User talk:Benison/Archives/ 51
 | This is an archive of past discussions with User:Benison. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
The Downlink Volume 3, Issue 2
 |
The Downlink | The WikiProject Spaceflight Newsletter |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 1 — 28 February |
| Volume 3 — Issue 2 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spaceflight Project • Project discussion • Members • Assessment • Open tasks • Popular pages • The Downlink | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
In the News
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Article of the month
.png) The Family Portrait, or sometimes Portrait of the Planets, is an image of the Solar System acquired by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990, from a distance of approximately 6 billion km (40 AU; 3.7 billion mi) from Earth. It features individual frames of six planets and a partial background indicating their relative positions. The picture is a mosaic of 60 frames. The frames used to compose the image were the last photographs taken by either Voyager spacecraft (which continued to relay other telemetry afterward). The frames were also the source of the famous Pale Blue Dot image of the Earth. Astronomer Carl Sagan, who was part of the Voyager imaging team, campaigned for many years to have the pictures taken.[failed verification] |
Image of the month
STS-98 following liftoff
 Launched on 7 February 2001, STS-98 delivered to the Destiny laboratory module of the International Space Station. Flown by Atlantis, it was the first human spaceflight mission of the 21st century. The shuttle landed at Edwards Air Force Base on 20 February after being docked with the ISS for almost seven days. The crew consisted of Kenneth Cockrell, commander, Mark L. Polansky, pilot, Robert Curbeam, mission specialist 1, Marsha Ivins, mission specialist 2 and flight engineer, and Thomas David Jones, mission specialist 3. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Members
New Members: No new members. Number of active members: 200.
Total number of members: 426.
February Launches
|
Article Statistics This data reflects values from the 28 February 2025.
Monthly Changes
Since January 2025, one new high-importance, sixteen new low-importance, nineteen new NA-importance, and twelve new unknown-importance articles have been created, for a total of 58 new articles. One article has been demoted from Good Article status. There are also one more A-class article, one more B-class article, nine fewer C-class articles, thirteen more Start-class articles, three more Stub-class articles, and one more list. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Discuss & propose changes to The Downlink at The Downlink talk page. To unsubscribe from the newsletter remove your name from the Mailing list. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:59, 18 March 2025 (UTC)
Books & Bytes – Issue 67
The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 67, January – February 2025
- East View Press and The Africa Report join the library
- Spotlight: Wikimedia+Libraries International Convention and WikiCredCon
- Tech tip: Suggest page
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --18:48, 19 March 2025 (UTC)
The Signpost: 22 March 2025
- From the editor: Hanami
It's an ecstasy, my spring.
- Opinion: Talking about governments editing Wikipedia
Let them know what you think!
- News and notes: Deeper look at takedowns targeting Wikipedia
Read this, then forget all about it.
- In the media: The good, the bad, and the unusual
Life on the Wiki as usual!
- Recent research: Explaining the disappointing history of Flagged Revisions; and what's the impact of ChatGPT on Wikipedia so far?
And WMF invites multi-year research fund proposals
- Traffic report: All the world's a stage, we are merely players...
The Oscars, politics, and death elbow for the most attention.
- Gallery: WikiPortraits rule!
The photographers are the celebrities!
- Essay: Unusual biographical images
And very unusual biographical images.
- Obituary: Rest in peace
Send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
Voyager 1
I recently edited the voyager 1 page. The page states about voyagers future: “in about 40,000 years, it will pass within 1.6 light-years (0.49 parsecs) of the star Gliese 445, which is at present in the constellation Camelopardalis and 17.1 light-years from Earth.” Voyager 1 needs 17,000 years to cross one light-year. 17,000 years x 17 light years is 289,000 years. Without further explanation about the other star system moving towards our solar systems the math makes absolutely no sense. Did you actually read the edit or just undo everything anyone does automatically? 38.7.154.157 (talk) 14:31, 23 March 2025 (UTC)
This week's article for improvement (week 13, 2025)
Hello, Benison. The article for improvement of the week is:
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Cove • Rake (tool) Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 24 March 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
|---|
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.
March thanks
 | |
| story · music · places |
|---|
Thank you for improving article quality in March! -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:13, 20 March 2025 (UTC)
Today: an opera, 100 years old OTD, on Bach's birthday. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:05, 21 March 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks a lot, Gerda. :) — Benison (Beni · talk) 06:01, 23 March 2025 (UTC)
- Today, 300 years of Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 1! We sang works for (mostly) double choir by Pachelbel, Johann Christoph Bach, Kuhnau/Bach, Gounod and Rheinberger! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:51, 25 March 2025 (UTC)
This week's article for improvement (week 14, 2025)
_Jack_Black.jpg) Jack Black in 2023
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Ipomoea • Cove Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 31 March 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
|---|
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.
Precious anniversary
 | |
| One year! |
|---|
--Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:30, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
- Wow, one year..!!??? Thanks a lot Gerda. May your kindness be always reciprocated anywhere you go. Thanks again :) — Benison (Beni · talk) 11:55, 2 April 2025 (UTC)
- Thank you for a blessing. Isn't "always" asking a bit too much? Mirella Freni, a subject I admire, is in prep with a DYK hook that I don't admire. I suggested to use it for April 1, but the irony was not understood, and it didn't happen (although they pulled a hook). What do you think was not clear in my objection (on the article talk)? .. rather at the end: that she is not active, and interestingness only created by a famous man's name. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:00, 2 April 2025 (UTC)
Page move
In addition to Khaddama, the user The Intersider has also moved the page L2: Empuraan from Empuraan (directed by Prithviraj Sukumaran) without any explanation whatsoever. 2409:4073:4D9F:E889:6161:A5BB:4E68:4DC0 (talk) 15:17, 5 April 2025 (UTC)
This week's article for improvement (week 15, 2025)
Hello, Benison. The article for improvement of the week is:
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Jack Black • Ipomoea Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 7 April 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
|---|
Administrators' newsletter – April 2025
News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2025).
Administrator changes
Bureaucrat changes
CheckUser changes
Oversighter changes
Miscellaneous
- Sign up for The Core Contest, a competition running from 15 April to 31 May to improve vital articles.
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
| ||||||
The Signpost: 9 April 2025
- Special report: Wikipedian and physician Ziyad al-Sufiani reportedly released from Saudi prison
Fellow doctor Osama Khalid remains behind bars for "violating public morals" by editing.
- In focus: WMF to explore "common standards" for NPOV policies; implications for project autonomy remain unclear
Major changes to core content policy, or still-developing plan for new initiative?
- In the media: Indian judges demand removal of content critical of Asian News International
Defeat, or just a setback?
- News and notes: 35,000 user accounts compromised, locked in attempted credential-stuffing attack
Plus: 30-year anniversary of wiki software commemorated.
- Op-ed: How crawlers impact the operations of the Wikimedia projects
Our content is free, our infrastructure is not!
- Opinion: Crawlers, hogs and gorillas
What is to be done?
- Debriefing: Giraffer's RfA debriefing
Advice to aspirants: "Read RfA debriefs", including this one.
- Obituary: RHaworth, TomCat4680 and PawełMM
Rest in peace.
- Traffic report: Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho, off to report we go...
Snow White sinking, Adolescence soaring, spacefarers stranded, this list has it all!
- News from Diff: Strengthening Wikipedia’s neutral point of view
The Wikimedia Foundation's announcement from Diff.
- Comix: Thirteen
Gadzooks!
Request to Review Deleted Article
Good evening,
I hope you are doing well. Are you able to share a previously deleted page with me? The page of Daniel Comeaux was soft deleted after consideration last year on October, 4, 2024. I am not asking for the deletion to be reconsidered, but I would like to receive a copy of the page that was deleted if possible.
Thank you so much for your time. BucketSky10 (talk) 21:17, 9 April 2025 (UTC)
- @BucketSky10: Hey, thanks for dropping by. I'm not an administrator and hence can't help you with that. But, you can see Category:Wikipedia administrators willing to provide copies of deleted articles for that and contact anyone there. Thanks and happy editing. — Benison (Beni · talk) 06:42, 10 April 2025 (UTC)
The Downlink Volume 3, Issue 3
|
The Downlink | The WikiProject Spaceflight Newsletter |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 1 — 31 March |
| Volume 3 — Issue 3 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spaceflight Project • Project discussion • Members • Assessment • Open tasks • Popular pages • The Downlink | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
In the News
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Article of the month
The Phootprint mission was conceived as a candidate for the Mars Robotic Exploration Preparation Programme 2 (MREP-2) at ESA. In 2014, ESA funded Footprint's pre-phase A feasibility study and an 8-month industrial system study. The mission would have lasted about 3.5 years, including the cruise time to Phobos, orbit mapping, 7 days on the surface, and finally, the sample return cruise time. The spacecraft would be powered by solar arrays. In August 2015, the ESA-Roscosmos working group, after cooperation on ExoMars, completed a joint study for a possible future Phobos Sample Return mission, and preliminary discussions were held. |
Image of the month
InSight lander testing
 The InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) lander was selected from among three options in August 2012. Initially planned to launch in March 2016, an instrument issue delayed the launch to May 2018, the next Earth-Mars launch window. It was successfully launched on 5 May, and landed on Elysium Planitia on 26 November 2018. Taking seismographic and thermographic readings, InSight operated for a total of 4 years and 19 days instead of its planned 2 year mission. The mission was declared over on 21 December, 2022 after contact was lost on 15 December. A re-analysis of some of its data indicates that there may be significant amounts of groundwater in Mars' crust. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Members
New Members:
Number of active members: 206.
Total number of members: 430.
March Launches
|
Article Statistics This data reflects values from the 28 February 2025.
Monthly Changes
Since February 2025, six new low-importance and one new unknown-importance articles have been created. One NA-importance article has been removed, for a total of six new articles. There are also five more C-class articles, three more Start-class articles, two more Stub-class articles, and one more list. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Discuss & propose changes to The Downlink at The Downlink talk page. To unsubscribe from the newsletter remove your name from the Mailing list. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:04, 11 April 2025 (UTC)
This week's article for improvement (week 16, 2025)
 Japan as seen from a satellite. Honshu is the largest, middle island.
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Plate (dishware) • Jack Black Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 14 April 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
|---|
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.
Wikimedia Apps newsletter – First quarter of 2025
Hello, and welcome to the first newsletter of 2025! In this edition, we’ll walk you through the exciting updates, experiments, and improvements made to the Wikipedia mobile apps during December, January, and February.
iOS
Personalized Wikipedia Year in Review
We released the improved version of the Year in Review to all users, now available in multiple languages and for both logged-in and logged-out users. While donation rates were lower than our goal, we saw great engagement with the feature & it brought in a higher share of first-time donors and a higher average donation compared to banner campaigns.
Notably:
- 97.4% of survey respondents rated the experience as neutral or better.
- We saw a 74% increase in new accounts, with 368 new editors actively contributing as a result.
- Most users asked for more personalized stats and a better summary of their reading journey.
We’re excited by the results and are already thinking ahead about how to improve it further next year. Want more details? You can check out the full analysis on the project page on MediaWiki.
Alt Text Experiment Wrap-Up
Our 60-day alternative text experiment has ended. While users showed interest in the task, quality was a challenge—especially for newcomers. The experiment helped us understand how we can guide editors better when writing alt text and which improvements to focus on next.
Some key takeaways:
- Completion rates were decent (28% for newer editors), but the quality of the alternative text needed improvement.
- Many users wanted clearer guidance and better context for writing alt text.
- Many users expressed interest in a dedicated feed for image-related tasks.
We’re not making the alternative text suggested edit permanent at this time. If we decided to focus on this task again, we would invest in improved guidance for writing alternative text, and make improvements to the user flow.
We made significant progress in refreshing the app’s navigation. Highlights include:
- A more native iOS feel with system-standard navigation bars.
- New access points for the Profile menu across multiple screens.
- Ongoing A/B testing of a more prominent search bar in articles, available in Arabic, French, German, and Japanese.
We also began tracking where article views come from (e.g., from Places, History, or Explore), which will help us understand user behavior better.
Tabbed Browsing Begins
We kicked off discovery and design work for adding tabs to the iOS app—one of the most requested features! Based on user feedback and inspiration from other apps, we’ve created a prototype and started user testing. Stay tuned as this exciting feature continues to evolve!
Bug Fixes & Developer Contributions
Thanks to volunteer contributions and internal efforts, we fixed several bugs including:
- Search results overlapping with the status bar.
- Crashes while editing specific articles.
- Incorrect day shown in “In the News.”
- Improved handling of italics and language variants.
Android
We released the Wikipedia Game to production in German Wikipedia and began work on WikiTrivia using “On this day” content. User feedback from initial testing is helping shape both features.
Private Donor Recognition Experiment
We wrapped up our donor recognition experiment in France and the Netherlands. While overall donations were lower than expected, user feedback was clear:
- 81% of surveyed users want the dashboard to exist on multiple platforms.
- 39% of users who saw the donor icon feature chose to personalize their app icon.
- Many users prefer automatic updates to their donor stats without manual input.
Rabbit Holes
To improve reader retention, we tested two approaches: suggested articles in search and personalized reading lists. Results showed strong engagement:
- 93.3% of feedback was positive or neutral.
- Pageviews were significantly higher for users who engaged with the feature.
- Users preferred reading lists over suggested search results.
We've started migrating our Android layouts to Jetpack Compose to modernize the app and improve performance long-term.
Other Fixes & Enhancements
- Fixed bugs related to offline article loading, push notifications, and language variants.
- Enhanced language support in captions and local language display.
Looking Ahead
From improving editing tasks to adding new ways to discover content and expanding personalization—this quarter was packed with learning and progress. Your feedback continues to shape where we go next.
Make sure you’re subscribe to this newsletter to stay in the loop, and thank you for being a part of this journey with us!
This week's article for improvement (week 17, 2025)
 Homemade sock monkeys have been part of U.S. and Canadian culture since the Great Depression.
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Honshu • Plate (dishware) Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 21 April 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
|---|
Tech News: 2025-17
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- Wikifunctions is now integrated with Dagbani Wikipedia since April 15. It is the first project that will be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in articles. A function is something that takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, such as adding up two numbers, converting miles into metres, calculating how much time has passed since an event, or declining a word into a case. Wikifunctions will allow users to do that through a simple call of a stable and global function, rather than via a local template.
- A new type of lint error has been created: Empty headings (documentation). The Linter extension's purpose is to identify wikitext patterns that must or can be fixed in pages and provide some guidance about what the problems are with those patterns and how to fix them.
- View all 37 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Following its publication on HuggingFace, the "Structured Contents" dataset, developed by Wikimedia Enterprise, is now also available on Kaggle. This Beta initiative is focused on making Wikimedia data more machine-readable for high-volume reusers. They are releasing this beta version in a location that open dataset communities already use, in order to seek feedback, to help improve the product for a future wider release. You can read more about the overall Structured Contents project, and about the first release that's freely usable.
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings and events
- The Editing and Machine Learning Teams invite interested volunteers to a video meeting to discuss Peacock check, which is the latest Edit check that will detect "peacock" or "overly-promotional" or "non-neutral" language whilst an editor is typing. Editors who work with newcomers, or help to fix this kind of writing, or are interested in how we use artificial intelligence in our projects are encouraged to attend. The meeting will be on April 28, 2025 at 18:00–19:00 UTC and hosted on Zoom.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
April music
 | |
| story · music · places |
|---|
Thank you for improving article quality in April! - My story is about music that Bach and Picander gave the world 300 years (and 19 days) ago, - listen (on the conductor's birthday) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:30, 20 April 2025 (UTC)
I finally managed to upload the pics I meant for Easter, see places. - Also finally, I managed a FAC, Easter Oratorio. I wanted that on the main page for Easter Sunday, but no, twice. You are invited to join a discussion about what "On this day" means, day or date. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:24, 25 April 2025 (UTC)
New pages patrol May 2025 Backlog drive
| May 2025 Backlog Drive | New pages patrol |  |
| |
| You're receiving this message because you are a new page patroller. To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here. | |
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:24, 24 April 2025 (UTC)
This week's article for improvement (week 18, 2025)
Hello, Benison. The article for improvement of the week is:
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Stuffed toy • Honshu Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:44, 28 April 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
|---|
Tech News: 2025-18
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- Event organizers who host collaborative activities on multiple wikis, including Bengali, Japanese, and Korean Wikipedias, will have access to the CampaignEvents extension this week. Also, admins in the Wikipedia where the extension is enabled will automatically be granted the event organizer right soon. They won't have to manually grant themselves the right before they can manage events as requested by a community.
- View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- The release of the next major version of Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, is scheduled for 29 April 2025. Technical editors will have access to the release by the week of 5 May 2025. This update will include a number of breaking changes and minor visual changes. Instructions on handling the breaking and visual changes are documented on this page. Pre-release testing is reported in T386298, with post-release issues tracked in T392379 and T392390.
- Users of Wiki Replicas will notice that the database views of
ipblocks,ipblocks_ipindex, andipblocks_compatare now deprecated. Users can query theblockandblock_targetnew views that mirror the new tables in the production database instead. The deprecated views will be removed entirely from Wiki Replicas in June, 2025. - Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization Newsletter is now available. This edition includes an overview of the improved Content Translation Dashboard Tool, support for new languages, highlights from the Wiki Loves Ramadan campaign, results from the Language Onboarding Experiment, an analysis of topic diversity in articles, and information on upcoming community meetings and events.
Meetings and events
- The Let's Connect Learning Clinic will take place on April 29 at 14:30 UTC. This edition will focus on "Understanding and Navigating Conflict in Wikimedia Projects". You can register now to attend.
- The 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which brings the global technical community together to connect, brainstorm, and hack existing projects, will take place from May 2 to 4th, 2025, at Istanbul, Turkey.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
WikiCup 2025 May newsletter
The second round of the 2025 WikiCup ended on 28 April at 23:59 UTC. To reiterate what we said in the previous newsletter, we are no longer disqualifying contestants based on how many points (now known as round points) they received. Instead, the contestants with the highest round-point totals now receive tournament points at the end of each round. These tournament points are carried over between rounds, and can only be earned if a competitor is among the top 16 round-point scorers at the end of each round. This table shows all competitors who have received tournament points so far. Everyone who competed in round 2 will advance to round 3 unless they have withdrawn or been banned.
Round 2 was quite competitive. Four contestants scored more than 1,000 round points, and eight scored more than 500 points (including one who has withdrawn). The following competitors scored at least 800 points:
BeanieFan11 (submissions) with 1,233 round points from 24 good articles, 28 Did you know articles, and one In the news nomination, mainly about athletes and politicians
Thebiguglyalien (submissions) with 1,127 round points, almost entirely from two high-multiplier featured articles on Black Widow (Natasha Romanova) and Grace Coolidge, in addition to two GAs and two reviews
History6042 (submissions) with 1,088 round points from four featured lists about Michelin-starred restaurants, nine good articles and a good topic mostly on Olympic-related subjects, seven ITN articles, and dozens of reviews
Gog the Mild (submissions) with 1,085 round points from three FAs, one GA, and four DYKs on military history, as well as 18 reviews
Arconning (submissions) with 887 round points, mostly from four FLs, six GAs, and seven DYKs on Olympic topics, along with more than two dozen reviews
In addition, we would like to recognize 
Generalissima (submissions) for her efforts; she scored 801 round points but withdrew before the end of the round.
The full scores for round 2 can be seen here. During this round, contestants have claimed 13 featured articles, 20 featured lists, 4 featured-topic articles, 138 good articles, 7 good-topic articles, and more than 100 Did You Know articles. In addition, competitors have worked on 19 In the News articles, and they have conducted nearly 300 reviews.
Remember that any content promoted after 28 April but before the start of Round 3 can be claimed in Round 3. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. If you want to help out with the WikiCup, feel free to review one of the nominations listed on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:02, 29 April 2025 (UTC)
Speedy deletion declined: Shakir Qureshi
Hello Benison. I am just letting you know that I declined the speedy deletion of Shakir Qureshi, a page you tagged for speedy deletion, because of the following concern: Subject is not obviously invented by the page creator. Thank you. Whpq (talk) 21:34, 30 April 2025 (UTC)
- Whpq, Thanks for that. Could you give me some pointers in the CSD category where the article would fit? The page is a promotional one by (most probably) the subject themselves. The username kinda gives it away. I've been out of touch from CSD for a while and now picking it up back again. Thanks again :) — Benison (Beni · talk) 21:41, 30 April 2025 (UTC)
- AfD it is. Thank you :) — Benison (Beni · talk) 05:48, 1 May 2025 (UTC)
- Probably the closest fit would be WP:A7, but I elected to go with AFD instead of speedy deletion because of the claims of government and media recognition are a claim of importance. A11 is really for original research or stuff invented by the author like a card game they made up. -- Whpq (talk) 11:25, 1 May 2025 (UTC)
- I thought of A7 too, but then this looked more like an autobiography. Thanks anyways :) — Benison (Beni · talk) 12:21, 1 May 2025 (UTC)
The Signpost: 1 May 2025
- News and notes: India cut off from Wiki money; WMF annual plan and Wikimedia programs seek comment
As always, Wikimedia community governance relies on user participation; plus, more updates from the Wikimedia world
- In the media: Feds aiming for WMF's nonprofit status
Scrapers, an Indian lawsuit, and a crash-or-not-crash?
- Recent research: How readers use Wikipedia health content; Scholars generally happy with how their papers are cited on Wikipedia
And other new research findings.
- Arbitration report: Sysop Tinucherian removed and admonished by the ArbCom
And don't bite those newbies!
- Discussion report: Latest news from Centralized discussions
And don't bite those newbies!
- Traffic report: Of Wolf and Man
Television dramas, televised sports, film, the Pope, and ... bioengineering at the top of the list?
- Disinformation report: At WikiCredCon, Wikipedia editors and Internet Archive discuss threats to trust in media
Community volunteers network among themselves and use technology to counter attacks on information sharing.
- News from the WMF: Product & Tech Progress on the Annual Plan
A look at some product and tech highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation's Annual Plan (July–December 2024).
- Humour: Crisis erupts as furious admins, functionaries complain about crappy t-shirts
Hey! At least it is something!
- Comix: By territory
Zounds!
- In focus: Using AI on the Russian Wikipedia: opportunities or challenges?
Would a billion articles be a good idea?
- Community view: A deep dive into Wikimedia
There's a lot more to this than you think.
- Debriefing: Barkeep49's RfB debriefing
I wonder about having crats, but decided to become one anyway.
- Gallery: Meet the winners of Wiki Loves Monuments 2024
Just beautiful photos!
- Obituary: JarrahTree, JohnClarknew and Yashthepunisher
Rest in Paradise.
AfC
Will a film draft be rejected if the film is not released yet. But it meets all the criteria (including commencement of principal photography). For example: Consider a film will be released in four months from now. The draft for that film is made, ensuring it obeys the criterion, and submitted. Will the draft be accepted? HeisenberG (talk) 06:51, 27 April 2025 (UTC)
- @HeisenberG: WP:NFF applies here. If you have really good reliable sources with significant coverage, you can go ahead. I'd suggest AfC drafting for that. Thanks and happy editing. — Benison (Beni · talk) 03:11, 2 May 2025 (UTC)
- I had submitted Draft:Hridayapoorvam. But it was not accepted. If you could, can you review it, since you are an AfC reviewer? HeisenberG (talk) 07:11, 2 May 2025 (UTC)
- I had a look at it, and I agree with RangersRus' (courtesy ping) evaluation. It comes under NFF and it better to wait till the movie teaser comes out. Per NFF, Additionally, films that have already begun shooting, but have not yet been publicly released (theatres or video), should generally not have their own articles unless the production itself is notable per the notability guidelines. The production is not that notable in this case and hence both NFF and WP:CRYSTAL also comes into play here. Additionally, yes I'm an AfC reviewer, but I don't really accept submissions like this. There are about 3000 pending submissions and it won't be fair to go out of the queue and accept this one. Someone will review it or if it comes in my random entry, I will review it too. Thanks and happy editing. — Benison (Beni · talk) 08:03, 2 May 2025 (UTC)
- I had submitted Draft:Hridayapoorvam. But it was not accepted. If you could, can you review it, since you are an AfC reviewer? HeisenberG (talk) 07:11, 2 May 2025 (UTC)
Question about moving
Hello! You just moved Aurora's file, to [[File:What Happened to the Heart (2024 AURORA album).png]], not the file name that I requested, [[File:Aurora - What Happened to the Heart (Deluxe).png]]. Could I ask why you changed to this file name instead of the file name I requested? I want to know it there's a special reason for it, thanks! Camilasdandelions (talk!) 10:02, 2 May 2025 (UTC)
- Camilasdandelions, hey, thanks for dropping by. I went with the best suitable name for the file, that describes it, as per naming conventions. Thanks. — Benison (Beni · talk) 10:20, 2 May 2025 (UTC)
Feedback request: Maths, science, and technology request for comment
Your feedback is requested at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard on a "Maths, science, and technology" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
You were randomly selected to receive this invitation from the list of Feedback Request Service subscribers. If you'd like not to receive these messages any more, you can opt out at any time by removing your name.
Message delivered to you with love by Yapperbot :) | Is this wrong? Contact my bot operator. | Sent at 14:32, 3 May 2025 (UTC)
This week's article for improvement (week 19, 2025)
 Mainboard of a NeXTcube computer
Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Internet research • Stuffed toy Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 5 May 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI • |
|---|
Tech News: 2025-19
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- The Wikimedia Foundation has shared the latest draft update to their annual plan for next year (July 2025–June 2026). This includes an executive summary (also on Diff), details about the three main goals (Infrastructure, Volunteer Support, and Effectiveness), global trends, and the budget and financial model. Feedback and questions are welcome on the talk page until the end of May.
Updates for editors
- For wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled, two new feature improvements have been released:
- Admins can now choose which namespaces are permitted for Event Registration via Community Configuration (documentation). The default setup is for event registration to be permitted in the Event namespace, but other namespaces (such as the project namespace or WikiProject namespace) can now be added. With this change, communities like WikiProjects can now more easily use Event Registration for their collaborative activities.
- Editors can now transclude the Collaboration List on a wiki page (documentation). The Collaboration List is an automated list of events and WikiProjects on the wikis, accessed via Special:AllEvents (example). Now, the Collaboration List can be added to all sorts of wiki pages, such as: a wiki mainpage, a WikiProject page, an affiliate page, an event page, or even a user page.
- View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Developers who use the
momentlibrary in gadgets and user scripts should revise their code to use alternatives like theIntllibrary or the newmediawiki.DateFormatterlibrary. Themomentlibrary has been deprecated and will begin to log messages in the developer console. You can see a global search for current uses, and ask related questions in this Phabricator task. - Developers who maintain a tool that queries the Wikidata term store tables (
wbt_*) need to update their code to connect to a separate database cluster. These tables are being split into a separate database cluster. Tools that query those tables via the wiki replicas must be adapted to connect to the new cluster instead. Documentation and related links are available. - Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The latest Chart Project newsletter is available. It includes updates on preparing to expand the deployment to additional wikis as soon as this week (starting May 6) and scaling up over the following weeks, plus exploring filtering and transforming source data.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Administrators' newsletter – May 2025
News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2025).
Administrator changes
Rusalkii
NaomiAmethyst (overlooked last month)
Interface administrator changes
Guideline and policy news
- Following an RfC, administrator elections were permanently authorized on a five-month schedule. The next election will be scheduled soon; see Wikipedia talk:Administrator elections for more information. This is an alternate process to the RfA process and does not replace the latter.
- An RfC was closed with consensus to allow editors to opt-out of seeing "sticky decorative elements". Such elements should now be wrapped in {{sticky decoration wrapper}}. Editors who wish to opt out can follow the instructions at WP:STICKYDECO.
- An RfC has resulted in a broad prohibition on the use of AI-generated images in articles. A few common-sense exceptions are recognized.
Miscellaneous
- A New Pages Patrol backlog drive is happening in May 2025 to reduce the backlog of articles in the new pages feed. Sign up here to participate!