Administrators' newsletter – January 2025

edit

News and updates for administrators from the past month (December 2024).

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • The Nuke feature also now provides links to the userpage of the user whose pages were deleted, and to the pages which were not selected for deletion, after page deletions are queued. This enables easier follow-up admin-actions.

Arbitration

Miscellaneous


Administrators' newsletter – February 2025

edit

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

Administrator changes

readded
removed Euryalus

CheckUser changes

removed

Oversighter changes

removed

Technical news

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

Arbitration


Administrators' newsletter – March 2025

edit

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

Administrator changes

removed

CheckUser changes

removed

Oversighter changes

removed AmandaNP

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • A new filter has been added to the Special:Nuke tool, which allows administrators 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. T378488
  • Non-administrators can now check which pages are able to be deleted using the Special:Nuke tool. T376378

Miscellaneous


Happy First Edit Day!

edit
Happy First Edit Day, Gyrofrog, from the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! Have a great day! DaniloDaysOfOurLives (talk) 03:02, 4 April 2025 (UTC)Reply

Happy First Edit Day!

edit
Happy First Edit Day, Gyrofrog, from the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! Have a great day! Randompersonediting (✍️📚) 04:18, 4 April 2025 (UTC)Reply

Administrators' newsletter – April 2025

edit

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

Administrator changes

added
readded Dennis Brown
removed

Bureaucrat changes

added Barkeep49

CheckUser changes

added 0xDeadbeef

Oversighter changes

removed GB fan
readded Moneytrees

Miscellaneous


Administrators' newsletter – May 2025

edit

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

Administrator changes

added Rusalkii
readded NaomiAmethyst (overlooked last month)
removed

Interface administrator changes

removed Galobtter

Guideline and policy news

Miscellaneous


Administrators' newsletter – June 2025

edit

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

Administrator changes

removed

Interface administrator changes

added 0xDeadbeef

CheckUser changes

readded L235

Oversight changes

readded L235

Guideline and policy news

  • An RfC is open to determine whether the English Wikipedia community should adopt a position on AI development by the WMF and its affiliates.

Technical news

Arbitration

  • An arbitration case named Indian military history has been opened. Evidence submissions for this case close on 8 June.

Miscellaneous


The World Destubathon

edit

Hello. You're invited to participate in The World Destubathon. We're aiming to destub a lot of articles and also improve longer stale articles. It will be held from Monday June 16 - Sunday July 13. There is over $3300 going into it, with $500 the top prize. If you are interested in winning something to save you money in buying books for future content, or just see it as a good editathon opportunity to see a lot of articles improved for subjects which interest you, sign up on the page in the participants section if interested. Even if you can only manage a few articles they would be very much appreciated and help towards making the content produced as diverse and broad as possible!♦ Dr. Blofeld 13:02, 15 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Administrators' newsletter – July 2025

edit

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

Administrator changes

removed NuclearWarfare

Interface administrator changes

added L235

Guideline and policy news

Miscellaneous

  • The 2025 Developing Countries WikiContest will run from 1 July to 30 September. Sign up now!
  • Administrator elections will take place this month. Administrator elections are an alternative to RFA that is a gentler process for candidates due to secret voting and multiple people running together. The call for candidates is July 9–15, the discussion phase is July 18–22, and the voting phase is July 23–29. Get ready to submit your candidacy, or (with their consent) to nominate a talented candidate!

Administrators' newsletter – August 2025

edit

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

Guideline and policy news

  • Following a request for comment, a new speedy deletion criterion, G15, has been enacted. It applies to pages generated by a large language model (LLM) without human review.
  • Following a request for comment, there is a new policy outlining the granting of permissions to view the IP addresses of temporary accounts. Temporary account deployment on the English Wikipedia is currently scheduled for September 2025, and editors can request access to the permission ahead of time. Admins are encouraged to keep an eye on the request page; there will likely be a flood of editors requesting the permission when they realize they can no longer see IP addresses.

Technical news

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

  • Wikimania 2025 is happening in Nairobi, Kenya, and online from August 6 to August 9. This year marks 20 years of Wikimania. Interested users can join the online event. Registration for the virtual event is free and will remain open throughout Wikimania. You can register here now.

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:Avant-garde jazz accordionists

edit

A tag has been placed on Category:Avant-garde jazz accordionists indicating that it is currently empty, and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion. If it remains empty for seven days or more, it may be deleted under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and removing the speedy deletion tag. Liz Read! Talk! 18:55, 18 August 2025 (UTC)Reply

Habesha peoples

edit

In their last two comments (, ), Menhelicks has been fairly explicit in their unwillingness to engage me. I'm going to withdraw from that Talk page conversation for now, as I don't think there's anything productive I can do. I will probably reengage if there's a return to disruptive editing of the main page or if something changes & I think engagement will be productive. Pathawi (talk) 02:51, 6 September 2025 (UTC)Reply

@Pathawi: I was thinking the same thing regarding the talk page discussion & agree it's a good idea. (They'd already told me to stay off their talk page.) The (IMO) strange thing is how similar the M.O. is to the content dispute a few years ago - accusations of persecution, WP:IDHT, combative tone etc. - except the desired output was completely different. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 13:09, 6 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
It's almost as tho ArbCom had a reason for declaring the Horn of Africa a contentious topic! Pathawi (talk) 13:48, 6 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
I thought about that - it almost seems baked into that one specific article, going back at least 8 years. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 14:48, 6 September 2025 (UTC)Reply

Mohamed Mooge Liibaan

edit

Dear Gyrofrog, hope all is well and sorry to bother you. Would you be able to help at all with some worries I have about citing of sources on Mohamed Mooge Liibaan, have added these worries to the talk page an various similar ips but... keep being reverted. Some help or advice might be welcome. Best wishes (Msrasnw (talk) 14:56, 6 September 2025 (UTC)) PS: I have raised this here: Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Edit warring but am not sure if that was the right place.Reply

Administrators' newsletter – September 2025

edit

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

Administrator changes

readded Euryalus
removed

Interface administrator changes

readded Ragesoss

CheckUser changes

readded AmandaNP
removed SQL

Oversight changes

readded AmandaNP

Guideline and policy news

  • An RfC is open on whether use of emojis with no encyclopedic value in mainspace and draftspace (e.g., at the start of paragraphs or in place of bullet points) should be added as a criterion under G15.

Technical news

Arbitration

  • The arbitration case Article titles and capitalisation 2 has been closed.
  • An RfC is in progress to amend the structure, rules, and procedures of the Arbitration Committee election and resolve any issues not covered by existing rules.

Happy Adminship Anniversary!

edit

Happy Adminship Anniversary!

edit

CREditzWiki (Talk to me!!) 00:38, 3 October 2025 (UTC)Reply

Administrators' newsletter – October 2025

edit

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

Administrator changes

removed

CheckUser changes

removed Vanamonde93

Arbitration

  • After a motion, arbitration enforcement page protections no longer need to be logged in the AELOG. A bot now automatically posts protections at WP:AELOG/P. To facilitate this bot, protection summaries must include a link to the relevant CT page (e.g. [[WP:CT/BLP]]), and you will receive talk page reminders if you forget to specify the contentious topic but otherwise indicate it is an AE action.

Guide to temporary accounts

edit

Hello, Gyrofrog. This message is being sent to remind you of significant upcoming changes regarding logged-out editing.

Starting 4 November, logged-out editors will no longer have their IP address publicly displayed. Instead, they will have a temporary account (TA) associated with their edits. Users with some extended rights like administrators and CheckUsers, as well as users with the temporary account IP viewer (TAIV) user right will still be able to reveal temporary users' IP addresses and all contributions made by temporary accounts from a specific IP address or range.

How do temporary accounts work?

Editing from a temporary account
  • When a logged-out user completes an edit or a logged action for the first time, a cookie will be set in this user's browser and a temporary account tied with this cookie will be automatically created for them. This account's name will follow the pattern: ~2025-12345-67 (a tilde, year of creation, a number split into units of 5).
  • All subsequent actions by the temporary account user will be attributed to this username. The cookie will expire 90 days after its creation. As long as it exists, all edits made from this device will be attributed to this temporary account. It will be the same account even if the IP address changes, unless the user clears their cookies or uses a different device or web browser.
  • A record of the IP address used at the time of each edit will be stored for 90 days after the edit. Users with the temporary account IP viewer (TAIV) user right will be able to see the underlying IP addresses.
  • As a measure against vandalism, there are two limitations on the creation of temporary accounts:
    • There has to be a minimum of 10 minutes between subsequent temporary account creations from the same IP (or /64 range in case of IPv6).
    • There can be a maximum of 6 temporary accounts created from an IP (or /64 range) within a period of 24 hours.

Temporary account IP viewer user right

How to enable IP Reveal

Impact for administrators

  • It will be possible to block many abusers by just blocking their temporary accounts. A blocked person won't be able to create new temporary accounts quickly if the admin selects the autoblock option.
  • It will still be possible to block an IP address or IP range.
  • Temporary accounts will not be retroactively applied to contributions made before the deployment. On Special:Contributions, you will be able to see existing IP user contributions, but not new contributions made by temporary accounts on that IP address. Instead, you should use Special:IPContributions for this (see a video about IPContributions in a gallery below).

Rules about IP information disclosure

  • Publicizing an IP address gained through TAIV access is generally not allowed (e.g. ~2025-12345-67 previously edited as 192.0.2.1 or ~2025-12345-67's IP address is 192.0.2.1).
  • Publicly linking a TA to another TA is allowed if "reasonably believed to be necessary". (e.g. ~2025-12345-67 and ~2025-12345-68 are likely the same person, so I am counting their reverts together toward 3RR, but not Hey ~2025-12345-68, you did some good editing as ~2025-12345-67)
  • See Wikipedia:Temporary account IP viewer § What can and can't be said for more detailed guidelines.

Useful tools for patrollers

  • It is possible to view if a user has opted-in to view temporary account IPs via the User Info card, available in Preferences Appearance Advanced options Tick Enable the user info card
    • This feature also makes it possible for anyone to see the approximate count of temporary accounts active on the same IP address range.
  • Special:IPContributions allows viewing all edits and temporary accounts connected to a specific IP address or IP range.
  • Similarly, Special:GlobalContributions supports global search for a given temporary account's activity.
  • The auto-reveal feature (see video below) allows users with the right permissions to automatically reveal all IP addresses for a limited time window.

Videos

Further information and discussion

Most of this message was written by Mz7 (source). Thanks, 🎃 SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 02:48, 31 October 2025 (UTC)Reply

Administrators' newsletter – November 2025

edit

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

Administrator changes

added Toadspike
removed

CheckUser changes

added asilvering

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

Arbitration

Miscellaneous


ArbCom 2025 Elections voter message

edit

Hello! Voting in the 2025 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 1 December 2025. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2025 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:18, 18 November 2025 (UTC)Reply

A throwback to 2011

edit

Hi Gyrofrog! 14 years ago you participated in a talk page discussion about the Schmidt sting pain index. As part of the upcoming event for Wikipedia's 25th birthday we're planning a segment which reads out some fun talk page interactions, and are considering including this discussion. Please let us know if you have any concerns. Best, RAdimer-WMF (talk) 01:31, 2 December 2025 (UTC)Reply

Administrators' newsletter – December 2025

edit

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

Administrator changes

added
readded Valereee
removed

CheckUser changes

removed Spicy

Technical news

  • Starting on November 4, the IP addresses of logged-out editors are no longer being publicly displayed. Instead, they will have a temporary account associated with their edits.
  • Administrators will now find that Special:MergeHistory is now significantly more flexible about what it can merge. It can now merge sections taken from the middle of the history of the source (rather than only the start) and insert revisions anywhere in the history of the destination page (rather than only the start). T382958

Miscellaneous


Administrators' newsletter – January 2026

edit

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

Guideline and policy news

Arbitration


Administrators' newsletter – February 2026

edit

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2026).

Arbitration

  • Due to the result of a recent motion, a rough consensus of administrators at the arbitration enforcement noticeboard may impose an expanded topic ban on Israel, Israelis, Jews, Judaism, Palestine, Palestinians, Islam, and/or Arabs, if an editor's Arab-Israeli conflict topic ban is determined to be insufficient to prevent disruption. At least one diff per area expanded into should be cited.

Miscellaneous


Administrators' newsletter – March 2026

edit

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2026).

Administrator changes

removed

CheckUser changes

removed Ks0stm

Oversight changes

removed Ks0stm

Guideline and policy news

Arbitration

  • Following a motion, remedy 9.1 of the Conduct in deletion-related editing case has been amended to limit TenPoundHammer to one XfD nomination or PROD per 24-hour period.
  • Following a motion, the Iskandar323 further POV pushing motion has been rescinded.
  • The Arbitration Committee has passed a housekeeping motion rescinding a number of outdated remedies and enforcement provisions across multiple legacy cases. In most instances, existing sanctions remain in force and continue to be appealable through the usual processes, while some case-specific remedies were amended or clarified.

Miscellaneous


Happy First Edit Day!

edit
Happy First Edit Day, Gyrofrog, from the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! Have a great day! ☘︎☘︎☘︎ALEXHammeke (talk | guestbook | sandbox) 02:16, 4 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

Happy First Edit Day!

edit

Administrators' newsletter – April 2026

edit

News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2026).

Administrator changes

added
removed

Checkuser changes

removed Giraffer

Oversight changes

added Kj cheetham
removed Giraffer

Guideline and policy news

Arbitration

  • Following a motion, the GSCASTE extended-confirmed restriction in the Indian military history case has been narrowed. It now applies to caste-related topics in South Asia, and the preemptive protection remedy has been amended accordingly.
  • The arbitration case Pbsouthwood has been closed.
  • The arbitration case Maghreb has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case will close on 7 April.

Administrators' newsletter – May 2026

edit

News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2026).

Administrator changes

readded
removed

Interface administrator changes

removed L235
added Chaotic Enby

CheckUser changes

removed

Oversight changes

removed Moneytrees

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • Changes to user permissions made from Meta are now included in the local user permissions log (T6055).
  • The autoconfirmed user group will soon be modified such that the four-day account age requirement begins when an account makes its first edit (T418484).

Arbitration

  • The arbitration case SchroCat has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case closed on 15 April.
  • Per a recent motion, appeals of blocks from the conflict-of-interest VRT queue are, by default, appealed on-wiki through the normal unblock process. However, they may be heard by the Committee if COIVRTers disagree on the interpretation of the evidence or believe ArbCom would be better suited to hear the appeal. Administrators are also advised that loosening or lifting such blocks without the consent of someone with access to the queue or ArbCom can be grounds for desysopping.
  • Per a recent motion, restrictions issued directly by the Committee may now be enforced with blocks which work exactly like contentious topic blocks.
  • The arbitration case Maghreb has been closed.

Miscellaneous


You may be eligible to vote in the U4C election

edit

I am contacting you because you previously voted in elections related to the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C). You may be eligible to vote in the current U4C election, which is open now and closes on 2 June 2026. You can find out more about the candidates and the election on the election page on Meta, and from there you can access the vote itself. Your participation in these elections is important to the governance of Wikimedia communities, and your time spent learning about the candidates and voting is appreciated.

-- In cooperation with the U4C, Keegan (WMF) (talk)

Keegan (WMF) (talk) 17:19, 20 May 2026 (UTC)Reply

Administrators' newsletter – June 2026

edit

News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2026).

Administrator changes

added
readded
removed

Bureaucrat changes

removed

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • Mandatory 2FA for bureaucrats: Bureaucrats without two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled have already lost access to their advanced rights on 26 May. Those who do not enable 2FA may be automatically removed from the groups in mid-June 2026, and from that point onward, new members must have 2FA enabled before they can be added. (T423119, T423120)

Arbitration

  • The arbitration case SchroCat has been closed.
  • The arbitration case Michael Jackson has opened. Evidence submissions in this case closes on 1 June.

Miscellaneous