Mike Peel
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Wikidata Platform Newsletter - June 2026
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This is the 7th issue of our monthly newsletter! The next issue will be published in July 2026.
- QLever as the New Backend System for WDQS: After reviewing feedback from the community on our architectural proposals shared last month (see Backend Replacement and WDQS Architecture Re-Design), we have decided to migrate to QLever as the new backend for the Wikidata Query Service. This decision has been aligned upon across partners in WMF, WMDE, and the QLever team. We are very excited about the improvements to performance and sustainability that this choice unlocks for WDQS users. We will continue to share details on the user-facing impacts of this decision, in future newsletters and on our migration project page, as the work progresses.
- We encourage all members of the community to continue helping us identify higher-risk areas by reporting use cases on our high-impact use cases and tools page. This page is not intended to catalogue all WDQS usage, but to highlight complex or critical cases that may require additional attention.
- Migration Timeline: Following the decision to use QLever, we would like to share some key milestones for our migration. More details will be shared as we approach full implementation. Please note that all dates are targets and may change in the event of unforeseen challenges. Refer to the migration project page for up to date information.
- Exploration: (COMPLETED) From September through March, the team conducted traffic and benchmarking analyses to understand the needs of WDQS users and alternatives to our current system. This culminated in our final recommendations for a new backend and platform architecture, which have been reviewed and aligned upon across stakeholders.
- Installation: (IN-PROGRESS) In April, the team began building. The development of new QLever endpoints (ie. WDQS v2) is underway, as is the refactoring of our platform architecture. This includes work on indexing, update pipelines, and rewriting observed production traffic into the SPARQL 1.1 standard. We are on track to complete our build of the new endpoints by July 1st and transition into initial implementation. The query service will continue to be available in its current state through implementation phases.
- Initial Implementation: (NOT STARTED) WDQS v2, a new endpoint built on QLever, will be first available to a small number of pilot users. The team will work closely with this group to learn where improvements are needed and how we can best support users in independently migrating their use cases. A self-service hub will be published by October 1st. This will include learnings from our pilot group, guidance on how all users of WDQS can migrate their work flows, and documentation on best practices for adapting all Blazegraph dependencies to our new system or alternative endpoints where needed.
- Full Implementation: (NOT STARTED) The new endpoints will be scaled to meet the needs of the broader community and will be generally accessible to all. The original Blazegraph endpoints will still be available, but may experience service degradation beginning in February, 2027 as we reallocate resources to the new infrastructure and begin slowly winding down the legacy service. We aim to have all WDQS traffic migrated by June 30, 2027, at which time the Blazegraph endpoint will be decommissioned.
- Query Categorization and Testing: We have begun evaluating WDQS queries to identify Blazegraph-specific features and functionality. All bespoke query aspects need to be rewritten into the SPARQL 1.1 standard in order to work with the new QLever backend. We have documented our process for this work in two Wikitech publications on SPARQL Query Characterization and Test Architecture for QLever. These documents provide more detail on methodology and testing used to validate the correctness and performance across the new and old backends. They are intended as supporting technical references for contributors interested in the migration validation and benchmarking approach.
- 2026-05-08 incident report: On May 7, 2026, aggressive web scrapers began overwhelming the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS), triggering a multi-day service degradation that impacted both availability and lag SLOs. The excessive load caused Blazegraph to timeout for over half of users at peak, while also throttling the streaming updater, which blocked index updates and cascaded into edit throttling on wikidata.org itself. Initial mitigation on May 7-8 included depooling the eqiad datacenter WDQS deployment and applying rate limits based on sampled request data, but the outage persisted through the weekend. Full resolution came on Monday, May 11, when deeper analysis of WDQS logs revealed a scraper that had evaded sampled webrequest data used for initial rate limiting. Once a targeted rate limiting rule was applied to the scraper's signatures, timeout rates returned to normal. See the full incident report
- Blazegraph Migration Office Hour (June session): Our next Blazegraph Migration Office Hour will take place on Tuesday, 9 June 2026 (Tomorrow) at . This session is focused on supporting the migration away from Blazegraph as the backend of WDQS. Whether you have questions, need clarification, or want to discuss how your use case may be affected. You can register for the session via the event page.
- In preparation, we encourage you to add questions, feedback, or migration-related support needs to this etherpad. This helps us shape the agenda and focus on the most relevant topics during the session.
Wikidata weekly summary #735
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week leading up to 2026-06-08. Missed the previous one? See issue #734.
Discussions
- RfC: Mass editing policy: The community is currently voting on a proposed policy to regulate mass edits on Wikidata. More input is needed to reach a broad consensus. Please review the proposal and join the discussion/vote on the RFC page.
Events
- Upcoming events:
- WikiProjects Days 2026 - see the first version of the program! The online event takes place during the weekend of June 19 - 21. Register for updates and access links.
- Mezi bajty 0 - meetup of the Czech Wikidata community in Prague and online, 10th June 17:00 - 19:00 CEST (in Czech, Slovak, English)
- GND (Gemeinsame Normdatei) SPARQL Workshop|, 17th July 17:00 - 19:30 CEST (in German) - workshop from the German National Library on use of their SPARQL-endpoint for the GND (Gemeinsamer Normdatei) national authority file for wikidata users and wikipedians.
- (Deutsch) Workshop: Make Research Software Findable using the Software Marketplace Wikidata - August 18, 14:00 – 16:00 Uhr (CEST), Zoom-link on registration.
- Blazegraph Migration Office Hour (June session) will take place on Tuesday, 9 June 2026 (Tomorrow) at 16:00 UTC. This office hour is focused on supporting the migration away from Blazegraph as the backend of WDQS. Whether you have questions, need clarification, or want to discuss how your use case may be affected. You can register for the session via the event page. In preparation, add questions, feedback, or migration-related support needs to this etherpad.
- Ongoing: Wiki Loves Pride 2026 (Meta) is ongoing and now has a dedicated Wikidata subpage: Event: Wiki Loves Pride 2026.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs:
- (日本語/Japanese) [Practice drill: SPARQL basics to make and learn - Let's master Wikidata Query Service by Shoku_pan_65. Page offers AI translations.
- Behind the <P812: academic major> Property by rtnf.
- Adding Visual Context to the Dagbanli Dictionary: How the University of Ghana HCI Lab Dataset Powered our Sentence Matching System. Diff post by Mohammed Sadat Abdulai and Mohammed Awal Alhassan.
- Papers:
- Volume 16, Issue 5 of the Wikimedia Research Newsletter is out! - includes 7 papers on Wikidata topics.
- Rosetta Statements: simplifying FAIR knowledge graph construction with a user-centred approach - Vogt et al., (2026)
- (Русский/Russian) Automated Analysis and Visualization of Geographic Data on Global Volcanoes Based on the Wikidata Semantic Graph - by Мария Паландер (2026).
- Speaker Mining: FAIR Data on Public Broadcasts for Question Answering by Wittenborg et al., (2026)
- Videos:
- (Español) Wikidata for Climate Change, Wikipedia for Sustainable Futures by Daniel Canedo, a workshop on using Wikidata to record linked open data from extreme weather events.
- (Svenska) Merge Wikidata samma som by Magnus Sälgö. What to do when you find duplicate Wikidata Items pointing at the same location on OpenStreetMap.
- (Español) EntreWikis - Hacerwiki: Progress of Free Knowledge Projects in Colombia - Colombian Art in Open Data: training and infrastructure on Wikidata
- (Français) Wikidata for research and teaching by Pascal Martinolli. Introduces Wikidata basics, SPARQL, practical examples of data visualisation, enriching research data and exploring the opportunities and limitations of linked open personal data.
- (Français) Literature review: FAIR data sharing | FAIR Data Spring 2026 - Presentation slides, given by Adélie Ranville on their experiences organizing and sharing data using Zenodo, DOI, Zotero, Wikidata, and OpenRefine.
- (Deutsch) Building a shared knowledge infrastructure: a federated wikibase for video and podcasts hosted by Tim @BorgNetzWerk.
Tool of the week
- AutoSuggestSitelink: New features available. See the update post on Project Chat
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- The WMF Wikidata pltaform team monthly newsletter (June edition) is out
- Gender diversity in French Wikipedia's occupation articles
- Gender diversity in French Wikipedia's articles about fields of knowledge
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes::
- trailer of (works that this trailer video represents)
- EPBC conservation status (the conservation status from the Australian Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 assigned by the Australian Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water)
- Newest External identifiers: Joysound artist ID, Joysound song ID, DUGA performer ID, Sri Lanka Company Registration Number, Wikimedia Phabricator project PHID, Indonesian government work unit ID (satker ID), DAM artist ID, British Library catalogue ID, OCHA Place Code, Philippines School ID, Swedish-Danish Dictionary ID, Filmmakers actor ID, Chilean Museums Registry ID, Sri Lanka NGO Secretariat Registration Number, Beeld & Geluid series ID, INAPROC instance ID (Indonesia), DUGA director ID, AV CHANNEL maker ID, AV CHANNEL director ID, AllMyLinks ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- applicable Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons (the dataset associated with this external id usually contains data applicable to this other wikidata property)
- IAU member ID (new) (ID of members in the [https://www.iau.org/IAU/Default.aspx International Astronomical Union (IAU)].)
- height above ground level (a property intended to indicate the height of any objects from the ground)
- Storm intensity classification (category assigned to a meteorological system according to an intensity or classification scale; the scale should be indicated with a qualifier (P1013 and P585))
- service status (the operational status of something like ship or building)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: PTS News Network topic ID, OTOTOY ID, identifiant EU sanctions tracker, OpenParlData ID, Catholica.cz ID, KSW person ID, KSW organization ID, KSW place ID, Myludo ID, Identifiant dans La Basa, PurplePort ID, Sokmil idol ID, Hancinema company ID, LinkMe ID, Netmath Glossary ID, Sokmil director ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- Schema examples: Nazareth Padilla Montero (Q139959656) has been added as a showcase example of human (E10)
- Newest WikiProjects:
- Project Civic Tech - for anyone developing datasets about civic resources in cities, and discuss best practices for Wikidata collaboration in civic tech.
- Project AI Cleanup - for reporting, monitoring and combatting edits and contributions from LLM and AI sources.
- Project: Whos who in marine taxonomy? - inititated by the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), this project will document and enrich entities of the persons who have described marine species.
- WikiProject Highlights:
- Project LGBT added an Abstract Wikipedia subpage.
- Project Roads added a subpage for Greece National roads with highly-visual tables.
- Wiki x K-Pop datathon 2.0 - there is still some work to do to reach the goal on modelling the album: BABYMONSTER.
- Newest database reports: Deleted Wikidata entities that are connected to Commons files structured data (SDC)
- Showcase Lexemes: kafuni - Dagbanli noun that translate to "fan" in English
Development
- The team was involved in workshops last week so there are no updates.
You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.
Weekly Tasks
- Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
- Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country:
- Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
- Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
- Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
- Help write the next summary!
Tech News: 2026-24
editLatest 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 Enterprise has increased the free usage limits for its API offerings. The monthly request limit for the On-demand API has increased from 5,000 to 50,000 requests, while the Snapshot API limit has increased from 15 to 30 requests per month. In addition, Structured Contents snapshots are now available for free accounts. These changes expand access to Wikimedia Enterprise data for developers, researchers, and organizations using Wikimedia content.
Updates for editors
- The refreshed Explore Feed, now called the Home Feed, is rolling out to 50% of users of the Wikipedia Android app. The Home Feed helps readers discover relevant content through two new tabs: Community and For You. The Community tab provides a scrollable feed of curated content and updates from the broader Wikimedia community and movement, while the For You tab offers a full-screen, swipeable experience that shows content tailored to a user's interests. The redesign is part of a broader effort to improve discovery and enhance the learning experience in the Wikipedia app.
- The Which came first? daily trivia game is now available in the beta version of the Wikipedia iOS app in English, German, French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Turkish. The game uses historical events from Wikipedia's "On This Day" content and challenges readers to guess which of two events happened first. The game was previously released on Android. Communities interested in making the game available in their languages can read the instructions and requirements.
- Sub-referencing, a new MediaWiki feature that allows editors to reuse references with different details, will begin rolling out to Wikimedia wikis following a successful pilot phase. Deployment will start on 8 June for most Group 1 wikis and French Wikipedia, with additional Wikipedia language editions receiving the feature over the coming months. Communities are encouraged to prepare by checking for untranslated Cite extension messages in their language and reviewing any use of Reference Tooltips, which may require updates to support the new functionality. Wikis using Reference Previews do not need to take any action. Communities may also wish to create the cite-tracking-category-ref-details tracking category as a hidden category using
__HIDDENCAT__(or a dedicated template), and connect it to the corresponding Wikidata item d:Q129764848. - The Page Previews experiment on mobile web has concluded. The team decided not to roll out the feature after the results showed no statistically significant impact on reader retention, as the primary success metric was retention improvement. Page Previews, which are already available on desktop and in the apps, display a thumbnail, lead paragraph, and link to the full article when readers tap a blue link. The experiment tested this experience on mobile web across six Wikipedias.
- The user interface icon library will be updated later this week or next week. Most of the ~300 icons have been slightly refined and ~30 new icons have been added. These changes improve the icons to make them more consistent and comprehensible, and provide more visual balance when they are used in groups.
- The Universal Language Selector (ULS) interface in MediaWiki, which helps users select content in other languages, has been updated. The new version improves speed and accessibility, and users of Wikimedia projects can now pin languages for quicker language switching. The deployment to Wikimedia sites will happen gradually in the coming weeks. You can test it now as a beta feature by selecting beta features in your profile preferences and share your feedback on the project page.
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the Pageviews Analysis dashboard on pageviews.wmcloud.org stopped updating graph data in May 2026, affecting all users, has been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- The function signature for
mw.util.addPortletLink()has been simplified. Developers can now pass a configuration object instead of a list of positional parameters when creating portlet links. The previous function signature remains supported for backwards compatibility. For example, instead of:mw.util.addPortletLink('p-cactions', '#', 'Stub', 'ca-stubtag', 'Add a stub tag to this page');usemw.util.addPortletLink('p-cactions', { href: '#', text: 'Stub', id: 'ca-stubtag', tooltip: 'Add a stub tag to this page' });. Script maintainers are encouraged to review existing uses ofaddPortletLink()and update them where appropriate. This change will be available on all wikis from 11 June. Thanks to community volunteer Gerges for contributing this improvement. - Community Wishlist discussion: Product & Technology introduced changes meant to increase the number and complexity of wishes fulfilled, including the disbanding of the Community Tech team. They are engaging in discussions about a proposed direction for the wishlist from community members. Includes ways to structure annual voting, better tracking of wishes, removing focus areas, and staffing updates.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 10
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Highlights
- Community Wishlist discussion: Product & Technology introduced changes meant to increase the number and complexity of wishes fulfilled, including the disbanding of the Community Tech team. They are engaging in discussions about a proposed direction for the wishlist from community members. Includes ways to structure annual voting, better tracking of wishes, removing focus areas, and staffing updates.
- Digital Public Goods: The Wikimedia Foundation has become a member of the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA).
- Better bot detection: A trial of hCaptcha on several Wikipedias, including English, French, and Japanese, showed it can effectively detect and deter bad-faith automated activity, on its own and by giving checkusers and stewards signals to look into. Based on these results, hCaptcha will be rolled out across all wikis. See the project page for technical information about the implementation and privacy protections.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org

- A better way to give credit: The Wikimedia Attribution Framework and API makes it simple for developers to fairly credit volunteer contribution. When anyone encounters Wikimedia content, we want them to know that it comes from our projects, and they are invited to participate.
- Baby Globe joins the Reading Challenge: The Android and iOS Wikipedia apps released the 25-day reading challenge, to drive readers engagement through reading milestones. To track their reading streak during the challenge, users can add a widget featuring Baby Globe to their home screen.
- Account security: The Foundation is technically enforcing that all privileges that enable users to take security- or privacy-sensitive actions can only be held by users who have enabled two-factor authentication. Logging in with passkeys is quicker than logging in without two-factor authentication. In addition, logged-in users can see a banner encouraging them to confirm their email address. These changes secure individual accounts as well as communities and the wikis.
- Incident reporting form: The Foundation began a trial on English Wikipedia of the incident reporting form. 60% of unblocked logged-in users see a new Report button, allowing them to report conduct issues.
- Encouraging account creation: Following a successful account creation experiment, an improved logged-out edit warning message will be deployed to all Wikimedia wikis this week. The change will only affect logged-out users on mobile web who open an editing session.
- Wikimedia Android App: The Wikipedia Android App is at the Phase 1 of redesigning its Home Feed. The new feed includes two tabs: Community, featuring refreshed Explore content, and For You, with personalized reading recommendations based on reader interests and activity. The For You feed refreshes daily with updated suggestions.
- Better discovery of images: The Image Browsing beta feature was rolled out for all Wikipedias on mobile following two successful experiments. The beta feature will include a carousel of all an article’s images at the top of the article, with controls for editors to exclude images from the article’s carousel or to exclude an article from the feature entirely.
- Reading Lists feature: The Foundation is conducting an experiment to show the reading lists feature, which is still in development, to logged-out mobile readers to test whether it encourages account creation at a higher rate compared to the watchstar button. The experiment was launched on May 18 on German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, and Urdu wikis, and will run for a month.

- Testing Suggestion Mode: Suggestion Mode was released as an A/B test for newcomer editors on the mobile website at ~15 Wikipedias. The experiment will measure its impact on the proportion of newcomer mobile web edit sessions that result in constructive (un-reverted) article edits. It will also evaluate the feature’s impact on editor retention and monitor changes in revert and block rates.
- Wikifunctions now supports Wikidata references: References in Wikidata statements are now available on Wikifunctions, and you now can use external links in Wikifunctions-generated citations. This allows the use of more than 1.3 billion references available in Wikidata and adding them as citations to individual statements in Abstract Wikipedia.
- Pilot wikis adopting Abstract Wikipedia: The Abstract Wikipedia team has identified five potential pilot wikis to assess their interest in adopting abstract articles on their wikis. The pilots are Malayalam, Bengali, Dagbani, Arabic, and Indonesian Wikipedia. If your community is interested in becoming a pilot, let us know on Meta.
- Latest experiments: An upcoming experiment is testing whether we can serve readers better when a footnote click in read mode shows the full bibliographic information rather than flying them to the reference list. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
- Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News weeks 20, 21, 22, 23 include an experiment to test a new Share Card feature that allows readers to create visually engaging cards from Wikipedia articles and share them online See also the 92 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · The Wikipedia Library · list of movement events
- Tech blog moved to Diff: The migration of the Techblog to Diff is now complete: 138 posts going back over a decade have been successfully migrated. Diff is now happy to welcome technology-focused blog posts with renewed vigor.
- What’s new in the Wikipedia Library: Access to the American Psychological Association was renewed and collections from the Harvard Business Review and Swiss Media Database (Swissdox) are now available to editors who are eligible for The Wikipedia Library.
- New course on WikiLearn: A free self-paced online course, designed for researchers who want to make their field more visible on Wikipedia, was launched on WikiLearn. Share "Wikipedia for Researchers” if you work with early-career researchers, teach in an academic institution, or support open knowledge communities.
- Wiki Mentor Africa: The first edition of Wiki Mentor Africa - Women Tech Summit brought together over 315 registered participants across Africa to learn, explore, and grow in tech together.
- Let's Connect Learning Clinic: If you missed it, you can now watch the recording of the Let's Connect Learning Clinic "How to support up-and-coming groups in the movement as a long-time Wikimedian" with Wikimedistas El Salvador.
- Community Conferences: Registration for WikiConference North America and Queering Wiki Conference is now opened. Call for Speakers for the Queering Wiki is also opened until June 30.
Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness
See also: Progress on the annual plan
- Sharing the Form 990s: The Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia Endowment published their Form 990s, covering the fiscal year that ran from July 2024 to June 2025. The Form 990 is an annual form required of all nonprofit organizations in the United States. You can read the highlights on Form 990 for the Foundation and Form 990 for the Endowment on Meta-Wiki.
- Wikimedia Enterprise: Wikimedia Enterprise's free API accounts gets a substantial upgrade across the Snapshot and On-demand APIs, including free access to Structured Contents Snapshots.
- Structured Contents: How Databricks Parsed Wikipedia to Markdown with Python.
Board and Board committee updates
See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- Board selection process: The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees is reviewing and improving how it selects new members. The goal is to ensure that there is the right mix of expertise and community representation on the board. Join the conversation on 16 June at 17:00 UTC, and share your ideas on the talk page.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. If you have feedback or suggestions about the bulletin, let us know at foundationbulletin
wikimedia.org. For questions about the Wikimedia Foundation's work, contact us!
Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #252 is out: Improved loading and display of Test results
editThere is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!
In this issue, we present you an improvement in loading and display of Test results, we talk about our next events, and we take a look at the latest software developments.
Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!
Also, we remind you that Denny will lead a discussion on the new NLG types in the next Natural Language Generation Special Interest Group meeting, that will be held on June 16, at 16:00 UTC (link to the meeting).
Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 15:29, 12 June 2026 (UTC)
This Month in GLAM: May 2026
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Daylit Gallery DYK
editWhile the Daylit Gallery thumbnail didn't ultimately make the top slot, the article itself (which still contains loads of your great photos) did land on DYK today! Cheers, Cl3phact0 (talk) 17:57, 14 June 2026 (UTC)
- @Cl3phact0: Congrats on the DYK, and nice work with the article! Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 17:58, 14 June 2026 (UTC)
- Thanks! I suppose that under the circumstances, as much as I like the other shot (yours), El Sol Rojo is pretty good company (and pretty stiff competition—if you're going to get gazumped, getting gazumped by Alexander Calder makes it something of a story within a story). -- Cl3phact0 (talk) 18:10, 14 June 2026 (UTC)
