User talk:Hawkeye7/Archive 2026

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Welcome to the 2026 WikiCup!

Happy New Year and Happy New WikiCup! The 2026 competition has just begun and all article creators, expanders, improvers and reviewers are welcome to take part. Even if you are a novice editor, we hope the WikiCup will give you a chance to improve your editing skills as you go. If you have already signed up, your submissions page can be found here. If you have not yet signed up, you can add your name here, and a bot will set up your submissions page within one day, ready for you to take part. Any questions on the scoring, rules or anything else should be directed to one of the judges, or posted to the WikiCup talk page.

For the 2026 WikiCup, the highest-ranking contestants will receive tournament points at the end of each round, and final rankings are decided by the number of tournament points each contestant has. This is the same scoring system that we had last year. If you're busy and can't sign up in January, don't worry: Signups are open throughout the year. To make things fairer for latecomers, the lowest-scoring contestants are no longer eliminated at the end of each round.

The first round will end on 26 February. The judges for the WikiCup this year are: Cwmhiraeth (talk · contribs · email), Epicgenius (talk · contribs · email), Frostly (talk · contribs · email), Guerillero (talk · contribs · email) and Lee Vilenski (talk · contribs · email). 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) 00:38, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

Happy New Year, Hawkeye7!

Happy New Year!

Hawkeye7,
Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia.
GGOTCC 07:57, 2 January 2026 (UTC)

   Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year fireworks}} to user talk pages.

GGOTCC 07:57, 2 January 2026 (UTC)

2025 Military Historian of the Year - nominee

		2025 Military Historian of the Year
		As voted by your peers within the Military history WikiProject, I hereby award you the WikiProject Barnstar for being nominated for the 2025 Military Historian of the Year Award. Congratulations, and thank you for your efforts throughout the year. Donner60 (talk) 05:37, 30 December 2025 (UTC)

@Donner60: I have corrected the pro forma at Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Academy/Establishing military historian and newcomer of the year election pages to subst the {{CURRENTYEAR}} template. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 03:49, 2 January 2026 (UTC)

Thanks. Donner60 (talk) 20:57, 2 January 2026 (UTC)

Possible Collaboration

I would like to introduce myself, Lorne Moore, from Edmonton, Canada. I have studied WWII for some 50 years, and I have an extensive library of 60+ boxes of WWII books. I have been a sometimes donor, and an avid user of Wikipedia. I have compiled a sizeable, but not necessarily complete, portfolio of wiki-pages of WWII. I have found some pages easy to find, while others are obscure, sometimes found by the rarest of links.

I would be interested in being involved in making a complete and easily accessed portal of all WWII content. I presume this would be a completely volunteer undertaking (i.e. not paid). While I am very versed in the subject-matter, I am not tech savvy. Perhaps I could be paired (for convenience, in my home city) with someone skilled at that.

In order to demonstrate my historical credentials, consider that I can read the contents of a single page of most any WWII book, and that I can determine the time of the war, and the place where combat is happening, just from the page context. Consider too, that I would be perfectly capable of conducting a credible college-level lecture about WWII, without need of notes. I know the subject matter inside out.

I would be a valuable resource, and I would like to help. Missiontactics (talk) 23:26, 31 December 2025 (UTC)

The Portal:World War II was deleted in 2024. I am not an admin, so I have no ability to undelete its components. Nick-D stewards the World War II article and is an admin, so he may have an opinion on this. I have a long list of World War II articles that need work though. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 01:07, 3 January 2026 (UTC)

Perhaps you should be directing my enquiry to Admin or Nick D or both. I do not know what "working thru WWII pages" means, but I suspect it involves tech skills I do not have. MY VALUE is in an oversight position, and my logical & organizational skills. I could produce a coherent package of WWII pages, fully linked, but as stated, I would need to be paired with someone of the right tech skills. My skills are not necessarily easily found. ~2026-43926 (talk) 06:54, 3 January 2026 (UTC)

Congratulations from the Military History Project

		Content Review Medal of Merit (Military history)
		On behalf of the Military History Project, I am proud to present the The Content Review Medal of Merit (Military history) for participating in 14 reviews between October and December 2025. Donner60 (talk) via MilHistBot (talk) 00:30, 4 January 2026 (UTC) Keep track of upcoming reviews. Just copy and paste {{WPMILHIST Review alerts}} to your user space

Your nomination of Gerald Carr (astronaut) is under review

Your good article nomination of the article Gerald Carr (astronaut) is under review. See the review page for more information. This may take up to 7 days; feel free to contact the reviewer with any questions you might have. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of MSincccc -- MSincccc (talk) 18:25, 8 January 2026 (UTC)

Douglas MacArthur at FAR

I have nominated Douglas MacArthur for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets the featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" in regards to the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Z1720 (talk) 17:02, 10 January 2026 (UTC)

Your support on the current FAC

You recently gave him a support on his FAC for 2025 U.S. Figure Skating Championships, however, when I asked him to acknowledge in the article that the President had extended sympathy for all the dead American athletes from the accident he told me that it was "grossly" inappropriate. That seems a little on the cold-hearted side and I thought to ask if there might be some middle ground you could add a comment about this. ErnestKrause (talk) 15:58, 11 January 2026 (UTC)

More articles

@Hawkeye7: Just noticed your question. After a long period of hibernation due to working 12-hour shifts and limiting myself to copy editing, my Wikimojo has thawed out. I'm mainly into Great War articles but have been doing Arctic and Mediterranean convoys for quite a while as they aren't as long. I'm open to suggestions though. Regards Keith-264 (talk) 17:13, 11 January 2026 (UTC)

Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026

Hello! I noticed you're a bot operator, so I thought you might be interested in a hackathon we're organizing: the Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026, on 13–14 March in Arnhem, Netherlands.

It's a two-day, technically oriented hackathon bringing together Wikimedians from the region. Whether you want to work on bot frameworks, tools, or other technical projects, this could be a great opportunity to collaborate with fellow developers. Registration closes mid-January or when full. Let me know if there are any questions. Hope to see you there! Daanvr (talk) 09:22, 12 January 2026 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: December 2025

This Month in GLAM – Volume XV, Issue XII, December 2025 Headlines From the team: Global GLAM Calls Continue in 2026 Albania report: Wikimedian in Residence, 2025, in Elbasan Albania Argentina report: Resume of the year Australia report: AMaGA partnership, signing the Open Heritage Statement and South Australian Museum Partner Project Belgium report: Public Domain Day 2026, Circus Heritage and Fosdem Colombia report: Preparándonos para celebrar el día del dominio público - Getting ready for the Public Domain Day celebration Italy report: Exploring Italy and Unlocking Its Heritage: Touring Club Italiano and GLAM Call 2026–2028 New Zealand report: ASBS 2025 Conference follow-up Wiki webinar & Auckland Museum student update Poland report: Public Domain, Conferences, and Conversations on Open Culture Switzerland report: GLAM on Tour Bellinzona, Xmas Event, GLAM Wiki Group UK report: 2025 in review USA report: December meetings Public Domain Day report: Public Domain Day 2026 Biodiversity Heritage Library report: Updates on work by BHLWiki Working Group members Memory of the World report: 2025 in review Calendar: January's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 12:57, 12 January 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-03

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 Wikimedia Foundation has shared some guiding questions for the July 2026–June 2027 Annual Plan on Meta and Diff. These focus on global trends, faster and healthier experimentation, better support for newcomers, strengthening editors and advanced users, improving collaboration across projects, and growing and retaining readership. Feedback and ideas are welcome on the talk page.

Updates for editors

• As part of the current work of Community Tech team on the Multiple watchlists project, the display of EditWatchlist will be updated as a first step towards multiple watchlists. Additionally, the pagination on Search will be updated too, as a part of the work on the Revamp pagination / page navigation wish.
• The Global Watchlist is a MediaWiki extension that lets you see your watchlists from different wikis on the same page. It was recently updated to look more like the regular Watchlist, such as preparing it for temporary accounts in IP masking (including rerouting user links to contributions pages), making page titles bold, and opening links in edit summaries and tags in new browser tabs.
• View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where global blocks did not have the option to disable sending emails, has now been fixed, and will be available for use in the week of January 13.

Updates for technical contributors

• The VisualEditor citation tool and Reference Previews now support "map" as a reference type.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki/MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:31, 12 January 2026 (UTC)

Your nomination of Gerald Carr (astronaut) has passed

Your good article nomination of the article Gerald Carr (astronaut) has passed; congratulations! See the review page for more information. If the article is eligible to appear in the "Did you know" section of the Main Page, you can nominate it within the next seven days. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of MSincccc -- MSincccc (talk) 07:04, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 15 January 2026

• News and notes: Wikipedia's 25th anniversary is here!
  Where does the time go?

• Special report: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call
  The internet is booming. We are not.

• Serendipity: The WMF wants to buy you books!
  Really! A major triumph.

• WikiProject report: Time for a health check: the Vital Signs 2026 campaign
  The campaign to get all of our top-importance medical articles up to B-class or above.

• In the media: Fake Acting President Trump and a Wikipedia infobox
  D.J.T. assumes a new position.

• Community view: The inbox behind Wikipedia
  What the Volunteer Response Team actually does!

• Recent research: Art museums on Wikidata; comparing three comparisons of Grokipedia and Wikipedia
  And other research.

• Traffic report: Tonight I'm gonna rock you tonight
  A world in white gets underway.

• Comix: Oh come on man.
  Really?

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:14, 15 January 2026 (UTC)

MILHIST template question

Hawkeye, what change needs to be made to WikiProject banner at Talk:USS Romeo so that this shows up in the MILHIST FA categories instead of the MILHIST A-Class categories? It passed ACR in June 2025 and FAC in December 2025. Hog Farm _Talk 02:03, 16 January 2026 (UTC)

I have corrected this. Not completely happy though. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 06:29, 16 January 2026 (UTC)

The Downlink Volume 3, Issue 11

	The Downlink	The WikiProject Spaceflight Newsletter
		2025 1 — 31 December

Volume 3 — Issue 11
Spaceflight Project • Project discussion • Members • Assessment • Open tasks • Popular pages • The Downlink
In the News The International Space Station's eight compartments were fully occupied for the first time on 1 December, with the rebirthing of Cygnus NG-23 to Unity. On 3 December, China's Zhuque-3 made the first non-American attempt at landing a booster. The booster failed to land following a landing-burn anomaly. A second attempt on the 23rd, this time using the new Long March 2A launch vehicle, also failed. On 6 December, contact with NASA's MAVEN Mars orbiter was lost. The last received telemetry was from the 4th, with the fragmented transmission of the 6th suggesting that the craft was rotating in an unintended way, and possibly having changed orbit. As of 16 January 2026, the mission has not yet been officially ended, although reestablishing communications with MAVEN is considered highly improbable.
Featured Content The article "Gordon Cooper" was promoted to Featured Article status on 9 December. It was nominated by Hawkeye7.
Article of the month PROCYON PROCYON (Proximate Object Close flyby with Optical Navigation) was an asteroid flyby space probe that was launched together with Hayabusa2 on 3 December 2014 13:22:04 (JST). It was developed by University of Tokyo and JAXA. It was a small (70 kg, approx. 60 cm cube), low cost (¥500 million) spacecraft. It was intended to flyby the asteroid (185851) 2000 DP107 in 2016, but the plan was abandoned due to the malfunction of the ion thruster.	Image of the month STS-116 spacewalk STS-116 was the 33rd mission of the Space Shuttle Discovery. Launched in the late evening of 6 December, the main aims of the mission were the installation of one of the International Space Station's Integrated Truss Structure segments, rewiring of the power system, and personnel exchange. Also known as ISS-12A.1, STS-116 was the first mission to include a Swedish astronaut, Christer Fuglesang. It returned to Earth in the evening of 22 December. This image, of the first of three EVA sessions, was taken on the fourth day of the mission. Flight engineer Robert Curbeam is on the left, opposite mission specialist 3 Christer Fuglesang. The image was taken over New Zealand; the South Island is visible on the left, while the southern portion of the North Island, mostly consisting of the Wairarapa region, is visible in the top-right.
Members New Members: none Number of active members: 218. Total number of members: 445. December Launches All times stated here are in UTC. See the complete list here. Zhuque-3 — no payload (3 Dec. at 04:00) (success) HANBIT-NANO — various (22 Dec. at 12:45) (launch failure) Long March 12A — mass simulator (23 Dec. at 02:00:00) (success) LVM3 — BlueBird-6 (24 Dec. at 03:25:30) (success) Soyuz-2.1b (1st stage), Fregat-M (2nd stage) — various (28 Dec. at 13:18:05) (success)	Article Statistics This data reflects values from 31 December 2025. Spaceflight articles by quality and importance Quality Importance Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total FA 7 29 15 8 59 FL 3 4 4 11 FM 124 124 A 1 2 1 4 GA 12 26 33 57 2 130 B 16 78 195 234 5 528 C 45 169 609 847 1 57 1,728 Start 15 134 1,024 2,698 493 4,364 Stub 5 196 1,988 282 2,471 List 11 119 109 238 1 43 521 Category 1,281 1,281 Disambig 48 48 File 262 262 Portal 55 55 Project 109 109 Redirect 2 43 141 1,246 1,432 Template 532 532 NA 2 2 Other 32 32 Assessed 107 565 2,230 6,216 3,693 882 13,693 Unassessed 10 119 129 Total 107 565 2,230 6,226 3,693 1,001 13,822 Monthly Changes Since November 2025, there are one more mid-importance, 29 more low-importance, two more NA-importance, and 20 more unknown-importance class articles, for a total of 52 more articles. There are also one more FA-class articles, one less GA-class articles, ten more C-class articles, 20 more Start-class articles, eleven more Stub-class articles, and four more lists.
Discuss & propose changes to The Downlink at The Downlink talk page. To unsubscribe from the newsletter remove your name from the Mailing list. Newsletter contributors: Ships&Space

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:27, 17 January 2026 (UTC)

Edward Neufville Crosse

Hi Hawkeye, hope you're well? A while ago you gave some feedback on Edward Neufville Crosse, namely about referencing. I think I have made the required changes now, and would really appreciate a final check on whether it now meets B Class requirements? Thanks! BBWood1908 (talk) 15:44, 16 January 2026 (UTC)

 Done Re-assessed B class. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 19:40, 16 January 2026 (UTC)

Cheers Hawkeye! BBWood1908 (talk) 11:14, 17 January 2026 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for Netball

Netball has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Z1720 (talk) 16:01, 17 January 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-04

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

• The tray shown on Special:Diff in mobile view has been redesigned. It is now collapsed by default, and incorporates a link to undo the edit being viewed, making it easier for mobile editors and reviewers to take action while keeping the interface uncluttered.
• The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension continues to improve — it now automatically determines the text direction (ensuring correct display of sites with unusual domain names) and shows detailed descriptions for log actions. Later this week, a new permanent link for page creations and CSS classes for each entry element will be added.
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the previously observed issue in Vector 2022, where anchor link targets were obscured by the sticky header, has now been addressed.

Updates for technical contributors

• As mentioned in the October 2025 deprecation announcement, MediaWiki Interfaces team will begin sunsetting all transform endpoints containing a trailing slash from the MediaWiki REST API the week of January 26. Changes are expected to roll out to all wikis on or before January 30th. All API users currently calling them are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. Both endpoint variations can be found, compared, and tested using the REST Sandbox. If you have questions or encounter any problems, please file a ticket in Phabricator to the #MW-Interfaces-Team board.
• Interactive reference documentation for the Wikimedia REST API has moved. Requests to API docs previously hosted through RESTBase (e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/) are now redirected to the REST Sandbox.
• The WMF Wikidata Platform team (WDP) has published its January 2026 newsletter. It includes updates on the legacy full-graph endpoint decommissioning, the User-Agent policy change, the monthly Blazegraph migration office hours, and efforts to reduce regressions caused by the legacy endpoint shutdown. As a reminder, you can subscribe to the WDP newsletter!
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• The Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026 will take place on 13-14 March 2026 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Applications opened mid-December and will close soon or when capacity is reached. It's a two-day, technically oriented hackathon bringing together Wikimedians from the region. Hope to see you there!

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:27, 19 January 2026 (UTC)

Hi Hawkeye I have a problem per se, with another article, and I am trying to find the best place to reach out to the military project group at large

Hi Hawkeye. Sorry to bug you but I would like your help.

For the article United States intervention in Syria. Some of the editors tried to remove the entire infobox. I did not create this article, but even I will admit that it is rather long. On the other hand this conflict has an extremely complex history and system of alliances, and I do not think removing an entire infobox especially without deliberation sets a good precedent.

That being said I am not 100% sure how the military project would handle or historically has handled such extreme edits before. I get sometimes infobox issues can be tricky, but if we start removing entire infoboxes, we are going to lose a lot of that on many military conflicts.

I proposed 2 comromises:

1. We modify the infobox to removed the military leaders.
2. We modify the infobox to be more simple, however owing to the extreme complexity of this conflict perhaps we add a new article that is solely a summary of belligerents of this conflict, complete with a chart. And only dedicate that page for those purposes.

But again I am looking for information on how similar cases were handled by military project volunteers as a whole to see if I can find other solution or to find out if my compromises are good ideas or not, or maybe perhaps my compromise ideas are not acceptable for reasons I am not aware of or have not thought of.

Where do you suggest I go to find such answers? Can you send me a link or refer me to some editors?

Thank you so much. (: Historyguy1138 (talk) 17:31, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

		The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
		You deserve this barnstar for all your contributions since 2005, especially those related to the Gaza war. Pachu Kannan (talk) 14:30, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-05

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

Updates for editors

• Wikimedia Foundation invites comments on proposed future of the Product and Technology Advisory Council until 28 February.
• All users with registered accounts can now use passkeys for two-factor authentication (2FA). Passkeys are a simple way to log in without using a second device. They verify the user's identity using a fingerprint, face scan, or a PIN code. To set up a passkey, first set up a regular 2FA method. Currently, to log in with a passkey, users must also use a password. Later this quarter, passwordless login will allow users to log in with a single click and a passkey. Users with advanced rights will also be required to have 2FA enabled. This is part of the Account Security project.
• Unregistered contributors on blocked IPs or blocked IP ranges can now interact on-wiki to appeal a block by creating a temporary account to appeal a block on the user talk page, unless the "prevent this user from editing their own talk page" is enabled. This solves the problem of logged-out users unable to use the default unblock process via user talk page.
• View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) methods description on the management page has been updated. It is now clearer and easier for users to understand and make use of.

Updates for technical contributors

• A new AbuseFilter variable, account_type, has been added to provide a reliable way to determine the account type being created in the createaccount and autocreateaccount actions. As part of this change, the variable accountname has been renamed to account_name, and accountname is now deprecated. Edit filter managers should update any filters that use hardcoded account type checks or the deprecated variable.
• Image thumbnails that are requested in non-standard sizes, and using non-standard methods such as direct requests to upload.wikimedia.org/… will stop working in the near future. This change is to prevent ongoing external abuse by web-scrapers and bots. Some users with custom CSS/JS, Interface Admins who can fix gadgets and local skins, and Tool-authors, will need to update their code to use standard thumbnail sizes. Details, search-links, and examples of how to fix them, are available in the task.
• 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 21:15, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

Your nomination of Special Engineer Detachment is under review

Your good article nomination of the article Special Engineer Detachment is under review. See the review page for more information. This may take up to 7 days; feel free to contact the reviewer with any questions you might have. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of Hog Farm -- Hog Farm (talk) 05:04, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue 237, January 2026

Your Military History Newsletter Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content Book review: Hawkeye7 and Peacemaker67 review four books Op-ed: Nick-D on the Stanley Military Cemetery in Hong Kong Timeline: This month in military history

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 12:10, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 January 2026

• Traffic report: The most viewed articles of 2025
  Everybody had a hard year, everybody had a good time.

• News and notes: Good news... but also bad news for the Public Domain
  Benvenuto Betty Boop, arrivederci Italian Photos.

• News from Diff: Solving puzzles together
  Maryana Iskander says farewell.

• In the media: Every view on the 25th anniversary of everything
  Media about hard-core nerds, a place with paragraphs, baby globes, and wikipedes.

• Comix: Perspectives
  Everybody has one.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:27, 29 January 2026 (UTC)

January–February 2026 NPP drive - Phase 2

NPP unreviewed article statistics as of February 02, 2026

Welcome to Phase 2 of the January–February 2026 NPP drive. During Phase 1, we reviewed 16,658 articles and 4,416 redirects, and there is currently a backlog of 16,475 articles and 23,782 redirects in the queue. Fantastic job! Completing 22,502 patrols in the first phase made a significant dent in the backlog. Let's keep our foot on the gas for Phase 2, and I hope we can achieve even more reviews than Phase 1. Best of luck!

Start patrolling!

You are receiving this message because you added your name to the participants list.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:21, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-06

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

• The "Page information" feature, which gives validating information about a page (example), now automatically includes a table of contents. If there is a local MediaWiki:Pageinfo-header page created by individual users, it can now be removed.
• View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, VisualEditor previously added bold or italic formatting inside link descriptions, making the wikicode complex. This has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• There was no XML dump on 20 January. Additionally, from now on, dumps will be generated once per month only.
• The MediaWiki Interfaces team removed support for all transform endpoints containing a trailing slash from the MediaWiki REST API. All API users currently calling those endpoints are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. If you have questions or encounter any problems, please file a ticket in phabricator to the #MW-Interfaces-Team board.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Weekly highlight

• Users are reminded that the Wikimedia Foundation has shared some guiding questions for the July 2026–June 2027 Annual Plan on Meta and Diff. These focus on global trends, faster and healthier experimentation, better support for newcomers, strengthening editors and advanced users, improving collaboration across projects, and growing and retaining readership. Feedback and ideas are welcome on the talk page.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 17:41, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

Your nomination of Special Engineer Detachment has passed

Your good article nomination of the article Special Engineer Detachment has passed; congratulations! See the review page for more information. If the article is eligible to appear in the "Did you know" section of the Main Page, you can nominate it within the next seven days. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of Hog Farm -- Hog Farm (talk) 15:24, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

A Barnstar for you!

		The Good Article Barnstar
		I wanted to sincerely thank you for your rigorous and helpful review of Charles Thau. Your patience with the offline verification and image provenance was invaluable. This history means a great deal to my family, and I appreciate you helping me get it right. Milwaukee911 (talk) 07:41, 6 February 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-07

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

Updates for editors

• Logged-in contributors who manage large or complex watchlists can now organise and filter watched pages in ways that improve their workflows with the new Watchlist labels feature. By adding custom labels (for example: pages you created, pages being monitored for vandalism, or discussion pages) users can more quickly identify what needs attention, reduce cognitive load, and respond more efficiently. This improves watchlist usability, especially for highly active editors.
• A new feature available on Special:Contributions shows temporary accounts that are likely operated by the same person, and so makes patrolling less time-consuming. Upon checking contributions of a temporary account, users with access to temporary account IP addresses can now see a view of contributions from the related temporary accounts. The feature looks up all the IPs associated with a given temporary account within the data retention period and shows all the contributions of all temporary accounts that have used these IPs. Learn more.
• When editors preview a wikitext edit, the reminder box that they are only seeing a preview (which is shown at the top), now has a grey/neutral background instead of a yellow/warning background. This makes it easier to distinguish preview notes from actual warnings (for example, edit conflicts or problematic redirect targets), which will now be shown in separate warning or error boxes.
• The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension continues to improve — it now properly supports more than one Wikibase site, for example both Wikidata and testwikidata. In addition, issues regarding text direction have been fixed for users who prefer Wikidata or other Wikibase sites in right-to-left (RTL) languages.
• The automatic "magic links" for ISBN, RFC, and PMID numbers have been deprecated in wikitext since 2021 due to inflexibility and difficulties with localization. Several wikis have successfully replaced RFC and PMID magic links with equivalent external links, but a template was often required to replace the functionality of the ISBN magic link. There is now a new built-in parser function {{#isbn}} available to replace the basic functionality of the ISBN magic link. This makes it easier for wikis who wish to migrate off of the deprecated magic link functionality to do so.
• Two new wikis have been created:
  • a Wikipedia in Jju (w:kaj:)
  • a Wikipedia in Nawat (w:ppl:)
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• A new global user group has been created: Local bots. It will be used internally by the software to allow community bots to bypass rate limits that are applied to abusive web scrapers. Accounts that are approved as bots on at least one Wikimedia wiki will be automatically added to this group. It will not change what user permissions the bot has.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• The MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference, Spring 2026 will be held March 25–27 in Salt Lake City, USA. This event is organized by and for the third-party MediaWiki community. You can propose sessions and register to attend.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:28, 9 February 2026 (UTC)

DYK for James I. Hopkins Jr.

On 10 February 2026, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article James I. Hopkins Jr., which you recently nominated. The fact was ... that James I. Hopkins Jr., who signed the order to bomb Hiroshima, mysteriously disappeared without a trace? You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, James I. Hopkins Jr.), and the hook may be added to the statistics page after its run on the Main Page has completed. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to nominate it.

		Hook update
		Your hook reached 37,318 views (1,554.9 per hour), making it one of the most viewed hooks of February 2026 – nice work!

GalliumBot (talk • contribs) (he/it) 03:27, 11 February 2026 (UTC)

 — Chris Woodrich (talk) 00:02, 10 February 2026 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: January 2026

This Month in GLAM – Volume XVI, Issue I, January 2026 Headlines From the team: Wikipedia at 25 Aruba report: Pap-Wikipedia Turns 20: A Milestone for Papiamento/u Knowledge Colombia report: Celebrando el día del dominio público 2026/Celebrating the public domain day 2026 France report: Wikipedia's Birthday in France Germany report: Gifted by our friends: Loads of presents for Wikipedia25 by German and Austrian GLAMs Indonesia report: Activities in December-January Italy report: Knowledge in action: Barindelli collection and Wikipedia 25 Netherlands report: Image donation Dutch Book History New Zealand report: Auckland Museum Student Edit-a-thon, the NZBSI Wikimedian in Residence project, and other residencies North Macedonia report: GLAM Program of Wikimedia MKD – 2026 Overview Poland report: Explore Historic Portraits from the Museum of Photography in Kraków Serbia report: January in Wikimedia Serbia Switzerland report: Museum in Chiasso, Alpine Museum, Women Monuments UK report: Sharing more of the Enamels of the World Biodiversity Heritage Library report: Updates on work by BHLWiki Working Group members Map the GLAM report: Wiki and GLAM: Harnessing Knowledge to Foster Gender Equality Memory of the World report: Manuscripts on Arabic Wikipedia Wikidata report: Two key Wikidata Requests for Comments, relevant for future GLAM-Wiki work Calendar: February's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 08:33, 11 February 2026 (UTC)

Orphaned non-free image File:James I. Hopkins Jr.gif

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Thanks for uploading File:James I. Hopkins Jr.gif. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of non-free use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).

Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in section F5 of the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. --B-bot (talk) 03:19, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

Military logistics

I went through the aforementioned article and made a few revisions, but I cannot do a formal review at the moment due to my ongoing examinations. I will, however, fix any changes if necessary. Good luck with your nomination. MSincccc (talk) 11:40, 14 February 2026 (UTC)

Savannah River Plant article

This sentence in the article appears to contain an error: "The commissioners learned that DuPont was recommending the acquisition of 240,000 acres (97,000 ha) instead of 2,160,000 acres (870,000 ha)." The source: Reed, et al 2002, at page 144 states: "The engineering manpower was needed as the AEC learned that Du Pont was recommending the acquisition of 240,000 acres rather than the 160,000 first projected." The 240,000 acres as the larger number is consistent with the next sentence of the article; "The additional land provided river frontage as a natural boundary, secure access to the water supply, and provide flexibility in the location of pumping stations." Other than that, B class headed up. Donner60 (talk) 01:41, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

Typo. Corrected. Thanks for that. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 03:13, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-08

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

• The SRE Team will be performing a cleanup of Wikimedia's Etherpad instance, the web-based editor for real-time collaborative document editing. All pads will be permanently deleted after 30 April, 2026 – if there are still migration projects in progress at that point the team can revisit the date on a case by case basis. Please create local backups of any content you wish to keep, as deleted data cannot be recovered. This cleanup helps reduce database size and minimize infrastructure footprint. Etherpad will continue to support real-time collaboration, but long-term storage should not be expected. Additional cleanups may occur in the future without prior notice.

Updates for editors

• The Information Retrieval team will be launching an Android mobile app experiment that tests hybrid search capabilities which can handle both semantic and keyword queries. The improvement of on-platform search will enable readers to find what they’re looking for directly on Wikipedia more easily. The experiment will first be launched on Greek Wikipedia in late February, followed by English, French, and Portuguese in March. Read more on Diff blog.
• The Reader Growth team will run an experiment for mobile web users, that adds a table of contents and automatically expands all article sections, to learn more about navigation issues they face. The test will be available on Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
• Previously, site notices (MediaWiki:Sitenotice and MediaWiki:Anonnotice) would only render on the desktop site. Now, they will render on all platforms. Users on mobile web will now see these notices and be informed. Site administrators should be prepared to test and fix notices on mobile devices to avoid interference with articles. To opt out, interface admins can add #siteNotice { display: none; } to MediaWiki:Minerva.css.
• View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue on Special:RecentChanges has been fixed. Previously, clicking hide in the active filters caused the "view new changes since…" button to disappear, though it should have remained visible. The button now behaves as expected.

Updates for technical contributors

• New documentation is now available to help editors debug on-site search features. It supports troubleshooting when pages do not appear in results, when ranking seems unexpected, and when you need to inspect what content is being indexed, helping make search behavior easier to understand and analyze. Learn more.
• 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 19:15, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

Re: Queue 4

You just deleted the queue; as the reviewer, I don't think you're supposed to mess around with it. Also, the secondary source says "Van Vleck credits her with key work on the quantum mechanics of magnetism", which was early work. I have no objection to restoring the thesis part, but my information was correct and it's best to notify me. Viriditas (talk) 01:22, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

You're right; I should not have edited it. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 01:27, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

That's okay. I've made the same mistake before. Now, how do you want to word it? Viriditas (talk) 01:28, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

The issue I have is that the hook and the article are now out of step. The wording of the article, hook, and source should all agree with each other. (WP:DYKHOOKCITE) The Conversation source (fn 1) says "Frank’s thesis, partially published in Physical Review in 1932, focused on the element samarium. It showed quantum mechanical corrections were needed to explain the experimental data and contains a plot that appears in Van Vleck’s Nobel lecture (fn 6), labelled 'V.V. & F'." The Nobel Prize speech does not cite Frank's thesis but a 1929 paper, Van Vleck, J. H.; Frank, A. (1 December 1929). "The Effect of Second Order Zeeman Terms on Magnetic Susceptibilities in the Rare Earth and Iron Groups". Physical Review. 34: 1494–1496. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.34.1494.. I know from personal experience that supervisors often publish material from their graduate students under their own name, but at least van Vleck read it. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 03:10, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

I’m confused. I added back in the wording you wanted. Are you saying it should be removed again? Viriditas (talk) 05:10, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

No, it now matches the article. The use of "cited" is a bit colloquial here but I think it is okay. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 05:42, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

What would you change it to ("cited") if you had a preference? Viriditas (talk) 21:25, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

I am not sure. I am not good at finding better words. Referenced? Included research from? Hawkeye7 (discuss) 22:30, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 17 February 2026

• In the media: Global powers see Wikipedia as fundamental target for manipulation
  Attempted Wikipedia shenanigans apparent from Epstein, AI, various governments.

• News and notes: Discussions open for the next WMF Annual Plan
  Plus, WikiFlix going places, steady progress on older FAs and other news from the Wikimedia world.

• Serendipity: Maintenance crews continue to slog through Wikipedia's oldest Featured Articles
  Hundreds of old FAs have been triaged since project began, but thousands remain — and they need reviewers.

• Disinformation report: Epstein's obsessions
  The sex offender's attempts to whitewash Wikipedia run deeper than we first thought.

• Technology report: Wikidata Graph Split and how we address major challenges
  A personal perspective on a major update to the Wikimedia social machine.

• Traffic report: Deaths, killings, films, and the Olympics
  I'll have the usual!

• Opinion: Incoming Incurables
  A poem for Wikipedia Day 2026.

• Crossword: Pop quiz
  Sharpen your pencil. How well do you really know Wikipedia?

• Comix: herculean
  efforts.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:59, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

Help, please

I want to be sure you're seeing , and I really hope you can help keep this from ending in tears. You of all people know how much respect men such as Uwikis deserve, and I don't want to see him hurt. EEng 13:27, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-09

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

Weekly highlight

• Reference Check has been deployed to English Wikipedia, completing its rollout across all Wikipedias. The feature prompts newcomers to add a citation before publishing new content, helping reduce common citation-related reverts and improve verifiability. In A/B testing, the impact was substantial: newcomers shown Reference Check were approximately 2.2 times more likely to include a reference on desktop and about 17.5 times more likely on mobile web.

Updates for editors

• The InterwikiSorting extension, which allowed for the sorting of interwiki links, has been undeployed from Wikipedia. As a result, editors who had enabled interwiki link sorting in non-compact mode (full list format) will now see links reordered. The links moving forward will be listed in the alphabetical order of language code.
• Later this week, people who are editing a page-section using the mobile visual editor, will notice a new "Edit full page" button. When tapped, you will be able to edit the entire article. This helps when the change you want to make is outside the section you initially opened.
• The Reader Experience team is inviting editors to assess whether dark mode should still be considered "beta" on their wiki, based on their experience of how well it functions on desktop and mobile. If the feature is deemed mature, editors can update the interface messages in MediaWiki:skin-theme-description and MediaWiki:Vector-night-mode-beta-tag to indicate that dark mode is ready and no longer considered beta.
• The improved Activity tab which displays user-insights is now available to all users of the Wikipedia iOS app (version 7.9.0 and later). Following earlier A/B testing that showed higher account creation among users with access to the feature, it has been rolled out to 100% of users along with some updates. The Activity tab now shows your edited articles in the timeline, offers editing impact insights like contribution counts and article view trends, and customization options to improve in-app experience for users.
• View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug that prevented DiscussionTools from working on mobile has now been fixed, restoring full functionality.

Updates for technical contributors

• The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension that makes this possible continues to improve. The latest upgrade is the inclusion of a new hook, ext.globalwatchlist.rebuild, which fires after each watchlist rebuild. This allows you to run gadgets and user scripts for the Special page.
• 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 19:01, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

Relief of Douglas MacArthur scheduled for TFA

This is to let you know that Relief of Douglas MacArthur has been scheduled as today's featured article for 11 April 2026. Please check that the article needs no amendments. Feel free to amend the draft blurb, which can be found at Wikipedia:Today's featured article/April 2026, or to make comments on other matters concerning the scheduling of this article at Wikipedia talk:Today's featured article/April 2026. Please keep an eye on that page, as notifications of copy edits to or queries about the draft blurb may be posted there. I also suggest that you watchlist Wikipedia:Main Page/Errors from two days before it appears on the Main Page. Thanks, and congratulations on your work! Z1720 (talk) 21:52, 24 February 2026 (UTC)

Request to review Bella Ramsey FAC nomination

Hi @Hawkeye7. Apologies for contacting you out of the blue but I was wondering whether you be willing to take a look at my featured article nomination for Bella Ramsey's page? I noticed you’ve recently reviewed Robert Pattison’s FAC, and I’d really value any feedback or suggestions you had. Thanks! Crp74 (talk) 09:58, 26 February 2026 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue 238, February 2026

Your Military History Newsletter Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content Book review: Hawkeye7, Hog Farm and Nick-D review four works Op-ed: GGOTCC discusses the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships Timeline: This month in military history

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 12:02, 26 February 2026 (UTC)

WikiCup 2026 March newsletter

The first round of the 2026 WikiCup ended on 26 February. As some of you may have noticed, good article nomination reviews now receive 10 points, an increase from 5 points in the previous year, as per a consensus at WT:CUP. This point increase has been retroactively applied to all good article reviews for which competitors have claimed points in this round. Peer reviews, which continue to be worth 5 points, are now listed in the same section as featured article candidate reviews, rather than with good article reviews. Everyone who competed in round 1 will advance to round 2 unless they have withdrawn or been banned. No other changes to the round-point system have been made for this year.

Round 1 was competitive. Three contestants scored more than 1,000 round points, and the top 16 contestants all scored more than 300 round points. The following competitors scored more than 800 round points:

• Bgsu98 (submissions) with 1,467 round points, largely gained from 1 featured article, 5 featured lists, 15 good articles, and 42 FAC and GAN reviews;
• Olliefant (submissions) with 1,246 round points, largely from 4 featured lists, 9 good articles, 2 featured topic articles, 4 did you know articles, and 75 FAC and GAN reviews;
• Generalissima (submissions) with 1,095 round points, largely from 3 featured articles, 6 good articles, and 5 did you know articles;
• MCE89 (submissions) with 848 round points, largely from 1 featured article, 8 good articles, 1 did you know article, and 32 FAC and GAN reviews; and
• Rollinginhisgrave (submissions) with 838 round points, largely from 1 featured article, 8 good articles, 1 did you know article, and 14 FAC, GAN, and peer reviews.

The full scores for round 1 can be seen here. During this round, contestants have claimed 7 featured articles, 16 featured lists, 2 featured-topic articles, 168 good articles, 13 good-topic articles and more than 50 Did You Know articles. In addition, competitors have worked on 14 In the News articles, and they have conducted nearly 700 reviews. The tournament points table will be updated within the next few days.

Remember that any content promoted after 26 February but before the start of Round 2 can be claimed in Round 2. 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) 14:57, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-10

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

Weekly highlight

• Wikipedia 25 Birthday mode is now live on Betawi, Breton, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, Gorontalo, Indonesian, Italian, Luxembourgish, Madurese, Sicilian, Spanish, Thai, and Vietnamese Wikipedias! This limited-time campaign feature celebrates 25 years of Wikipedia with a birthday mascot, Baby Globe. When turned on, Baby Globe is shown on ~2,500 articles, waiting to be discovered by readers. Communities can choose to turn Birthday mode on by getting consensus from their community and asking an admin to enable the feature and customize it via community configuration on the local wiki.

Updates for editors

• Sub-referencing, a new feature to re-use references with different details has been released to Swedish Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia and a couple of other wikis. You can try the feature on these projects or on testwiki and betawiki. Learnings from the first pilot wiki German Wikipedia have been published in a report. Reach out to the Wikimedia Deutschland team if you are interested in becoming a pilot wiki.
• Paste Check will become available at all Wikipedias this week. The feature prompts newcomers who are pasting text they are not likely to have written into VisualEditor to consider whether doing so risks a copyright violation. Paste Check tags all edits where it is shown for potential review. Local administrators can configure various aspects of the feature via Special:EditChecks. Research across 22 wikis found that Paste Check resulted in an 18% decrease in relative reverted-edits compared to the control group. Translators can help to localize this and related features.
• The Reader Experience team will be standardizing the user menu in the top right for all mobile users so that it is closer to the desktop experience. Currently this user menu is only visible to users with Advanced Mobile Controls (AMC) turned on. The only change is that a couple buttons previously in the left-side menu will move to the top right for users who do not have AMC turned on. This change is expected to go out March 9 and seeks to improve the user interface.
• Starting in the week of March 2, the emails sent out when an email address was added, removed, or changed for an account will switch to a substantially nicer and clearer HTML email from the prior plaintext one.
• Notifications are currently limited to 2,000 historic entries per user, and extend back to 2013 when the feature was released. This is going to be changed to only store Notifications from the last 5 years, but up to 10,000 of them. This will help with long-term infrastructure health and help to prevent more recent notifications from disappearing too soon.
• The Global Watchlist which lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on a single page continues to see improvements. The latest update improves label usage experience. The extension now allows activating the language fallback system for Wikidata items without labels in the viewed language, and showing those labels in the user’s preferred Wikidata language if no uselang= URL parameter is provided.
• The Wikipedia Android team has started a beta test of hybrid search on Greek Wikipedia. Hybrid search capabilities can handle both semantic and keyword queries enabling readers to find what they’re looking for directly on Wikipedia more easily.
• For security reasons, members of certain user groups are required to have two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled. Currently, 2FA is required to use the group, but not to be a member of it. Given that this model still has some vulnerabilities, the situation will gradually change in March. Members of these groups will be unable to disable last 2FA method on their account, and it will be impossible to add users without 2FA to these groups. Users will still be able to add new authentication methods or remove them, as long as at least one method is continuously enabled. In the second half of March, users without 2FA will be removed from these groups. This applies to: CentralNotice administrators, checkusers, interface administrators, suppressors, Wikidata staff, Wikifunctions staff, WMF Office IT and WMF Trust & Safety. Nothing will change for other users. See the linked task for deployment schedule.
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue preventing users from creating an instance in Wikibase.cloud has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• To help ensure fair use of infrastructure, over the next month the Wikimedia Foundation will implement global API rate limits across our APIs. In early March, stricter limits will be applied to unidentified requests from outside Toolforge/WMCS and API requests that are made from web browsers. In April, higher limits will be applied to identified traffic. These limits are intentionally set as high as possible to minimise impact on the community. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits.
• The Wikidata Query Service Linked Data Fragment (LDF) endpoint will be decommissioned in February. This endpoint served limited traffic, which was successfully migrated to other data access methods that were better suited to support existing use cases. The hardware used to support the LDF endpoint will be reallocated to support the ongoing backend migration efforts.
• The new Parsoid parser continues to be deployed to additional wikis, improving platform sustainability and making it easier to introduce new reading and editing features. Parsoid is now the default parser on 488 WMF wikis (268 Wikipedias), now covering more than 10% of all Wikipedia page views.
• The process and criteria for requesting exceptional access to the high volume feed of the Wikimedia Enterprise APIs (at no cost for mission-aligned usecases), have now been published. This is to provide more thorough and clearer documentation for users.
• Tech Blog, the blog dedicated to the Wikimedia technical community will be migrating to Diff, the community news and event blog. The migration should be complete in April 2026, after which new posts will be accepted for publishing. Readers will be able to access posts – old and new – on the landing page at https://diff.wikimedia.org/techblog.
• 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 17:49, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

The Downlink Volume 4, Issue 1

⭠ Previous Issue Following Issue ⭢

	The Downlink	The WikiProject Spaceflight Newsletter
		2026 1 — 31 January

Volume 4 — Issue 1
Spaceflight Project • Project discussion • Members • Assessment • Open tasks • Popular pages • The Downlink
In the News NASA called off a planned spacewalk of SpaceX Crew-11 on 8 January, and later cancelled the mission outright, after one of the crewmembers, Mike Fincke, was reported to have a medical complication. This was the first time that this occurred in US history. On 11 January, the Pandora spacecraft was successfully launched. Pandora is designed to study the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets, with the intention of identifying targets for future observation.
Article of the month Exoplanetary Circumstellar Environments and Disk Explorer Exoplanetary Circumstellar Environments and Disk Explorer (EXCEDE) is a proposed space telescope for NASA's Explorer program to observe circumstellar protoplanetary and debris discs and study planet formation around nearby (within 100 parsecs) stars of spectral classes M to B. Had it been selected for development, it was proposed to launch in 2019. The spacecraft concept proposed to use a 70 centimeter diameter telescope-mounted coronagraph called PIAA (Phase Induced Amplitude Apodized Coronagraph) to suppress starlight in order to be able to detect fainter radiation of circumstellar dust. Characterizing constitution of such disks would provide clues for planetary formation (mostly in habitable zones), while already existing exoplanets can be detected through their interaction with dust disk. The project's Principal Investigator is Glenn Schneider.	Image of the month Wernher von Braun with the Rocketdyne F-1 engines Pictured here are two titans of spaceflight history: Dr. Wernher von Braun, one of the main figures of the early American space program and designer of both the Saturn V and V-2 rockets, and five (four visible) Rocketdyne F-1 engines, used on the Saturn V Dynamic Test Vehicle. Dr. von Braun's career is noted for a great number of achievements in human spaceflight, including the Apollo mission which successfully put human beings on the moon; nevertheless, it is burdened with the shadow of his activities in the Nazi Party, especially concerning his work on the V-2. The engines behind him, in addition to being immense, have the honor of being the only engines used to get humans to the moon, as of the time of writing. Developed in the late 1950s, the 8,400 kilograms (18,500 lb) engines are still the most powerful single combustion chamber liquid-propellant rocket ever made.
Members New Members: GiftedIceCream (24 January) Number of active members: 219. Total number of members: 446. January Launches All times stated here are in UTC. See a complete list here. Falcon 9 Block 5 — various, including Pandora (11 Jan. at 13:44:50) (success) PSLV-DL — various, including EOS-N1 and THEOS-2A (12 Jan. at 04:48:30) (launch failure) Ceres-2 — various (17 Jan. at 04:05) (launch failure)	Article Statistics This data reflects values from 31 January 2026. Spaceflight articles by quality and importance Quality Importance Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total FA 6 30 15 8 59 FL 3 4 4 11 FM 124 124 A 1 2 1 4 GA 12 26 34 59 2 133 B 16 77 196 236 6 531 C 44 170 607 860 1 58 1,740 Start 15 134 1,026 2,701 499 4,375 Stub 5 195 1,986 296 2,482 List 11 119 110 239 1 44 524 Category 1,282 1,282 Disambig 48 48 File 275 275 Portal 55 55 Project 109 109 Redirect 2 43 143 1,248 1,436 Template 534 534 NA 2 2 Other 34 34 Assessed 105 566 2,232 6,237 3,713 905 13,758 Unassessed 1 8 127 136 Total 105 567 2,232 6,245 3,713 1,032 13,894 Monthly Changes Since December 2025, there are two fewer top-importance, two more high-importance, two more mid-importance, 19 more low-importance, 20 more NA-importance, and 31 more unknown-importance articles, for a total of 72 new articles. There are also three more GA-class, three more B-class, twelve more C-class, eleven more Start-class, and eleven more Stub-class articles, and three more lists.
Discuss & propose changes to The Downlink at The Downlink talk page. To unsubscribe from the newsletter remove your name from the Mailing list. Newsletter contributors: Ships&Space

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:43, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

DYK for John David Rogers

On 4 March 2026, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article John David Rogers, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that John David Rogers represented Australia at the Japanese surrender in Singapore in September 1945 (video featured)? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/John David Rogers. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, John David Rogers), and the hook may be added to the statistics page after its run on the Main Page has completed. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to nominate it.

HurricaneZeta^C 00:02, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

This is a really interesting article. I've never given much consideration to the Australian Army's intelligence services during World War II, and I learned a lot from reading it. Nick-D (talk) 09:39, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

Page move during FAC

Hi Hawkeye, I've just promoted Shipping discourse and subsequently realised it was moved to Shipping ethics controversy in fanfiction during the FAC. Pls remind me, for the benefit of FACBot, would it be simpler to move the article page back to its original name (which it is in the FAC archive page), let FACBot do its thing, and then re-do the article page move? Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 05:14, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

It should be okay. I will watch it and ensure that it gets processed properly. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 07:16, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

Thanks mate, I'll just proceed with the regular promotion steps then -- but should I use the new name to add to the Featured Log and the FAs page, and just leave the FAC archive page name as is? Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 07:32, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

Yes, use the new name. So long as redirects are in place, the Bot should be able to follow. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 09:31, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

It all worked fine. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 23:15, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

Great, tks. So it looks like now it's not an issue if an article page name is altered during the life of the FAC, we just keep the original name for the FAC archive page and add the article under its new name to the FA page... Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 00:20, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

DYK for Special Engineer Detachment

On 6 March 2026, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Special Engineer Detachment, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that John D. Hoffman of the Special Engineer Detachment was awarded the Soldier's Medal, the US Army's highest non-combat decoration and the only one given to a member of the Manhattan District? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Special Engineer Detachment. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, Special Engineer Detachment), and the hook may be added to the statistics page after its run on the Main Page has completed. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to nominate it.

HurricaneZeta^C 12:03, 6 March 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-11

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

Weekly highlight

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday, 25 March 2026 at 15:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests, which happen twice a year. During the switchover, all Wikimedia website traffic is shifted from one primary data center to the backup data center to test availability and prevent service disruption even in emergencies.
• Last week, all wikis had 2 hours of read-only time, and extended unavailability for user-scripts and gadgets. This was due to a security incident which has since been resolved. Work is ongoing to prevent re-occurrences. For current information please see the post on the Stewards' noticeboard (translations).

Updates for editors

• Users facing multiple blocks on mobile will now see the reasons for each block separately, instead of a generic message. This helps them understand why they are blocked and what steps they can take to resolve the issue. For example, users affected for using common VPNs (such as iCloud Private Relay) will receive clearer guidance on what they need to do to start editing again.
• Later this week, Suggestion Mode will become available as a beta feature within the visual editor at all Wikipedias. This feature proactively suggests various types of actions that people can consider taking to improve Wikipedia articles, and learn about related guidelines. The feature is locally configurable, and can also be locally expanded with custom Suggestions. Current settings can be seen at Special:EditChecks and there are instructions for how administrators can customize the links to point to local guidelines. The feature is connected to Edit check which suggests improvements while someone is writing new content. In the future, the Editing team plans to evaluate the feature's impact with newcomers through a controlled experiment.
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where the cursor became misaligned during the use of CodeMirror’s syntax highlighting, which makes wikitext and code easier to read, has now been fixed. This problem specifically affected users who defined a font rule in a custom stylesheet while creating a new topic with DiscussionTools.

Updates for technical contributors

• API rate limiting update: To help ensure fair use of infrastructure, global API rate limits will be applied this week to requests without a compliant User-Agent that originate from outside Toolforge/WMCS and to unauthenticated requests made from web browsers. Higher limits will be applied to identified traffic in April. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits.
• The new GraphQL API has been released. The API was developed as a flexible alternative to select features of the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS), to improve developer experience and foster adaptability, and efficient data access. Try it out and give feedback. You can also sign up for usability tests.
• The PTAC Unsupported Tools Working Group continued improvements to Video2Commons in February, with fixes addressing authentication errors, large-file handling, task queue visibility, and clearer upload behavior. Work is still ongoing in some areas, including changes related to deprecated server-side uploads. Read this update to learn more.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The Article Guidance team invites experienced Wikipedia editors from selected pilot wikis and interested contributors from other Wikipedias to fill out this questionnaire which is available in English, Arabic, Bengali, Japanese, Portuguese, Persian, and Turkish. Your answers will help the team customize guidance for less experienced editors and help them learn community policies and practices while creating an article. Learn more on the project page.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 18:51, 9 March 2026 (UTC)

March 2026

Welcome to Wikipedia, and thank you for your contributions. Although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, please note that there is a Manual of Style that should be followed to maintain a consistent, encyclopedic appearance. Deviating from this style, as you did in Hugh Mackenzie (Royal Navy officer), disturbs uniformity among articles and may cause readability or accessibility problems. Please take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. A directly relevant quote from MOS:POSTNOM: "The lead sentence should be concise: Academic (including honorary) degrees and professional qualifications may be mentioned in the article, along with the above, but should be omitted from the lead." Qwerty123M (talk) 02:28, 10 March 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 10 March 2026

• Interview: Bernadette Meehan, new Wikimedia Foundation CEO
  Part 2.

• News and notes: Security testing unleashes computer worm on Meta-wiki
  Dormant worm awakes; a sketchy archiving site struck; ether burns.

• Special report: What actually happened during the Wikimedia security incident?
  A horrifying exploit took place, which could have had catastrophic and far-reaching consequences if used maliciously; instead, it seems to have happened by accident and was used for childish vandalism. How did this happen, and what did the script actually do?

• In the media: Indonesian government blocks Wikimedia logins; archive site scoured from Wikipedia after owner runs malware
  As well as controversy over LLM translations.

• Recent research: To wiki, perchance to groki
  Comparisons continue.

• Obituary: Madhav Gadgil, Fredrick Brennan, Mark Miller, Chip Berlet
  Rest in peace.

• Opinion: Interface administrators and trusting trust
  Potential attacks are the logical consequence of giving a group of users unlimited control over JavaScript.

• Technology report: English Wikipedia deprecates archive.today after DDoS against blog, altered content
  After the archive site launched a DDoS campaign against a small blog in January 2026, a request for comment was started, with consensus to deprecate the site used almost 700 thousand times.

• Op-ed: Why is "Trypsin-sensitive photosynthetic activities in chloroplast membranes" cited in "List of tallest buildings in Chicago"?
  The answer is slop.

• Essay: The pursuit of a button click
  Volunteering for Wikipedia has its rewards. The thank-button, for example.

• In focus: Short descriptions: One year later
  A discussion of the challenge set forth to the Wikipedia community one year ago!

• WikiProject report: Unreferenced articles backlog drive
  Unreferenced articles in English Wikipedia - help us in the backlog drive!

• Community view: Speaking of planning ...
  The WMF planning process is underway.

• Traffic report: Over the mountain, kissing silver inlaid clouds
  Death and the Winter Olympics.

• Crossword: "It will never happen"
  Want to take a break?

• Comix: BRIEn't
  Or is it.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:11, 10 March 2026 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: February 2026

This Month in GLAM – Volume XVI, Issue II, February 2026 Headlines From the team: GLAM in 2026 is calling to action! Belgium report: A photo safari through Wiki Loves Fashion & a rescue mission with Mission Gourmande! Czech Republic report: National Library overview of 2025 Italy report: Cultural Heritage and Memory: 2026 GLAM Call and Executed Renaissance Edit-a-thon New Zealand report: Farewelling the Auckland Museum Summer Students and an update on the NZBSI WiR Poland report: Wikipedia in Cultural Marketing at Crash Mondays Warsaw Serbia report: February in Wikimedia Serbia Spain report: Wikidata in the GLAM context II Switzerland report: Neocomensia, SAPA, Atelier Winterthur, GLAM-on-Tour Disentis UK report: New content in African and Asian languages Biodiversity Heritage Library report: Updates on work by BHLWiki Working Group members Memory of the World report: Focus on Indigenous issues Calendar: March's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 00:51, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-12

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

Updates for editors

• The ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽ beta feature, also known as CodeMirror 6, has been used for wikitext syntax highlighting since November 2024. It will be promoted out of beta by May 2026 in order to bring improvements and new features to all editors who use the standard syntax highlighter. If you have any questions or concerns about promoting the feature out of beta, please share.
• Some changes to local user groups are performed by stewards on Meta-Wiki and logged there only. Now, interwiki rights changes will be logged both on Meta-Wiki and the wiki of the target user to make it easier to access a full record of user's rights changes on a local wiki. Past log entries for such changes will be backfilled in the coming weeks.
• On wikis using Flagged Revisions, the number of pending changes shown on Special:PendingChanges previously counted pages which were no longer pending review, because they have been removed from the system without being reviewed, e.g. due to being deleted, moved to a different namespace, or due to wiki configuration changes. The count will be correct now. On some wikis the number shown will be much smaller than before. There should be no change to the list of pages itself.
• Wikifunctions composition language has been rewritten, resulting in a new version of the language. This change aims to increase service stability by reducing the orchestrator's memory consumption. This rewrite also enables substantial latency reduction, code simplification, and better abstractions, which will open the door to later feature additions. Read more about the changes.
• Users can now sort search results alphabetically by page title. The update gives an additional option to finding pages more easily and quickly. Previously, results could be sorted by Edit date, Creation date, or Relevance. To use the new option, open 'Advanced Search' on the search results page and select 'Alphabetically' under 'Sorting Order'.
• View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the bug that prevented UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons from importing files from Flickr has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• A new special page, Special:LintTemplateErrors, has been created to list transcluded pages that are flagged as containing lint errors to help users discover them easily. The list is sorted by the number of transclusions with errors. For example: Special:LintTemplateErrors/night-mode-unaware-background-color.
• Users of the ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽ beta feature have been using CodeMirror instead of CodeEditor for syntax highlighting when editing JavaScript, CSS, JSON, Vue and Lua content pages, for some time now. Along with promoting CodeMirror 6 out of beta, the plan is to replace CodeEditor as the standard editor for these content models by May 2026. Feedback or concerns are welcome.
• The CodeMirror JavaScript modules will soon be upgraded to CodeMirror 6. Leading up to the upgrade, loading the ext.CodeMirror or ext.CodeMirror.lib modules from gadgets and user scripts was deprecated in July 2025. The use of the ext.CodeMirror.switch hook was also deprecated in March 2025. Contributors can now make their scripts or gadgets compatible with CodeMirror 6. See the migration guide for more information.
• The MediaWiki Interfaces team is expanding coverage of REST API module definitions to include extension APIs. REST API modules are groups of related endpoints that can be independently managed and versioned. Modules now exist for GrowthExperiments and Wikifunctions APIs. As we migrate extension APIs to this structure, documentation will move out of the main MediaWiki OpenAPI spec and REST Sandbox view, and will instead be accessible via module-specific options in the dropdown on the REST Sandbox (i.e., Special:RestSandbox, available on all wiki projects).
• The Scribunto extension provides different pieces of information about the wiki where the module is being used via the mw.site library. Starting last week, the library also provides a way of accessing the wiki ID that can be used to facilitate cross-wiki module maintenance.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The 2026 Coolest Tool Award celebrating outstanding community tools, is now open for nominations! Nominate your favorite tool using the nomination survey form by 23 March 2026. For more information on privacy and data handling, please see the survey privacy statement.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:34, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

Your nomination of Military logistics is under review

Your good article nomination of the article Military logistics is under review. See the review page for more information. This may take up to 7 days; feel free to contact the reviewer with any questions you might have. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of A.Cython -- A.Cython (talk) 23:33, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue 239, March 2026

Your Military History Newsletter Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content Book review: Hawkeye7 looks at three recent works Timeline: This month in military history

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 12:07, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

DYK for James Stanley Rogers

On 20 March 2026, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article James Stanley Rogers, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that James Stanley Rogers was the secretary of a panel that oversaw the production of optical munitions in Australia during the Second World War? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/James Stanley Rogers. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, James Stanley Rogers), and the hook may be added to the statistics page after its run on the Main Page has completed. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to nominate it.

 — Chris Woodrich (talk) 00:45, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Nomination of 2020s American renouncement of allies for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article 2020s American renouncement of allies, which you previously marked as reviewed, is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted. The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2020s American renouncement of allies until a consensus is reached, and you are welcomed to contribute to the discussion. SodiumBot (botop|talk|contribs) 04:02, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

These updates are delivered by SodiumBot. To opt out of these messages, add {{User:SodiumBot/NoNPPDelivery}} to your talk page.

Your nomination of Military logistics is on hold

Your good article nomination of the article Military logistics has been placed on hold, as the article needs some changes. See the review page for more information. If these are addressed within 7 days, the nomination will pass; otherwise, it may fail. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of A.Cython -- A.Cython (talk) 08:03, 21 March 2026 (UTC)

Your nomination of Military logistics has passed

Your good article nomination of the article Military logistics has passed; congratulations! See the review page for more information. If the article is eligible to appear in the "Did you know" section of the Main Page, you can nominate it within the next seven days. Please also consider reviewing somebody else's nomination to help keep the backlog down. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of A.Cython -- A.Cython (talk) 02:33, 22 March 2026 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for March 22

An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Military logistics, a link pointing to the disambiguation page Tactics was added.

(Opt-out instructions.) --DPL bot (talk) 09:53, 22 March 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-13

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

• Wikimedia site users can now log in without a password using passkeys. This is a secure method supported by fingerprint, facial recognition, or PIN. With this change, all users who opt for passwordless login will find it easier, faster, and more secure to log in to their accounts using any device. The new passkey login option currently appears as an autofill suggestion in the username field. An additional "Log in with passkey" button will soon be available for users who have already registered a passkey. This update will improve security and user experience. The screen recording demonstrates the passwordless login process step by step.
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday, 25 March 2026 at 15:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests, which happen twice a year. During the switchover, all Wikimedia website traffic is shifted from one primary data center to the backup data center to test availability and prevent service disruption even in emergencies.

Updates for editors

• Wikimedia site users can now export their notifications older than 5 years using a new Toolforge tool. This will ensure that users retain their important notifications and avoid them being lost based on the planned change to delete notifications older than 5 years, as previously announced.
• Wikipedia editors in Indonesian, Thai, Turkish, and Simple English now have access to Special:PersonalDashboard. This is an early version of an experience that introduces newer editors to patrolling workflows, making it easier for them to move from making edits to participating in more advanced moderation work on their project.
• The Special:Block now has two minor interface changes. Administrators can now easily perform indefinite blocks through a dedicated radio button in the expiry section. Also, choosing an indefinite expiry provides a different set of common reasons to select from, which can be changed at: MediaWiki:Ipbreason-indef-dropdown.
• Mobile editors at several wikis can now see an improved logged-out edit warning, thanks to the recent updates from the Growth team. These changes released last week are part of ongoing efforts and tests to enhance account creation experience on mobile and then increase participation.
• View all 36 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the bug that prevented mobile web users from seeing the block information when affected by multiple blocks has been fixed. They can now see messages of all the blocks currently affecting them when they access Wikipedia.

Updates for technical contributors

• Images built using Toolforge will soon get the upgraded buildpacks version, bringing support for newer language versions and other upstream improvements and fixes. If you use Toolforge Build Service, review the recent cloud-announce email and update your build configuration as necessary to ensure your tools are compatible.

• The API Portal documentation wiki will shut down in June 2026. API keys created on the API Portal will continue to work normally. api.wikimedia.org endpoints will be deprecated gradually starting in July 2026. Documentation on the API Portal is moving to mediawiki.org. Learn more on the project page.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• WMDE Technical Wishes is considering improvements to automatically generated reference names in VisualEditor. Please check out the proposed solutions and participate in the request for comment.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 16:49, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

Promotion of Manhattan Project feed materials program

Congratulations, Hawkeye7! The article you nominated, Manhattan Project feed materials program, has been promoted to featured status, recognizing it as one of the best articles on Wikipedia. The nomination discussion has been archived.

This is a rare accomplishment and you should be proud. If you would like, you may nominate it to appear on the Main Page as Today's featured article. Keep up the great work! Cheers, David Fuchs (talk) via FACBot (talk) 23:06, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

The Downlink Volume 4, Issue 2

	The Downlink	The WikiProject Spaceflight Newsletter
		2026 1 — 28 February

Volume 4 — Issue 2
Spaceflight Project • Project discussion • Members • Assessment • Open tasks • Popular pages • The Downlink
In the News The first crewed spaceflight of 2026, SpaceX Crew-12, was launched on the 13th. Four astronauts were flown to the ISS in an atypical indirect handover that was caused by the early return of Crew-11 due to a medical emergency. On the 14th, the ESA lost contact with PROBA-3, a dual-probe technological demonstration mission for chronographic high-precision formation flying. Specifically, the Chronograph Spacecraft lost orientation and drifted away from the Occulter.
Article of the month Parking orbit A parking orbit is a temporary orbit used during the launch of a spacecraft. A launch vehicle follows a trajectory to the parking orbit, then coasts for a while, then engines fire again to enter the final desired trajectory. An alternative trajectory that is used on some missions is direct injection, where the rocket fires continuously (except during staging) until its fuel is exhausted, ending with the payload on the final trajectory. This technique was first used by the Soviet Venera 1 mission to Venus in 1961.	Image of the month Space Shuttle Endeavour prior to rendezvous with the International Space Station Part of a series of photographs, this image depicts the Space Shuttle Endeavour prior to rendezvous and docking with the International Space Station as part of STS-130 in 2010. It was taken from the station by a member of Expedition 22 when the ISS was 183 nautical miles above the South Pacific, off the coast of southern Chile. Earth is in the bottom-left; the orange part of the atmosphere is the troposphere, the white band in the middle is the stratosphere, and the blue section is the mesosphere.
Members New Members: none Number of active members: 219. Total number of members: 446. February Launches All times stated here are in UTC. See a current list here. Proton-M/DM-03 — Elektro–L №5, Jam-e-Jam 1 (12 Feb. at 08:52:15) (success) Vulcan Centaur VC4S — GSSAP-7/-8, USA-584 (12 Feb. at 09:22:00) (success)	Article Statistics This data reflects values from 28 February 2026. Spaceflight articles by quality and importance Quality Importance Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total FA 6 30 15 8 59 FL 3 4 4 11 FM 124 124 A 1 2 1 4 GA 12 26 34 59 2 133 B 16 77 196 238 7 534 C 44 170 609 868 1 61 1,753 Start 15 134 1,026 2,713 503 4,391 Stub 5 194 1,976 297 2,472 List 11 119 111 242 1 44 528 Category 1,284 1,284 Disambig 48 48 File 274 274 Portal 55 55 Project 109 109 Redirect 2 43 141 1,248 1,434 Template 533 533 NA 2 2 Other 1 37 38 Assessed 105 566 2,234 6,251 3,716 914 13,786 Unassessed 1 9 128 138 Total 105 567 2,234 6,260 3,716 1,042 13,924 Monthly Changes Since January 2026, there are two more mid-importance, fifteen more low-importance, three more NA-importance, and ten more unknown-importance articles, for a total of 30 new articles. There are also three more B-class, thirteen more C-class, sixteen more Start-class, and ten fewer Stub-class articles, and four more lists.
Discuss & propose changes to The Downlink at The Downlink talk page. To unsubscribe from the newsletter remove your name from the Mailing list. Newsletter contributors: Ships&Space

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:34, 26 March 2026 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Original Barnstar
	Thank you for your help on re-opening USCGC Dione's A-class review! GGOTCC 02:11, 28 March 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-14

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

Weekly highlight

• The Beta version of Abstract Wikipedia a new Wikimedia project which is language-independent, was launched last week. The project allows communities to build Wikipedia articles in their native language, which can be readily accessed by other users in their own languages. The wiki is powered by instructions from Wikifunctions and also based on structured content from Wikidata. Read more.

Updates for editors

• The Growth team is running an A/B test to evaluate a clearer, more user-friendly message that promotes account creation on wikis. Currently when logged-out mobile users begin editing, they see a jarring warning message that can feel abrupt and discouraging. This also presents temporary account editing as the default rather than encouraging account creation. The test is running on ten Wikipedias, including Arabic, French, Spanish and German. Read more.
• The Wikimedia Apps team is inviting feedback on how editing should work on the Wikipedia mobile apps. The discussion focuses on improving how users access editing tools when they tap "Edit". This is part of a broader effort to convert readers who develop an interest in editing, to access a more user-friendly pathway to start contributing.
• View all 45 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where citation fetching from the large newspaper archive Newspapers.com was no longer working, due to a block in Citoid requests, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 19:23, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 March 2026

• News and notes: Entirety of Wikinews to be shut down
  All languages to be shut down in May; first AI agent blocked; new name for AfD?

• In the media: AI ban, newspapers disrupt archiving; and antisemitism complaints
  Perennial challenges with AI, demographic representation, and attacks from people buying media influence.

• Community view: Videos from WikiConference North America 2025 in NYC
  In attendees' own words.

• Disinformation report: Cleaning up after Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Nygard, and Mohamed Al-Fayed
  Countering the edits of the rich and dangerous.

• WikiConference report: WikiConference North America 2025 in NYC review
  About the conference series, and this conference particularly.

• Obituary: Dr. Subas Chandra Rout
  Rest in peace.

• Traffic report: Call in the dogs of war, soldier of fortune
  Though of course the picture needs to be Chuck Norris...

• Gallery: Canadian Rangers participate in Operation Enduring Encyclopedia
  Analogies between how Wikipedia works and how Canada works.

• Comix: n00bsitting
  ...!

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:04, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

Four Award for Manhattan Project feed materials program

		Four Award
		Congratulations! You have been awarded the Four Award for your work from beginning to end on Manhattan Project feed materials program. All the Best -- Chuck Talk 19:48, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

Auto check for February

The bot missed February, apparently. March is now up. Donner60 (talk) 00:22, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

I can re-run February if you like. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 00:34, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

I think that would be a good idea since we usually find a few questionable ones. It may take a little time to catch up again, with January not quite finished, of course. Thanks. Donner60 (talk) 04:10, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

Congratulations from the Military History Project

		Content Review Medal of Merit (Military history)
		On behalf of the Military History Project, I am proud to present the The Content Review Medal of Merit (Military history) for participating in 14 reviews between January and March 2026. Donner60 (talk) via MilHistBot (talk) 00:30, 3 April 2026 (UTC) Keep track of upcoming reviews. Just copy and paste {{WPMILHIST Review alerts}} to your user space

January–February 2026 NPP backlog drive – Points award

		The Special Bronze Barnstar
		This award is given in recognition of Hawkeye7 for accumulating at least 75 points in the January–February 2026 NPP backlog drive. Your contributions helped review 27,750 articles and 7,050 redirects during the drive. Thank you so much for taking part and helping reduce the backlog! – DreamRimmer ■ 16:55, 4 April 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-15

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

• The CampaignEvents extension now includes a new group goal-setting feature, enabling organizers to set and track event goals such as the number of articles created and participating contributors in real time. Similarly, participants can work toward shared targets and see their collective impact as the event unfolds. The feature is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. Learn more in the documentation.
• The new watchlist labels feature (announced in Tech News 2026-07) is now available via VisualEditor, the source editor, and the 'watchstar' (or watch link, for skins that don't have a star icon). Previously it was only possible to assign labels via EditWatchlist. In all three places it is a new field following the expiry field.
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where talk pages on mobile with Parsoid are unusable after empty section headers, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The sub-referencing feature, which lets editors add details to an existing reference without duplicating it, will be gradually rolled out to more wikis later this year. Wikis using the Reference Tooltips gadget are encouraged to update their version (typically at MediaWiki:Gadget-ReferenceTooltips.js as shown here) to ensure compatibility. Other reference-related gadgets may also be affected.
• All Wikinews editions will be closed and switched to read-only mode on 4 May 2026. Content will remain accessible, but no new edits or articles can be added. This closure was approved by the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation following extended discussions. Read more.
• The Action API has had several formats for requested output. One of them, format=php, is being removed soon. Please ensure your scripts or bots use the JSON format. This removal should affect very few scripts and bots.
• The Special:NamespaceInfo page now includes namespace aliases. For example "WP" for the "Project" ("Wikipedia") namespace on the German Wikipedia.
• 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 16:17, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: March 2026

This Month in GLAM – Volume XVI, Issue III, March 2026 Headlines From the team: GLAM in Equinox Albania report: Wikigap 2026 in Tirana, Albania Aruba report: Celebrating 20 Years of Papiamentu/o Wikipedia Bolivia report: The Family Treasures Project Returns, with New GLAM Partners Brazil report: Wiki Loves Folklore Brazil defines six categories to represent Brazilian culture on Commons Colombia report: Architecture in the public domain in libraries in Nariño/Arquitectura en dominio público en bibliotecas nariñenses Czech Republic report: Main Wikimedian in Residence report for 2025 is here Germany report: Art History Loves Wiki 2026 – digital/local. collection loves wiki India report: Collaboration resumes with the British Library for Bangla Wikisource Italy report: 2026 winners projects New Zealand report: New Zealand Bioeconomy Science Institute Wikimedian in Residence update, a letter published in Nature & Architecture + Women NZ North Macedonia report: Wikimedia MKD's GLAM Highlights: Botany and Beyond Portugal report: March in Portugal Serbia report: March in Wikimedia Serbia Sweden report: Looking for similar images Switzerland report: GLAM Wiki Group, Donna, CoCreation PTT-Archive UK report: CILIP MDG 2026 Conference, Library meetups and the World's Enamels Ukraine report: Spring 2026 news from Ukraine – Wiki Loves Folklore & more #1Lib1Ref USA report: MoMA's International Traveling Exhibitions and Wikidata on the LD4 Arts Affinity Group April Community Call Biodiversity Heritage Library report: Updates on work by BHL-Wiki Working Group members AvoinGLAM report: Oulu Löyly Memory of the World report: Indigenous languages on the Main Page Calendar: April's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 18:19, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

CS1 error on Savannah River Site

Hello, I'm Qwerfjkl (bot). I have automatically detected that this edit performed by you, on the page Savannah River Site, may have introduced referencing errors. They are as follows:

• A missing title error. References show this error when they do not have a title. Please edit the article to add the appropriate title parameter to the reference. (Fix | Ask for help)

Please check this page and fix the errors highlighted. If you think this is a false positive, you can report it to my operator. Thanks, Qwerfjkl (bot) (talk) 04:42, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-16

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

• Experienced editors are invited to test the Article guidance feature, designed to help less-experienced editors create well-structured, policy-compliant Wikipedia articles. Testing instructions are available. Also, after reviewing the outlines, please provide feedback on the project talk page. Based on your input, the feature will be refined and transferred to the pilot Wikipedias to translate and adapt. Check out the video explaining the feature.

Updates for editors

• On most wikis, all autoconfirmed users can now use Special:ChangeContentModel page to create new pages with custom content models, such as mass message lists, making custom page formats more accessible. Check Special:ListGroupRights for the status of your wiki.
• The Growth team has launched an account creation experiment to evaluate whether adding an account creation button to the mobile web header increases new account registrations and encourages more mobile users to contribute to the wikis. The experiment is currently live on Hindi, Indonesian, Bengali, Thai, and Hebrew Wikipedia, and targets 10% of logged-out mobile web users.
• View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where VisualEditor could get stuck loading on Windows devices with animations turned off, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• Starting later this week, Edit filter managers who have the ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽ beta feature enabled will have CodeMirror instead of CodeEditor as the editor at Special:AbuseFilter. This is part of the broader effort to make the user experience more consistent across all editors.
• Tools and bots that access the Notifications API (action=query&meta=notifications) will need to update their OAuth or BotPassword grants to also include access to private notifications.
• Due to a library upgrade, listings on category pages may be displayed out of order starting on Monday, 20th April. A migration script will be run to correct this, and will take hours to days depending on the size of the wiki (up to a week for English Wikipedia).
• 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 15:17, 13 April 2026 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Destubathon of the Americas

You are invited to participate in the Destubathon of the Americas, a contest/editathon which will run from May 1 to May 31. The goal is to destub as many of our 475,000+ stubs for the Americas (from Alaska down to Chile) as possible. A good chance to have fun in expanding many of our old stale stubs and win up to £2000 ($2680) in Amazon vouchers for expanding stub articles. Sign up in the Contestants/participants section on the contest page if interested. Even if not interested in prizes you are still warmly welcome to participate in it as an editathon! Hopefully we can achieve something significant in the month of May together! ♦ Dr. Blofeld 17:02, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

A BIG thank you for participating in WikiCon 2026 Canberra!

Aliceinthealice (talk) has given you a kookaburra as kind thanks for coming to Wikimedia Australia's WikiCon 2026 in Canberra (Kanbarra) either in person or online.

This kookaburra is an homage to our lovely hosts at the (Australian) National Film and Sound Archive and are to thank you for coming along, learning alongside each other and helping make the event what it was. We hope the kookaburra brightens your day!

Make someone else's day and spread some WikiLove'

Aliceinthealice (talk) 23:33, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

Sally Ride scheduled for TFA

This is to let you know that the above article has been scheduled as today's featured article for May 26, 2026. Please check that the article needs no amendments. Feel free to amend the draft blurb, which can be found at Wikipedia:Today's featured article/May 2026, or to make comments on other matters concerning the scheduling of this article at Wikipedia talk:Today's featured article/May 2026. Please keep an eye on that page, as notifications of copy edits to or queries about the draft blurb may be left there by user:JennyOz, who assists the coordinators by reviewing the blurbs, or by others. I also suggest that you watchlist Wikipedia:Main Page/Errors from two days before it appears on the Main Page. Thanks, and congratulations on your work! Gog the Mild (talk) 12:33, 17 April 2026 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue 240, April 2026

Your Military History Newsletter Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content Book review: Hawkeye7 and Nick-D look at four works Timeline: This month in military history

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 12:51, 17 April 2026 (UTC)

TFA

story · music · places

Thank you today for President Truman's relief of General Douglas MacArthur, saying (in 2012): "General MacArthur's relief in 1951 remains a controversial topic in the field of civil-military relations."! -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 05:13, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

When is your TFA? Hawkeye7 (discuss) 23:44, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

It was 5 April, see Easter. - Today's FA is Bridge, - a broad topic by many. My father loved bridges, and I wrote a few articles with that in mind (Empress Elisabeth Bridge, adding to Chain bridge and Müngsten Bridge, the latter for childhood memory), and also thinking of bridges between people. - I brought two bios to the same page, Christian Schwarz-Schilling and Bill Ramsey whose regular Swingtime I used to hear in the car driving to choir rehearsals. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:15, 17 April 2026 (UTC)

FAC - Conscription in Rhodesia

Hi Hawkeye, Would you be interested in reviewing Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Conscription in Rhodesia/archive1? It needs a few more reviews. Of course, please leave critical comments if you consider the article isn't up to standard, and no worries at all if you're not able to post a review here. Thank you, Nick-D (talk) 07:13, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-17

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

Weekly highlight

• After two years of development, ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽, also known as CodeMirror 6, is to be promoted out of beta on Tuesday, April 21. It brings better code and wikitext readability, reduction in typing errors, and other benefits to all users of the standard syntax highlighter. A huge thank you to volunteer Bhsd who developed many of the new features, including code folding, autocompletion, and linting.
• A major update to the Wikipedia app for iOS is now rolling out, redesigning the interface to align with Apple's latest "Liquid Glass" visual design. Download the latest version and explore the update.

Updates for editors

• Reading lists is a feature which allows readers to save articles to a list for reading later. This feature is now in beta on Arabic, French, Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Chinese Wikipedias and by default for all new accounts on all Wikipedias.
• An experiment which explores extending Page Previews to mobile web will be launched in the week of April 20 on Arabic, English, French, Italian, Polish, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. Page Previews are pop-ups that display a thumbnail, lead paragraph, and a link to open the full article of a blue link, thereby improving content discovery. The feature is already available on desktop and in the apps. Read more about this experiment and others.
• On several wikis, logged-in editors who haven't confirmed their email addresses can now see a banner encouraging them to do so. Having the email address confirmed allows a user to restore access to the account if they lose it. Learn more.
• View all 15 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where editing very large wiki pages in the 2017 wikitext editor caused slow loading, preview and scrolling lag, and performance issues when selecting, cutting, or pasting content, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• As part of the promotion of CodeMirror from a beta feature, all users will use CodeMirror instead of CodeEditor for syntax highlighting when editing JavaScript, CSS, JSON, Vue and Lua content pages.
• The mirrors.wikimedia.org service for Debian and Ubuntu users will sunset and stop working on May 15. The resources for the service will be replaced with new and better options. Some users may need to switch to a different server which should take about a minute. You can read more.
• The image and oldimage table will be removed from wikireplicas. If your tools or queries access image or oldimage directly, please update them to use the file and filerevision table before 28 May.
• Following the recent implementation of global API rate limits on unidentified traffic, the Wikimedia Foundation will continue efforts to ensure fair use of infrastructure by applying global limits to identified API traffic beginning the last week of April. These limits are intentionally set as high as possible to minimise impact on the community. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits and Frequently Asked Questions.
• The Attribution API is now available as a beta. The API fetches information for crediting Wikimedia articles and media files wherever they are used. Reference documentation is available through the REST Sandbox special page available on all Wikimedia wikis (such as the REST sandbox on English Wikipedia). Share your feedback on the project talk page.
• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 14:58, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

WikiProject stub ratings

Can you do this again? Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 84#Stub assessments with ORES

We have 350K unassessed articles, and I wouldn't be surprised if half of them are stubs. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:08, 25 March 2026 (UTC)

The problem was that the majority are not stubs and as the Bot move moved through, it drained the stubs away, but still had to work its way through thousands of unassessed Start and C class articles to find the stubs. The only real solution was allowing the Bot to process the Start and C class articles as well. However, I have ordered the Bot to run, and it should be able to remove a few thousand stubs. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 01:04, 26 March 2026 (UTC)

I see your point. I did 10 in Category:Unassessed medicine articles, and only two of them were stubs.

User:WP 1.0 bot/Tables/OverallArticles has the overall count. It will be interesting to see how it changes (in about an hour). WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:09, 26 March 2026 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: I am setting the Bot to work on the Stubs. There are definitely enough Stubs to keep it busy. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 00:24, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm looking forward to seeing how many get assessed this way.

I've found that ORES is a little less reliable for Start-class, as it doesn't distinguish well between 10 sentences vs 2 sentences + a list of 10 bibliographic citations. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:15, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: After a delay caused by some issues with Toolforge, I have set the Bot to work on the Stubs. Logs can be seen on pages like User:AussieBot/Stubs/2026/April/15. There will be a new log page created each day and the bot will run hourly and assess up to 2,400 articles per day. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 05:06, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: Category:All unassessed articles is now down to 105,977. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 03:45, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

Yay! Thank you for all the work that went into this. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:05, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 21 April 2026

• News and notes: Six Serbian Wikipedia editors banned following controversy about political bias
  Plus, new bans for AI-generated content in place, a new drop in active admins, pranks on pranks, May admin election, and other news from the Wikimedia world.

• In the media: Could Wikipedia be involved in Massachusetts' proposed social media ban for minors?
  Another regulate-the-internet attempt casts a wide net.

• Gallery: March equinox
  The progression of seasons in March.

• Traffic report: Time to change my galaxy in case, we outta space!
  What catches the reader's eye? Death and film, per usual, and a loop around the moon per unusual.

• Comix: Of skirts and articles
  When significant coverage is only skin deep.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:47, 21 April 2026 (UTC)

Australian Rupert

Have you heard from him since he retired from Wiki? Regards Keith-264 (talk) 15:06, 19 April 2026 (UTC)

No. I have never met him. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 19:09, 19 April 2026 (UTC)

Pity, I hope you're both doing well. Regards Keith-264 (talk) 17:29, 21 April 2026 (UTC)

Well, I am still doing well. I recently gave a presentation at Event:WikiCon Australia 2026. There were a lot of other Australian Wikipedians there, plus some foreigners from New Zealand and Indonesia. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 19:24, 21 April 2026 (UTC)

FA review of Dualism

Hello Hawkeye7 and thanks for your FA review of the article History a while back. I was wondering whether you may be interested in reviewing the article Dualism at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Dualism/archive1 since the article hasn't received enough reviews so far. Thank you for taking a look and please feel under no obligation if now is not a good time. Phlsph7 (talk) 08:15, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

Well outside my area of expertise, but I'll take a look. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 19:39, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

@Phlsph7: Could you drop by with a comment on Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Operation Forager logistics/archive1? I need to head off the nomination being archived. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 19:25, 22 April 2026 (UTC)

Sure, I'll take a look. Having a nomination archived because there are not enough reviews is always frustrating. I'm currently busy with a few other things but I should be able to find the time. Since Nick-D already started a review, I suggest pinging them to see if they have more comments. Phlsph7 (talk) 09:09, 23 April 2026 (UTC)

FAQs at FAC

I and user Noleander have been drafting a revised FAQ page for FAC newcomers. A proposal has been made at WT:FAC as well.

Well, your opinion will be appreciated and feel free to add additional questions that we may have missed. Best, MSincccc (talk) 08:57, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-18

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

• There is a change in how new users are autoconfirmed that will improve anti-vandalism protection. Currently, users who have had an account for a few days and made a few edits are automatically added to the Autoconfirmed users group. This configuration tends to be exploited by some vandals, who create accounts and start to use them only after some time. To mitigate this, the configuration will be updated next week so that – for the purpose of becoming autoconfirmed – the account age will be counted from their first edit, instead of registration date. The numeric value of the age threshold will remain the same. This change will be deployed only to wikis which require at least one edit as part of the autoconfirmation conditions.
• All Wikipedia users with new accounts and those who activated the "automatically enable most beta features" option in their preference can now use the reading lists beta feature to save articles for later reading. This helps organize reading interests in one place for convenient access.
• View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where infobox images have huge padding in Firefox, has been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• As a reminder, the global API rate limits will be applied this week to identified API traffic. This is to help ensure fair use of infrastructure. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, including the actual rate limits, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits and Frequently Asked Questions.
• 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 18:04, 27 April 2026 (UTC)

New pages patrol May 2026 Backlog drive

May 2026 Backlog Drive | New pages patrol
On 1 May 2026, a one-month backlog drive for New Page Patrol will begin. Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles patrolled. Barnstars will also be granted for re-reviewing articles previously reviewed by other patrollers during the drive. Each review will earn 1 point. Interested in taking part? Sign up here.
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) 11:23, 29 April 2026 (UTC)

WikiCup 2026 May newsletter

The second round of the 2026 WikiCup ended on 28 April. As a reminder for contestants who just joined or are unaware of recent changes to our round-points system, good article nomination reviews now receive 10 points, an increase from 5 points in the previous year, as per a consensus at WT:CUP. Peer reviews, which continue to be worth 5 points, are now listed in the same section as featured article candidate reviews, rather than with good article reviews. Everyone who competed in round 2 will advance to round 3 unless they have withdrawn or been banned. No other changes to the round-point system have been made for this year.

Round 2 was competitive. Three contestants scored more than 1,000 round points; nine scored over 500; and fourteen scored over 300. The top seven contestants had at least one featured article (two of them with two apiece). The following competitors scored more than 800 round points:

• MCE89 (submissions) with 1,333 points, mainly from good and featured articles about Australian people and geography
• Generalissima (submissions) with 1,169 points, mainly from good and featured articles related to shipping ethics controversy in fanfiction, waterways, and Gu Yanwu
• Bgsu98 (submissions) with 1,149 points, mainly from good articles, featured articles, and featured lists about figure skating, along with many article reviews and two good topics
• Olliefant (submissions) with 830 points, mainly from good and featured articles about television shows, episodes and media, along with nearly four dozen good and featured article reviews
• Gommeh (submissions) with 827 points, mainly from good and featured articles related to Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail

The full scores for round 2 can be seen here. During this round, contestants have claimed 12 featured articles, 13 featured lists, 2 featured-topic articles, 106 good articles, 22 good-topic articles and more than 40 Did You Know articles. In addition, competitors have worked on 3 In the News articles, and they have conducted over 200 reviews. The tournament points table has been updated.

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) 14:49, 29 April 2026 (UTC)

The Downlink Volume 4, Issue 3

	The Downlink	The WikiProject Spaceflight Newsletter
		2026 1 — 31 March

Volume 4 — Issue 3
Spaceflight Project • Project discussion • Members • Assessment • Open tasks • Popular pages • The Downlink
In the News On 22 March, Baikonur Cosmodrome Site 31 was used for the first time since being damaged in November 2025. Progress MS-33, a resupply mission to the ISS, was launched from the site following substantial repairs. ESA launched the first two satellites in the Celeste constellation on 28 March. They were launched aboard a Electron launch vehicle, marking the first time ESA has used the vehicle. China's Qingzhou cargo spacecraft was tested for the first time on 30 March. Launched on the maiden flight of the Kinetica 2, the prototype performed a number of tests in coordination with another satellite.
Article of the month OTV-2 The X-37B back on Earth after completing OTV-2 OTV-2 (also known as USA-226) was the first flight of the second Boeing X-37B, an American unmanned robotic vertical-takeoff, horizontal-landing spaceplane. It was launched aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral on 5 March 2011, and landed at Vandenberg Air Force Base on 16 June 2012. It operated in low Earth orbit. Its USA-226 mission designation is part of the USA series. The spaceplane was operated by Air Force Space Command, which has not revealed the specific identity of the payload for the first flight. The Air Force stated only that the spacecraft would "demonstrate various experiments and allow satellite sensors, subsystems, components, and associated technology to be transported into space and back."	Image of the month STS-1 This section is an excerpt from STS-1.[edit] STS-1 (Space Transportation System-1) was the first orbital spaceflight of NASA's Space Shuttle program. The first orbiter, Columbia, launched on April 12, 1981, and returned on April 14, 1981, 54.5 hours later, having orbited the Earth 37 times. Columbia carried a crew of two—commander John W. Young and pilot Robert L. Crippen. It was the first American crewed space flight since the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) in 1975. STS-1 was also the maiden test flight of a new American spacecraft to carry a crew, though it was preceded by atmospheric testing (ALT) of the orbiter and ground testing of the Space Shuttle system. The launch occurred on the 20th anniversary of Vostok 1, the first human spaceflight, performed by Yuri Gagarin for the USSR. This was a coincidence rather than a celebration of the anniversary; a technical problem had prevented STS-1 from launching two days earlier, as was planned.
Members New Members: Swedmark111 (26 March) Number of active members: 220. Total number of members: 447. March Launches All times stated here are in UTC. See a current list here. Alpha Block 1 — ICOR SV (11 Mar. at 00:50:00) (success) Soyuz-2.1a — Progress MS-33 (22 Mar. at 11:59:51) (success) Rocket Lab Electron — Celeste IOD-1/-2 (28 Mar. at 09:14:00) (success) Kinetica 2 — New March 01/02, TS 01 (30 Mar. at 11:00:00) (success)	Article Statistics This data reflects values from 31 March 2026. Spaceflight articles by quality and importance Quality Importance Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total FA 6 30 15 8 59 FL 3 4 4 11 FM 124 124 A 1 2 1 4 GA 12 26 34 59 3 134 B 16 77 196 239 7 535 C 44 170 609 875 1 68 1,767 Start 15 134 1,026 2,724 511 4,410 Stub 5 194 1,974 298 2,471 List 11 119 111 244 1 45 531 Category 1,285 1,285 Disambig 48 48 File 274 274 Portal 55 55 Project 109 109 Redirect 2 43 142 1,250 1,437 Template 533 533 NA 2 2 Other 45 45 Assessed 105 566 2,234 6,270 3,727 932 13,834 Unassessed 1 6 121 128 Total 105 567 2,234 6,276 3,727 1,053 13,962 Monthly Changes Since February 2026, there are 16 more Low-importance, eleven more NA-importance, and eleven more Unknown-importance articles, for a total of 38 new articles. There are also one more GA-class, one more B-class, 14 more C-class, 19 more Start-class, one fewer Stub-class articles, and three more lists.
Discuss & propose changes to The Downlink at The Downlink talk page. To unsubscribe from the newsletter remove your name from the Mailing list. Newsletter contributors: Ships&Space

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:38, 29 April 2026 (UTC)

ANI topic, Wikihounding by Hawkeye7

You have been reported and are subject to ongoing discussion for wikihounding on the ANI message board. CowboyJPA17 (talk) 17:51, 29 April 2026 (UTC)

Manhattan Project

Re the Manhattan Project, I agree with you that the project was conducted with medical safety precautions. Civilian employees were covered by medical insurance at $1.50 or $2 for singles and $4 for families. The three locations (Los Alamos, Clinton and Hanford) were remote and in any case the employees (eg the Caulotron girls) did not know they were involved with radioactivity! Hugo999 (talk) 03:13, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

February 2026 GAN Backlog Drive - award

		The Premium Reviewer Barnstar
		This award is given to Hawkeye7 for accumulating 25.5 points in the February 2026 GAN Backlog Drive. Your dedicated reviews contributed to the successful reduction of the backlog and helped improve the quality of articles. Here's our token of appreciation. Thank you for your time and efforts! Fade258 (talk) 07:22, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-19

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 Article guidance team invites experienced editors of pilot Wikipedias—Arabic, Bangla, Japanese, Portuguese, Persian, Turkish, Simple English, Spanish, and French—to help translate and adapt sample outlines. These outlines will guide editors in creating clear, well-structured, and policy-compliant articles when using the feature once it is launched in May 2026. Simple instructions on how to translate and adapt the outlines are available.

Updates for editors

• The Product and Technology Advisory Council has published draft recommendations on a model that affiliates can follow when contributing to the technical space. Community members are invited to provide feedback on the recommendation until May 8th on the talk page.
• The number of available thumbnail size preferences in MediaWiki is being reduced to three standardized options—Small (180px), Regular (250px), and Large (400px), as part of ongoing efforts to improve performance and reduce strain on thumbnail services. As a result, existing preferences will be mapped to the nearest new size (for example, smaller selections like 120px or 150px will render at 180px, while larger ones like 300px or 360px will render at 400px). The preferences interface will soon be updated to reflect these changes, and users who wish to opt out or provide feedback can do so.
• From now on, even when a permission expires automatically, users will receive an Echo notification similar to the standard notification for permission changes. There is a difference between this and Global reminder bot in that the latter reminds users a week before the rights are due to expire, so that they can renew the rights.
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the problem where the ULS language selector in Special:Translate would scroll vertically when it shouldn't, has been resolved. Previously, when users opened the "Translate to English" dropdown and typed certain inputs, the dialog would scroll vertically by a few pixels even when there was enough space to display all results. The dropdown no longer shifts unnecessarily when filtering languages.
• The Global Watchlist, which lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on a single page, continues to improve. For example, watchlists for Wikibase sites such as Wikidata now support EntitySchema elements for better tracking. The Live Updates mode now refreshes the special page every 60 seconds to comply with the updated global API rate limits for improved real-time responsiveness. Additionally, a directionality bug that displayed links as "changes 3" instead of "3 changes" in mixed-direction lists has been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The second phase of global API rate limits has been rolled out to reduce the impact of AI crawlers and ensure fair, sustainable access to Wikimedia resources, prioritising human and mission-aligned traffic. Limits have been shifted from per-hour to per-minute, producing smoother traffic patterns and more predictable API load. Community users are not expected to be affected, and no action is required. Early indications show some User-Agent-based requestors are adjusting behaviour, and around 64% of automated API traffic has been identified. Monitoring continues, and Wikimedia Enterprise remains available for commercial support.
• 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 20:41, 4 May 2026 (UTC)