TheSandDoctor

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Question from Pluralmath (20:34, 22 May 2026)

Note: Pluralmath's mentor MuffinHunter0 is away.

Hi! I keep getting recommended this article, to fix the tone on: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hubert_Zemke&gesuggestededit=1 It is pointing particularly to a paragraph at the very end. I assume it is flagging the commendations and such; however, this appears to be directly quoted, and I do not feel a direct quote should be changed.

Is there any way to make the bot stop recommending this to me? I have clicked the decline>does not need tone change, but it continues. --Pluralmath (talk) 20:34, 22 May 2026 (UTC)

@Pluralmath: You are correct in your instinct to not change a direct quote. I am admittedly not sure. I don't see any tags on the page that would cause that. If this is still occurring (sorry for the delay), I would recommend asking on this page. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 07:15, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

@TheSandDoctor: Thanks for the response! I haven't seen it in my recommendations for a while now, and just went and checked the article, and no longer saw any sort of tone flagging on that piece of text. I assume that means that the bot got the hint? If I do see this article popping up again, I will put a message up on that link! Thank you for the help, and happy editing! Pluralmath :) talk 12:11, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

@Pluralmath: You're welcome! I am glad to hear that it stopped being suggested as a suggestion. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 22:33, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment

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(replacing Yapperbot) SodiumBot (botop|talk|contribs) 18:30, 30 May 2026 (UTC)

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Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment

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(replacing Yapperbot) SodiumBot (botop|talk|contribs) 12:30, 13 June 2026 (UTC)

Happy Adminship Anniversary!

Wishing TheSandDoctor a very happy adminship anniversary on behalf of the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! CAPTAIN RAJU^(T) 16:42, 16 June 2026 (UTC)

Thank you very much, @CAPTAIN RAJU, AlexHammeke, and DaniloDaysOfOurLives:! Much appreciated. Hard to believe it's been 8 whole years! --TheSandDoctor ^Talk 22:31, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

Question about Draft:Shufti

Hi TheSandDoctor,

Thank you for being my mentor. I have a question about my draft Draft:Shufti.

The draft was declined with the reason that it does not meet WP:SIRS for independent coverage at significant length demonstrating corporate depth.

I have since updated the draft with additional independent references from Biometric Update, ID Tech Wire, PYMNTS, SecurityBrief UK, FF News, and Companies House — covering the company's Series A funding, DHS RIVR evaluation results, iBeta Level 3 PAD conformance, US gaming regulatory approvals, and DACH market expansion.

Could you please take a look at the updated draft and let me know whether the references now meet the notability requirements, or whether there are specific gaps I should address before resubmitting?

Thank you for your time. --Alyharis (talk) 11:18, 17 June 2026 (UTC)

@Alyharis: Press releases don't help demonstrate notability. They might be useful as primary sources from time to time for non-contentious things, but from a "demonstrating notability" perspective they are worthless. There needs to be demonstrated "significant coverage in multiple reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject", ideally over a sustained period of time. If you can come back with your best three sources that satisfy what I just laid out and is in WP:NCORP then I can take a closer look. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 22:30, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment

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(replacing Yapperbot) SodiumBot (botop|talk|contribs) 20:30, 17 June 2026 (UTC)

Question from PIXVENTA (12:54, 21 June 2026)

How can publish a article or information page about PIXVENTA PRIVATE LIMITED. --PIXVENTA (talk) 12:54, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

@PIXVENTA: I would strongly recommend against it at this point. A quick Google search didn't turn up anything demonstrating that that company meets the notability guideline for corporations. In short, you need "significant coverage in multiple reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject", ideally over a sustained period of time. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 22:26, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-26

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

• Growth features are now available at Wikidata. This update enables access to Mentorship (if configured), Impact module, the Help Panel, and a simplified Newcomer Homepage (without Suggested Edits). Wikidata administrators are still configuring the features through Community Configuration.

Updates for editors

• The special page Special:RangeCalculator has been created. It allows users to find an IP range without needing to rely on external tools. Until now, this tool was only available to CheckUsers.
• Sub-referencing is a new MediaWiki feature that allows editors to reuse references with different details. It will be deployed to most small and medium-sized Wikipedia language versions on June 23. The FAQ lists possible actions to take on your wiki to support the deployment. Check the rollout plan for the next deployment steps.
• Starting next week, users will get a notification when they are blocked or unblocked from editing, or if this block changes.
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Starting next week, abuse filters that are set to "require CAPTCHA verification" will begin to also affect users with the skipcaptcha right, which includes most autoconfirmed users. Bots are exempted. This change only affects edits that trigger an abuse filter. The skipcaptcha right will continue to exempt users from having to solve CAPTCHAs in the ordinary course of using the wikis.
• Reference documentation for the Lift Wing API has moved from the API Portal to the interactive REST Sandbox.
• The API Portal wiki is now closed. For API documentation, see Wikimedia APIs on mediawiki.org. All API Portal wiki URLs (https://api.wikimedia.org/wiki/) will redirect to the mediawiki.org page starting June 22.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• Join an online call on 25 June at 2:30pm UTC to meet the current Wikimedia interns for Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. Interns will provide an overview of their projects and a brief demo of their work so far. Attendees are encouraged to share ideas and connections in their community.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 13:03, 23 June 2026 (UTC)

Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment

Your feedback is requested at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) on a "All RFCs" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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(replacing Yapperbot) SodiumBot (botop|talk|contribs) 16:31, 24 June 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-27

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

• As part of the Account Creation Experiments, the Growth team tested adding a user account icon in the mobile web header for logged-out users, providing direct access to "Create account" and "Log in" actions. The experiment increased account creation by about 20% without negatively affecting edit quality or constructive edit rates. The feature will now be rolled out to all Wikimedia Foundation wikis on mobile web in the first week of July.
• After a successful experiment, logged-in users who did not confirm their email address when their account was created see a new banner asking them to complete that process. This helps reduce the risk that users get locked out of their account, and makes account email addresses overall more reliable. This is part of the Account Security project.
• An update to Search is refining how the -prefix: behaves when used to exclude results. Previously, using -prefix: with negation could unintentionally broaden search results by adding the namespaces included in the search scope, leading to confusing behavior for users expecting a straightforward exclusion filter. With the update, -prefix: will now strictly exclude matching page titles as intended and may display a warning if the relevant namespace has not been explicitly selected. The behavior of prefix: without negation however remains unchanged.
• View all 33 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where reviewers using the Page Curation toolbar were not automatically subscribed to talk page discussions they started has now been fixed. Reviewers will now receive notifications when someone replies to those discussions.

Updates for technical contributors

• Starting June 29th, automated downloads from the dumps.wikimedia.org website will be subject to the user-agent policy. Automated requests that provide a generic or empty user-agent will be blocked. Access to dumps through Wikimedia Cloud Services remains unaffected. This is a follow up to the announcement made in the 2026/25 issue of Tech News.
• 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 11:46, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

Question from Maxi Battyan (20:13, 29 June 2026)

hello --Maxi Battyan (talk) 20:13, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

Hi Maxi Battyan! Do you have a question? TheSandDoctor ^Talk 22:23, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – July 2026

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

Administrator changes

• Chipmunkdavis
• TechnoSquirrel69

• Mlaffs
• SpuriousQ
• Lectonar
• Dennis Brown
• Hog Farm

CheckUser changes

• Giraffer
• TonyBallioni

• Dbeef
• EdJohnston

Oversight changes

• Giraffer
• TonyBallioni

L235

Guideline and policy news

• A request for comment asks whether the criteria for autoconfirmed and extended confirmed should be modified.
• A request for comment proposes an addendum for the Real name section of the Username policy.

Technical news

• The special page Special:RangeCalculator has been created for any users to use to find an IP range. (phab:T268429)
• The "indefinitely" button in Special:Block for temporary accounts can be replaced with a preferred block duration stated on MediaWiki:ipb-indefinite-expiry-temporary-account. (phab:T427125)

Arbitration

• Following a series of motions, changes to the contentious topics procedure to restructure awareness have been implemented.
• The arbitration case Michael Jackson has been closed.

Miscellaneous

• The 2026 Developing Countries WikiContest will run from 1 July to 30 September. Sign up now!
• 10 candidates have been appointed to the U4C.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:08, 2 July 2026 (UTC)

Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment

Your feedback is requested at Talk:Jet Lag: The Game on a "All RFCs" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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SodiumBot (botop|talk|contribs) 21:30, 2 July 2026 (UTC)

Your draft article, Draft:Sally Wood

Hello, TheSandDoctor. It has been over six months since you last edited the Articles for Creation submission or draft page you started, "Sally Wood".

In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material, the draft has been deleted. When you plan on working on it further and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.

Thank you for your submission to Wikipedia, and happy editing. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 22:40, 4 July 2026 (UTC)

Your draft article, Draft:Morning Brew

Hello, TheSandDoctor. It has been over six months since you last edited the Articles for Creation submission or draft page you started, "Morning Brew".

In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material, the draft has been deleted. When you plan on working on it further and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.

Thank you for your submission to Wikipedia, and happy editing. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 01:40, 5 July 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-28

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

• View all 34 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the search bar results on Wikidata, showed English results instead of using the correct language fallback for users of language variants, has now been fixed. Search suggestions will now follow the expected language fallback chain.

Updates for technical contributors

• In preparation for Celebrate Women campaign planned for March 2027, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Content Enablement team has launched a 22-question survey to better understand technical contributions by women+ (anyone who identifies as a woman) across Wikimedia projects. The survey takes approximately 15–20 minutes to complete and will remain open until 20 July 2026. The questions are also available on-wiki for review in advance.
• The Score extension now supports rendering music scores as SVG images in addition to PNG, addressing a long-standing feature request and resolving historical image quality issues. Both formats are now provided to clients, with PNG in the src attribute and SVG in the srcset attribute.
• The new Parsoid parser continues to be deployed to additional wikis, making it easier to introduce new reading and editing features. It was enabled on French Wikipedia, bringing total progress to covering 78.9% of Wikipedia page views. Rollout to English Wikipedia desktop will progress through this week.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The Wikimedia Hackathon 2026 recap blog post is now live. It highlights the projects, sessions, and social activities from this year’s event, and shares initial plans for the 2027 Wikimedia Hackathon.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 13:55, 6 July 2026 (UTC)

Question from ZaidAhmedWikiEditor on Intel Atom (06:24, 12 July 2026)

I cant find any mistakes iam new here --ZaidAhmedWikiEditor (talk) 06:24, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

Question from Red-Hot ChilliPaper (20:40, 12 July 2026)

I don't know how to create a Wikipedia article yet, but I want to learn editing. Where should I start? Need guidanceRₑd-ₕₒₜ CₕᵢₗₗᵢPₐₚₑᵣ 🌶️ (talk) 20:44, 12 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)

You're invited to the Mentorship noticeboard

Hi, TheSandDoctor. You are cordially invited to the brand new Wikipedia:Mentorship noticeboard. I get the impression sometimes that we mentors are each toiling in our own cubbyhole, quietly answering mentee questions with little to no interaction with other mentors. I think we have a lot to share and learn from each other, and I know it will make me feel better just having the opportunity to interact with you and other mentors there, and I hope it will for you, too. Looking forward to hearing your feedback. Please take the § Survey when you get there! Mathglot (talk) 06:38, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

Question from IBYAS (13:31, 14 July 2026)

Muhammad ibn ilyas is music Producer and Composer his main Genre is Hip Hop, EDM, TRAP experimental Boom Bap --IBYAS (talk) 13:31, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

Question from Loss dock on Death Merchant (20:43, 15 July 2026)

The section “The books” of this article is plagiarized from this webpage: https://unobtainium13.com/2026/01/20/guilty-pleasure-no-99-death-merchant-series-by-joseph-rosenberger/.

I am new to editing Wikipedia and am unsure of how to fix this. Your advisement would be appreciated. Thank you. --Loss dock (talk) 20:43, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

Question from Con10021 (17:16, 16 July 2026)

Good evening, I was hoping to edit a citation on the page “Vero Man”. The final citation, regarding FAU joining excavation efforts, leads to a bot website. If i wanted to edit this, would I need the correct page to substitute it. Thank you for your time. --Con10021 (talk) 17:16, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

Articles for Creation backlog drive

Hello TheSandDoctor:

WikiProject Articles for creation is holding a month long Backlog Drive in August!
The goal of this drive is to reduce the backlog of unreviewed drafts to less than a month of outstanding reviews from the current 3+ months. Bonus points will be given for reviewing drafts that have been waiting more than 30 days. The drive is running from 1 August 2026 through 31 August 2026.

You may find Category:AfC pending submissions by age or other categories and sorting helpful.

Barnstars will be given out as awards at the end of the drive.
There is a backlog of over 5000 pages, so start reviewing drafts. We're looking forward to your help! MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:38, 19 July 2026 (UTC)

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