RoySmith

Earth Day 2022 Edit-a-thon - April 22nd - 2PM EST

You're invited! NYC Earth Day 2022 Edit-a-thon! April 22nd!

Sure We Can and the Environment of New York City Task Force invite you to join us for: 2022 Earth Day Edit-a-thon 2pm - 4pm EST (April 22nd) online via Zoom and in person This Edit-a-Thon is part of a larger Earth Day celebration, hosted by Brooklyn based recycling and community center Sure We Can, that runs from 1PM-7PM and is open to the public! See this flyer for more information: https://www.instagram.com/p/CcGr4FyuqEa/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

-- Environment of New York City Task Force

How adverse is DYK...

Moved to Template:Did you know nominations/David Yong

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of Maze1995

A tag has been placed on Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of Maze1995 indicating that it is currently empty, and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion. If it remains empty for seven days or more, it may be deleted under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and removing the speedy deletion tag. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 04:56, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

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) 07:24, 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)

Orphaned non-free image File:Bronx Grit Chamber service area orientation map.png

⚠

Thanks for uploading File:Bronx Grit Chamber service area orientation map.png. 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) 17:17, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

Least publishable unit commentary

Hey Roy, I was going to start a thread at WT:FAC but thought I'd run it by you first. I have seen you cite and/or oppose based on least publishable unit a few times at FAC (e.g. at Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/Figure skating at the 2022 Winter Olympics/archive1 and some big ship articles) and think it deserves broader discussion. In my read, while the opening sentence of WP:FACR does say "a featured article exemplifies Wikipedia's very best work", it then goes on to define what that is: conforming to WP:CONPOL, with a discrete set of attributes ("it has the following attributes"). I don't get the sense that least publishable unit commentary is relevant to the designation. On the question of whether such questions should be, I am undecided. Do you share / disagree with this reading? Whonting (talk) 01:31, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

We have human editors so they can apply human judgement. In other words, WP:IAR. RoySmith (talk) 02:14, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

@Whonting I realize that my initial response may have been unsatisfying. If you are looking for a deeper answer, WP:SUMMARY may be of some value. It says, for example, A fuller treatment of any major subtopic should go in a separate article of its own. And WP:FACR requires that an article stays focused on the main topic without going into unnecessary detail and uses summary style where appropriate. RoySmith (talk) 10:54, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

No it's alright, I just wasn't sure how to continue while distinguishing evaluating cookie-cutter-ness against the FA criteria from SUMMARY/PAGEDECIDE questions. I also wanted to communicate that I wasn't trying to call you out or say you're wrong, instead ask a meta-question on what the FA criteria is (is the process an evaluation against them with judgement applied in their fulfilment, or is it an evaluation against whether something is Wikipedia's best work with the criteria a set of guardrails). Don't have an answer to how to do that, and was unsure if it was going into navel-gazing so hadn't thought it worthwhile saying anything. Whonting (talk) 11:08, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

DYK for Bronx Grit Chamber

On 21 July 2026, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Bronx Grit Chamber, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that a human corpse can shut down a sewage plant? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Bronx Grit Chamber. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (Bronx Grit Chamber), 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) 00:02, 21 July 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-30

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 Reader Experience team has incorporated community feedback around the placement of watchstar and watchlist buttons for the Reading Lists beta feature, which would allow for saving articles for later reading – a wishlist item to bring the functionality to web. Editors are invited to enable the beta feature to test it out and share their thoughts.
• Suggestion Mode offers edit suggestions within the VisualEditor for improving Wikipedia articles. All suggestions are community-configurable. The TextMatch feature is a way for volunteers to create custom local suggestions. The feature searches in articles for strings of text, and now includes support for regular expressions. This gives volunteers greater precision and flexibility over the kinds of local suggestions they can create. Note: Suggestions can be targeted based on the edit count of the person editing as well as other aspects of the page. You can find examples from other communities for inspiration, including TextMatches that detect: typos, grammar-errors, potential advertisements, clichés, incorrect dash or hyphen usage, non-specific time keywords, outdated names, and more. Any feedback is appreciated.
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the SVG Translate tool could use an outdated version of a file, causing existing translations to be overwritten when new ones were uploaded, has now been fixed. Overall, in the last quarter from April – June 2026 about 337 community tasks were resolved by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Updates for technical contributors

• On Parsoid-enabled wikis, Parsoid now renders a maximum of 1,250 images per page. A new tracking category, "media-limit-reached", will be soon made available to identify pages where this limit is reached, making it easier to find content whose media output may have been restricted during rendering. See phab:T430854 for more information and to provide feedback.
• 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 05:44, 21 July 2026 (UTC)