Guz13

The Signpost: 13 July 2026

• News and notes: An exclusive club
  Wikipedia Co-Founder Larry Sanger gets a community ban for canvassing.

• In the media: Battle for a soul – who won?
  Commissars, winners and losers, blocks or bans, a Wiki red card, social engineering on wikis, and Swift action!

• Opinion: We need to innovate with Wikimedia decision-making
  Rules we can actually read, trust and change!

• Recent research: LLMs and NPOV, 20 years of user blocks, Esperanto and Volapük Wikipedias
  And other research findings.

• News from Diff: How to host Wikicurious in your own community
  The Wikicurious team shares their approach to Wiki-event organizing.

• Community view: CUNY Newmark Wikimedian-in-Residence Quarterly Brief – April to June 2026
  Quarterly update on the activities of the City University of New York's Wikimedian-in-Residence, Richard Knipel.

• Special report: Wikipedia escapes Category 1 designation under the UK Online Safety Act – for now
  A possible future recategorization by the UK Government remains an existential threat to Wikipedia.

• On the bright side: Fatherhood, weather, and diplomacy
  Father's Day, Canada Day, and the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence.

• Op-ed: A Layup Easy Proposal for Wikimedia at 25: Spend 25% of Donations on the Community
  If strategy priority 1.1 is supporting the community, can we not increase the support to the community? Increasing grantmaking to 25% of the budget would be a move toward equality in the movement.

• Traffic report: The grass was greener, the light was brighter
  We reached the dizzy heights of that dreamed of World Cup.

• Comix: schnozzed
  on lollerskates

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:22, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-29

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

• Revise Tone helps newcomers identify passages in Wikipedia articles that may contain non-encyclopedic language and encourages them to consider revising the tone. The feature was A/B tested on the Arabic, English, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias, where newcomer task completion rates increased by 38.7% compared to the default Copyedit task, with no decrease in edit quality. The test ended on July 9, and the feature is now available for everyone on these wikis, configurable via Community Configuration. The plan is to release Revise Tone to more wikis.
• The community configuration that allows automatic removal of inactive mentors based on configurable criteria will be enabled on Thursday 16, on some wikis to keep mentor lists up to date. Mentors are experienced contributors who opt in to help new users on-wiki through the Growth Features. Administrators can now prepare the settings via Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship; they will take effect starting Thursday.
• View all 38 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where some users of the Wikipedia Android app were logged out immediately after signing in, preventing them from staying logged in and editing pages, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• Editing a page via user scripts or gadgets was causing watchlist labels that the user had assigned to that page to reset. This has now been fixed.
• To work around a Safari bug (see phab:T425211), on Parsoid-enabled wikis, wikilink hrefs now use absolute urls instead of protocol-relative urls. REST API output remains unchanged and continue to use protocol-relative urls. Gadgets, user scripts, bots, and CSS might need to be adapted if they relied on the presence of protocol-relative urls in wikilink hrefs.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The Wikimedia Foundation’s Experiment Platform Team has published a blog post reflecting on its first year of structured experimentation. It highlights successful experiments such as Paste Check, Reference Check, and Tone Check, which improved editing outcomes and have been rolled out to more users, as well as experiments that did not lead to product changes. Read more.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 16:09, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Category:Ottoman anti-Zionists has been nominated for deletion

Category:Ottoman anti-Zionists has been nominated for deletion. A discussion is taking place to decide whether it complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Gjs238 (talk) 18:07, 19 July 2026 (UTC)

Almost done

Hi Guz, just a quick note to let you know that I think I’ll soon be finished rewriting the Glossary of sumo terms. Since I’ll be working on getting the article on shinpan promoted to GA status, I’ll be taking a break from editing in my sandbox to update 2 or 3 biographies, so feel free to rephrase anything or ask questions if you’d like. As usual, I reserve the right to revert any changes. I’m also considering going through Wikipedia:Peer review before publishing. My goal is to make it to FL status. Cheers! :) - OtharLuin (talk) 07:04, 20 July 2026 (UTC)

May 2026 Administrator Elections – RFC Phase

Administrator Elections | RFC phase

The RFC phase of the May 2026 administrator elections has started. There are 20 RFCs for consideration. You can participate in the RFC phase at Wikipedia:Administrator elections/May 2026/RFC phase.

Any questions or issues can be asked on the election talk page. Thank you for your participation. Happy electing.

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:02, 20 July 2026 (UTC)