [357]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 September. It will be on all wikis from 16 September (calendar).
• Starting this week, Wikipedia in Italian will receive weekly software updates on Wednesdays. It used to receive the updates on Thursdays. Due to this change, bugs will be noticed and fixed sooner. [358]
• You can add language links in the sidebar in the new Vector skin again. You do this by connecting the page to a Wikidata item. The new Vector skin has moved the language links but the new language selector cannot add language links yet. [359]
• The syntax highlight tool marks up code with different colours. It now can highlight 23 new code languages. Additionally, golang can now be used as an alias for the Go programming language, and a special output mode has been added to show a program's output. [360][361]

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

15:32, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-38

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

Recent changes

• Growth features are now deployed to almost all Wikipedias. For the majority of small Wikipedias, the features are only available for experienced users, to test the features and configure them. Features will be available for newcomers starting on 20 September 2021.
• MediaWiki had a feature that would highlight local links to short articles in a different style. Each user could pick the size at which "stubs" would be highlighted. This feature was very bad for performance, and following a consultation, has been removed. [362]
• A technical change was made to the MonoBook skin to allow for easier maintenance and upkeep. This has resulted in some minor changes to HTML that make MonoBook's HTML consistent with other skins. Efforts have been made to minimize the impact on editors, but please ping Jon (WMF) on wiki or in phabricator if any problems are reported.

Problems

• There was a problem with search last week. Many search requests did not work for 2 hours because of an accidental restart of the search servers. [363]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 September. It will be on all wikis from 23 September (calendar).
• The meta=proofreadpage API has changed. The piprop parameter has been renamed to prpiprop. API users should update their code to avoid unrecognized parameter warnings. Pywikibot users should upgrade to 6.6.0. [364]

Future changes

• The Reply tool will be deployed to the remaining wikis in the coming weeks. It is currently part of "Discussion tools" in Beta features at most wikis. You will be able to turn it off in Editing Preferences. [365]
• The previously announced change to how you obtain tokens from the API has been delayed to September 21 because of an incompatibility with Pywikibot. Bot operators using Pywikibot can follow T291202 for progress on a fix, and should plan to upgrade to 6.6.1 when it is released.

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

18:30, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 46

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 46, July – August 2021

• Library design improvements deployed
• New collections available in English and German
• Wikimania presentation

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --11:15, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

This Month in Education: September 2021

This Month in Education Volume 10 • Issue 9 • September 2021 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue Cultural history on Wikipedia Education program in Ukraine is finally back to offline! Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom Module Distribution in the Philippines Senior Citizens WikiTown 2021: Týn nad Vltavou #WikiXLaEducación: New contest to include articles about education on Wikipedia

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 19:42, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 26 September 2021

• News and notes: New CEO, new board members, China bans

• In the media: The future of Wikipedia

• Opinion: Wikimedians of Mainland China were warned

• Op-Ed: I've been desysopped

• Disinformation report: Paid promotional paragraphs in German parliamentary pages

• Discussion report: Editors discuss Wikipedia's vetting process for administrators

• Recent research: Wikipedia images for machine learning; Experiment justifies Wikipedia's high search rankings

• Community view: Is writing Wikipedia like making a quilt?

• Traffic report: Kanye, Emma Raducanu and 9/11

• News from Diff: Welcome to the first grantees of the Knowledge Equity Fund

• WikiProject report: The Random and the Beautiful

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:58, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-39

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

Recent changes

• iOS 15 has a new function called Private Relay (Apple website). This can hide the user's IP when they use Safari browser. This is like using a VPN in that we see another IP address instead. It is opt-in and only for those who pay extra for iCloud. It will come to Safari users on OSX later. There is a technical discussion about what this means for the Wikimedia wikis.

Problems

• Some gadgets and user-scripts add items to the portlets (article tools) part of the skin. A recent change to the HTML may have made those links a different font-size. This can be fixed by adding the CSS class .vector-menu-dropdown-noicon. [366]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 September. It will be on all wikis from 30 September (calendar).
• The GettingStarted extension was built in 2013, and provides an onboarding process for new account holders in a few versions of Wikipedia. However, the recently developed Growth features provide a better onboarding experience. Since the vast majority of Wikipedias now have access to the Growth features, GettingStarted will be deactivated starting on 4 October. [367]
• A small number of users will not be able to connect to the Wikimedia wikis after 30 September. This is because an old root certificate will no longer work. They will also have problems with many other websites. Users who have updated their software in the last five years are unlikely to have problems. Users in Europe, Africa and Asia are less likely to have immediate problems even if their software is too old. You can read more.
• You can receive notifications when someone leaves a comment on user talk page or mentions you in a talk page comment. Clicking the notification link will now bring you to the comment and highlight it. Previously, doing so brought you to the top of the section that contained the comment. You can find more information in T282029.

Future changes

• The Reply tool will be deployed to the remaining wikis in the coming weeks. It is currently part of "Discussion tools" in Beta features at most wikis. You will be able to turn it off in Editing Preferences. See the list of wikis. [368]

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

22:20, 27 September 2021 (UTC)

September 2021 Guild of Copy Editors newsletter

Guild of Copy Editors September 2021 Newsletter Hello and welcome to the September GOCE newsletter, a brief update of Guild activities since June 2021.                  Current and upcoming events September Drive: Our current backlog-elimination drive is open until 23:59 on 30 September (UTC) and is open to all copy editors. Sign up today! Drive and Blitz reports June Blitz: From 20 to 26 June, 6 participating editors claimed 16 copy edits, focusing on requests and articles tagged in March and April. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here. July Drive: Almost 575,000 words of articles were copy edited for this event. Of the 24 people who signed up, 18 copyedited at least one article. Final results and awards are listed here. August Blitz: From 15 to 21 August, we copy edited articles tagged in April and May 2021 and requests. 9 participating editors completed 17 copy edits on the blitz. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here. Other news June election: Jonesey95 was chosen to continue as lead coordinator, assisted by Dhtwiki, Tenryuu, and Miniapolis. New maintenance template added to our project scope: After a short discussion in June, we added {{cleanup tense}} to the list of maintenance templates that adds articles to the Guild's copy editing backlog categories. This change added 198 articles, spread over 97 months of backlog, to our queue. We processed all of those articles except for those from the three or four most recent months during the July backlog elimination drive (Here's a link to a "tense" discussion during the drive). Progress report: As of 18:26, 24 September 2021 (UTC), GOCE copyeditors have processed 468 requests since 1 January and there were 60 requests awaiting completion on the Requests page. The backlog of articles tagged for copy-editing stood at 433 (see monthly progress graph above). Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators Jonesey95, Dhtwiki, Tenryuu, and Miniapolis. To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:45, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – October 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2021).

Administrator changes

Blablubbs

Alvestrand • Black Falcon • Deathphoenix • Dppowell • Mark Arsten • JGHowes (deceased)

Oversighter changes

Callanecc

Mkdw

Interface administrator changes

Galobtter

Guideline and policy news

• Following an RfC, extended confirmed protection may be used preemptively on certain high-risk templates.
• Following a discussion at the Village Pump, there is consensus to treat discord logs the same as IRC logs. This means that discord logs will be oversighted if posted onwiki.

Technical news

• DiscussionTools has superseded Enterprisey's reply-link script. Editors may switch using the "Discussion tools" checkbox under Preferences → Beta features.

Arbitration

• A motion has standardised the 500/30 (extended confirmed) restrictions placed by the Arbitration Committee. The standardised restriction is now listed in the Arbitration Committee's procedures.
• Following the closure of the Iranian politics case, standard discretionary sanctions are authorized for all edits about, and all pages related to, post-1978 Iranian politics, broadly construed.
• The Arbitration Committee encourages uninvolved administrators to use the discretionary sanctions procedure in topic areas where it is authorised to facilitate consensus in RfCs. This includes, but is not limited to, enforcing sectioned comments, word/diff limits and moratoriums on a particular topic from being brought in an RfC for up to a year.

Miscellaneous

• Editors have approved expanding the trial of Growth Features from 2% of new accounts to 25%, and the share of newcomers getting mentorship from 2% to 5%. Experienced editors are invited to add themselves to the mentor list.
• The community consultation phase of the 2021 CheckUser and Oversight appointments process is open for editors to provide comments and ask questions to candidates.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:04, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-40

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

Recent changes

• A more efficient way of sending changes from Wikidata to Wikimedia wikis that show them has been enabled for the following 10 wikis: mediawiki.org, the Italian, Catalan, Hebrew and Vietnamese Wikipedias, French Wikisource, and English Wikivoygage, Wikibooks, Wiktionary and Wikinews. If you notice anything strange about how changes from Wikidata appear in recent changes or your watchlist on those wikis you can let the developers know.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 October. It will be on all wikis from 7 October (calendar).
• Some gadgets and bots that use the API to read the AbuseFilter log might break. The hidden property will no longer say an entry is implicit for unsuppressed log entries about suppressed edits. If your bot needs to know this, do a separate revision query. Additionally, the property will have the value false for visible entries; previously, it wasn't included in the response. [369]
• A more efficient way of sending changes from Wikidata to Wikimedia wikis that show them will be enabled for all production wikis. If you notice anything strange about how changes from Wikidata appear in recent changes or your watchlist you can let the developers know.

Future changes

• You can soon get cross-wiki notifications in the iOS Wikipedia app. You can also get notifications as push notifications. More notification updates will follow in later versions. [370]
• The JavaScript variables wgExtraSignatureNamespaces, wgLegalTitleChars, and wgIllegalFileChars will soon be removed from mw.config. These are not part of the "stable" variables available for use in wiki JavaScript. [371]
• The JavaScript variables wgCookiePrefix, wgCookieDomain, wgCookiePath, and wgCookieExpiration will soon be removed from mw.config. Scripts should instead use mw.cookie from the "mediawiki.cookie" module. [372]

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

16:28, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-41

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

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 October. It will be on all wikis from 14 October (calendar).

• The "auto-number headings" preference is being removed. You can read phab:T284921 for the reasons and discussion. This change was previously announced. A JavaScript snippet is available which can be used to create a Gadget on wikis that still want to support auto-numbering.

Meetings

• You can join a meeting about the Desktop Improvements. A demonstration version of the newest feature will be shown. The event will take place on Tuesday, 12 October at 16:00 UTC. See how to join.

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

15:29, 11 October 2021 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: September 2021

This Month in GLAM – Volume XI, Issue IX, September 2021 Headlines Albania report: Diaspora Edits Wikipedia Campaign Argentina report: New parnership agreements and more training! Australia report: Preserving paralympic history Belgium report: Wikimedia Belgium GLAM report September 2021 Brazil report: WikidataCon's right around the corner: find out how to participate France report: Wikidata training in Musée de Grenoble Italy report: Call for Italian museums, archives and libraries Kosovo report: Diaspora Edits Wikipedia Campaign Netherlands report: GLAM at WikiconNL2021, ISA-campaign Tag the species Naturalis en Rijksmuseum Serbia report: New WiR and presentation of our activities Spain report: Women Gastronomes Edit-a-thon Sweden report: Kulturhistoria som gymnasiearbete; Uploads from museums in Göteborg; Wiki Loves Monuments; LGBTQIA+ edit-a-thon UK report: British Library and Khalili Collections USA report: New page patrol not assuming good faith towards workshop editors Content Partnerships Hub report: Working towards a thematic hub on content partnerships Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report: First steps for Wikimedia Commons reconciliation service WMF GLAM report: Updates on grant-funded technical projects Calendar: October's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 22:33, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-42

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

Recent changes

• Toolhub is a catalogue to make it easier to find software tools that can be used for working on the Wikimedia projects. You can read more.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 October. It will be on all wikis from 21 October (calendar).

Future changes

• The developers of the Wikipedia Android app are working on communication in the app. You can now answer questions in survey to help the development.
• 3–5% of editors may be blocked in the next few months. This is because of a new service in Safari, which is similar to a proxy or a VPN. It is called iCloud Private Relay. There is a discussion about this on Meta. The goal is to learn what iCloud Private Relay could mean for the communities.
• Wikimedia Enterprise is a new API for those who use a lot of information from the Wikimedia projects on other sites. It is a way to get big commercial users to pay for the data. There will soon be a copy of the Wikimedia Enterprise dataset. You can read more. You can also ask the team questions on Zoom on 22 October 15:00 UTC.

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

20:52, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-43

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

Recent changes

• The Coolest Tool Award 2021 is looking for nominations. You can recommend tools until 27 October.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 October. It will be on all wikis from 28 October (calendar).

Future changes

• Diff pages will have an improved copy and pasting experience. The changes will allow the text in the diff for before and after to be treated as separate columns and will remove any unwanted syntax. [373]
• The version of the Liberation fonts used in SVG files will be upgraded. Only new thumbnails will be affected. Liberation Sans Narrow will not change. [374]

Meetings

• You can join a meeting about the Community Wishlist Survey. News about the disambiguation and the real-time preview wishes will be shown. The event will take place on Wednesday, 27 October at 14:30 UTC. See how to join.

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

20:07, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

This Month in Education: October 2021

This Month in Education Volume 10 • Issue 10 • October 2021 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue 1st joint contest Wikimedia UG Georgia and the Ministry of Education of Georgia Promoting more inclusive and equitable support for the Wikimedia Education community The Second Online EduWiki Camp in Serbia Higher and further education courses in the UK Wikipedia on Silesia Cieszyn in Poland and in Czech Republic

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: ZI Jony 15:40, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

Growth Newsletter #19

Welcome to the nineteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in Wikimedia projects.

Structured tasks

"Add an image" prototype, showing suggested image for the article

• "Add a link" is the team's first structured task. It uses machine-learning to suggest wikilinks as easy edits for newcomers. It was deployed in May 2021 on four Wikipedias and then in July on eight more Wikipedias after we evaluated the initial results. So far, we've seen a high level of engagement from newcomers. Communities that have the feature suggested valuable ideas for improvement. We'll work on improvements and then contact more communities to deploy it.
• "Add an image" is the team's second structured task, currently in development. It is an editing task that suggests Commons images for unillustrated Wikipedia articles. We have conducted many community discussions and tests. Then, we've decided to build a first prototype. We'll first deploy it only to our pilot Wikipedias, to learn whether newcomers can be successful with the task. The project page contains links to interactive prototypes. We are very interested to hear your thoughts on this idea as we build and test the early versions. These prototypes have already been tested by newcomers, in English and Spanish.

News for mentors

• The Mentor dashboard is available at our pilot wikis: Arabic, Czech, and Bengali Wikipedias. It will soon be available at a few more volunteering wikis, as a test. [375]
• At wikis where the mentor dashboard is deployed, a new filter is available for mentors. Mentors can monitor their mentees' activity in Watchlist and RecentChanges, so they can help support their mentees' work. For privacy reasons, this filter can't be accessed by someone else than the mentor itself. This filter only filters mentees assigned to the mentor. This filter is not visible for people who are not listed as mentors [376]

Community configuration

• Communities now have the ability to configure how Growth features behave on their own wikis. At Special:EditGrowthConfig, community members can add a list of volunteer mentors, alter the templates used for suggested edits, update help links, and more. This special page is editable by administrators and interface admins.

Scaling

• We are proud to announce that all Wikipedias now have the Growth features! Thank you to all the community members who helped the team build the features and bring them to their wikis. The only exception is Chinese Wikipedia (zh), for technical reasons. [377]
• The wikis that have Growth features deployed have been part of A/B testing since deployment, in which some newcomers did not receive the new features. Now, all of the newcomers on 280 of the smallest of those Wikipedias have the features. [378][379]
• A test is undergoing at English Wikipedia: 25% of newcomers receive the Growth features. The results from this test will be part of a discussion of how to proceed on that wiki.
• Now that Growth features are available at Wikipedia, the Growth team considers to extend them to other projects. Some Wikisource users have expressed some interest in getting Growth features. There is currently a discussion about implementing them on Wikisource.

News for communities

• Do you have questions about the Growth features? This translatable FAQ contains answers to the most common questions about the Growth team work.
• The Growth features were recently used in a test amongst Latin American donors to give donors the opportunity to learn to edit. You can see the results here.
• Interface translations are important for newcomers. Please help for your language, by translating or copyediting interface translations for the Growth features.
• Help:GettingStarted was a feature developed in 2013, which directed newcomers to articles that needed editing. We recently removed this feature from all wikis, because it has been replaced by the Growth features.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:36, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 October 2021

• From the editor: Different stories, same place

• News and notes: The sockpuppet who ran for adminship and almost succeeded

• In the media: China bans, and is there intelligent life on this planet?

• Opinion: A photo on Wikipedia can ruin your life

• Discussion report: Editors brainstorm and propose changes to the Requests for adminship process

• Recent research: Welcome messages fail to improve newbie retention

• Community view: Reflections on the Chinese Wikipedia

• Traffic report: James Bond and the Giant Squid Game

• Technology report: Wikimedia Toolhub, winners of the Coolest Tool Award, and more

• Serendipity: How Wikipedia helped create a Serbian stamp

• Book review: Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality

• WikiProject report: Redirection

• Humour: A very Wiki crossword

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:15, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – November 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2021).

Administrator changes

Clpo13

Brian0918 • JDoorjam • Karanacs • MrDarcy • Mindspillage

Interface administrator changes

Evad37

CheckUser changes

Dreamy Jazz • Ferret • GeneralNotability • Girth Summit • RoySmith

Oversight changes

Dreamy Jazz • LuK3

Guideline and policy news

• Phase 2 of the 2021 RfA review has commenced which will discuss potential solutions to address the 8 issues found in Phase 1. Proposed solutions that achieve consensus will be implemented and you may propose solutions till 07 November 2021.

Technical news

• Toolhub is a catalogue of tools which can be used on Wikimedia wikis. It is at http://toolhub.wikimedia.org/.

Arbitration

• GeneralNotability, Mz7 and Cyberpower678 have been appointed to the Electoral Commission for the 2021 Arbitration Committee Elections. Ivanvector and John M Wolfson are reserve commissioners.
• Eligible editors are invited to self-nominate themselves to stand in the 2021 Arbitration Committee elections from 07 November 2021 until 16 November 2021.

Miscellaneous

• The 2021 CheckUser and Oversight appointments process has concluded with the appointment of five new CheckUsers and two new Oversighters.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:44, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-44

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

Recent changes

• There is a limit on the amount of emails a user can send each day. This limit is now global instead of per-wiki. This change is to prevent abuse. [380]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 November. It will be on all wikis from 4 November (calendar).

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

20:27, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

WikiCup 2021 November newsletter

The WikiCup is over for another year and the finalists can relax! Our Champion this year is The Rambling Man (submissions), who amassed over 5000 points in the final round, achieving 8 featured articles and almost 500 reviews. It was a very competitive round; seven of the finalists achieved over 1000 points in the round (enough to win the 2019 contest), and three scored over 3000 (enough to win the 2020 event). Our 2021 finalists and their scores were:

1. The Rambling Man (submissions) with 5072 points
2. Lee Vilenski (submissions) with 3276 points
3. Amakuru (submissions) with 3197 points
4. Epicgenius (submissions) with 1611 points
5. Gog the Mild (submissions) with 1571 points
6. BennyOnTheLoose (submissions) with 1420 points
7. Hog Farm (submissions) with 1043 points
8. Bloom6132 (submissions) with 528 points

All those who reached the final round will win awards. The following special awards will be made based on high performance in particular areas of content creation and review. Awards will be handed out in the next few days.

• The Rambling Man (submissions) wins the featured article prize, for 8 FAs in round 5.
• Lee Vilenski (submissions) wins the featured list prize, for 3 FLs in round 5.
• Gog the Mild (submissions) wins the featured topic prize, for 13 articles in a featured topic in round 5.
• Epicgenius (submissions) wins the good article prize, for 63 GAs in round 4.
• The Rambling Man (submissions) wins the good topic prize, for 86 articles in good topics in round 5.
• The Rambling Man (submissions) wins the reviewer prize, for 68 FAC reviews and 213 GAN reviews, both in round 5.
• Epicgenius (submissions) wins the DYK prize, for 30 did you know articles in round 3 and 105 overall.
• Bloom6132 (submissions) wins the ITN prize, for 71 in the news articles in round 1 and 284 overall.

Congratulations to everyone who participated in this year's WikiCup, whether they made it to the final round or not, and particular congratulations to the newcomers to the WikiCup, some of whom did very well. Wikipedia has benefitted greatly from the quality creations, expansions and improvements made, and the numerous reviews performed. Thanks to all who have taken part and helped out with the competition, not forgetting User:Jarry1250, who runs the scoring bot.

If you have views on whether the rules or scoring need adjustment for next year's contest, please comment on the WikiCup talk page. Next year's competition will begin on 1 January. You are invited to sign up to participate; the WikiCup is open to all Wikipedians, both novices and experienced editors, and we hope to see you all in the 2022 competition. Until then, it only remains to once again congratulate our worthy winners, and thank all participants for their involvement! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Sturmvogel 66 and Cwmhiraeth. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:56, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-45

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

Recent changes

• Mobile IP editors are now able to receive warning notices indicating they have a talk page message on the mobile website (similar to the orange banners available on desktop). These notices will be displayed on every page outside of the main namespace and every time the user attempts to edit. The notice on desktop now has a slightly different colour. [381][382]

Changes later this week

• Wikidata will be read-only for a few minutes on 11 November. This will happen around 06:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [383]
• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

• In the future, unregistered editors will be given an identity that is not their IP address. This is for legal reasons. A new user right will let editors who need to know the IPs of unregistered accounts to fight vandalism, spam, and harassment, see the IP. You can read the suggestions for how that identity could work and discuss on the talk page.

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

20:35, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 47

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 47, September – October 2021

• On-wiki Wikipedia Library notification rolling out
• Search tool deployed
• New My Library design improvements

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --16:58, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: October 2021

This Month in GLAM – Volume XI, Issue X, October 2021 Headlines Australia report: Open access as Australia reopens Belgium report: Wikimedia Belgium GLAM report October 2021 Estonia report: Wikipedia Art Month + Heritage Days Italy report: Collaborations and partnership Netherlands report: How Wikipedia helped to create a Serbian stamp; Many GLAM-related presentations planned at WikiconNL New Zealand report: Outreach by members of the Aotearoa New Zealand Wikimedia User Group Nigeria report: Wikidata for Libraries and notable Librarians in Nigeria Serbia report: A good start to GLAM Fall Spain report: Women Writers Month Sweden report: The Constitution of Pylyp Orlyk; More museum data on Wikidata; LGBT edit-a-thon; Local business history in Nyköping; Stockholm City Museum ♥ Wikipedia; Writing about fashion at Nordiska museet UK report: British Library and Khalili Collections USA report: Wikiconference North America + Workshops Content Partnerships Hub report: Needs assessment interviews; Cultural heritage on Wikidata – thousands of monuments in Norway; Structured Data uploads continue Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report: A Wikimedia Commons Reconciliation Service, You Say? WMF GLAM report: GLAM office hours, GLAM newsletter moving to Meta-wiki, and more Calendar: November's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 06:18, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-46

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

Recent changes

• Most large file uploads errors that had messages like "stashfailed" or "DBQueryError" have now been fixed. An incident report is available.

Problems

• Sometimes, edits made on iOS using the visual editor save groups of numbers as telephone number links, because of a feature in the operating system. This problem is under investigation. [384]
• There was a problem with search last week. Many search requests did not work for 2 hours because of a configuration error. [385]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 November. It will be on all wikis from 18 November (calendar).

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

22:05, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

This Month in Education: November 2021

This Month in Education Volume 10 • Issue 11 • November 2021 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue We talked about EduWiki Outreach Collaborators and how Wikimedia Serbia played a role being a part of it Welcome to Meta! Wikipedia Education Program in Ukraine in 2021 Wikipedia and Education Mentorship Program-Serbia and Philippines Partnership Launch of the Wikimedia Research Fund! Education projects in the Land of Valencia A Hatch-Tyap-Wikipedia In-person Training Event Celebrating Sq Wikipedia Birthday with the Vasil Kamami High School students Celebrating Wikidata with the Nikola Koperniku High School students

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: ZI Jony 16:18, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

This Month in Education: November 2021

This Month in Education Volume 10 • Issue 11 • November 2021 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue We talked about EduWiki Outreach Collaborators and how Wikimedia Serbia played a role being a part of it Welcome to Meta! Wikipedia Education Program in Ukraine in 2021 Wikipedia and Education Mentorship Program-Serbia and Philippines Partnership Launch of the Wikimedia Research Fund! Education projects in the Land of Valencia A Hatch-Tyap-Wikipedia In-person Training Event Celebrating Sq Wikipedia Birthday with the Vasil Kamami High School students Celebrating Wikidata with the Nikola Koperniku High School students

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: ZI Jony 16:19, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-47

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

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
• The template dialog in VisualEditor and in the new wikitext mode Beta feature will be heavily improved on a few wikis. Your feedback is welcome.

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

20:01, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 November 2021

• In the media: Denial: climate change, mass killings and pornography

• WikiCup report: The WikiCup 2021

• Deletion report: What we lost, what we gained

• From a Wikipedia reader: What's Matt Amodio?

• Arbitration report: ArbCom in 2021

• Discussion report: On the brink of change – RFA reforms appear imminent

• Technology report: What does it take to upload a file?

• WikiProject report: Interview with contributors to WikiProject Actors and Filmmakers

• Serendipity: "Did You Know ..." featured a photo of the wrong female WWII pilot

• News from Diff: Content translation tool helps create one million Wikipedia articles

• Traffic report: Reporting ticket sales on the edge of the Wiki, if Eternals should fail

• Recent research: Vandalizing Wikipedia as rational behavior

• Humour: A very new very Wiki crossword

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:47, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-48

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

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 December. It will be on all wikis from 2 December (calendar).

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

21:13, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – December 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (November 2021).

Administrator changes

A Train • Berean Hunter • Epbr123 • GermanJoe • Sanchom • Mysid

Technical news

• Unregistered editors using the mobile website are now able to receive notices to indicate they have talk page messages. The notice looks similar to what is already present on desktop, and will be displayed on when viewing any page except mainspace and when editing any page. (T284642)
• The limit on the number of emails a user can send per day has been made global instead of per-wiki to help prevent abuse. (T293866)

Arbitration

• Voting in the 2021 Arbitration Committee Elections is open until 23:59, 06 December 2021 (UTC).
• The already authorized standard discretionary sanctions for all pages relating to the Horn of Africa (defined as including Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and adjoining areas if involved in related disputes), broadly construed, have been made permanent.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:25, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

December 2021 GOCE Newsletter

Guild of Copy Editors December 2021 Newsletter Hello and welcome to the December GOCE newsletter, a brief update of Guild activities since September 2021.                  Current and upcoming events Election time: Our end-of-year election of coordinators opened for nominations on 1 December and will close on 15 December at 23:59 (UTC). Voting opens at 00:01 the following day and will continue until 31 December at 23:59, just before "Auld Lang Syne". Coordinators normally serve a six-month term and are elected on an approval basis. Self-nominations are welcome. If you've thought of helping out at the Guild, or know of another editor who would make a good coordinator, please consider standing for election or nominating them here. December Blitz: We have scheduled a week-long copy-editing blitz for 12 to 18 December. Sign up now! Drive and Blitz reports September Drive: Almost 400,000 words of articles were copy edited for this event. Of the 27 people who signed up, 21 copyedited at least one article. Final results and awards are listed here. October Blitz: From 17 to 23 October, we copy edited articles tagged in May and June 2021 and requests. 8 participating editors completed 26 copy edits on the blitz. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here. November Drive: Over 350,000 words of articles were copy edited for this event. Of the 21 people who signed up, 14 copyedited at least one article. Final results and awards are listed here. Other news It is with great sadness that we report the death on 19 November of Twofingered Typist, who was active with the Guild almost daily for the past several years. His contributions long exceeded the thresholds for the Guild's highest awards, and he had a hand in innumerable good and featured article promotions as a willing collaborator. Twofingered Typist also served as a Guild coordinator from July 2019 to June 2021. He is sorely missed by the Wikipedia community. Progress report: As of 30 November, GOCE copyeditors have completed 619 requests in 2021 and there were 51 requests awaiting completion on the Requests page. The backlog stood at 946 articles tagged for copy-editing (see monthly progress graph above). Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators Jonesey95, Dhtwiki, Tenryuu, and Miniapolis. To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.

Distributed via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:03, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-49

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

Problems

• MediaWiki 1.38-wmf.11 was scheduled to be deployed on some wikis last week. The deployment was delayed because of unexpected problems.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 December. It will be on all wikis from 9 December (calendar).
• At all Wikipedias, a Mentor Dashboard is now available at Special:MentorDashboard. It allows registered mentors, who take care of newcomers' first steps, to monitor their assigned newcomers' activity. It is part of the Growth features. You can learn more about activating the mentor list on your wiki and about the mentor dashboard project.
• The predecessor to the current MediaWiki Action API (which was created in 2008), action=ajax, will be removed this week. Any scripts or bots using it will need to switch to the corresponding API module. [386]
• An old ResourceLoader module, jquery.jStorage, which was deprecated in 2016, will be removed this week. Any scripts or bots using it will need to switch to mediawiki.storage instead. [387]

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

21:58, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: November 2021

This Month in GLAM – Volume XI, Issue XI, November 2021 Headlines From the team: Migration from Outreach to Meta: your opinion is needed France report: Study day on open content; Open content GLAM report India report: Second proofread competition ended on Bengali Wikisource in collaboration with the British Library Italy report: Traing course and conference in November Serbia report: GLAMorous November Sweden report: Art, design and history from the museums of Göteborg; Maps in the National Archives of Sweden UK report: Khalili Collections Ukraine report: Aricle contest for librarians «Local cultural heritage and prominent people» USA report: Smithsonian demos new Wiki API Connector tool and other meetups Content Partnerships Hub report: We continue building for the hub; SDC for fun and profit: detecting bad coordinates; Needs assessment – video recorded interviews; Improving ISA WMF GLAM report: Wikisource birthday celebration, Community Tech Wishlist, and upcoming conversation about courses for GLAM professionals Calendar: December's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 11:52, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-50

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

Recent changes

• There are now default short aliases for the "Project:" namespace on most wikis. E.g. On Wikibooks wikis, [[WB:]] will go to the local language default for the [[Project:]] namespace. This change is intended to help the smaller communities have easy access to this feature. Additional local aliases can still be requested via the usual process. [388]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 December. It will be on all wikis from 16 December (calendar).

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

22:26, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-51

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

Tech News

• Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 10 January 2022.

Recent changes

• Queries made by the DynamicPageList extension (<DynamicPageList>) are now only allowed to run for 10 seconds and error if they take longer. This is in response to multiple outages where long-running queries caused an outage on all wikis. [389]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.

Future changes

• The developers of the Wikipedia iOS app are looking for testers who edit in multiple languages. You can read more and let them know if you are interested.
• The Wikimedia Cloud VPS hosts technical projects for the Wikimedia movement. Developers need to claim projects they use. This is because old and unused projects are removed once a year. Unclaimed projects can be shut down from February. [390]

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

22:04, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 December 2021

• From the editor: Here is the news

• News and notes: Jimbo's NFT, new arbs, fixing RfA, and financial statements

• Serendipity: Born three months before her brother?

• In the media: The past is not even past

• Recent research: STEM articles judged unsuitable for undergraduates below the first paragraph

• Arbitration report: A new crew for '22

• By the numbers: Four billion words and a few numbers

• Deletion report: We laughed, we cried, we closed as "no consensus"

• Gallery: Wikicommons presents: 2021

• Traffic report: Spider-Man, football and the departed

• Crossword: Another Wiki crossword for one and all

• Humour: Buying Wikipedia

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:08, 28 December 2021 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – January 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (December 2021).

Administrator changes

Amalthea • Ihcoyc (deceased) • Kateshortforbob • Kirill Lokshin • Rifleman 82 • Ryan Norton • Wrp103

Interface administrator changes

Mr. Stradivarius

CheckUser changes

Cabayi • Donald Albury • Enterprisey • Izno • Wugapodes

Opabinia regalis

Casliber • David Fuchs • Newyorkbrad • SoWhy

Oversighter changes

Cabayi • Donald Albury • Enterprisey • Izno • Wugapodes

Opabinia regalis

Casliber • David Fuchs • Newyorkbrad • SoWhy

Guideline and policy news

• Following consensus at the 2021 RfA review, the autopatrolled user right has been removed from the administrators user group; admins can grant themselves the autopatrolled permission if they wish to remain autopatrolled.

• Additionally, consensus for proposal 6C of the 2021 RfA review has led to the creation of an administrative action review process. The purpose of this process will be to review individual administrator actions and individual actions taken by users holding advanced permissions.

Arbitration

• Following the 2021 Arbitration Committee elections, the following editors have been appointed to the Arbitration Committee: Beeblebrox, Cabayi, Donald Albury, Enterprisey, Izno, Opabinia regalis, Worm That Turned, Wugapodes.

Miscellaneous

• The functionaries email list (functionaries-enlists.wikimedia.org) will no longer accept incoming emails apart from those sent by list members and WMF staff. Private concerns, apart from those requiring oversight, should be directly sent to the Arbitration Committee.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:25, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Welcome to the 2022 WikiCup!

Happy New Year and Happy New WikiCup! The 2022 competition has just begun and all article creators, expanders, improvers and reviewers are welcome to take part. Even if you are a novice editor you should be able to advance to at least the second round, improving 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. Any questions on the rules or on anything else should be directed to one of the judges, or posted to the WikiCup talk page. Signups will close at the end of January, and the first round will end on 26 February; the 64 highest scorers at that time will move on to round 2. The judges for the WikiCup this year are: Sturmvogel 66 (talk · contribs · email) and Cwmhiraeth (talk · contribs · email). Good luck! MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:37, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Welcome to the 2022 WikiCup!

Happy New Year and Happy New WikiCup! The 2022 competition has just begun and all article creators, expanders, improvers and reviewers are welcome to take part. Even if you are a novice editor you should be able to advance to at least the second round, improving 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. Any questions on the rules or on anything else should be directed to one of the judges, or posted to the WikiCup talk page. Signups will close at the end of January, and the first round will end on 26 February; the 64 highest scorers at that time will move on to round 2. The judges for the WikiCup this year are: Sturmvogel 66 (talk · contribs · email) and Cwmhiraeth (talk · contribs · email). Good luck! MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:02, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-02

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

Recent changes

• A oauth_consumer variable has been added to the AbuseFilter to enable identifying changes made by specific tools. [391]
• Gadgets are now able to directly include JSON pages. This means some gadgets can now be configured by administrators without needing the interface administrator permission, such as with the Geonotice gadget. [392]
• Gadgets can now specify page actions on which they are available. For example, |actions=edit,history will load a gadget only while editing and on history pages. [393]
• Gadgets can now be loaded on demand with the withgadget URL parameter. This can be used to replace an earlier snippet that typically looks like withJS or withCSS. [394]
• At wikis where the Mentorship system is configured, you can now use the Action API to get a list of a mentor's mentees. [395]
• The heading on the main page can now be configured using MediaWiki:Mainpage-title-loggedin for logged-in users and MediaWiki:Mainpage-title for logged-out users. Any CSS that was previously used to hide the heading should be removed. [396] [397]
• Four special pages (and their API counterparts) now have a maximum database query execution time of 30 seconds. These special pages are: RecentChanges, Watchlist, Contributions, and Log. This change will help with site performance and stability. You can read more details about this change including some possible solutions if this affects your workflows. [398]
• The sticky header has been deployed for 50% of logged-in users on more than 10 wikis. This is part of the Desktop Improvements. See how to take part in the project.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 January. It will be on all wikis from 13 January (calendar).

Events

• Community Wishlist Survey 2022 begins. All contributors to the Wikimedia projects can propose for tools and platform improvements. The proposal phase takes place from 10 January 18:00 UTC to 23 January 18:00 UTC. Learn more.

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

01:22, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: December 2021

This Month in GLAM – Volume XI, Issue XII, December 2021 Headlines Australia report: Writing The Record: the Australian Music Wikipedia project launches Colombia report: We were editing about Bogotan writers Croatia report: Ab ovo. Towards future reports... New Zealand report: The New Zealand Wikidata thesis project Poland report: Safeguarding the heritage of a community Sweden report: Commons project with Göteborg museums was a success; Digital humaniora meets Wikidata; HBTQI, Europeana and WiR UK report: 2021 in Review USA report: Smithsonian Institution Training Content Partnerships Hub report: Adding more Structured Data on Commons statements WMF GLAM report: Some structured data developments Calendar: January's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 10:46, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: December 2021

This Month in GLAM – Volume XI, Issue XII, December 2021 Headlines Australia report: Writing The Record: the Australian Music Wikipedia project launches Colombia report: We were editing about Bogotan writers Croatia report: Ab ovo. Towards future reports... New Zealand report: The New Zealand Wikidata thesis project Poland report: Safeguarding the heritage of a community Sweden report: Commons project with Göteborg museums was a success; Digital humaniora meets Wikidata; HBTQI, Europeana and WiR UK report: 2021 in Review USA report: Smithsonian Institution Training Content Partnerships Hub report: Adding more Structured Data on Commons statements WMF GLAM report: Some structured data developments Calendar: January's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 16:23, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-03

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

Recent changes

• When using WikiEditor (also known as the 2010 wikitext editor), people will now see a warning if they link to disambiguation pages. If you click "Review link" in the warning, it will ask you to correct the link to a more specific term. You can read more information about this completed 2021 Community Wishlist item.
• You can automatically subscribe to all of the talk page discussions that you start or comment in using DiscussionTools. You will receive notifications when another editor replies. This is available at most wikis. Go to your Preferences and turn on "Automatically subscribe to topics". [399]
• When asked to create a new page or talk page section, input fields can be "preloaded" with some text. This feature is now limited to wikitext pages. This is so users can't be tricked into making malicious edits. There is a discussion about if this feature should be re-enabled for some content types.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 January. It will be on all wikis from 20 January (calendar).

Events

• Community Wishlist Survey 2022 continues. All contributors to the Wikimedia projects can propose for tools and platform improvements. The proposal phase takes place from 10 January 18:00 UTC to 23 January 18:00 UTC. Learn more.

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

19:54, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

This Month in Education: January 2022

This Month in Education
Volume 11 • Issue 1 • January 2022

---

Contents • Headlines • Subscribe

---

In This Issue

• 30-h Wikipedia Article Writing Challenge
• Announcing Wiki Workshop 2022
• Final exhibition about Cieszyn Silesia region
• Join us this February for the EduWiki Week
• Offline Education project WikiChallenge closed its third edition
• Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom ToT Experience of a Filipina Wikimedian
• Welcoming new trainers of the Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom program
• Wikimedia Israel’s education program: Students enrich Hebrew Wiktionary with Biblical expressions still in use in modern Hebrew

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: ZI Jony 17:28, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-04

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

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 January. It will be on all wikis from 27 January (calendar).
• The following languages can now be used with syntax highlighting: BDD, Elpi, LilyPond, Maxima, Rita, Savi, Sed, Sophia, Spice, .SRCINFO.
• You can now access your watchlist from outside of the user menu in the new Vector skin. The watchlist link appears next to the notification icons if you are at the top of the page. [400]

Events

• You can see the results of the Coolest Tool Award 2021 and learn more about 14 tools which were selected this year.
• You can translate, promote, or comment on the proposals in the Community Wishlist Survey. Voting will begin on 28 January.

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

21:37, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 January 2022

• Special report: WikiEd course leads to Twitter harassment

• News and notes: Feedback for Board of Trustees election

• Interview: CEO Maryana Iskander "four weeks in"

• Black History Month: What are you doing for Black History Month?

• Deletion report: Ringing in the new year: Subject notability guideline under discussion

• WikiProject report: The Forgotten Featured

• Arbitration report: New arbitrators look at new case and antediluvian sanctions

• Traffic report: The most viewed articles of 2021

• Gallery: No Spanish municipality without a photograph

• Obituary: Twofingered Typist

• Op-Ed: Identifying and rooting out climate change denial

• Essay: The prime directive

• Opinion: Should the Wikimedia Foundation continue to accept cryptocurrency donations?

• In the media: Fuzzy-headed government editing

• Recent research: Articles with higher quality ratings have fewer "knowledge gaps"

• Serendipity: Pooh entered the Public Domain – but Tigger has to wait two more years

• Crossword: Cross swords with a crossword

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:21, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-05

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

Recent changes

• If a gadget should support the new ?withgadget URL parameter that was announced 3 weeks ago, then it must now also specify supportsUrlLoad in the gadget definition (documentation). [401]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 February. It will be on all wikis from 3 February (calendar).

Future changes

• A change that was announced last year was delayed. It is now ready to move ahead:
  • The user group oversight will be renamed suppress. This is for technical reasons. This is the technical name. It doesn't affect what you call the editors with this user right on your wiki. This is planned to happen in three weeks. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections. As usual, these labels can be translated on translatewiki (direct links are available) or by administrators on your wiki.

Events

• You can vote on proposals in the Community Wishlist Survey between 28 January and 11 February. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on.

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

17:41, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 48

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 48, November – December 2021

• 1Lib1Ref 2022
• Wikipedia Library notifications deployed

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --15:13, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – February 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2022).

Administrator changes

AustralianRupert • Cimon Avaro • Euryalus • Jehochman • Nunh-huh

28bytes

Bureaucrat changes

28bytes

Interface administrator changes

Evad37 • Galobtter

Ragesoss

Guideline and policy news

• The Universal Code of Conduct enforcement guidelines have been published for consideration. Voting to ratify this guideline is planned to take place 7 March to 21 March. Comments can be made on the talk page.

Technical news

• The user group oversight will be renamed suppress in around 3 weeks. This will not affect the name shown to users and is simply a change in the technical name of the user group. The change is being made for technical reasons. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections.
• The Reply Tool feature, which is a part of Discussion Tools, will be opt-out for everyone logged in or logged out starting 7 February 2022. Editors wishing to comment on this can do so in the relevant Village Pump discussion.

Arbitration

• Community input is requested on several motions aimed at addressing discretionary sanctions that are no longer needed or overly broad.
• The Arbitration Committee has published a generalised comment regarding successful appeals of sanctions that it can review (such as checkuser blocks).
• A motion related to the Antisemitism in Poland case was passed following a declined case request.

Miscellaneous

• Voting in the 2022 Steward elections will begin on 07 February 2022, 14:00 (UTC) and end on 26 February 2022, 13:59 (UTC). The confirmation process of current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.
• Voting in the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey is open until 11 February 2022.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:02, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-06

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

Recent changes

• English Wikipedia recently set up a gadget for dark mode. You can enable it there, or request help from an interface administrator to set it up on your wiki (instructions and screenshot).
• Category counts are sometimes wrong. They will now be completely recounted at the beginning of every month. [402]

Problems

• A code-change last week to fix a bug with Live Preview may have caused problems with some local gadgets and user-scripts. Any code with skin-specific behaviour for vector should be updated to also check for vector-2022. A code-snippet, global search, and example are available.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 February. It will be on all wikis from 10 February (calendar).

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

21:14, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: January 2022

This Month in GLAM – Volume XII, Issue I, January 2022 Headlines Belgium report: Belgium report Brazil report: A portable museum experience to digitize and share collections online Colombia report: Let's celebrate the Public domain day with Wikisource Estonia report: Mobile Photo Studio + New Cooperations Finland report: Photowalks in Helsinki, autumn 2021 France report: Training course for Musée de l'armée staff members; Journée Wikimédia Culture et numérique 2022; Wikiway Indonesia report: GLAM Indonesia wrap-up; Public Domain Day 2022 in Indonesia; #1Lib1Ref Italy report: Collaborations and new projects in January Romania report: About #1lib1ref activities in Romania (and Moldova) Serbia report: Successful end of the Old and even more successful beginning of the New year Spain report: BiBat Museum and libraries Sweden report: Uploads of photographs taken by Swedish missionaries in China; Sörmlands museum's first contributions UK report: Khalili Collections and British Library USA report: Report from DPLA AvoinGLAM report: Hello, world! Content Partnerships Hub report: Results and summaries; Helping with getting Pattypan back on track; Working with partners to make content available Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report: February 22: Meetup about SDC support in OpenRefine WMF GLAM report: Wikimedia campaigns for librarians and museum workers; Community Wishlist Survey; and Wikimedia query services Calendar: February's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 18:30, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-07

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

Recent changes

• Purging a category page with fewer than 5,000 members will now recount it completely. This will allow editors to fix incorrect counts when it is wrong. [403]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 February. It will be on all wikis from 17 February (calendar).
• In the AbuseFilter extension, the rmspecials() function has been updated so that it does not remove the "space" character. Wikis are advised to wrap all the uses of rmspecials() with rmwhitespace() wherever necessary to keep filters' behavior unchanged. You can use the search function on Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage. [404]

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

19:17, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-08

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

Recent changes

• Special:Nuke will now provide the standard deletion reasons (editable at MediaWiki:Deletereason-dropdown) to use when mass-deleting pages. This was a request in the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey. [405]
• At Wikipedias, all new accounts now get the Growth features by default when creating an account. Communities are encouraged to update their help resources. Previously, only 80% of new accounts would get the Growth features. A few Wikipedias remain unaffected by this change. [406]
• You can now prevent specific images that are used in a page from appearing in other locations, such as within PagePreviews or Search results. This is done with the markup class=notpageimage. For example, [[File:Example.png|class=notpageimage]]. [407]
• There has been a change to the HTML of Special:Contributions, Special:MergeHistory, and History pages, to support the grouping of changes by date in the mobile skin. While unlikely, this may affect gadgets and user scripts. A list of all the HTML changes is on Phabricator.

Events

• Community Wishlist Survey results have been published. The ranking of prioritized proposals is also available.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 February. It will be on all wikis from 24 February (calendar).

Future changes

• The software to play videos and audio files on pages will change soon on all wikis. The old player will be removed. Some audio players will become wider after this change. The new player has been a beta feature for over four years. [408][409]
• Toolforge's underlying operating system is being updated. If you maintain any tools there, there are two options for migrating your tools into the new system. There are details, deadlines, and instructions on Wikitech. [410]
• Administrators will soon have the option to delete/undelete the associated "talk" page when they are deleting a given page. An API endpoint with this option will also be available. This was a request from the 2021 Wishlist Survey.

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

19:11, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 February 2022

• From the team: Selection of a new Signpost Editor-in-Chief

• News and notes: Impacts of Russian invasion of Ukraine

• Opinion: Why student editors are good for Wikipedia

• Special report: A presidential candidate's team takes on Wikipedia

• In the media: Wiki-drama in the UK House of Commons

• Serendipity: War photographers: from Crimea (1850s) to the Russian invasion of Ukraine (2022)

• Technology report: Community Wishlist Survey results

• WikiProject report: 10 years of tea

• Featured content: Featured Content returns

• Deletion report: The 10 most SHOCKING deletion discussions of February

• Recent research: How editors and readers may be emotionally affected by disasters and terrorist attacks

• Arbitration report: Parties remonstrate, arbs contemplate, skeptics coordinate

• By the numbers: Does birthplace affect the frequency of Wikipedia biography articles?

• Gallery: The vintage exhibit

• Traffic report: Euphoria, Pamela Anderson, lies and Netflix

• News from Diff: The Wikimania 2022 Core Organizing Team

• Crossword: A Crossword, featuring Featured Articles

• Humour: Notability of mailboxes

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:21, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

This Month in Education: February 2022

Please help translate to other languages.

This Month in Education

Volume 11 • Issue 2 • February 2022

---

Contents • Headlines • Subscribe

---

In This Issue

• Open Foundation West Africa Expands Open Movement With UHAS
• Celebrating the 18th anniversary of Ukrainian Wikipedia
• Integrating Wikipedia in the academic curriculum in a university in Mexico
• Results of "Reading Wikipedia" workshop in the summer school of Plan Ceibal in Uruguay
• WikiFundi, offline editing plateform : last release notes and how-tos
• Writing Wikipedia as an academic assignment in STEM fields
• The Learning and Connection – 1Lib1Ref with African Librarians

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: ZI Jony 15:09, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-09

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

Recent changes

• When searching for edits by change tags, e.g. in page history or user contributions, there is now a dropdown list of possible tags. This was a request in the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey. [411]
• Mentors using the Growth Mentor dashboard will now see newcomers assigned to them who have made at least one edit, up to 200 edits. Previously, all newcomers assigned to the mentor were visible on the dashboard, even ones without any edit or ones who made hundred of edits. Mentors can still change these values using the filters on their dashboard. Also, the last choice of filters will now be saved. [412][413]
• The user group oversight was renamed suppress. This is for technical reasons. You may need to update any local references to the old name, e.g. gadgets, links to Special:Listusers, or uses of NUMBERINGROUP.

Problems

• The recent change to the HTML of tracking changes pages caused some problems for screenreaders. This is being fixed. [414]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 March. It will be on all wikis from 3 March (calendar).

Future changes

• Working with templates will become easier. Several improvements are planned for March 9 on most wikis and on March 16 on English Wikipedia. The improvements include: Bracket matching, syntax highlighting colors, finding and inserting templates, and related visual editor features.
• If you are a template developer or an interface administrator, and you are intentionally overriding or using the default CSS styles of user feedback boxes (the classes: successbox, messagebox, errorbox, warningbox), please note that these classes and associated CSS will soon be removed from MediaWiki core. This is to prevent problems when the same class-names are also used on a wiki. Please let us know by commenting at phab:T300314 if you think you might be affected.

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

22:58, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – March 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2022).

Administrator changes

Modussiccandi

BOZ • Brookie (deceased) • Jackmcbarn • Jamesday • Jonathunder • Master of Puppets • Saravask

CheckUser changes

Callanecc

Oversighter changes

Callanecc

Guideline and policy news

• A RfC is open to change the wording of revision deletion criterion 1 to remove the sentence relating to non-infringing contributions.
• A RfC is open to discuss prohibiting draftification of articles over 90 days old.

Technical news

• The deployment of the reply tool as an opt-out feature, as announced in last month's newsletter, has been delayed to 7 March. Feedback and comments are being welcomed at Wikipedia talk:Talk pages project. (T296645)
• Special:Nuke will now allow the selection of standard deletion reasons to be used when mass-deleting pages. This was a Community Wishlist Survey request from 2022. (T25020)
• The ability to undelete the talk page when undeleting a page using Special:Undelete or the API will be added soon. This change was requested in the 2021 Community Wishlist Survey. (T295389)

Arbitration

• Several unused discretionary sanctions and article probation remedies have been rescinded. This follows the community feedback from the 2021 Discretionary Sanctions review.

Miscellaneous

• The 2022 appointees for the Ombuds commission are Érico, Faendalimas, Galahad, Infinite0694, Mykola7, Olugold, Udehb and Zabe as regular members and Ameisenigel and JJMC89 as advisory members.
• Following the 2022 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: AntiCompositeNumber, BRPever, Hasley, TheresNoTime, and Vermont.
• The 2022 Community Wishlist Survey results have been published alongside the ranking of prioritized proposals.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:46, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

WikiCup 2022 March newsletter

And so ends the first round of the WikiCup. Last year anyone who scored more than zero points moved on to Round 2, but this was not the case this year, and a score of 13 or more was required to proceed. The top scorers in Round 1 were:

• Epicgenius, a finalist last year, who led the field with 1906 points, gained from 32 GAs and 19 DYKs, all on the topic of New York buildings.
• AryKun, new to the contest, was second with 1588 points, having achieved 2 FAs, 11 GAs and various other submissions, mostly on the subject of birds.
• Bloom6132, a WikiCup veteran, was in third place with 682 points, garnered from 51 In the news items and several DYKs.
• GhostRiver was close behind with 679 points, gained from achieving 12 GAs, mostly on ice hockey players, and 35 GARs.
• Kavyansh.Singh was in fifth place with 551 points, with an FA, a FL, and many reviews.
• SounderBruce was next with 454 points, gained from an FA and various other submissions, mostly on United States highways.
• Ktin, another WikiCup veteran, was in seventh place with 412 points, mostly gained from In the news items.

These contestants, like all the others who qualified for Round 2, now have to start scoring points again from scratch. Between them, contestants completed reviews of a large number of good articles as the contest ran concurrently with a GAN backlog drive. Well done all! To qualify for Round 3, contestants will need to finish Round 2 among the top thirty-two participants.

Remember that any content promoted after the end of Round 1 but before the start of Round 2 can be claimed in Round 2. Anything that should have been claimed for in Round 1 is no longer eligible for points. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed.

Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Sturmvogel 66 (talk) and Cwmhiraeth (talk) MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:07, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

WikiCup 2022 March newsletter

And so ends the first round of the WikiCup. Last year anyone who scored more than zero points moved on to Round 2, but this was not the case this year, and a score of 13 or more was required to proceed. The top scorers in Round 1 were:

• Epicgenius, a finalist last year, who led the field with 1906 points, gained from 32 GAs and 19 DYKs, all on the topic of New York buildings.
• AryKun, new to the contest, was second with 1588 points, having achieved 2 FAs, 11 GAs and various other submissions, mostly on the subject of birds.
• Bloom6132, a WikiCup veteran, was in third place with 682 points, garnered from 51 In the news items and several DYKs.
• GhostRiver was close behind with 679 points, gained from achieving 12 GAs, mostly on ice hockey players, and 35 GARs.
• Kavyansh.Singh was in fifth place with 551 points, with an FA, a FL, and many reviews.
• SounderBruce was next with 454 points, gained from an FA and various other submissions, mostly on United States highways.
• Ktin, another WikiCup veteran, was in seventh place with 412 points, mostly gained from In the news items.

These contestants, like all the others who qualified for Round 2, now have to start scoring points again from scratch. Between them, contestants completed reviews of a large number of good articles as the contest ran concurrently with a GAN backlog drive. Well done all! To qualify for Round 3, contestants will need to finish Round 2 among the top thirty-two participants.

Remember that any content promoted after the end of Round 1 but before the start of Round 2 can be claimed in Round 2. Anything that should have been claimed for in Round 1 is no longer eligible for points. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed.

Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Sturmvogel 66 (talk) and Cwmhiraeth (talk) MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:55, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-10

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

Problems

• There was a problem with some interface labels last week. It will be fixed this week. This change was part of ongoing work to simplify the support for skins which do not have active maintainers. [415]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 March. It will be on all wikis from 10 March (calendar).

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

21:15, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: February 2022

This Month in GLAM – Volume XII, Issue II, February 2022 Headlines Albania report: Traditional Food Photography Belgium report: Shakespeare is dead - Contemporary playwriting festival; Public Domain Day Belgium 2022 (10/02) report Estonia report: An examples of a visual storytelling – two virtual exhibitions France report: Wikimedian in Residence in Clermont Auvergne Italy report: New agreement for Wiki Loves Monument Italy 2022 Kosovo report: Traditional Food Photography Netherlands report: New photo collections of Alkmaar, Wiki goes Caribbean meeting, contemporary art Wikidata import and knowledge platform for GLAMS New Zealand report: National Digital Forum and Editing in a Time of COVID Nigeria report: 1Lib1Ref 2022 Kwara Poland report: New GLAM-Wiki partnerships and cooperations Serbia report: A month in the sign of 1Lib1Ref Sweden report: Additional photos from Swedish missionairies; Historical maps of Ukraine UK report: Khalili Collections Ukraine report: Stand with Ukraine! USA report: Women's History Month activities AvoinGLAM report: February in AvoinGLAM Content Partnerships Hub report: Encyclopaedia of Life release their 2 million species descriptions under CC0 Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report: Editing SDC with OpenRefine; Monthly OpenRefine and Wikimedia office hours Calendar: March's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 16:19, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-11

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

Recent changes

• In the Wikipedia Android app it is now possible to change the toolbar at the bottom so the tools you use more often are easier to click on. The app now also has a focused reading mode. [416][417]

Problems

• There was a problem with the collection of some page-view data from June 2021 to January 2022 on all wikis. This means the statistics are incomplete. To help calculate which projects and regions were most affected, relevant datasets are being retained for 30 extra days. You can read more on Meta-wiki.
• There was a problem with the databases on March 10. All wikis were unreachable for logged-in users for 12 minutes. Logged-out users could read pages but could not edit or access uncached content then. [418]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 March. It will be on all wikis from 17 March (calendar).
• When using uselang=qqx to find localisation messages, it will now show all possible message keys for navigation tabs such as "View history". [419]
• Access to Special:RevisionDelete has been expanded to include users who have deletelogentry and deletedhistory rights through their group memberships. Before, only those with the deleterevision right could access this special page. [420]
• On the Special:Undelete pages for diffs and revisions, there will be a link back to the main Undelete page with the list of revisions. [421]

Future changes

• The Wikimedia Foundation has announced the IP Masking implementation strategy and next steps. The announcement can be read here.
• The Wikipedia Android app developers are working on new functions for user talk pages and article talk pages. [422]

Events

• The Wikimedia Hackathon 2022 will take place as a hybrid event on 20-22 May 2022. The Hackathon will be held online and there are grants available to support local in-person meetups around the world. Grants can be requested until 20 March.

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

22:06, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

Growth Newsletter #20

Welcome to the twentieth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in Wikimedia projects.

Suggested edits

As of February, 300,000 suggested edits have been completed since the feature was first deployed in December 2019.

Add a link is the team's first structured task, deployed in May 2021. It has improved outcomes for newcomers. The team is now working on a second iteration based on community feedback and data analysis. Improvements will include: improved algorithmic suggestions, guardrails to prevent too many similar links to be added, and clearer encouragement for users to continue making edits. After adding these improvements, we will deploy this task to more Wikipedias.

Add an image is the second structured task built by our team. It was deployed in November 2021 to four pilot Wikipedias. This is a more challenging task for newcomers. However, it adds more value to articles (so far, over 1,000 images have been added). We are currently learning from communities and from the data on what is working well and what needs improvements. The project page contains links to interactive prototypes. We are very interested to hear your thoughts on this idea as we build and test the early versions. We will soon deploy this task to more Wikipedias as a test.

"Add a link" and "Add an image" now both have a limitation on how many of these tasks newcomers can do per day. It is meant to discourage careless newcomers from making too many problematic edits.

Positive reinforcement

Over the last two years, the Growth team has focused on building suggested edits: easy tasks for newcomers to start with. We have learned with this experience that these tasks help many newcomers to make their first edits. Now, the team is starting a new project : "positive reinforcement". Its goal is to make newcomers proud of their editing and to make them want to come back for more of them. With the positive reinforcement project, we are considering three kinds of features:

• Impact stats: give newcomers the ability to see how many people read the articles they edit.
• Leveling up: encourage newcomers to progress from easier tasks to harder tasks.
• Personalized praise: encourage mentors and other editors to "thank" and award newcomers for good work.

This project is just beginning, and we hope for community thoughts on the direction. We know that things can wrong if we offer the wrong incentives to newcomers, so we want to be careful. Please visit the talk page to help guide the project!

News for mentors

• The mentor dashboard is available at all wikis. It helps mentors see who their mentees are and keep track of their activity. It is automatically activated where a list of mentors has been created. If you need assistance to create a list of mentors, please contact us.
• The mentor dashboard has a new module: settings. It is now possible for mentors to define their status (active or away). They can specify the volume of questions they want to receive, and they can claim mentees in an easier way. It is also possible for mentors to quit, which will automatically reassign their mentees to other mentors.
• We are working on an ability for a mentee to opt-out (and back in) to having a mentor.
• Previously, in the table that displays mentees activity, the filters displayed all mentees, even the ones with zero edits or lots of edits. We have changed this so that only mentees with between 1 and 500 edits are visible by default. Mentors can change this value in their filters.
• We are currently working on a special page for mentors to sign-up.

Some wikis have created userboxes that mentors can display on the user pages. If your wiki has one, please link it to Wikidata!

Scaling

Previously, at most Wikipedias, only 80% of newcomers were getting the Growth features. This was done for experimentation, to have a control group. We have changed this setting. Now 100% of new accounts at all Wikipedias get the Growth features (except a few, kept as test wikis). We invite communities to update their onboarding documentation and tutorials. Please include the Growth features in it. To help you, we have created an help page that can be translated and adapted to your wiki.

How to help

Do you have questions about the Growth features? This translatable FAQ contains answers to the most common questions about the Growth team work. We regularly update it.

Interface translations are important for newcomers. Please help for your language, by translating or copyediting interface translations for the Growth features.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:12, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-12

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

New code release schedule for this week

• There will be four MediaWiki releases this week, instead of just one. This is an experiment which should lead to fewer problems and to faster feature updates. The releases will be on all wikis, at different times, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. You can read more about this project.

Recent changes

• You can now set how many search results to show by default in your Preferences. This was the 12th most popular wish in the Community Wishlist Survey 2022. [423]
• The Jupyter notebooks tool PAWS has been updated to a new interface. [424]

Future changes

• Interactive maps via Kartographer will soon work on wikis using the FlaggedRevisions extension. Please tell us which improvements you want to see in Kartographer. You can take this survey in simple English. [425]

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

15:59, 21 March 2022 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 49

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 49, January – February 2022

• New library collections
• Blog post published detailing technical improvements

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --10:06, 25 March 2022 (UTC)

This Month in Education: March 2022

This Month in Education

Volume 11 • Issue 3 • March 2022

---

Contents • Headlines • Subscribe

---

In This Issue

• Arte+Feminismo Pilipinas:Advocacy on Women Empowerment
• The edit-a-thon on Serbian Wikipedia on the occasion of Edu Wiki Week
• Call for Participation: Higher Education Survey
• Collection of Good Practices in Wikipedia Education
• Conversation: Open education in the Wikimedia Movement views from Latin America
• EduWiki Week 2022, celebrations and learnings
• EduWiki Week in Armenia
• Open Education Week at the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León
• Wikipedia + Education Talk With Leonard Hagan
• Wikimedia Israel cooperates with Yad Vashem in developing a training course for teachers

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: ZI Jony 16:57, 25 March 2022 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 March 2022

• From the Signpost team: How The Signpost is documenting the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine

• News and notes: Of safety and anonymity

• Eyewitness Wikimedian, Kharkiv, Ukraine: Countering Russian aggression with a camera

• Eyewitness Wikimedian, Vinnytsia, Ukraine: War diary

• Eyewitness Wikimedian, Western Ukraine: Working with Wikipedia helps

• Disinformation report: The oligarchs' socks

• In the media: Ukraine, Russia, and even some other stuff

• Recent research: Top scholarly citers, lack of open access references, predicting editor departures

• Wikimedian perspective: My heroes from Russia, Ukraine & beyond

• Discussion report: Athletes are less notable now

• Technology report: 2022 Wikimedia Hackathon

• Arbitration report: Skeptics given heavenly judgement, whirlwind of Discord drama begins to spin for tropical cyclone editors

• Traffic report: War, what is it good for?

• Deletion report: Ukraine, werewolves, Ukraine, YouTube pundits, and Ukraine

• Gallery: "All we are saying is, give peace a chance..."

• From the archives: Burn, baby burn

• Essay: Yes, the sky is blue

• Tips and tricks: Become a keyboard ninja

• On the bright side: The bright side of news

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:51, 27 March 2022 (UTC)