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Exchange rates
Thank you for doing the heavy lifting on updating exchange rates this year. Updating them was one of the projects that I undertook on Wikivoyage because I felt that showing exchange rates from seven years ago (not exaggerating) told readers "Wikivoyage is out of date and not worth your time", which is true in some cases, but definitely not true in others. Updating them every year shows that Wikivoyage is an active, current community of editors, unlike some other travel site. Happy new year, mate! Ground Zero (talk) 20:59, 5 January 2025 (UTC)
- @Ground Zero: Hey, not a problem at all :-) – I felt the same way as you too, and figured I might as well also try update them in July going forward. Happy new year to you too! One thing, though, I did leave out some of the countries with very unstable currencies (like Lebanon, Myanmar or Zimbabwe), but I see you've updated those; thanks for going ahead and updating those (I wasn't sure what to do with them). --SHB (t | c | m) 21:51, 5 January 2025 (UTC)
- Those countries take a bit of extra digging through Google, but I find it interesting work. Some other editors are keen on adding in other currencies to the charts, like SGD, CNY, INR, but I don't think the the value added justifies the extra work involved for those who take on the task of updating, so I've taken those out in places. Ground Zero (talk) 22:06, 5 January 2025 (UTC)
- Yeah I can see the value of adding certain popular currencies used in nearby areas (such as all Nordic countries having DKK, NOK and SEK), CAD in Caribbean countries, AUD + NZD in the Pacific and in some cases, CAD, AUD and JPY for Europe and the US due to the large number of visits from both countries but that's simply a use-case of WV:TTCF and where we get the most readers (plus they're in a template so minimal work is required to update those as well).
- I'm not sure if the same can be said for CNY, THB or INR (and SGD outside Southeast Asia), especially all the more so when it adds a lot of clutter (e.g. Laos#Buy) and when we don't have nearly as much site traffic coming from those countries. --SHB (t | c | m) 22:18, 5 January 2025 (UTC)
- Those countries take a bit of extra digging through Google, but I find it interesting work. Some other editors are keen on adding in other currencies to the charts, like SGD, CNY, INR, but I don't think the the value added justifies the extra work involved for those who take on the task of updating, so I've taken those out in places. Ground Zero (talk) 22:06, 5 January 2025 (UTC)
A couple quick questions
Hello SHB2000! I had a couple questions on technical matters.
First, I noticed you are using a tool called "restorer" which seems like a useful tool to revert vandalism. I added what appeared to be the necessary changes to User:SelfieCity/common.js but I don't see any additional buttons. Is this because of user rights?
Second (not sure what talk page to raise this on as it's just a prompt) but at the top of the new article page, the text reads:
"To start, please click on one of the following links to pre-fill this article with the standard sections:
City/town • City district • Rural area • Region • National/regional park • Phrasebook • Huge airport • Dive site • Itinerary • Event • Disambiguation • Redirect"
I like this prompt, but it is missing the travel topic template. While that template is less rigid than our other templates, I think it would still be helpful to include it, as it adds several important templates to new articles, including PartofTopic, outlinetopic and pagebanner. Would it be possible to add travel topic to the above list, with a prefilled template based upon Wikivoyage:Travel topic article template? --Comment by Selfie City (talk) (contributions) 17:46, 7 January 2025 (UTC)
- @SelfieCity: For the first one, the reason why you're not seeing it in my commons.js is because I have it in my global.js (on Meta). I'd definitely recommend putting it in your global js purely due to the fact that it works globally (this is before I got global rollback + global sysop, but it still comes in handy on the occasional day that rollback also fails). Might want to copy what's in my global.js and see if that works.
- I'll try and mend the second one – iirc there's a special page in the MediaWiki namespace.
- --SHB (t | c | m) 21:48, 7 January 2025 (UTC)
Done the second too – see Special:Diff/5002236. --SHB (t | c | m) 21:52, 7 January 2025 (UTC) - Wow, that's really good! I hope it leads more people to create travel topic articles, as I think there is a lot of potential in that field. Thank you. --Comment by Selfie City (talk) (contributions) 04:00, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
- Glad to help. :) --SHB (t | c | m) 04:01, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
- oh btw, your global js is supposed to be on Meta (at m:User:SelfieCity/global.js) – sorry for not mentioning this earlier. SHB (t | c | m) 04:02, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
- Ah, I see. I've done that now. Thanks again! --Comment by Selfie City (talk) (contributions) 14:16, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
- Wow, that's really good! I hope it leads more people to create travel topic articles, as I think there is a lot of potential in that field. Thank you. --Comment by Selfie City (talk) (contributions) 04:00, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
This Month in GLAM: December 2024
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Currency tables
I understand not wanting to make the lists too long, but it's admittedly a tough call. Some countries will inevitably have longer lists than others because they are major financial hubs, or they receive a lot of visitors from some of their neighbours. The reason why I've put so many currencies for Singapore because it is a major financial and transit hub. Many people travelling from Australia or New Zealand to Europe change flights in Singapore, which is why I would consider Australian and New Zealand dollars important for Singapore. The dog2 (talk) 21:29, 10 January 2025 (UTC)
- I suppose that's true, too. I'm still wondering if there's a way to just extract the values from Wikidata (which would save time updating), though I don't know how often WD updates their lists. --SHB (t | c | m) 22:20, 10 January 2025 (UTC)
- People who work in the financial sector will not rely on Wikivoyage for exchange rates. Adding in extra currencies makes the task if updating exchange rates more onerous. It takes a lot of time. I am grateful for SHB taking on the lion's share of the work this year. I am not interested in spending time to update the Swiss franc-to-Icelandic kroner and the Swiss franc-to-Danish kroner rates in case we have a Swiss reader travelling to Iceland or the Faroe Islands. As a Canadian, I don't expect my currency to be a standard unit of exchange anywhere. It is nice to have in the Caribbean/Central America sun locations, but I do not expect to see it elsewhere. Ground Zero (talk) 22:37, 10 January 2025 (UTC)
- I would say we should only ever be willing to add a long list (long would mean generally over 6) if we ever find a way to automatically update the exchange rates. Which relies on users at Wikidata to update the rates, which I wouldn't place my bets on. SHB (t | c | m) 22:42, 10 January 2025 (UTC)
- Or is there a way to write a script to pull the exchange rates directly from XE? That you be the best, if someone can do it. Speaking of Swiss francs, it's still a major currency and I think it's useful to have for destinations in Europe, given the ease of travel around Europe. I wouldn't put Swiss francs in table for Mongolia, for instance. The dog2 (talk) 02:00, 11 January 2025 (UTC)
- I feel as though CHF would be something for dewikivoyage and frwikivoyage to handle, not us at en. --SHB (t | c | m) 09:40, 11 January 2025 (UTC)
- CHF is a major currency in bond markets, but who would travel with CHF instead of EUR? About 8 million Swiss people. That's it. There are 37 million Poles who use the złoty. Ground Zero (talk) 10:55, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
- And those 8 million Swiss people are much more likely to read the German and French Wikivoyages as opposed to the English Wikivoyages anyway. --SHB (t | c | m) 11:12, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
- My reasoning is that it would also be useful for people travelling around Europe visit Switzerland as well. There's nothing stopping an American tourist from flying into Zurich then travelling overland into Germany, France or Italy. And Zurich is also one of Europe's major air hubs, so you can connect through Zurich to get to almost any major city in Europe except Moscow. I can bet that if you go to a bank in Iceland, they are more likely to exchange Swiss francs than Polish zloty. I can tell you for a fact that in Singapore (I know it's not in Europe, but this is just to make a point that population is not the only thing that determines if a currency is major or minor), any money changer will exchange Swiss francs, but finding one that will exchange Polish zloty, Czech koruna or Swedish krona will be a challenge. The dog2 (talk) 15:32, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
- Those scenarios are possible, but not likely. The question is whether Wikivoyage wants to be a travel guide for the general reader, or a compendium of the obscure. I am not interested in spending my time updating more rarely used currencies, but if you are, then please do so next January. I don't think it's a good use of time. Ground Zero (talk) 02:00, 14 January 2025 (UTC)
- An American flying to Zurich on their way to France should get as much Swiss francs as they need in Switzerland, not any for their needs in France or Iceland. They might leave Switzerland with some francs left, but not so much that it's important for their travel budget. The same for Asians; there is little reason to get francs instead of euros for later exchanging into kronor or zloties. –LPfi (talk) 07:42, 14 January 2025 (UTC)
- Agreed. --SHB (t | c | m) 08:54, 14 January 2025 (UTC)
- An American flying to Zurich on their way to France should get as much Swiss francs as they need in Switzerland, not any for their needs in France or Iceland. They might leave Switzerland with some francs left, but not so much that it's important for their travel budget. The same for Asians; there is little reason to get francs instead of euros for later exchanging into kronor or zloties. –LPfi (talk) 07:42, 14 January 2025 (UTC)
- Those scenarios are possible, but not likely. The question is whether Wikivoyage wants to be a travel guide for the general reader, or a compendium of the obscure. I am not interested in spending my time updating more rarely used currencies, but if you are, then please do so next January. I don't think it's a good use of time. Ground Zero (talk) 02:00, 14 January 2025 (UTC)
- My reasoning is that it would also be useful for people travelling around Europe visit Switzerland as well. There's nothing stopping an American tourist from flying into Zurich then travelling overland into Germany, France or Italy. And Zurich is also one of Europe's major air hubs, so you can connect through Zurich to get to almost any major city in Europe except Moscow. I can bet that if you go to a bank in Iceland, they are more likely to exchange Swiss francs than Polish zloty. I can tell you for a fact that in Singapore (I know it's not in Europe, but this is just to make a point that population is not the only thing that determines if a currency is major or minor), any money changer will exchange Swiss francs, but finding one that will exchange Polish zloty, Czech koruna or Swedish krona will be a challenge. The dog2 (talk) 15:32, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
- And those 8 million Swiss people are much more likely to read the German and French Wikivoyages as opposed to the English Wikivoyages anyway. --SHB (t | c | m) 11:12, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
- CHF is a major currency in bond markets, but who would travel with CHF instead of EUR? About 8 million Swiss people. That's it. There are 37 million Poles who use the złoty. Ground Zero (talk) 10:55, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
- XE provides a free trial and packages starting at €799 (for using their API and some additional services). I cannot find any terms of service, but I assume that hacking your way to retrieve exchange rates automatically isn't exactly what they'd like you to do. They might of course allow our use out of goodwill, but I think we should have explicit permission before running a script automatically. Their €799 "lite" package offers daily updates, much more than monthly, which I think should be our target, so we would probably affect neither their server load nor their business. Coding the script should be easy, at least with access to their API. –LPfi (talk) 10:38, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
- Not sure who would be willing to pay that much money for what is essentially a volunteer commitment either tbh. SHB (t | c | m) 10:46, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
- Of course not, and that price is for internal use. WMF could pay if they feel like (no big money for them), but I quoted it because it tells something about their business. The expense for them allowing us to use their API is not about missed income, but about having a lawyer check the deal. –LPfi (talk) 12:39, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
- Definitely agreed there. SHB (t | c | m) 12:41, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
- Of course not, and that price is for internal use. WMF could pay if they feel like (no big money for them), but I quoted it because it tells something about their business. The expense for them allowing us to use their API is not about missed income, but about having a lawyer check the deal. –LPfi (talk) 12:39, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
- Not sure who would be willing to pay that much money for what is essentially a volunteer commitment either tbh. SHB (t | c | m) 10:46, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
- I feel as though CHF would be something for dewikivoyage and frwikivoyage to handle, not us at en. --SHB (t | c | m) 09:40, 11 January 2025 (UTC)
- Or is there a way to write a script to pull the exchange rates directly from XE? That you be the best, if someone can do it. Speaking of Swiss francs, it's still a major currency and I think it's useful to have for destinations in Europe, given the ease of travel around Europe. I wouldn't put Swiss francs in table for Mongolia, for instance. The dog2 (talk) 02:00, 11 January 2025 (UTC)
- I would say we should only ever be willing to add a long list (long would mean generally over 6) if we ever find a way to automatically update the exchange rates. Which relies on users at Wikidata to update the rates, which I wouldn't place my bets on. SHB (t | c | m) 22:42, 10 January 2025 (UTC)
- People who work in the financial sector will not rely on Wikivoyage for exchange rates. Adding in extra currencies makes the task if updating exchange rates more onerous. It takes a lot of time. I am grateful for SHB taking on the lion's share of the work this year. I am not interested in spending time to update the Swiss franc-to-Icelandic kroner and the Swiss franc-to-Danish kroner rates in case we have a Swiss reader travelling to Iceland or the Faroe Islands. As a Canadian, I don't expect my currency to be a standard unit of exchange anywhere. It is nice to have in the Caribbean/Central America sun locations, but I do not expect to see it elsewhere. Ground Zero (talk) 22:37, 10 January 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-03
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- The Single User Login system is being updated over the next few months. This is the system which allows users to fill out the login form on one Wikimedia site and get logged in on all others at the same time. It needs to be updated because of the ways that browsers are increasingly restricting cross-domain cookies. To accommodate these restrictions, login and account creation pages will move to a central domain, but it will still appear to the user as if they are on the originating wiki. The updated code will be enabled this week for users on test wikis. This change is planned to roll out to all users during February and March. See the SUL3 project page for more details and a timeline.
Updates for editors
- On wikis with PageAssessments installed, you can now filter search results to pages in a given WikiProject by using the
inproject:keyword. (These wikis: Arabic Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage, French Wikipedia, Hungarian Wikipedia, Nepali Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia) - One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Tigre (
w:tig:) 
View all 35 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a bug with updating a user's edit-count after making a rollback edit, which is now fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. Starting the week of January 13, we will begin rerouting some page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newer MediaWiki REST API endpoints for all wiki projects. This change was previously available on testwiki and should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints may raise issues directly to the MediaWiki Interfaces Team in Phabricator if they arise.- Toolforge tool maintainers can now share their feedback on Toolforge UI, an initiative to provide a web platform that allows creating and managing Toolforge tools through a graphic interface, in addition to existing command-line workflows. This project aims to streamline active maintainers’ tasks, as well as make registration and deployment processes more accessible for new tool creators. The initiative is still at a very early stage, and the Cloud Services team is in the process of collecting feedback from the Toolforge community to help shape the solution to their needs. Read more and share your thoughts about Toolforge UI.
- For tool and library developers who use the OAuth system: The identity endpoint used for OAuth 1 and OAuth 2 returned a JSON object with an integer in its
subfield, which was incorrect (the field must always be a string). This has been fixed; the fix will be deployed to Wikimedia wikis on the week of January 13. - Many wikis currently use Cite CSS to render custom footnote markers in Parsoid output. Starting January 20 these rules will be disabled, but the developers ask you to not clean up your MediaWiki:Common.css until February 20 to avoid issues during the migration. Your wikis might experience some small changes to footnote markers in Visual Editor and when using experimental Parsoid read mode, but if there are changes these are expected to bring the rendering in line with the legacy parser output.
Meetings and events
- The next meeting in the series of Wikimedia Foundation Community Conversations with the Wikimedia Commons community will take place on January 15 at 8:00 UTC and at 16:00 UTC. The topic of this call is defining the priorities in tool investment for Commons. Contributors from all wikis, especially users who are maintaining tools for Commons, are welcome to attend.
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The Signpost: 15 January 2025
- From the editors: Looking back, looking forward
- Traffic report: The most viewed articles of 2024
- In the media: Will you be targeted?
- Technology report: New Calculator template brings interactivity at last
- Opinion: Reflections one score hence
- Serendipity: What we've left behind, and where we want to go next
- Arbitration report: Analyzing commonalities of some contentious topics
- Humour: How to make friends on Wikipedia
Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 07:58, 15 January 2025 (UTC)
My examples
If you don't like my examples, give ones you're sure are better. Just deleting stuff is not helpful. What I'm trying to get away from is the idea that suburbs are full of boring, let alone chain restaurants. That's true in some places, but it's not accurate in many other places. Ikan Kekek (talk) 00:16, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
- @Ikan Kekek: I reverted my edit for now (and looking back, my apologies for deleting it without substituting for a better text), but how many examples are we able to give to be able to give a fully accurate representation? The issue with the suburbs article right now is that it makes no attempt to differentiate between low-density single family home suburbs, high-density suburbs, streetcar/tramway suburbs (you see this a lot more in Toronto or Melbourne), medium-density suburbs, mixed use suburbs – and the availability of how good a place is to eat really depends on which type of suburb it is. High- and medium-density suburbs and mixed use developments will have way more nicer options to eat, streetcar/tramway suburbs are a mixed bag, while the stereotype only applies to low-density or single family home suburbs (and even that greatly varies by place). And I fully agree with what you said at Special:GoToComment/c-Ikan_Kekek-20250115232800-Yvwv-20250115224100 – it isn't really a helpful article and definitely no more than an article on cities (or parks). --SHB (t | c | m) 00:26, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
- Right, I agree with you. It's impossible to give a fully accurate representation. The best we can do is give examples. All of your points are well taken. Ikan Kekek (talk) 00:32, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
- Yeah, I think you're right, the best we can do is give examples. I suppose it wouldn't exactly violate Wikivoyage:Avoid long lists if we gave one or two examples from each continent? SHB (t | c | m) 00:35, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
- No, surely not, or even more. Ikan Kekek (talk) 01:06, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
- Yeah, I think you're right, the best we can do is give examples. I suppose it wouldn't exactly violate Wikivoyage:Avoid long lists if we gave one or two examples from each continent? SHB (t | c | m) 00:35, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
- Right, I agree with you. It's impossible to give a fully accurate representation. The best we can do is give examples. All of your points are well taken. Ikan Kekek (talk) 00:32, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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Deletion request
Hello, can you delete my sandbox page, please? Thanks. Veracious (talk) 03:24, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
- Done --Comment by Selfie City (talk) (contributions) 03:27, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
- Was going to do it but SelfieCity beat me to it. Cheers, SelfieCity :). --SHB (t | c | m) 03:27, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
- Ah, ok. Thank you to both of you. ^^ Veracious (talk) 04:59, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
SS
To me, this abbreviation means only one thing: the Nazi SS. How many people are going to see that and think "South Sudan"? I would really like to delete that redirect. Ikan Kekek (talk) 11:15, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
- I suppose feel free to delete the redirect as I don't feel particularly strongly about it, but I'm very much a fan of having redirects for ISO 3166 codes since those are the only thing you see on dynamic maps when zoomed out for smaller countries (example) and zooming into maps is not particularly easy on mobile. SHB (t | c | m) 12:19, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
- Maybe we should get another opinion. Ikan Kekek (talk) 18:58, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
- If we have redirects for all ISO 3166 codes, then deleting this one seems a bit overkill-PC. I suppose it is seen by few but those writing "SS" (or "ss") in the search box, and those that see it can quickly see where the link leads. Would they think it is some vandalism trying to associate the country with Nazis? In that case the mistake was done by assigning the code, not by us linking it. The link isn't relevant for those that think "South Sudan" when they see SS (they can just use the country name), but – apparently – those that see SS and have no idea what country those letters are about. LPfi (talk) 20:18, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
- Yeah if anything I think the International Organization for Standardardization could've picked a better code. --SHB (t | c | m) 21:28, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
- The problem is that by using that code, Wikivoyage co-owns that problem. We can't just blame the International Organization for Standardardization for our choice to use that code. Ikan Kekek (talk) 05:10, 28 January 2025 (UTC)
- Maybe, but these are the codes that appear on our dynamic maps which isn't really in our control to change. --SHB (t | c | m) 05:20, 28 January 2025 (UTC)
- The ISO 3166 code also appears at "xx" in www.webpage.xx and in xx.wikipedia.com. FredTC (talk) 05:27, 28 January 2025 (UTC)
- That would be a good reason to use a static map for South Sudan. Ikan Kekek (talk) 05:57, 28 January 2025 (UTC)
- Maybe, but these are the codes that appear on our dynamic maps which isn't really in our control to change. --SHB (t | c | m) 05:20, 28 January 2025 (UTC)
- The problem is that by using that code, Wikivoyage co-owns that problem. We can't just blame the International Organization for Standardardization for our choice to use that code. Ikan Kekek (talk) 05:10, 28 January 2025 (UTC)
- Yeah if anything I think the International Organization for Standardardization could've picked a better code. --SHB (t | c | m) 21:28, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
- If we have redirects for all ISO 3166 codes, then deleting this one seems a bit overkill-PC. I suppose it is seen by few but those writing "SS" (or "ss") in the search box, and those that see it can quickly see where the link leads. Would they think it is some vandalism trying to associate the country with Nazis? In that case the mistake was done by assigning the code, not by us linking it. The link isn't relevant for those that think "South Sudan" when they see SS (they can just use the country name), but – apparently – those that see SS and have no idea what country those letters are about. LPfi (talk) 20:18, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
- Maybe we should get another opinion. Ikan Kekek (talk) 18:58, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
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. - 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.
- 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.
- 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_historydump, theanonymousfield will be renamed tois_anonymous. The changes will take effect with the next release of the dumps in February.
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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.
- 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. You can now also insert
<code>tags using a new toolbar button. 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.jsonto include entries forpreprint,standard, anddataset; 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, andversionNumber.
- (1) Administrators should update the local versions of the page
- One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Central Kanuri (
w:knc:) - 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.
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This Month in Education: January 2025
This Month in Education
Volume 14 • Issue 1 • January 2025
In This Issue
- Advancing Education Pillar in Kosovo: 2024 Journey
- Auckland Museum Wikipedia Students Making Progress
- Celebrating 10 Years of Wiki Education
- Empowering Multilingual Students: Expanding Wikipedia Through Collaboration of foreign languages faculty's students of the University of Tehran
- Ensuring accurate and authentic information with 1Lib1Ref Campaign in Anambra
- Experiences of Wikipedia in the classroom with a gender perspective in Monterrey
- Fine Arts University Students exploring Wikipedia in Tirana, Albania
- Lviv hosted Ukraine’s first student photo walk for Wikipedia
- Many new trained volunteers and new articles at the end of the year in Macedonia
- Wikimedia and Scientific Events in Brazil
- Wiki Workshop- Call for Contributions
The Signpost: 7 February 2025
- Recent research: GPT-4 writes better edit summaries than human Wikipedians
- News and notes: Let's talk!
- Opinion: Fathoms Below, but over the moon
- Community view: 24th Wikipedia Day in New York City
- Arbitration report: Palestine-Israel articles 5 has closed
- Traffic report: A wild drive
Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 02:00, 7 February 2025 (UTC)
This Month in GLAM: January 2025
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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.
- 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, andforced-colors). Thanks to user Bawolff for these improvements. - 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.
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.
- The function
getDescriptionwas 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. - As part of the RESTBase deprecation effort, the
/page/relatedendpoint 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.
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.
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I wrote on that article's talk page
- I think this could now be promoted Usable->Guide, but as the main author I'm reluctant to do that myself.
You replied
- Haven't read the article yet but I definitely think there's FTT potential for an article like this.
Would you care to have a look & maybe tag it guide? Then maybe nominate for FTT? Pashley (talk) 21:42, 14 February 2025 (UTC)
- @Pashley: I'm no medical expert, but I think what needs to be said has been said, ensuring there is no duplicated sections between this, water and arid region safety and thus I've upgraded it to guide. I think you're good to go for nominating it for FTT. //shb (t | c | m) 21:50, 14 February 2025 (UTC)
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:Homepagefor newcomers. This feature will help newcomers to be informed about editing activities they can participate in. Administrators can create a new event to showcase atSpecial: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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
- Developers of tools that run on-wiki should note that
mw.Uriis deprecated. Tools requiringmw.Urimust explicitly declaremediawiki.Urias a ResourceLoader dependency, and should migrate to the browser nativeURLAPI soon.
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Tech News: 2025-09
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- Administrators can now customize how the Babel feature creates categories using Special:CommunityConfiguration/Babel. They can rename language categories, choose whether they should be auto-created, and adjust other settings.
- The wikimedia.org portal has been updated – and is receiving some ongoing improvements – to modernize and improve the accessibility of our portal pages. It now has better support for mobile layouts, updated wording and links, and better language support. Additionally, all of the Wikimedia project portals, such as wikibooks.org, now support dark mode when a reader is using that system setting.
- One new wiki has been created: a Wiktionary in Santali (
wikt:sat:) - View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that prevented clicking on search results in the web-interface for some Firefox for Android phone configurations.
Meetings and events
- The next Language Community Meeting is happening soon, February 28th at 14:00 UTC. This week's meeting will cover: highlights and technical updates on keyboard and tools for the Sámi languages, Translatewiki.net contributions from the Bahasa Lampung community in Indonesia, and technical Q&A. If you'd like to join, simply sign up on the wiki page.
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The Signpost: 27 February 2025
- Serendipity: Guinea-Bissau Heritage from Commons to the World
- Technology report: Hear that? The wikis go silent twice a year
- In the media: The end of the world
- Recent research: What's known about how readers navigate Wikipedia; Italian Wikipedia hardest to read
- Opinion: Sennecaster's RfA debriefing
- Tips and tricks: One year after this article is posted, will every single article on Wikipedia have a short description?
- Community view: Open letter from French Wikipedians says "no" to intimidation of volunteer contributors
- Traffic report: Temporary scars, February stars
Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 10:32, 27 February 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-10
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- All logged-in editors using the mobile view can now edit a full page. The "Edit full page" link is accessible from the "More" menu in the toolbar. This was previously only available to editors using the Advanced mobile contributions setting.
- Interface administrators can now help to remove the deprecated Cite CSS code matching "
mw-ref" from their local MediaWiki:Common.css. The list of wikis in need of cleanup, and the code to remove, can be found with this global search and in this example, and you can learn more about how to help on the CSS migration project page. The Cite footnote markers ("[1]") are now rendered by Parsoid, and the deprecated CSS is no longer needed. The CSS for backlinks ("mw:referencedBy") should remain in place for now. This cleanup is expected to cause no visible changes for readers. Please help to remove this code before March 20, after which the development team will do it for you. - When editors embed a file (e.g.
[[File:MediaWiki.png]]) on a page that is protected with cascading protection, the software will no longer restrict edits to the file description page, only to new file uploads. In contrast, transcluding a file description page (e.g.{{:File:MediaWiki.png}}) will now restrict edits to the page. - When editors revert a file to an earlier version it will now require the same permissions as ordinarily uploading a new version of the file. The software now checks for 'reupload' or 'reupload-own' rights, and respects cascading protection.
- When administrators are listing pages for deletion with the Nuke tool, they can now also list associated talk pages and redirects for deletion, alongside pages created by the target, rather than needing to manually delete these pages afterwards.
- The previously noted update to Single User Login, which will accommodate browser restrictions on cross-domain cookies by moving login and account creation to a central domain, will now roll out to all users during March and April. The team plans to enable it for all new account creation on Group0 wikis this week. See the SUL3 project page for more details and an updated timeline.
- Since last week there has been a bug that shows some interface icons as black squares until the page has fully loaded. It will be fixed this week.
- One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Sylheti (
w:syl:) - View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed with loading images in very old versions of the Firefox browser on mobile.
Updates for technical contributors
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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Growth Newsletter #33
A quarterly update from the Growth team on our work to improve the new editor experience.
This year, the Growth team is exploring ways to help more new account holders start editing—and do so constructively, meaning their edits are not reverted. Our latest experiments include:
- Gradual rollout of "Add a Link" at English Wikipedia – We are gradually introducing the "Add a Link" structured task to newcomers at English Wikipedia (T386029). This serves as a natural A/B test to measure its impact on activation, retention, and revert rates (T382603). Previous experiments on pilot wikis showed that "Add a Link" increases newcomer participation, particularly by helping them make constructive (non-reverted) edits.
- Testing in-article suggestions for first-time editors – Many new account holders want to contribute but don’t know where to start. To help, we’re piloting a feature that surfaces structured task suggestions directly in an article’s read view for brand-new editors (T385343). These suggestions will appear for logged-in users with no edits, providing a clear, simple way to begin contributing that is surfaced while they read.
Newcomers often struggle to find their place in Wikipedia’s collaborative environment. While experienced editors easily discover events like edit-a-thons and writing campaigns, newcomers often miss out.
- To bridge this gap, we launched the Community Updates module for the Newcomer Homepage. This module is disabled by default, allowing Community Admins to decide how (or if) to use it.
- If your community hosts events, consider setting up a Community Update to engage and welcome newcomers! Learn more on Diff. To configure, visit Special:CommunityConfiguration.
Community Configuration is now available across all wikis, including non-Wikipedia projects (T383910). Community Configuration allows admins to customize various features like Growth features and Automoderator for their communities, and more recently the Babel extension now allows admins to modify configuration:
- Babel customization – Admins can now configure Babel settings (T374348), including category naming, automatic category creation, and more. See an example on Wikimedia Commons.
- Upcoming configurable features – Projects exploring community configuration options include: Incident Reporting System (T374113) and Cite backlinks (T378807).
Mentors play a key role in guiding new editors. If you’re interested in mentoring, or turning mentorship on at your wiki, check out the Mentorship FAQ
- Starting February 17, 100% of new accounts at English Wikipedia will be assigned a mentor (T384505).
- At Spanish Wikipedia, on 50% of newcomers get a mentor. Experienced contributors are encouraged to join mentorship so that Spanish Wikipedia can provide a mentor to all new users.
Looking Ahead
In the coming months, we will continue balancing maintenance work—such as deprecating EditGrowth Config (T367574) and migrating Statslib (T359352) — with user-facing improvements that support new editors and foster the next generation of contributors.
Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
19:00, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
Itineraries talk archive
I see that you archived old discussions on Wikivoyage talk:Itineraries. However, there are only the archives Wikivoyage talk:Itineraries/Archive 2004–2007 and Wikivoyage talk:Itineraries/Archive 2010–2014, while also content from 2015–2023 has been removed. It seems some stuff from 2015 is retained, while there is a cut-off in the middle of a comment of mine from August 2015, with everything later removed. Could you check what happened? –LPfi (talk) 06:49, 9 March 2025 (UTC)
- Sure, I'll check on what exactly happened. //shb (t | c | m) 06:51, 9 March 2025 (UTC)
- I see what now happened – seems I accidentally removed a good chunk of discussions when adding the archive box. Nonetheless I've restored them and now the page is fixed. Thanks for picking that up, LPfi. //shb (t | c | m) 06:57, 9 March 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks. –LPfi (talk) 13:34, 9 March 2025 (UTC)
- I see what now happened – seems I accidentally removed a good chunk of discussions when adding the archive box. Nonetheless I've restored them and now the page is fixed. Thanks for picking that up, LPfi. //shb (t | c | m) 06:57, 9 March 2025 (UTC)
This Month in GLAM: February 2025
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Tech News: 2025-11
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- Editors who use password managers at multiple wikis may notice changes in the future. The way that our wikis provide information to password managers about reusing passwords across domains has recently been updated, so some password managers might now offer you login credentials that you saved for a different Wikimedia site. Some password managers already did this, and are now doing it for more Wikimedia domains. This is part of the SUL3 project which aims to improve how our unified login works, and to keep it compatible with ongoing changes to the web-browsers we use.
- The Wikipedia Apps Team is inviting interested users to help improve Wikipedia’s offline and limited internet use. After discussions in Afrika Baraza and the last ESEAP call, key challenges like search, editing, and offline access are being explored, with upcoming focus groups to dive deeper into these topics. All languages are welcome, and interpretation will be available. Want to share your thoughts? Join the discussion or email [email protected]!
- All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 19. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
- View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: the launch of the Community Updates module, the most recent changes in Community Configuration, and the upcoming test of in-article suggestions for first-time editors.
- An old API that was previously used in the Android Wikipedia app is being removed at the end of March. There are no current software uses, but users of the app with a version that is older than 6 months by the time of removal (2025-03-31), will no longer have access to the Suggested Edits feature, until they update their app. You can read more details about this change.
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This Month in Education: February 2025
This Month in Education
Volume 14 • Issue 2 • February 2025
In This Issue
- Activities series at the Shefit Hekali school in Peqin, Albania
- Wikimedia Brazil has formed a partnership with a public policy research institute
- Preserving Heritage: Tuluvas Aati Month Educational Wikimedia Programs
- Reflecting on our Past: Farewell to the Auckland Museum Summer Students
- Successful Conclusion of the Second Phase of "Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom" in Yemen
- Wiki Workshop in Mitrovica
- Wikimedia MKD' Education: Lots of new trained users, lots of new articles
- Wikimedia Serbia receives accreditation from the National Library of Serbia for the Wiki Senior seminar
Tech News: 2025-12
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- Twice a year, around the equinoxes, the Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team performs a datacenter server switchover, redirecting all traffic from one primary server to its backup. This provides reliability in case of a crisis, as we can always fall back on the other datacenter. Thanks to the Listen to Wikipedia tool, you can hear the switchover take place: Before it begins, you'll hear the steady stream of edits; Then, as the system enters a brief read-only phase, the sound stops for a couple of minutes, before resuming after the switchover. You can read more about the background and details of this process on the Diff blog. If you want to keep an ear out for the next server switchover, listen to the wikis on March 19 at 14:00 UTC.
Updates for editors
- The improved Content Translation tool dashboard is now available in 10 Wikipedias and will be available for all Wikipedias soon. With the unified dashboard, desktop users can now: Translate new sections of an article; Discover and access topic-based article suggestion filters (initially available only for mobile device users); Discover and access the Community-defined lists filter, also known as "Collections", from wiki-projects and campaigns.
- On Wikimedia Commons, a new system to select the appropriate file categories has been introduced: if a category has one or more subcategories, users will be able to click on an arrow that will open the subcategories directly within the form, and choose the correct one. The parent category name will always be shown on top, and it will always be possible to come back to it. This should decrease the amount of work for volunteers in fixing/creating new categories. The change is also available on mobile. These changes are part of planned improvements to the UploadWizard.
- The Community Tech team is seeking wikis to join a pilot for the Multiblocks feature and a refreshed Special:Block page in late March. Multiblocks enables administrators to impose multiple different types of blocks on the same user at the same time. If you are an admin or steward and would like us to discuss joining the pilot with your community, please leave a message on the project talk page.
- Starting March 25, the Editing team will test a new feature for Edit Check at 12 Wikipedias: Multi-Check. Half of the newcomers on these wikis will see all Reference Checks during their edit session, while the other half will continue seeing only one. The goal of this test is to see if users are confused or discouraged when shown multiple Reference Checks (when relevant) within a single editing session. At these wikis, the tags used on edits that show References Check will be simplified, as multiple tags could be shown within a single edit. Changes to the tags are documented on Phabricator.
- The Global reminder bot, which is a service for notifying users that their temporary user-rights are about to expire, now supports using the localized name of the user-rights group in the message heading. Translators can see the listing of existing translations and documentation to check if their language needs updating or creation.
- The GlobalPreferences gender setting, which is used for how the software should refer to you in interface messages, now works as expected by overriding the local defaults.
- View all 26 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the Wikipedia App for Android had a bug fixed for when a user is browsing and searching in multiple languages.
Updates for technical contributors
- Later this week, the way that Codex styles are loaded will be changing. There is a small risk that this may result in unstyled interface message boxes on certain pages. User generated content (e.g. templates) is not impacted. Gadgets may be impacted. If you see any issues please report them. See the linked task for details, screenshots, and documentation on how to fix any affected gadgets.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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The Signpost: 22 March 2025
- From the editor: Hanami
- News and notes: Deeper look at takedowns targeting Wikipedia
- In the media: The good, the bad, and the unusual
- Recent research: Explaining the disappointing history of Flagged Revisions; and what's the impact of ChatGPT on Wikipedia so far?
- Traffic report: All the world's a stage, we are merely players...
- Gallery: WikiPortraits rule!
- Essay: Unusual biographical images
- Obituary: Rest in peace
Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 03:12, 22 March 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-13
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking your feedback on the drafts of the objectives and key results that will shape the Foundation's Product and Technology priorities for the next fiscal year (starting in July). The objectives are broad high-level areas, and the key-results are measurable ways to track the success of their objectives. Please share your feedback on the talkpage, in any language, ideally before the end of April.
Updates for editors
- The CampaignEvents extension will be released to multiple wikis (see deployment plan for details) in April 2025, and the team has begun the process of engaging communities on the identified wikis. The extension provides tools to organize, manage, and promote collaborative activities (like events, edit-a-thons, and WikiProjects) on the wikis. The extension has three tools: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation Lists. It is currently on 13 Wikipedias, including English Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia, as well as Wikidata. Questions or requests can be directed to the extension talk page or in Phabricator (with #campaigns-product-team tag).
- Starting the week of March 31st, wikis will be able to set which user groups can view private registrants in Event Registration, as part of the CampaignEvents extension. By default, event organizers and the local wiki admins will be able to see private registrants. This is a change from the current behavior, in which only event organizers can see private registrants. Wikis can change the default setup by requesting a configuration change in Phabricator (and adding the #campaigns-product-team tag). Participants of past events can cancel their registration at any time.
- Administrators at wikis that have a customized MediaWiki:Sidebar should check that it contains an entry for the Special pages listing. If it does not, they should add it using
* specialpages-url|specialpages. Wikis with a default sidebar will see the link moved from the page toolbox into the sidebar menu in April. - The Minerva skin (mobile web) combines both Notice and Alert notifications within the bell icon (
). There was a long-standing bug where an indication for new notifications was only shown if you had unseen Alerts. This bug is now fixed. In the future, Minerva users will notice a counter atop the bell icon when you have 1 or more unseen Notices and/or Alerts. - View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- VisualEditor has introduced a new client-side hook for developers to use when integrating with the VisualEditor target lifecycle. This hook should replace the existing lifecycle-related hooks, and be more consistent between different platforms. In addition, the new hook will apply to uses of VisualEditor outside of just full article editing, allowing gadgets to interact with the editor in DiscussionTools as well. The Editing Team intends to deprecate and eventually remove the old lifecycle hooks, so any use cases that this new hook does not cover would be of interest to them and can be shared in the task.
- Developers who use the
mw.ApiJavaScript library, can now identify the tool using it with theuserAgentparameter:var api = new mw.Api( { userAgent: 'GadgetNameHere/1.0.1' } );. If you maintain a gadget or user script, please set a user agent, because it helps with library and server maintenance and with differentiating between legitimate and illegitimate traffic. - Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Edits in Nenmara Article
Thank you for your edits in Nenmara Article. I have some questions. Why you removed this line * Don't tease and feed wildlife. I am just curious. My point is Nenmara is a town near to forest. Also tourist visiting the near by places are also near to the forest. So this must be a warning kind of thing. Just curious to know the reason behind the edit. Regards, Ranjithsiji (talk) 04:49, 25 March 2025 (UTC)
- Hi, Ranjithsiji, it's because not feeding wildlife is not something unique to Nenmara; it's bad anywhere you go. Animals around the world often get aggressive and lose their natural hunting skills the more you feed them, and I don't think it needs to be repeated per Wikivoyage:No advice from Captain Obvious. //shb (t | c | m) 05:31, 25 March 2025 (UTC)
- I added a sentence to Dangerous animals#Understand. The article could be linked from India#Stay safe (and is from Stay safe#See also). I assume many travellers to India are more exposed to wildlife than most travellers to, say, Europe, and some really need advice from our beloved captain – but the advice doesn't need to be repeated for every town in India. –LPfi (talk) 12:10, 25 March 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-14
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- The Editing team is working on a new Edit check: Peacock check. This check's goal is to identify non-neutral terms while a user is editing a wikipage, so that they can be informed that their edit should perhaps be changed before they publish it. This project is at the early stages, and the team is looking for communities' input: in this Phabricator task, they are gathering on-wiki policies, templates used to tag non-neutral articles, and the terms (jargon and keywords) used in edit summaries for the languages they are currently researching. You can participate by editing the table on Phabricator, commenting on the task, or directly messaging Trizek (WMF).
- Single User Login has now been updated on all wikis to move login and account creation to a central domain. This makes user login compatible with browser restrictions on cross-domain cookies, which have prevented users of some browsers from staying logged in.
- View all 35 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Starting on March 31st, the MediaWiki Interfaces team will begin a limited release of generated OpenAPI specs and a SwaggerUI-based sandbox experience for MediaWiki REST APIs. They invite developers from a limited group of non-English Wikipedia communities (Arabic, German, French, Hebrew, Interlingua, Dutch, Chinese) to review the documentation and experiment with the sandbox in their preferred language. In addition to these specific Wikipedia projects, the sandbox and OpenAPI spec will be available on the on the test wiki REST Sandbox special page for developers with English as their preferred language. During the preview period, the MediaWiki Interfaces Team also invites developers to share feedback about your experience. The preview will last for approximately 2 weeks, after which the sandbox and OpenAPI specs will be made available across all wiki projects.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- Sometimes a small, one line code change can have great significance: in this case, it means that for the first time in years we're able to run all of the stack serving maps.wikimedia.org - a host dedicated to serving our wikis and their multi-lingual maps needs - from a single core datacenter, something we test every time we perform a datacenter switchover. This is important because it means that in case one of our datacenters is affected by a catastrophe, we'll still be able to serve the site. This change is the result of extensive work by two developers on porting the last component of the maps stack over to kubernetes, where we can allocate resources more efficiently than before, thus we're able to withstand more traffic in a single datacenter. This work involved a lot of complicated steps because this software, and the software libraries it uses, required many long overdue upgrades. This type of work makes the Wikimedia infrastructure more sustainable.
Meetings and events
- MediaWiki Users and Developers Workshop Spring 2025 is happening in Sandusky, USA, and online, from 14–16 May 2025. The workshop will feature discussions around the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies in different industries and will inspire and onboard new users. Registration and presentation signup is now available at the workshop's website.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
April 2025 CEE Hub Newsletter Now Available
Good morning,
The latest edition of the CEE Hub Newsletter is now available, bringing you updates from across the region and beyond. This issue features new initiatives, event highlights, and opportunities for engagement.
In This Issue:
- Meet Karolina Gruszczyk – Introducing the new Community & Communications Specialist at CEE Hub, working to strengthen communication and support communities across the region.
- International Wikimedia Updates – A look at key global events and discussions shaping the movement in 2025.
- Next CEE Catch-up (April 23, 2025) – A Foundation Annual Planning Workshop focused on global trends affecting Wikimedia communities.
- Wiki Loves Food in Latvia – The Latvian Wikipedia community successfully revives engagement with a culinary writing competition.
- Czechoslovakia 2024 Challenge – Over 210 articles and 498 photographs contributed to document history, culture, and everyday life.
- WikiGap Tirana 2025 – The 8th edition of this initiative continues efforts to improve the representation of women on Albanian Wikipedia.
- Wikipedia for 55+ in Ukraine – A new program supporting senior citizens in becoming active Wikipedia editors.
- Cultural Heritage Under Threat – A photography exhibition in St. Petersburg showcasing endangered cultural heritage sites.
- Open Calls & Consultations – Opportunities for community members to share their perspectives and participate in movement-wide discussions.
Read the full newsletter here. Happy reading!
On behalf of the CEE Newsletter team,
Tech News: 2025-15
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- From now on, interface admins and centralnotice admins are technically required to enable two-factor authentication before they can use their privileges. In the future this might be expanded to more groups with advanced user-rights.
- View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- The Design System Team is preparing to release the next major version of Codex (v2.0.0) on April 29. Editors and developers who use CSS from Codex should see the 2.0 overview documentation, which includes guidance related to a few of the breaking changes such as
font-size,line-height, andsize-icon. - The results of the Developer Satisfaction Survey (2025) are now available. Thank you to all participants. These results help the Foundation decide what to work on next and to review what they recently worked on.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- The 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon will take place in Istanbul, Turkey, between 2–4 May. Registration for attending the in-person event will close on 13 April. Before registering, please note the potential need for a visa or e-visa to enter the country.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
This Month in GLAM: March 2025
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The Signpost: 9 April 2025
- Opinion: Crawlers, hogs and gorillas
- Debriefing: Giraffer's RfA debriefing
- Obituary: RHaworth, TomCat4680 and PawełMM
- Traffic report: Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho, off to report we go...
- News from Diff: Strengthening Wikipedia’s neutral point of view
- Comix: Thirteen
Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 18:26, 9 April 2025 (UTC)
This Month in Education: March 2025
This Month in Education
Volume 14 • Issue 3 • March 2025
In This Issue
- A Whole New World: Research Findings on New Editor Integration in Serbian Wikipedia
- Bolivia: a new round of Leamos Wikipedia begins in Bolivia
- Faculty of Social Sciences Workshop in Albania
- Lots of contributions and trainings as part of Wikimedia MKD's Education Programme
- Wikimedia organized multiple events of science and education in Brazil during the month of March
Tech News: 2025-16
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- Later this week, the default thumbnail size will be increased from 220px to 250px. This changes how pages are shown in all wikis and has been requested by some communities for many years, but wasn't previously possible due to technical limitations.
- File thumbnails are now stored in discrete sizes. If a page specifies a thumbnail size that's not among the standard sizes (20, 40, 60, 120, 250, 330, 500, 960), then MediaWiki will pick the closest larger thumbnail size but will tell the browser to downscale it to the requested size. In these cases, nothing will change visually but users might load slightly larger images. If it doesn't matter which thumbnail size is used in a page, please pick one of the standard sizes to avoid the extra in-browser down-scaling step.
Updates for editors
- The Wikimedia Foundation are working on a system called Edge Uniques which will enable A/B testing, help protect against Distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks), and make it easier to understand how many visitors the Wikimedia sites have. This is so that they can more efficiently build tools which help readers, and make it easier for readers to find what they are looking for.
- To improve security for users, a small percentage of logins will now require that the account owner input a one-time password emailed to their account. It is recommended that you check that the email address on your account is set correctly, and that it has been confirmed, and that you have an email set for this purpose.
- "Are you interested in taking a short survey to improve tools used for reviewing or reverting edits on your Wiki?" This question will be asked at 7 wikis starting next week, on Recent Changes and Watchlist pages. The Moderator Tools team wants to know more about activities that involve looking at new edits made to your Wikimedia project, and determining whether they adhere to your project's policies.
- On April 15, the full Wikidata graph will no longer be supported on query.wikidata.org. After this date, scholarly articles will be available through query-scholarly.wikidata.org, while the rest of the data hosted on Wikidata will be available through the query.wikidata.org endpoint. This is part of the scheduled split of the Wikidata Graph, which was announced in September 2024. More information is available on Wikidata.
- The latest quarterly Wikimedia Apps Newsletter is now available. It covers updates, experiments, and improvements made to the Wikipedia mobile apps.
- View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: an invitation for tool maintainers to attend the Toolforge UI Community Feedback Session on April 15th; recent community metrics; and recent technical blog posts.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
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