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

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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:

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...

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Moved to Template:Did you know nominations/David Yong

Tech News: 2024-38

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

Improvements and Maintenance

  • Wishlist item Editors interested in templates can help by reading the latest Wishlist focus area, Template recall and discovery, and share your feedback on the talkpage. This input helps the Community Tech team to decide the right technical approach to build. Everyone is also encouraged to continue adding new wishes.
  • The new automated Special:NamespaceInfo page helps editors understand which namespaces exist on each wiki, and some details about how they are configured. Thanks to DannyS712 for these improvements. [1]
  • References Check is a feature that encourages editors to add a citation when they add a new paragraph to a Wikipedia article. For a short time, the corresponding tag "Edit Check (references) activated" was erroneously being applied to some edits outside of the main namespace. This has been fixed. [2]
  • It is now possible for a wiki community to change the order in which a page’s categories are displayed on their wiki. By default, categories are displayed in the order they appear in the wikitext. Now, wikis with a consensus to do so can request a configuration change to display them in alphabetical order. [3]
  • Advanced item Tool authors can now access ToolsDB's public databases from both Quarry and Superset. Those databases have always been accessible to every Toolforge user, but they are now more broadly accessible, as Quarry can be accessed by anyone with a Wikimedia account. In addition, Quarry's internal database can now be queried from Quarry itself. This database contains information about all queries that are being run and starred by users in Quarry. This information was already public through the web interface, but you can now query it using SQL. You can read more about that, and 20 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
  • Any pages or tools that still use the very old CSS classes mw-message-box need to be updated. These old classes will be removed next week or soon afterwards. Editors can use a global-search to determine what needs to be changed. It is possible to use the newer cdx-message group of classes as a replacement (see the relevant Codex documentation, and an example update), but using locally defined onwiki classes would be best. [4]

Technical project updates

  • Next week, all Wikimedia wikis will be read-only for a few minutes. This will start on September 25 at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. This maintenance process also targets other services. The previous switchover took 3 minutes, and the Site Reliability Engineering teams use many tools to make sure that this essential maintenance work happens as quickly as possible. [5]

Tech in depth

  • Advanced item The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes details about: research about hook handlers to help simplify development, research about performance improvements, work to improve the REST API for end-users, and more.
  • Advanced item To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
    • Hackathon Showcase (45 mins) - 19 short presentations by some of the Hackathon participants, describing some of the projects they worked on, such as automated testing of maintenance scripts, a video-cutting command line tool, and interface improvements for various tools. There are more details and links available in the Phabricator task.
    • Co-Creating a Sustainable Future for the Toolforge Ecosystem (40 mins) - a roundtable discussion for tool-maintainers, users, and supporters of Toolforge about how to make the platform sustainable and how to evaluate the tools available there.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:59, 16 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:05, 29 September 2024 (UTC)== September music ==[reply]

story · music · places

Thank you for understanding my hook exactly as I meant it, - that's so unusual! - My story today is about a man who played jazz when it was banned by the Nazis, - you can listen to how they played it later. -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:39, 17 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you again, - my story today about one of the greatest users I had the honour to meet here, mentioned in my edit notice. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:21, 19 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

To be fair, I think you could make these things go smoother by being more accommodating of suggestions from reviewers. 11 editors invested 9 days arguing over this. It didn't need to be that complicated. RoySmith (talk) 20:37, 19 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree completely that it should not be complicated. The original hook could have been modified a bit, instead of struck. Next time I'll call you for mediation sooner, if there is a next time that is. I really try to avoid DYK but with a brandnew article about a woman musician, I failed to resist the temptation to tell the world about her. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:50, 19 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Ach, lieben Christen, seid getrost, BWV 114, is one of the pieces in my topic of this year. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 18:52, 22 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you today for Arthur O. Austin, introduced: "Have you ever listened to a radio broadcast or admired the pretty blinking lights on a radio transmitter tower? Have you ever wondered how aircraft survive being hit by lightning? Has it ever struck you as odd that every electrical appliance you buy has a label warning you about the dangers of electrocution if you get it wet, but the high-tension lines that bring power to your house do just fine outside in the rain and snow? If so, you'll want to read this article to find out how some guy you've probably never heard of was a big part of making all that work." - Yes! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:56, 23 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My story today features a pic I took from my position in the choir, I can also offer varied delightful music, some from Venice, also with pics I took, - note the rose in the clarinet ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:36, 25 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for Margrit Waltz. - BWV 130 on the same page, - OTD, a process much easier than DYK. --

AN close

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In this, isn't it the reported-user that got indef'ed, not OP (Marchjuly)? DMacks (talk) 04:37, 20 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yup, thanks for the correction. RoySmith (talk) 08:11, 20 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-39

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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 September 25 at 15:00 UTC. Reading the wikis will not be interrupted, but editing will be paused. These twice-yearly processes allow WMF's site reliability engineering teams to remain prepared to keep the wikis functioning even in the event of a major interruption to one of our data centers.

Updates for editors

A screenshot of the interface for the Alt Text suggested-edit feature
  • Editors who use the iOS Wikipedia app in Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Chinese, may see the Alt Text suggested-edit experiment after editing an article, or completing a suggested edit using "Add an image". Alt-text helps people with visual impairments to read Wikipedia articles. The team aims to learn if adding alt-text to images is a task that editors can be successful with. Please share any feedback on the discussion page.
  • The Codex color palette has been updated with new and revised colors for the MediaWiki user interfaces. The most noticeable changes for editors include updates for: dark mode colors for Links and for quiet Buttons (progressive and destructive), visited Link colors for both light and dark modes, and background colors for system-messages in both light and dark modes.
  • Advanced item It is now possible to include clickable wikilinks and external links inside code blocks. This includes links that are used within <syntaxhighlight> tags and on code pages (JavaScript, CSS, Scribunto and Sanitized CSS). Uses of template syntax {{…}} are also linked to the template page. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements. [6]
  • Two bugs were fixed in the GlobalVanishRequest system by improving the logging and by removing an incorrect placeholder message. [7][8]
  • View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Advanced item From Wikimedia Enterprise:
    • The API now enables 5,000 on-demand API requests per month and twice-monthly HTML snapshots freely (gratis and libre). More information on the updates and also improvements to the software development kits (SDK) are explained on the project's blog post. While Wikimedia Enterprise APIs are designed for high-volume commercial reusers, this change enables many more community use-cases to be built on the service too.
    • The Snapshot API (html dumps) have added beta Structured Contents endpoints (blog post on that) as well as released two beta datasets (English and French Wikipedia) from that endpoint to Hugging Face for public use and feedback (blog post on that). These pre-parsed data sets enable new options for researchers, developers, and data scientists to use and study the content.

In depth

  • Advanced item The Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) is used to get answers to questions using the Wikidata data set. As Wikidata grows, we had to make a major architectural change so that WDQS could remain performant. As part of the WDQS Graph Split project, we have new SPARQL endpoints available for serving the "scholarly" and "main" subgraphs of Wikidata. The query.wikidata.org endpoint will continue to serve the full Wikidata graph until March 2025. After this date, it will only serve the main graph. For more information, please see the announcement on Wikidata.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:33, 23 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 26 September 2024

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* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:11, 26 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Arbitration committee elections notice

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In the past, I waited until the elections RfC was about to end before posting a notice, which is why you've posted before I could for two years now ;-). If you don't mind, perhaps next time you could include the following items: please get in touch with anyone you'd like to see run, or whose plans affect your decision to run, and see the arbitrator experiences page for more information on the work involved. I would appreciate it! isaacl (talk) 23:51, 26 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

RFA2024 update: Discussion-only period now open for review

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Hi there! The trial of the RfA discussion-only period passed at WP:RFA2024 has concluded, and after open discussion, the RfC is now considering whether to retain, modify, or discontinue it. You are invited to participate at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/2024 review/Phase II/Discussion-only period. Cheers, and happy editing! MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:38, 27 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

DYK for Margrit Waltz

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On 29 September 2024, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Margrit Waltz, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that Margrit Waltz has ferried planes to points on five continents? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Margrit Waltz. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, Margrit Waltz), 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 suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

RoySmith (talk) 00:02, 29 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-40

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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

  • Readers of 42 more wikis can now use Dark Mode. If the option is not yet available for logged-out users of your wiki, this is likely because many templates do not yet display well in Dark Mode. Please use the night-mode-checker tool if you are interested in helping to reduce the number of issues. The recommendations page provides guidance on this. Dark Mode is enabled on additional wikis once per month.
  • Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor as their default can access features from the 2017 wikitext editor by adding ?veaction=editsource to the URL. If you would like to enable the 2017 wikitext editor as your default, it can be set in your preferences. [9]
  • For logged-out readers using the Vector 2022 skin, the "donate" link has been moved from a collapsible menu next to the content area into a more prominent top menu, next to "Create an account". This restores the link to the level of prominence it had in the Vector 2010 skin. Learn more about the changes related to donor experiences. [10]
  • The CampaignEvents extension provides tools for organizers to more easily manage events, communicate with participants, and promote their events on the wikis. The extension has been enabled on Arabic Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Swahili Wikipedia, and Meta-Wiki. Chinese Wikipedia has decided to enable the extension, and discussions on the extension are in progress on Spanish Wikipedia and on Wikidata. To learn how to enable the extension on your wiki, you can visit the CampaignEvents page on Meta-Wiki.
  • View all 22 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Developers with an account on Wikitech-wiki should check if any action is required for their accounts. The wiki is being changed to use the single-user-login (SUL) system, and other configuration changes. This change will help reduce the overall complexity for the weekly software updates across all our wikis.

In depth

  • The server switch was completed successfully last week with a read-only time of only 2 minutes 46 seconds. This periodic process makes sure that engineers can switch data centers and keep all of the wikis available for readers, even if there are major technical issues. It also gives engineers a chance to do maintenance and upgrades on systems that normally run 24 hours a day, and often helps to reveal weaknesses in the infrastructure. The process involves dozens of software services and hundreds of hardware servers, and requires multiple teams working together. Work over the past few years has reduced the time from 17 minutes down to 2–3 minutes. [11]

Meetings and events

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:16, 30 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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