User talk:TheSandDoctor

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RfA candidate	S	O	N	S%	Ending (UTC)	Time left	Dups?	Report
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No RfXs since 17:37, 25 December 2024 (UTC).—^{cyberbot I}_{Talk to my owner:Online}

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Article policies

This user talk page might be watched by friendly talk page stalkers, which means that someone other than me might reply to your query. Their input is welcome and their help with messages that I cannot reply to quickly is appreciated.

Archives

If you feel that I have reverted an edit or issued a warning in error, please let me know. I am human, and I do make mistakes. Please don't interpret an error on my part as a personal attack on you. It's not, I promise. I ask you to simply bring it to my attention; I am always open to civil discussion. Thank you. TheSandDoctor (talk) 04:52, 30 March 2017 (UTC)]][reply]

If I see something such as a box, template, image, etc., on another user/user talk page that catches my eye, I will "borrow" it. More than likely without asking. ;) TheSandDoctor (talk) 04:52, 30 March 2017 (UTC)]][reply]

Question from Mikdotey (16:43, 17 January 2025)

Hello sir --Mikdotey (talk) 16:43, 17 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi there @Mikdotey:! Do you have any questions? TheSandDoctor ^Talk 16:09, 18 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from PadihamChels (11:35, 18 January 2025)

Hi - can I set up a page for an individual --PadihamChels (talk) 11:35, 18 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@PadihamChels: I would recommend looking at this guide for how to create your first article. Please read it in full and carefully, paying particular attention to the "The basics", "Gather sources", and "Notability – should this topic have an article?" sections, at least to start. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 16:12, 18 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-04

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

Updates for editors

Administrators can mass-delete multiple pages created by a user or IP address using Extension:Nuke. It previously only allowed deletion of pages created in the last 30 days. It can now delete pages from the last 90 days, provided it is targeting a specific user or IP address. [1]
On wikis that use the Patrolled edits feature, when the rollback feature is used to revert an unpatrolled page revision, that revision will now be marked as "manually patrolled" instead of "autopatrolled", which is more accurate. Some editors that use filters on Recent Changes may need to update their filter settings. [2]
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the Visual Editor's "Insert link" feature did not always suggest existing pages properly when an editor started typing, which has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

The Structured Discussion extension (also known as Flow) is being progressively removed from the wikis. This extension is unmaintained and causes issues. It will be replaced by DiscussionTools, which is used on any regular talk page. The last group of wikis (Catalan Wikiquote, Wikimedia Finland, Goan Konkani Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikibooks, Wikimedia Sweden) will soon be contacted. If you have questions about this process, please ping Trizek (WMF) at your wiki. [3]
The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: updates about services from the Data Platform Engineering teams, information about Codex from the Design System team, and more.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:35, 21 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from Dmiller.oct11 (04:08, 22 January 2025)

Greetings Sand Doctor, I am curious as to how to create a new page/article about an author I know. --Dmiller.oct11 (talk) 04:08, 22 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hello Dmiller.oct11. I would recommend starting by reading this guide to creating your first article. Please read it in full and carefully, paying particular attention to the "The basics", "Gather sources", and "Notability – should this topic have an article?" sections, at least to start. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 05:30, 22 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment

Your feedback is requested at Talk:Killing of Brian Thompson on a "All RFCs" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Notification of administrators without tools

	Greetings, TheSandDoctor. You are receiving this notification because you've agreed to consider endorsing prospective admin candidates identified by the process outlined at Administrators without tools. Recently, the following editor(s) received this distinction and the associated endearing title: Dclemens1971
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Question from ElectionPolitician (17:59, 25 January 2025)

Yo, I have mostly been doing wiki works on Roblox and other websites, is there anything different about it? I mostly do British & American elections --ElectionPolitician (talk) 17:59, 25 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @ElectionPolitician: I am admittedly not sure what exactly you're asking. Do you mean that you have used the mediawiki software previously? If so, from a technical level/perspective it is probably much the same here. However, I would caution that Wikipedia's policies and norms are most likely a lot different. The English Wikipedia is particularly big/stringent on notability for article subjects, for example. I would recommend starting off with this tutorial as a starting point to help you get up to speed on editing Wikipedia. If you can provide any more concrete examples of what you are referring to, I would be happy to try and help answer your questions. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 07:04, 30 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-05

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

Weekly highlight

Patrollers and admins - what information or context about edits or users could help you to make patroller or admin decisions more quickly or easily? The Wikimedia Foundation wants to hear from you to help guide its upcoming annual plan. Please consider sharing your thoughts on this and 13 other questions to shape the technical direction for next year.

Updates for editors

iOS Wikipedia App users worldwide can now access a personalized Year in Review feature, which provides insights based on their reading and editing history on Wikipedia. This project is part of a broader effort to help welcome new readers as they discover and interact with encyclopedic content.
Edit patrollers now have a new feature available that can highlight potentially problematic new pages. When a page is created with the same title as a page which was previously deleted, a tag ('Recreated') will now be added, which users can filter for in Special:RecentChanges and Special:NewPages. [4]
Later this week, there will be a new warning for editors if they attempt to create a redirect that links to another redirect (a double redirect). The feature will recommend that they link directly to the second redirect's target page. Thanks to the user SomeRandomDeveloper for this improvement. [5]
Wikimedia wikis allow WebAuthn-based second factor checks (such as hardware tokens) during login, but the feature is fragile and has very few users. The MediaWiki Platform team is temporarily disabling adding new WebAuthn keys, to avoid interfering with the rollout of SUL3 (single user login version 3). Existing keys are unaffected. [6]
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

For developers that use the MediaWiki History dumps: The Data Platform Engineering team has added a couple of new fields to these dumps, to support the Temporary Accounts initiative. If you maintain software that reads those dumps, please review your code and the updated documentation, since the order of the fields in the row will change. There will also be one field rename: in the mediawiki_user_history dump, the anonymous field will be renamed to is_anonymous. The changes will take effect with the next release of the dumps in February. [7]

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MediaWiki message delivery 22:12, 27 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from Kristomitja (02:24, 30 January 2025)

Hello how do I make a good user page? --Kristomitja (talk) 02:24, 30 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Kristomitja:! I would recommend checking out this page if you want to learn more about user pages and their use case etc; when it comes to creating them, people have put together some helpful documentation that talks about them and is a bit easier to read than the first page I linked. It should be noted that user pages are very different from articles. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 07:06, 30 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment

Your feedback is requested at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard on a "All RFCs" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Question from Draïçhïe Wëlçh (04:06, 1 February 2025)

What do you do outside of wikipedia? --Draïçhïe Wëlçh (talk) 04:06, 1 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Speedy deletion question

Hi there. You recently deleted MBC 1 (Middle Eastern and North African TV channel) under WP:G6, but I think that might have been the wrong call, because the article was at that location until January 28th. See Talk:MBC 1 (Middle East and North Africa) for the move discussion. What do you think? Thanks! - Eureka Lott 23:37, 1 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Eureka Lott: That is a good point, though it isn't a redirect currently in use in any articles. Restored. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 16:23, 2 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! Looks like the same applies to Disney XD (Polish TV channel)—see Talk:Disney XD (Poland). - Eureka Lott 17:12, 2 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Eureka Lott: Sorry for the delay. Done. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 04:42, 6 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from Squishikesh on User:Squishikesh/Mobilise (03:44, 3 February 2025)

Hi, was just creating this first page. Is there anything else you would recommend doing to get this page up? --Squishikesh (talk) 03:44, 3 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-06

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

Updates for editors

Editors who use the "Special characters" editing-toolbar menu can now see the 32 special characters you have used most recently, across editing sessions on that wiki. This change should help make it easier to find the characters you use most often. The feature is in both the 2010 wikitext editor and VisualEditor. [8]
Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor can now create sublists with correct indentation by selecting the line(s) you want to indent and then clicking the toolbar buttons.[9] You can now also insert <code> tags using a new toolbar button.[10] Thanks to user stjn for these improvements.
Help is needed to ensure the citation generator works properly on each wiki.
- (1) Administrators should update the local versions of the page MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json to include entries for preprint, standard, and dataset; Here are example diffs to replicate for 'preprint' and for 'standard' and 'dataset'.
- (2.1) If the citoid map in the citation template used for these types of references is missing, one will need to be added. (2.2) If the citoid map does exist, the TemplateData will need to be updated to include new field names. Here are example updates for 'preprint' and for 'standard' and 'dataset'. The new fields that may need to be supported are archiveID, identifier, repository, organization, repositoryLocation, committee, and versionNumber. [11]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Central Kanuri (w:knc:) [12]
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the OCR (optical character recognition) tool used for Wikisource now supports a new language, Church Slavonic. [13]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:07, 4 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – February 2025

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2025).

Administrator changes

Euryalus

CheckUser changes

Oversighter changes

Technical news

Administrators can now nuke pages created by a user or IP address from the last 90 days, up from the initial 30 days. T380846
A 'Recreated' tag will now be added to pages that were created with the same title as a page which was previously deleted and it can be used as a filter in Special:RecentChanges and Special:NewPages. T56145

Arbitration

The arbitration case Palestine-Israel articles 5 has been closed.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:29, 5 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You've got mail

Hello, TheSandDoctor. Please check your email; you've got mail!
It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template. Tyw7 (🗣️ Talk) — If (reply) then (ping me) 00:14, 6 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Never mind. Handled by another admin. Tyw7 (🗣️ Talk) — If (reply) then (ping me) 00:17, 6 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from JamaicaRafael (19:35, 7 February 2025)

I want to write an article on myself --JamaicaRafael (talk) 19:35, 7 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@JamaicaRafael: Please see Wikipedia:An article about yourself isn't necessarily a good thing. It should help explain. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 06:34, 8 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks 216.240.166.233 (talk) 14:59, 8 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from Eachléim (20:28, 7 February 2025)

Hello is there charge for inserting photos? --Eachléim (talk) 20:28, 7 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Eachléim: What do you mean exactly? If there is a charge to you for inserting photos in articles? Wikipedia/Wikimedia are free. --TheSandDoctor ^Talk 06:35, 8 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment

Your feedback is requested at Talk:Third Anglo-Afghan War on a "All RFCs" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment

Your feedback is requested at Talk:Far-right politics on a "All RFCs" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Tech News: 2025-07

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

Weekly highlight

The Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) has published a draft of their recommendations for the Wikimedia Foundation's Product and Technology department. They have recommended focusing on mobile experiences, particularly contributions. They request community feedback at the talk page by 21 February.

Updates for editors

The "Special pages" portlet link will be moved from the "Toolbox" into the "Navigation" section of the main menu's sidebar by default. This change is because the Toolbox is intended for tools relating to the current page, not tools relating to the site, so the link will be more logically and consistently located. To modify this behavior and update CSS styling, administrators can follow the instructions at T385346. [14]
As part of this year's work around improving the ways readers discover content on the wikis, the Web team will be running an experiment with a small number of readers that displays some suggestions for related or interesting articles within the search bar. Please check out the project page for more information.
Template editors who use TemplateStyles can now customize output for users with specific accessibility needs by using accessibility related media queries (prefers-reduced-motion, prefers-reduced-transparency, prefers-contrast, and forced-colors). Thanks to user Bawolff for these improvements. [15]
View all 22 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the global blocks log will now be shown directly on the Special:CentralAuth page, similarly to global locks, to simplify the workflows for stewards. [16]

Updates for technical contributors

Wikidata now supports a special language as a "default for all languages" for labels and aliases. This is to avoid excessive duplication of the same information across many languages. If your Wikidata queries use labels, you may need to update them as some existing labels are getting removed. [17]
The function getDescription was invoked on every Wiki page read and accounts for ~2.5% of a page's total load time. The calculated value will now be cached, reducing load on Wikimedia servers. [18]
As part of the RESTBase deprecation effort, the /page/related endpoint has been blocked as of February 6, 2025, and will be removed soon. This timeline was chosen to align with the deprecation schedules for older Android and iOS versions. The stable alternative is the "morelike" action API in MediaWiki, and a migration example is available. The MediaWiki Interfaces team can be contacted for any questions. [19]

In depth

The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: Updates about the "Contribute" menu; details on some of the newest language editions of Wikipedia; details on new languages supported by the MediaWiki interface; updates on the Community-defined lists feature; and more.
The latest Chart Project newsletter is available. It includes updates on the progress towards bringing better visibility into global charts usage and support for categorizing pages in the Data namespace on Commons.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:10, 11 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Your draft article, Draft:Morning Brew

Hello, TheSandDoctor. It has been over six months since you last edited the Articles for Creation submission or draft page you started, "Morning Brew".

In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material, the draft has been deleted. When you plan on working on it further and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.

Thank you for your submission to Wikipedia, and happy editing. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 06:45, 11 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from Pluralized (22:37, 12 February 2025)

Hi!

Am I supposed to edit articles that come up on my homepage or is it okay that I edit articles passively when I find something missing in an article I'm reading.

Thank you! --Pluralized (talk) 22:37, 12 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Pluralized: It's totally okay to improve articles you come across! TheSandDoctor ^Talk 00:01, 15 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from Smelly Business (18:35, 13 February 2025)

How does one *add* a banner declaring the article needs improvement? --Smelly Business (talk) 18:35, 13 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Smelly Business: The easiest way is through Twinkle. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 00:02, 15 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question from Selvam sebatharsan on Last Fair Deal Gone Down (album) (02:29, 16 February 2025)

We're tiwn --Selvam sebatharsan (talk) 02:29, 16 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-08

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

Weekly highlight

Communities using growth tools can now showcase one event on the Special:Homepage for newcomers. This feature will help newcomers to be informed about editing activities they can participate in. Administrators can create a new event to showcase at Special:CommunityConfiguration. To learn more about this feature, please read the Diff post, have a look at the documentation, or contact the Growth team.

Updates for editors

Starting next week, talk pages at these wikis – Spanish Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia – will get a new design. This change was extensively tested as a Beta feature and is the last step of talk pages improvements. [20]
You can now navigate to view a redirect page directly from its action pages, such as the history page. Previously, you were forced to first go to the redirect target. This change should help editors who work with redirects a lot. Thanks to user stjn for this improvement. [21]
When a Cite reference is reused many times, wikis currently show either numbers like "1.23" or localized alphabetic markers like "a b c" in the reference list. Previously, if there were so many reuses that the alphabetic markers were all used, an error message was displayed. As part of the work to modernize Cite customization, these errors will no longer be shown and instead the backlinks will fall back to showing numeric markers like "1.23" once the alphabetic markers are all used.
The log entries for each change to an editor's user-groups are now clearer by specifying exactly what has changed, instead of the plain before and after listings. Translators can help to update the localized versions. Thanks to user Msz2001 for these improvements.
A new filter has been added to the Special:Nuke tool, which allows administrators to mass delete pages, to enable users to filter for pages in a range of page sizes (in bytes). This allows, for example, deleting pages only of a certain size or below. [22]
Non-administrators can now check which pages are able to be deleted using the Special:Nuke tool. Thanks to user MolecularPilot for this and the previous improvements. [23]
View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed in the configuration for the AV1 video file format, which enables these files to play again. [24]

Updates for technical contributors

Parsoid Read Views is going to be rolling out to most Wiktionaries over the next few weeks, following the successful transition of Wikivoyage to Parsoid Read Views last year. For more information, see the Parsoid/Parser Unification project page. [25][26]
Developers of tools that run on-wiki should note that mw.Uri is deprecated. Tools requiring mw.Uri must explicitly declare mediawiki.Uri as a ResourceLoader dependency, and should migrate to the browser native URL API soon. [27]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 21:14, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]