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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Feature News
Stewards can now globally block accounts. Before the change only IP addresses and IP ranges could be blocked globally. Global account blocks are useful when the blocked user should not be logged out. Global locks (a similar tool logging the user out of their account) are unaffected by this change. The new global account block feature is related to the Temporary Accounts project, which is a new type of user account that replaces IP addresses of unregistered editors that are no longer made public.
Later this week, Wikimedia site users will notice that the Interface of FlaggedRevs (also known as "Pending Changes") is improved and consistent with the rest of the MediaWiki interface and Wikimedia's design system. The FlaggedRevs interface experience on mobile and Minerva skin was inconsistent before it was fixed and ported to Codex by the WMF Growth team and some volunteers. [1]
Wikimedia site users can now submit account vanishing requests via GlobalVanishRequest. This feature is used when a contributor wishes to stop editing forever. It helps you hide your past association and edit to protect your privacy. Once processed, the account will be locked and renamed. [2]
Have you tried monitoring and addressing vandalism in Wikipedia using your phone? A Diff blog post on Patrolling features in the Mobile App highlights some of the new capabilities of the feature, including swiping through a feed of recent changes and a personal library of user talk messages for use when patrolling from your phone.
Wikimedia contributors and GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) organisations can now learn and measure the impact Wikimedia Commons is having towards creating quality encyclopedic content using the Commons Impact Metrics analytics dashboard. The dashboard offers organizations analytics on things like monthly edits in a category, the most viewed files, and which Wikimedia articles are using Commons images. As a result of these new data dumps, GLAM organisation can more reliably measure their return on investment for programs bringing content into the digital Commons. [3]
Project Updates
Come share your ideas for improving the wikis on the newly reopened Community Wishlist. The Community Wishlist is Wikimedia’s forum for volunteers to share ideas (called wishes) to improve how the wikis work. The new version of the wishlist is always open, works with both wikitext and Visual Editor, and allows wishes in any language.
Learn more
Have you ever wondered how Wikimedia software works across over 300 languages? This is 253 languages more than the Google Chrome interface, and it's no accident. The Language and Product Localization Team at the Wikimedia Foundation supports your work by adapting all the tools and interfaces in the MediaWiki software so that contributors in our movement who translate pages and strings can translate them and have the sites in all languages. Read more about the team and their upcoming work on Diff.
How can Wikimedia build innovative and experimental products while maintaining such heavily used websites? A recent blog post by WMF staff Johan Jönsson highlights the work of the WMF Future Audience initiative, where the goal is not to build polished products but test out new ideas, such as a ChatGPT plugin and Add a Fact, to help take Wikimedia into the future.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Feature news
Editors using the Visual Editor in languages that use non-Latin characters for numbers, such as Hindi, Manipuri and Eastern Arabic, may notice some changes in the formatting of reference numbers. This is a side effect of preparing a new sub-referencing feature, and will also allow fixing some general numbering issues in Visual Editor. If you notice any related problems on your wiki, please share details at the project talkpage.
Bugs status
Some logged-in editors were briefly unable to edit or load pages last week. These errors were mainly due to the addition of new linter rules which led to caching problems. Fixes have been applied and investigations are continuing.
Editors can use the IP Information tool to get information about IP addresses. This tool is available as a Beta Feature in your preferences. The tool was not available for a few days last week, but is now working again. Thank you to Shizhao for filing the bug report. You can read about that, and 28 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Project updates
There are new features and improvements to Phabricator from the Release Engineering and Collaboration Services teams, and some volunteers, including: the search systems, the new task creation system, the login systems, the translation setup which has resulted in support for more languages (thanks to Pppery), and fixes for many edge-case errors. You can read details about these and other improvements in this summary.
There is an update on the Charts project. The team has decided which visualization library to use, which chart types to start focusing on, and where to store chart definitions.
One new wiki has been created: a Wikivoyage in Czech (voy:cs:) [4]
Hey there, welcome to the 25th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 1 March 2024. We've got a ton of wonderful editors taking back their pitchforks today. Don't worry, for they come in peace, to forcibly fix and extend existing scripts you use with sheer passion. There's so many, them forks have got what's basically their own column now! gift us with some rows before it's too late Aaron Liu (talk) 04:01, 1 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
To a lesser extent, the same goes for PrimeHunter/Search sort. I wish someone would integrate the sorts into the sort menu instead of adding 11 portlet links.
An easily configurable script to add a link to the #p-vector-user-menu-overflow portlet with a name, target, and icon. This one should be a relatively easier one. I would do it myself, but I'm too busy rotting away on Celeste (video game).
After the ＲＩＩＪ update, Aaron Liu: Watchlyst Greybar Unsin has a dismiss button that allows you to mark an item as read in one click and cycle to the next Watchlist item.
Lordseriouspig/StatusChangerImproved is just like Enterprisey's script, except you select your status from a dropdown instead of cycling through them with a button. The WMF operates out of car-centric infrastructure anyway. Shame!
Aaron Liu has created Duplinks from Evad37/duplinks-alt; his fork adds a config variable to automatically highlight duplicate links on the loading of any page where the portlet link would've appeared.
Tired of staring at a bunch of filtering text and waiting for darn filter logs to load? Msz2001/AbuseFilter analyzer can parse abuse filters into a visual syntax tree and evaluate locally on-demand!
Polygnotus/DuplicateReferences finds references with the same link and displays the number of them along with a button to add the {{duplicated citations}} tag under the references section. Being lazy has never been easier!
fastest gun on the net Ponor/really-quick-block really quick add to contribution lists three buttons awesome
Hello, I hope you're well! I was assigned as your mentee, and I have a question. I created this account because on the page for Clint Bolick (https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Clint_Bolick) a lot of the page reads in a very laudatory tone. I see that the talk page notes that someone connected to Justice Bolick, user Mr. Conservative, has edited the page. I have no issue with this, but there seems to be unnecessary information on the page (e.g., in the "Early life and education" section it mentions that, as a law student [in 1982], Bolick was in favor of Brown v. Board of Education). Is there a process for getting rid of unnecessary information? What should I think about when looking at this? I don't want to be rude about the efforts of the article writers, but I don't see how that type of statement merits inclusion in an article. --Pate Ah Choo (talk) 20:00, 2 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Pate Ah Choo: Hello! Welcome to Wikipedia! While we don't have a formal process for getting rid of unnecessary information, one of our core principles is to be bold, i.e. just attempt to remove it yourself. If you have further questions feel free to ask! Rusty🐈23:30, 2 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have answered your question on my talk page. Why you are creating Loop redirects from non-existing pages ???
You CANNOT create new Wiki pages for every word that does not have its own Wiki entry and then redirect to somewhere else. This is not the proper way to create entries. If you want to create a Wiki article create one and then link to it. Otherwise, it is better to have no existing page, so that Wiki editors are aware of the "non-existence". Else, one can create Loops by linking page to itself, which is nonsense. Danko Georgiev (talk) 09:29, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have now inserted templates for Speedy deletion of empty pages. Editors should know that the pages do not exist, oherwise they insert "blue links" (aka existing pages) which create loops onto the page itself, e.g. all the links from HRE page that were removed by me, were links from HRE to HRE via the intermediate redirects. The solution is to delete all the redirect pages. Some response elements do have standalone pages, so all those that do not have such pages better be deleted as non-existent. Danko Georgiev (talk) 09:45, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Danko Georgiev: I would say you have done the correct thing to remove the links on the HRE page itself. The redirecting page themselves are different.
Your guess about the creation of the redirects is probably not correct; I think that someone first created the redirects from types of HREs to the HRE page, because they thought it would help Wikipedia readers. Then, someone else added links to the pages, see the blue links, and think that there is an article on the page because they do not check the content in the page they link to.
2 hours after you placed the speedy deletion, an administrator declined it "Decline speedy, seems to be a plausible redirect" (here)
Dear Rusty Cat. I disagree. The problem is exactly in the improper redirects (see example at the end). There is a good coding practice in Wikipedia directly to page subsection using # in Wikilink, or you can do Masked Wiki link leading directly to Wikipage X then putting | and writing different text Y. Going via redirect is POOR coding and this is NOT the purpose of redirect to lead to completely different Wikipedia page. The SEMANTIC meaning of redirect is to avoid duplicates due to synonymous words or one word being abbreviation of another, e.g. DNA is the same as Deoxyribonucleic acid. To put redirects from specific instance of a set, to the general category of the sets is plain nonsense. I expect you appreciate what is the meaning of what I am saying and then go and delete all these nonsense redirects and de facto "empty pages". If and when somebody has the time to write a standalone article for example on GRE, then he/she can do so by creating a new GRE page. It is NOT helpful to have GRE page redirecting to HRE, because potential Wiki writers may assume that GRE does not deserve its standalone page and the job of writing about GRE has been already done. In order to understand exactly what kind of position you are defending, let me give you nice example: basically, you are saying that it is OK if a specific city like "New York" redirects to "USA". This is exactly what you were doing with your reverts of my edits. Redirect from "New York" to "USA" is NOT a plausible redirect. Similarly, redirect from GRE to HRE is NOT a plausible redirect. Thank you! Danko Georgiev (talk) 20:04, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Danko Georgiev: I understand what you are saying but I never said that linking via redirect was recommended. What I previously stated was that redirects are to help with locating a page, not linking to it.
Cases like GRE redirecting to HRE do happen, for instance Professor Rowan (List of Pokémon characters#Professor Rowan), and I don't think that everyone assumes it will never deserve its own page (WP:RTOA). Now, if New York does not have its own article and there is a list "List of United States cities" then it is ok for New York to redirect to it. But if the list does not exist then USA might be okay to redirect to.
I am writing to request the removal of the speedy deletion tag placed on the article Draft:Josh Tedeku I am currently drafting. I understand that the draft may have appeared incomplete; however, I was in the process of gathering information and working on the draft offline.
Now that this issue has been brought to my attention, I have resumed work on the article and am committed to improving it to meet Wikipedia's standards.
Please consider removing the speedy deletion tag to allow me the opportunity to complete and refine the draft.
@Afrowriter: Done, just so you know, next time create the page with at least basic info like "Josh Tedku is a British actor" so it is less likely to be deleted. Rusty🐈18:20, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Feature news
Two new parser functions will be available this week: {{#dir}} and {{#bcp47}}. These will reduce the need for Template:Dir and Template:BCP47 on Commons and allow us to drop 100 million rows from the "what links here" database. Editors at any wiki that use these templates, can help by replacing the templates with these new functions. The templates at Commons will be updated during the Hackathon at Wikimania. [5][6]
Communities can request the activation of the visual editor on entire namespaces where discussions sometimes happen (for instance Wikipedia: or Wikisource: namespaces) if they understand the known limitations. For discussions, users can already use DiscussionTools in these namespaces.
The tracking category "Pages using Timeline" has been renamed to "Pages using the EasyTimeline extension" in TranslateWiki. Wikis that have created the category locally should rename their local creation to match.
Project updates
Editors who help to organize WikiProjects and similar on-wiki collaborations, are invited to share ideas and examples of successful collaborations with the Campaigns and Programs teams. You can fill out a brief survey or share your thoughts on the talkpage. The teams are particularly looking for details about successful collaborations on non-English wikis.
The new parser is being rolled out on Wikivoyage wikis over the next few months. The English Wikivoyage and Hebrew Wikivoyage were switched to Parsoid last week. For more information, see Parsoid/Parser Unification.
The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New design previews for Translatable pages; Updates about MinT for Wiki Readers; the release of Translation dumps; and more.
Users wishing to permanently leave may now request "vanishing" via Special:GlobalVanishRequest. Processed requests will result in the user being renamed, their recovery email being removed, and their account being globally locked.
Hi Rusty, i've made some edits to pages but marked some of them as minor edits before understanding exactly what this meant, apologies, I'm fairly new to this. Any tips/guidance you can provide on what not to do would be greatly appreciated. --Maznet1 (talk) 22:09, 7 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Maznet1: I reviewed your edits; sometimes, adding links to other websites isn't always the best option. If the information in the external website could be added to the article, try to do that. Mistakes are perfectly fine when you're starting out here; I made the same mistake regarding minor edits when I was new here.
Thank you Rusty. Should I copy and paste large amounts of relevant information from other websites to Wikipedia, won't Google see this as duplicate content? Maznet1 (talk) 10:44, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I hope this message finds you well. I am reaching out to inquire about creating a Wikipedia page for my website, Cinema Guru, which I launched three months ago. As the owner and primary author of the site, I am eager to share the purpose and content of Cinema Guru with a broader audience through this platform.
Could you kindly advise whether I am eligible to create this page?Thank you for your time and consideration.
@Altamash422: I must advise you, Wikipedia is not the place for promoting or sharing your content. As it was said on your talk page, Cinema Guru does not meet the criteria for inclusion for websites. There is nothing you can do to make it meet these criteria, as one of them is being discussed in what we call "reliable sources", like a globally known newspaper.
Of course you can try to create the page, but the question then would be whether it would be retained and accepted as an article.
I want to add " Vicky Kaushal's film "Bad Newz" has Released theatrically on July 19, 2024, the film has grossed over ₹108.25 crore (US$12.4 million) worldwide. The film had a strong start with a first day collection of ₹8.3 crore and went on to earn ₹44.1 crore over its first weekend. "
@Altamash422: I would not recommend linking to your website if there are better sources. In one of the links you tried to post on Wikipedia, there was a disclaimer about how you cannot be responsible for the authenticity of the data. We don't use sources that are unreliable. What sources does your website gather information from? Rusty🐈14:16, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
At Cinema Guru, we gather information from a variety of sources, including X/Twitter, Instagram, and news articles, to ensure our content is both current and comprehensive. Each article undergoes thorough research and verification before it is published on our website, ensuring that the information we share is accurate and well-informed.My website gather information from X/Twitter, Instagram and News Article
@Altamash422: Twitter and Instagram are not considered reliable sources (even if they are the official account) on Wikipedia because they are user-generated. I would recommend you stop trying to link to your website on Wikipedia; you've already tried and failed.
Perhaps take a break from writing about your website, and go do something like fixing spelling errors.
Rusty, I gather you have volunteered to mentor Altamash422. As such, you should know that he has already been blocked once for repeatedly referencing his own blog (WP:REFSPAM). Your guidance to Altamash in this matter might need to be more sternly worded. I fear they will be blocked if they again attempt to use their own blog as a source. WikiDan61ChatMe!ReadMe!!14:57, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have a question regarding the benefits of editing, correcting, and sharing information. Could you please explain how these practices contribute to the accuracy and reliability of information? I am interested in understanding their significance in maintaining high-quality content and ensuring that information is both credible and useful to the audience.
@Altamash422: Could you be more specific in your question? Also, this does not seem like it was written by the same person above in your previous question. Are multiple people using this account, or are you using a LLM (AI) like ChatGPT? Rusty🐈17:10, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Stewards can now specify if global blocks should prevent account creation. Before this change by the Trust and Safety Product Team, all global blocks would prevent account creation. This will allow stewards to reduce the unintended side-effects of global blocks on IP addresses.
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
Featured script
Improve a script
Requested scripts
Updated scripts
Newly maintained scripts
New scripts
Two new parser functions will be available this week: 
Technical news
Arbitration