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
The Chart extension is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. Editors can use this new extension to create interactive data visualizations like bar, line, area, and pie charts. Charts are designed to replace many of the uses of the legacy Graph extension.
Updates for editors
It is now easier to configure automatic citations for your wiki within the visual editor's citation generator. Administrators can now set a default template by using the _default key in the local MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json page (example diff). Setting this default will also help to future-proof your existing configurations when new item types are added in the future. You can still set templates for individual item types as they will be preferred to the default template. [1]
Starting the week of June 2, bots logging in using action=login or action=clientlogin will fail more often. This is because of stronger protections against suspicious logins. Bots using bot passwords or using a loginless authentication method such as OAuth are not affected. If your bot is not using one of those, you should update it; using action=login without a bot password was deprecated in 2016. For most bots, this only requires changing what password the bot uses. [2]
From this week, Wikimedia wikis will allow ES2017 features in JavaScript code for official code, gadgets, and user scripts. The most visible feature of ES2017 is async/await syntax, allowing for easier-to-read code. Until this week, the platform only allowed up to ES2016, and a few months before that, up to ES2015. [3]
Scholarship applications to participate in the GLAM Wiki Conference 2025 are now open. The conference will take place from 30 October to 1 November, in Lisbon, Portugal. GLAM contributors who lack the means to support their participation can apply here. Scholarship applications close on June 7th.
Can I ask you take a step back and consider not WP:BADGERING Olga ? Also consider toning down on asking rhetorical questions or by default assuming that consensus will be overridden by surveys in this discussion (like you did with respect to MMiller).
Note that these folks are real people with real jobs that typically include a large number of disparate projects, they are typically not single threading on a specific thing (and thus are not required to answer every single pointy question thrown at them by the community and neither should you try to get them to do it). Sohom (talk) 13:38, 5 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Sohom Datta Please read the page you linked to. I do not think it is polite to falsely accuse someone. You can disagree with me, that is fine. But pretending that I am doing things I am clearly not doing, just because you have a different position in a discussion is weak sauce.
Note that I am also a real person, and your approach of not engaging in discussion but falsely accusing me of something I did not annoys me. Please stay off my talkpage if you have nothing to offer but negativity. Thank you. Unlike you I am actually working towards a solution and helping the WMF. Polygnotus (talk) 13:44, 5 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Sohom Datta: You claim to be an expert JavaScript programmer on your userpage. If you want to contribute something meaningful and constructive, I have this but I am not sure what the best way is to have it occupy the side of the screen. Normally that wouldn't be difficult but for some stupid reason the different themes Wikipedia uses mess things up. Claude couldn't figure it out and I am currently too sick for debugging. The idea is to use it to prove to the Wikipedia community that not all AI is bad. You can look at User:Polygnotus/Scripts/Claude3.js. I use Vector 2010 but I tried to get it to work in modern Vector. Figuring out what to do is not hard: 1) WMF should acknowledge the problems and show that it understands 2) Someone should show the community that not all AI is bad. You can help me with both. Polygnotus (talk) 13:51, 5 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
So, I realize my initial message was a bit hasty and poorly worded. I wanted to dissuade you from making comments like Probably a bad idea to respond only to 1 comment, the only comment that is not critical but asks about the underlying stuff. We are kinda waiting for a response to the other stuff. since it makes people feel like you are demanding that folks answer the hard questions, even if you don't want it to sound that way. I can however, understand that this is a fairly emotionally charged situation and both of us worded our responses poorly.
Regarding the rest, User:Sohom Datta/claude.js should contain a fixed version of the script that you showed me. For my part, while I might seem relatively inactive onwiki, I've been doing my part as a member of the PTAC, I've raised this internally (on the PTAC slack) and pointed out that the English Wikipedia is perceives large-language model generated text negatively. I've also asked WMF folks to reconsider it's internal guidelines for what can/should be A/B tested without community approval (since I see this as being the main reason/loophole why this made it to a enwiki deployment). I also plan on doing some ground work trying to understand how/why the WMF made the decision of proposing this feature and see if I can provide feedback about the workstream. Sohom (talk) 00:13, 6 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Sohom Datta Thank you! One of the problems here is that, if you try to push a discussion in a direction, people link to WP:BADGER which is written for bad people with bad intentions, and not people who are, let's say, perhaps a bit overly enthusiastic. Saying "Oi, slow down" works better. Badgering is demanding that people restate their position, refusing to accept the consensus, IDHT behaviour. I didn't do any of that, and I very much agree with the consensus.
I know I can convince the community that we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater. I want to continue using AI, and I want the WMF to continue experimenting, while also being very very clear that some things go against our values.
I've been thinking about voluntarily tagging my own AI-assisted edits with a special (hash)tag so that people can see that the fear of AI (in a supporting role, while the human makes the decisions and holds the responsibility) is overblown. I don't use the generated text on Wikipedia, I just have it generate instructions that I can follow (like "fix this typo").
Stuff like this is a major setback because the community loses confidence that the WMF respects the community and understands its own role. Creating a simple script like the one I showed you and posting some screenshots on a public place is a quick win. I want to show the WMF what acceptable and responsible AI use looks like and show the community that they have nothing to fear from responsible AI use. We can't just shout "bad dog" at the WMF and expect them to do better next time. Anthropic's Sonnet 4 and Opus 4 work really well in my experience. It may be a good idea to also make a ChatGPT-version. In the future, maybe we can have a script like this with a model hosted by the WMF.
I do think that calling out manipulative tricks is very important. There is probably a better term for this I am unaware of, but let's call it "politician-speak". I think the WMF uses politician-speak to protect itself and does not realize that it is hurting instead of helping. We need to be able to criticize undesirable behaviour without wrapping it in compliments. Way too often people hide behind the trick "oh, you criticized something I said, then you must be a one-dimensional villain/troll who is just plain evil and has nothing of value to add" instead of realizing that their behaviour is not who they are as a person and that they can't grow if no one points out when they mess up. It may have something to do with the world getting more polarized/people being less relaxed but I am no expert in that field. I am on the other end of the spectrum in the sense that I rarely agree with myself, and can write books about the flaws in my own reasoning.
I may want to get community consensus for my AI-assisted typo fix tool at some point, and people will object to it if they think all AI is evil and wrong.
Thanks for your help. I think we need to turn this debacle into something positive, somehow. If you need help with PTAC stuff or other stuff, you know where to find me. Polygnotus (talk) 01:31, 6 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
use OOUI buttons (but they use too much space, because they are fullwidth)
think about accessibility
make OpenAI version(?)
add warning about AI imperfections
preserve scroll position when navigating to new page
currently it opens on top of the page, and when you drag the left border the article width changes. It should never be on top, and always next to article content
make button to delete API key from localStorage() instead of pointless "clear results" button
key should probably be in sessionStorage not localStorage
improve prompt to not include summary at the end The article is generally well-written
improve prompt to ensure it focuses on areas in which it gives good advice, and ignores areas about which it gives bad advice. Should probably run it on ~100 pages and check what is the worst advice and tune the prompt based on that. Special:NewPages >10k b?
horribly ugly in light mode
ability to minimize and restore?
it is relatively pointless on pages with very little text/pages that consist mostly on tables with scores. Perhaps have a way to detect that it shouldn't even bother trying?
An Articles for Creation backlog drive is happening in June 2025, with over 1,600 drafts awaiting review from the past two months. In addition to AfC participants, all administrators and new page patrollers can help review using the Yet Another AFC Helper Script, which can be enabled in the Gadgets settings. Sign up here to participate!
Greetings Polygnotus! I'm a huge fan of your work on User:Polygnotus/Scripts/Claude6.js. Anthropic has to charge a lot of money but Google offers their slightly better (at text in LMArena, anyway)
gemini-2.5-flash-preview-05-20 model for free, so I asked it to convert your code to User:Cramulator/GeminiProofreader.js which I have tested and seems to work. There is a hyperlink to Google's API key generation page in the key entry dialog box which anyone logged in to Google even without a Google Cloud account can use to generate a free tier key. The only technical change I had to make was to increase maxOutputTokens well above the default for when it had to say a lot, because unlike Claude, Gemini returns no completion at MAX_TOKENS instead of truncating, nor does it prioritize generation to fit inside the limit in the first place. I also made it prepend the article title to the LLM results since the output persists (which I think is a good thing, while you work on an initial article; but this probably could have been a prompt change.)
I also enabled Gemini's googleSearch and urlContext tools, so presumably it should be using its "grounding" capability to search for facts and sources, and actually examine linked sources (including PDFs etc.) when prudent, but I haven't tested either of those yet because I'm not sure how I could set up conclusive tests -- maybe you can think of something?
...Maybe we should put something in the Gemini prompt to use web search to check important facts and figures, and browse sources to confirm important or conflicting statements? Cramulator (talk) 06:15, 9 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Cramulator Ooh that is excellent work, thank you! We may need to combine them at some point and add OpenAI. AI bashing is pretty popular round these parts, but Wikipedians should be able to deal with unreliable sources. I'll have to make something to compare them so we can judge who is best. I prefer Claude for coding tasks at the moment, but being free is a very important advantage of course! When I have more time I'll try to make some minor improvements. Thanks again! Polygnotus (talk) 00:21, 11 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
You're very welcome! I did very little compared to your 6 revisions. I agree the Claudes version 4 are better for code than competitors (when the much smaller context window doesn't get in the way), but Anthropic clearly didn't optimize them for prose over previous versions, while Gemini Flash 2.5 has three other advantages that I believe the Claude API lacks:
Web search: Gemini will try to use Google Search with its "grounding" approach which I believe looks at low confidence token output behind the scenes and gets more aggressive with searching when it thinks it might be hallucinating. Claude 4 via the API won't search the web without "extended thinking" which is slow, expensive, and possibly overkill for proofreading.
PDF browsing: Claude can read PDF files, but by default it refuses to. For example https://s24.q4cdn.com/216390268/files/doc_downloads/test.pdf which Claude says is forbidden by robots.txt, but there is no robots.txt or exclusionary headers for it, so.... I suggest many if not most of the PDF sources we link to in articlespace lack affirmative permissions from a robots.txt file. Also, when you turn on Gemini's urlContext tool as I did, I have confirmed it tries to load in as many links as it can, and keeps them when they fit in its million token window.
Cost: Gemini Flash has a very generous free tier, while Anthropic and OpenAI have less of a slush fund to dangle "$0" in front of potential APIs users, so I expect Google will continue to try to bludgeon them this way. We definitely want to prioritize this for editors, not just to reduce adoption friction and keep them from having to open their wallets, but also while I know very little about userscripts and gadgets, I know security issues are not unheard of, and I would hate to see editors getting defrauded somehow. Gemini free tier API keys just rate limit, without incurring payments.
If I were going to offer just one point of constructive criticism, I suggest the three vertical buttons could be improved to be horizontal when width allows. Cramulator (talk) 02:58, 11 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
P.S. Please feel free to fork User:Cramulator/GeminiProofreader.js back into your /scripts/ in which case I will make it a redirect to your version, or just edit it in my userspace as you see fit. Cramulator (talk) 03:07, 11 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That's ok, I've been famous for a long time, as a former admin and bureaucrat who has gotten into hot water more than once. Someone once found my personal website and a stand-up comedy routine that I did at an open mic night and posted it on Digg (not that it was well-hidden). They took it down when I asked nicely, I believe it is impossible to find now, but if you find it let me know 'cause I long since lost the video. Anyway, a word of unsolicited advice, a lot of people that I know are pretty sensitive about these issues (antisemitism on Wikipedia, and so on) especially what with what is going on in American politics right now (e.g. Trump using the word shylock, various horrific events of antisemitism in the country that I won't get into). I don't want to get into it any more than that, but my advice would be to try to tread a little lighter and consider being a bit more empathetic in terms of the impact your comments and actions may have. It is possible to both fix the coverage and articles and also be a bit more sensitive and respectful toward opposing viewpoints. I say this as someone who has been a hothead many times and I know that you are in good faith trying to improve Wikipedia. Andre🚐03:55, 7 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@AndreJustAndre Thanks! Yeah, they don't see it when I protect Talia Lavin, or fix typos on every single Rote Kapelle article written by user Scope creep. With the goodfaith people it usually works out in the end, we follow BRD and come to a consensus or agree to disagree, but for badfaith people it is always easy to pretend you are an evil %insert bad group here%-ist. As someone who has spent time online I have been called a nazi, commie, socialist, n-word, racist, antisemite, islamist and the like. Of course I make it worse by being against both sides in the I/P conflict. I think the civilians there deserve so much better. It would be much easier to support one side and hate the other. Polygnotus (talk) 04:20, 7 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Echoing @Polygnotus. I don’t like bullies, ethnicity or creed has nothing to do with it. It’s why I decided to pursue a career in law was so I could advocate for people weren’t as lucky as I was. Insanityclown1 (talk) 07:29, 7 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Insanityclown1 I do recommend simple.wiki it is like conservapedia:
Hamas (Arabic: حَمَاسُ, romanized: Ḥamās), an acronym of its official name, Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya (Arabic: حَرَكَةُ الْمُقَاوَمَةِ الِاسْلَامِيَّةِ, lit. "Islamic Resistance Movement"), is a Palestinian Sunni Islamist political movement in Gaza, with a history of terrorism and antisemitism despite its relative popularity in the Middle East and Western academia.[4]Polygnotus (talk) 09:25, 7 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Where was the most recent filtered list you started compiling in A-Z again? We'll need to work a lot on that after the contest in time for the next contest, likely in the mid autumn. Some way of filtering it to the most active members of WikiProjects and content producers across the site would be ideal, though in some ways contests like this have a lot of potential in motivating people who might otherwise not edit much, that has to be taken into account.♦ Dr. Blofeld12:17, 8 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. I suppose the first step would be to add a list of participants in former contests and challenges not on that list, which can be accessed in Template:The 100,000 Challenge. Then, given the emphasis on Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths, Medicine, Business, Geography and architecture, to find active members from all WikiProjects or associated articles in those realms and add them to the list. No rush as there's plenty of time over late summer but would be great if you could help and not too much trouble. ♦ Dr. Blofeld14:53, 8 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Not sure. I can find people manually, but would be great if you or somebody could use something which is quicker and more efficient and build it faster. ♦ Dr. Blofeld14:57, 8 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Dr. Blofeld You don't have to find people manually, Alien333 provided a nice little query for you. Then you can use the scripts above to filter out blocked and inactive users and sort the list by editcount. Polygnotus (talk) 15:09, 8 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The problem is a lot of those on that list aren't real science editors and are maintenance people like Ser Amantio and Liz. ♦ Dr. Blofeld15:37, 8 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think Liz will be near the top of any list you generate. Liz does roughly 50% of the work round here. Entering "Liz" into XTools makes it crash. Can it be used for each branch of the science projects too, geography and architecture? Alien333 will know. The problem is a lot of those on that list aren't real science editors and are maintenance people like Ser Amantio and Liz Maybe Alien333 can come up with a way to filter people who made articles in a specific category? Just spitballing. Polygnotus (talk) 15:51, 8 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Entering "Liz" into XTools makes it crash. Well, to be exact, we choose to not do such expensive calculations.
Can it be used for each branch of the science projects too, geography and architecture? It can, as they're given in the assessments templates. But they won't be found if you search for science. There is a technological solution to denote parent projects, but the only enwiki projects that use it also add the parent project directly (so there's not much point adding that to the query).
The problem is a lot of those on that list aren't real science editors and are maintenance people I'm afraid that there's no programmatic way of differentiating a content edit and non-content edit (though there's been a lot of discussion around it).
Come up with a way to filter people who made articles in a specific category Depends what you mean by "made". If it's "made" as in first edit, then should be fairly straightforward; for most other senses, it'll be near-impossible (in reasonable time at any rate). — Alien 3 3 316:15, 8 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
quarry:query/95313 is with only page creations. It is quite slower, especially for large projects, because we aren't using an index anymore. However, to the best of my knowledge (which granted is quite slight), there are no indexes on revision that include rev_parent_id. — Alien 3 3 316:37, 8 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think finding editors who created/significantly expanded articles in these fields rather than sheer edit count would be the way to go if it can be done. Including editors who wrote GAs and FAs.♦ Dr. Blofeld16:49, 8 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Creation is simple. But again, knowing who wrote an article or significantly expanded it is AFAIK not doable on a large scale. The best tool I know for that is mw:WikiWho (enwiki API), but it relies (as I think would any tool that does this) on analysing the whole revision history; which we can't do for thousands of articles.
A possible approximation could be number of edits to FAs and GAs of a certain WikiProject in the last year (though we can't check when exactly it became a GA/FA; assessment changes are not logged). — Alien 3 3 316:58, 8 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Edits to GAs and FAs and creations would be a start. A list of science and STEMM editors with such articles would be good. ♦ Dr. Blofeld17:44, 8 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That was the GA/FA edits in science &co list; I have also made the creations in science &co list. It's from quarry:query/95313 and I put the results at Special:PermaLink/1299492145. For the fun of it, I also made the list of GA/FA creations in science &co: Special:PermaLink/1299492308 (there are, understandably, only 32 people on that list).
Nice one, just updated it with the first list from your sandbox and hopefully removed the duplicates. The two of you feel free to add names to that list you find including from the second one. We want good contributors from all projects really, but STEM and Geography first place to start. Perhaps try Medicine next? Plenty of time, no rush! ♦ Dr. Blofeld19:16, 8 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hello, Polygnotus. You have new messages at Template talk:Talkback. Message added 09:54, 12 July 2025 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.
Hi, can you do two things. Wikipedia:The World Destubathon/Participants. Use that to generate a new full list with just User talk:Xxxx on each line for messaging, I should really notify all that the contest now ends on 16th. And two, add the list to my current A-Z list we worked on the other day in alpha order but remove duplicates? I think anybody who showed an interest automatically qualifies for notifying next time. ♦ Dr. Blofeld16:44, 12 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I often see you placing llm tags on articles and I would like to know how you come to such conclusions primarily because I want to do such research myself (If you don't mind, of course). I see more and more articles being infused with machine text, and in many cases it could be problematic.
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC, 16th July 2025 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Wikimania 2025 Hackathon kicks off on Tuesday, 5 August and a dedicated workspace will be available throughout the conference until Saturday, 9 August. Have a technical idea, tool, or project you want to build during the hackathon? Submit it now and start connecting with collaborators! Add your project here.
WikiCite 2025 will take place from Friday 29th to Sunday 31st of August! in Bern (Switzerland) and online! See the draft program here.
Wikidata for botanists: benefits of collaborating and sharing Linked Open Data By Sabine et al., (2025). This study explores Wikidata as an open, multilingual knowledge base that connects botanical data across sources, and urges botanists to collaboratively enrich its content to support a broad spectrum of plant science.
How To...Wikibase? - Senior Partner Manager, Christos Varvantakis has produced this set of training and educational material to get you started with Wikibase.
Tool of the week
Commons Depictions is a tool that display depictions of Wikidata items on Wikimedia Commons
Showcase Lexemes: reference (L5785) - English noun/verb (ˈɹɛf.ɹəns) meaning "source citation", "supporting document", or "relationship"
Development
Wikibase REST API: We started work on the simple Property prefix search phab:(T397838)
Mobile statement editing: We continued the work on the basics with viewing of statements (phab:T394886])
Search: Fixed a bug when pasting into the search box (phab:T397608)
Integration in Wikipedia and co:
We began research into current limits for collapsing entity usage. (Basically when an article uses more data from an Item than the configured limit then we consider all data on that Item to be used. This is done for infrastructure reasons.) We’d like to improve this to further reduce unnecessary Wikidata changes showing up on watchlist and recent changes on Wikipedia and co.
We will roll out showing labels instead of IDs in Wikidata edits in watchlist and recent changes to more wikis later this week.
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
Featured templates, a new feature related to Template Recall and Discovery will be deployed this week to all Wikimedia projects: With this feature, editors will be able to quickly access a list of templates that are likely to be useful. These templates will be displayed in a list, under the "featured" tab of the template discovery interface. Administrators can define the list via the Community Configuration interface. The feature fulfills a request by the community through the Community Wishlist. [5][6]
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the request to add Malayalam fonts in the Wikisource Book Export Tool was resolved and now, the rendering of Malayalam letters in exported Wikisource books are accurate. [7]
WikiIndaba 2025 scholarship application and program submission is open until 23:59 GMT on July 20. WikiIndaba is a regional conference for African Wikimedians both on the continent and in the diaspora to unite and grow together. Submit your scholarship application and program proposal now!
WikiCon Brasil 2025 will take place on July 19-20 in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. The Brazilian community members are encouraged to register and attend!
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on June 27. Please help translate.
The Wikimania Hackathon 2025 inviting project ideas.
Upcoming and current events and conversations Let's Talk continues
Wikimania Hackathon 2025: The Wikimania Hackathon 2025 is inviting you to submit your project idea.
WikiWomen* Summit 2025: The WikiWomen* Summit 2025 will take place in a hybrid format on 5th August, the pre-conference day of Wikimania 2025. Register now.
Tech News: Temporary accounts have been rolled out on 18 large and medium-sized Wikipedias, including German, Japanese, French, and Chinese; The CampaignEvents extension has been enabled on all Wikipedias. More updates from Tech News week 27 and 28.
AbuseFilter: AbuseFilter maintainers can now match against IP reputation data in AbuseFilters. IP reputation data is information about the proxies and VPNs associated with the user’s IP address. This data is not shown publicly and is not generated for actions performed by registered accounts.
Favorite Templates: A new feature related to Template Recall and Discovery will be deployed to all Wikimedia projects: a template category browser will be introduced to assist users in finding templates to put in their “favourite” list. The browser will allow users to browse a list of templates which have been organised into a given category tree. The feature has been requested by the community through the Community Wishlist.
Wikipedia App: We have launched an A/B test of tabbed browsing in the Wikipedia iOS app. This feature allows users to open multiple articles in separate tabs, making it easier to switch between topics, explore, and return to previous reading spots. The test is currently running in Arabic, English, and Japanese in selected regions. We’re collecting feedback and plan to make the feature more widely available soon.
MediaWiki: The MediaWiki Platform team has introduced a unified Built-in Notifications system, as part of MediaWiki 1.44, that makes it easier for developers to send, manage, and customize notifications across the platform.
Advocacy: We have created The Wikipedia Test: a public policy tool and a call to action to help ensure regulators consider how new laws can negatively affect online communities and platforms that provide services and information in the public interest.
Wikimedia Research Showcase: The next showcase will center around the theme of "Examining the Impact of LLMs on Knowledge Production Communities" and will take place on July 16 at 16:30 UTC.
Administrative Update to Our Privacy Policies: Following personnel changes, we are removing the name of our former point of contact serving the European Economic Area and the UK for questions and requests related to personal data in the privacy policy and donor privacy policy.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Hallo, When you retargetted the redirect Prof you don't seem to have added a hatnote at the new target to redirect readers to the previous target. (OK, it's all now up in the air with the redirect being under discussion at RfD, but the point is still valid.) Please remember to do so, for the sake of our readers. Thanks. PamD16:26, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@PamD I basically never do anything with redirects so I didn't know that was required. The next time I'll touch a redirect is probably 5 years from now so it is likely I will have forgotten by then. Thanks! Polygnotus (talk) 16:35, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Not that simple, there are lots of variations. But the bottom line is: Before this edit, a reader typing "Prof" was led to Professor, so we must make sure that they are still offered a route to get to that page even if they go via the rapper's page. Just think of the reader, and help them, even if they don't share your musical interests! PamD22:02, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not arguing about where the redirect Prof should go to: that's under discussion at RfD. What I'm saying is:
There was for many years a redirect from Prof to Professor, because someone thought it would help some readers
You retargetted it to the rapper because you thought it would help more readers
I suggest you should have helped the first lot by adding a hatnote "For the academic title see Professor" or similar, at the top of the rapper's page.
Actually, on further thought, you should probably have made it a formal Move discussion, to propose moving the rapper to an undisambiguated "Prof", because retargetting the redirect implies that he is the Primary Topic so should be at the base name.
@PamD That again sounds like a task that is automatable. Perhaps a bit more difficult, but surely doable. So I think that the solution is some code that figures out what the primary topic should be, and then deals with redirects and {{For}} and the like. Why waste valuable human time on such a task? If we have clickstream and pageview data some simple code is far more reliable and predictable than humans can ever be. If a page is incorrectly redirecting, like it was, then my edit was a clear improvement. Sure, it could've been even better by deleting the redirect and moving the article, but perfect is the enemy of good and I am no admin. So with the benefit of hindsight we can say Ohconfucius' edits were wrong, but unless Ohconfucius is a timetraveling wizard they probably couldn't reliably predict the future. Before this edit, a reader typing "Prof" was led to Professor, so we must make sure that they are still offered a route to get to that page I don't see the causal link, unless you think people type prof to find the article Professor over and over again, which seems unlikely. And of course people who want to learn about the concept of a "professor" are very unlikely to type the first 4 letters and then bash Enter and expect to get there. Usually you type the entire word, or you pick the correct option from the list that is presented to you while you type. Ideally we'd find a privacy-respecting way to collect data such as "time spent on page" and "lines scrolled", that could be used to improve the code. Polygnotus (talk) 05:30, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Wikimedia and Open Knowledge Conference (survey) is being planned for 2026 in Poland. This event is to focus on research carried out on or with Wikidata and Wikipedia. Your opinion is wanted! Please fill out the Google Forms survey to help the organisation committee plan. Also available in Polish and Ukrainian.
Wikimania 2025 Program is Live! This is also the time to add your Wikidata meetups. Please start marking your preferred Wikimania sessions (⭐/like) and mark to your mobile apps or calendars. If you are joining online to watch live stream and use the interactive features, please register on eventyay through wikimania.org (source)
Past: Missed the Q3 Wikidata+Wikibase office hour? You can catch up by reading the session log here: 2025-07-15 (Q3 2025)
Wikinity A tool allowing you to find (un)photographed objects, so you can take a picture of them and send it to Wikidata. The tool was created By Martin Urbanec
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The Call for Papers is now open for the Journal of Open Humanities Data special collection: "Wikidata across the Humanities: datasets, methodologies, reuse." This editorial will explore how Wikidata is transforming research and collaboration in the humanities. If you're working on a relevant project, submit your proposal here
What belongs where in the Wikibase Ecosystem? There is ongoing research to better understand what people are currently thinking about this and you can take part by sorting some scenarios.
Showcase Lexemes: Września (L1372236) - Polish proper noun (ˈvʐɛɕ.ɲa) meaning "September (month)", "town in Greater Poland", or "village in Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship"
Additional APIs: We are looking a bit more into GraphQL and what it could offer to make programmatic access to Wikidata's data better.
Wikidata integration in the Wikimedia projects: We enabled showing the labels of entities in edit summaries in recent changes and watchlist. Now you no longer have to click to get to Wikidata and check what is behind a mystery ID in an edit summary coming from Wikidata.
Mobile statement editing: We are working on formatting references, qualifiers, various data types and multiple statements for one property. We are planning to enable the new mobile UI on Beta Wikidata soon. Important: For now it is a read-only UI, as we have not started to implement editing yet, and some data types won’t have the correct appearance yet.
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 Translation Suggestions feature in the Content Translation tool now has another level of article filters added to the "... More" category. Translators who use the Suggestions feature can now select and receive article suggestions that are customized to geographical locations of their interest using the new "Regions" filter. [8]
Administrators can now limit "Add a Link" to newcomers. The "Add a Link" Structured Task helps new account holders start editing, but some communities have requested the ability to restrict it to its intended audience: newcomers. Administrators can configure this setting within the Community Configuration feature.
For AbuseFilter editors on some wikis, it is now possible to filter edits based on the RevertRisk score of the edit being attempted. It is only populated if the action being evaluated is an edit. For more information, please see the ORES/AbuseFilter variables documentation.
The Beta Cluster wikis have been moved from beta.wmflabs.org to beta.wmcloud.org. Users may need to update URLs in any tools, or in their password managers. Any related issues can be reported in the task.
WikiCite 2025 will take place from 29–31 August, both online and in-person in Bern, Switzerland. The event's goals are to reconnect communities, institutions, and individuals working with open citations, bibliographic data, and the Wikidata/Wikibase ecosystem. Registration is open and the call for proposals will be announced soon. [9]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-07-28. Missed the previous one? See issue #689.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: Aqurs1 (RfP scheduled to end after 31 July 2025 16:35 UTC)
New requests for permissions/Bot: THEbotIT 3 - New functional aspect to automatic creation of items describing the articles of Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (RE). We want to model now the articles, which amends the main articles, as those information where suppressed so far.
Wikidata's 13th birthday decentralized events will take place in October and November 2025. Feel free to browse the documentation pages to learn how to organize an event in your area, get funding, and get in touch with other organizers. Help translate the documentation pages into your language.
Wikimania starts next week August 6 through August 9. Check out the Wikidata related session in the program and start marking your preferred Wikimania sessions (⭐/like) on your mobile apps or calendars. If you are joining online to watch live stream and use the interactive features, please register on eventyay through wikimania.org. Note also the Wikidata meetups organised outside the official conference hours.
The modeling of agrégation ("the most competitive and prestigious examination for civil service in the French public education system" according to w:en:Agrégation) has been reviewed in various aspects: a summary is available in d:Talk:Q397610#Modeling agrégation. Suggestions are welcome.
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
organizational chart (image that displays the structure of this organization or government agency and the relationships and relative ranks of it's parts and positions/jobs)
Source Shrine (The shrine that the gods of this shinto shrine came from through Bunrei and Kanjo)
botanical photographs (a distinctive image of a flower, inflorescence, or a similar reproductive structure for this taxon)
WikiProject Highlights: WikiProject Sweden - A project to centralize, expand, and translate Sweden-related data on Wikidata while supporting the Swedish contributor community.
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
The Community Tech team will be focusing on wishes related to Watchlists and Recent Changes pages, over the next few months. They are looking for feedback. Please read the latest update, and if you have ideas, please submit a wish on the topic.
Updates for editors
The Wikimedia Commons community has decided to block cross-wiki uploads to Wikimedia Commons, for all users without autoconfirmed rights on that wiki, starting on August 16. This is because of widespread problems related to files that are uploaded by newcomers. Users who are affected by this will get an error message with a link to the less restrictive UploadWizard on Commons. Please help translating the message or give feedback on the message text. Please also update your local help pages to explain this restriction. [10]
On wikis with temporary accounts enabled and Meta-Wiki, administrators may now set up a footer for the Special:Contributions pages of temporary accounts, similar to those which can be shown on IP and user-account pages. They may do it by creating the page named MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer-temp. [11]
Wikimania 2025 will run from August 6–9. The program is available for you to plan which sessions you want to attend. Most sessions will be live-streamed, with exceptions for those that show the "no camera" icon. If you are joining online to watch live-streams and use the interactive features, please register for a free virtual ticket. For example, you may be interested in technical sessions such as:
The MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference, Fall 2025 will be held 28–30 October 2025 in Hanover, Germany. This event is organized by and for the third-party MediaWiki community. You can propose sessions and register to attend.
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on July 11. Please help translate. The bulletin will be back after Wikimania with a special issue on the 19th August.
Get Ready for Wikimania 2025!
Upcoming and current events and conversations Let's Talk continues
Strengthening a neutral point of view: An overview of NPOV policies across Wikipedia projects, shows that 153 Wikipedias out of 342 (45%) don’t have easily accessible guidance on neutrality. The research was conducted to help understand how neutrality is ensured in our projects. and to provide an opportunity for peer learning across project communities. Read the full research and join the conversation.
Tech News: See all the 60 community-submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks in Tech News week 29 and 30. For example, the request to add Malayalam fonts in the Wikisource Book Export Tool was resolved and now, the rendering of Malayalam letters in exported Wikisource books are accurate.
Temporary Accounts: After the rollout of temporary accounts on 18 large and medium-sized Wikipedias, we are monitoring the impact of this change, and preparing for the next deployments. See the full project update.
Add a link: Administrators can now limit "Add a Link" to newcomers, as opposed to keeping it open to more experienced editors as well. "Add a link" helps newcomers to start editing, so restricting the feature to them enables Administrators to cater the feature to that specific group, which they can do via the Community Configuration feature.
Equity Fund: As it closes, the Equity Fund has announced its final round of grants to six past grantees. It will also be providing four "Connected Grants" to movement organizations who will pair closely with one of the grantees to collaborate together.
Don't blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
Content Translation: Translators who use the Suggestions feature in the Content Translation tool can now select and receive article suggestions that are customized to geographical locations of their interest using the new "Regions" filter.
Board selection: The Elections Committee shared a list of the all eligible candidates. As there are more than 10 eligible candidates, a shortlisting process is currently taking place. Representatives of Wikimedia movement affiliates that are currently compliant with their reporting obligations can participate in the shortlisting process. Learn more about this process and next steps on Meta.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 27th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 2025! Boy, does it feel good to kick off the year with an issue. Yep, it's been a year since we cleared out the 2022-2024 backlog with issues 23 and 24! Good times. Though in this case "a year" just means... 6 months? 😯 The salience of whatever joke I was planning to make here has vanished speedily. Aaron Liu (talk) 21:00, 31 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
WikiTextExpander by Polygnotus, is this edition's featured script. At the click of a configurable hotkey, this script will find and replace or link a configurable list of phrases within the selected text in all source editors (even in the comment/reply field!). Besides allowing the quick insertion of templated messages, this script greatly mitigates the WP:WTF? problem by providing both the legibility of familiar words and the convenience of shortcuts. And to those asking, the capitalization of "Wikitext" as "WikiText" was a necessary sacrifice for far-more-memorable acronymy.
CanonNi: AlertAssistant has been fixed and rewritten using OOUI instead of Twinkle's Morebits. Such modern, very tool. (Do note that the maintainer has since become inactive.)
NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh/AjaxLoader has been updated to use modern JS APIs that replace the browser's URL bar with the link you clicked on to load in place. The "back" (and "forward") buttons also work now. Cool, innit?
andrybak: Unsigned helper no longer shows an error when the message to sign was added in the earliest 50 revisions of a page's history. This is especially relevant to pages with short histories.
BilledMammal/Move+ needs updating to order list of pages handle lists of pages to move correctly regardless of the discussion's page, so that we may avoid repeating fiasco history.
In breaking m:Tech/News, Gadgets can now include .vue files. This makes it easier to develop modern user interfaces using Vue.js, in particular using Codex, the official design system of Wikimedia. Codex icons are now also available. The documentation has examples.
Appo/Globstory integrates OpenHistoryMap, updating the map whenever hovering/clicking on a location or year, the latter of which changes the map to be (hopefully) accurate to the year selected. It's pretty interesting.
linkinfo Somewhat similar to WP:NavPops, Awesome Aasim/linkinfo(pictured) provides a collection of links to replace the right-click context menu, presented beautifully.
PreviousDiscussions provides a link to search for your username on subpages of another user's userpage and talkpage conveniently.
Twineeea/noRedLinks brings you to the "read" instead of the "create" tab when you visit a red link. Contemplate life's mysteries as you stare into the blank! Deeply.
No, this is not going to be the enduring tradition of S++ for the future. This was meant to be a joke for the special occasion on the first day of the fourth month but was delayed by four months because I'm lazy.
Wikimania begins this week (August 6-9). Check out the Wikidata sessions and meetups in the event schedule and mark them in your calander.
New Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series: Join the second session in our Intro to Wikidata/EMCO series. It will be focused on gadgets and user scripts that enhance Wikidata editing. We'll demo useful tools and invite you to share your favorites too! 🗓️ Tuesday, August 5 🕘 9am PT / 12pm ET / 16:00 UTC / 6pm CEST ℹ️ More info & Zoom link: Project page
Wikimedia Commons Depicts statements over time - Looking at the user of Wikidata Items to show that Wikimedia commons images depict, since the structured data on commons feature was originally turned on. Roads currently come out on top! By Adshore
Videos: Ongoing Wikidata sessions at the LD4 2025 events. (playlist)
Tool of the week
Who Painted this - is a tool developed by Francesco Negri. The tool is a game that let's you guess who created a painting, using data from Wikidata.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
If you are using Wikidata's APIs please be aware that the existing user agent policy will be enforced more strictly going forward. Please make sure your application sets a proper user agent. More details are in this announcement.
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
Editors can now enable the User Info card. This feature adds an icon next to usernames on history pages and similar user-contribution log pages. When you tap or click on the icon, it displays data related to that user account such as the number of edits, reverted edits, blocks, and more. It's part of a broader project to make it easier for moderators to evaluate account trustworthiness. The feature can be enabled in your global preferences, and later this week it will be available in local preferences. [12]
Everybody is invited to share comments on Collaborative Contributions, a project recently launched by the Connection team. The project aims to create a new way to display the impact of collaborative editing activities (such as edit-a-thons, backlog drives, and WikiProjects) on the wikis. Post your comments on the project talk page. [13]
Administrators can now define the default block duration for temporary accounts. To do that, they need to create a page named MediaWiki:Ipb-default-expiry-temporary-account and use a value defined in MediaWiki:Ipboptions. This allows administrators to easily block temporary accounts for 90 days, which is functionally equivalent to an indefinite block. The advantage of this solution is that it does not clutter Special:BlockList. More documentation is available. [14]
Gadgets can now include .vue files. This makes it easier to develop modern user interfaces using Vue.js, in particular using Codex, the official design system of Wikimedia. Codex icons can be loaded through the gadget definition. The documentation has examples. For user scripts that use Vue.js, an API module now exists to load Codex icons. [15][16]
Module developers can now use a Lua interface to simplify the preparation of Lua modules for translation on Meta-Wiki. This improvement makes it easier for translators to find and edit module strings without dealing with raw Lua code. It helps prevent mistakes that could break the module during translation. Module developers and translators are invited to watch the demo video, read more about translatable modules to understand how it works, refer to Meta-Wiki's Module:User Wikimedia project for example usage, and share their feedback on how well it addresses the challenges in their workflow. The interface still has some performance issues, so it should not be used in widely used modules yet. [17]
Developers of external tools that connect to Wikimedia pages must set a user-agent that complies with the user-agent policy. This policy will start to be more strongly enforced in August because of external crawlers that are overusing Wikimedia's resources. Tools that are hosted on Wikimedia's Toolforge or Cloud VPS will not be affected by this for now, but should still set a user-agent. More technical details are available, and related questions are welcome in that task.
Parsoid Read Views is going to be rolling out to some smaller Wikipedias over the next few weeks, following the successful transition of Wikivoyages and Wiktionaries to Parsoid Read Views. For more information, see the Parsoid/Parser Unification project page. [18]
Wikimania 2025 will run from August 6–9. The program is available for you to plan which sessions you want to attend. Most sessions will be live-streamed, with exceptions for those that show the "no camera" icon. If you are joining online to watch live-streams and use the interactive features, please register for a free virtual ticket. For example, you may be interested in technical sessions such as:
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View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Administrator changes
Guideline and policy news
Technical news
Arbitration
Miscellaneous
https://irontechsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2021-07-28-at-10.49.43-AM.png Pretty sure this is a false flag operation designed to make 'em look bad. 
Polygnotus (talk) 14:35, 7 July 2025 (UTC)
Liz does roughly 50% of the work round here. Entering "Liz" into XTools makes it crash. 
wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
Featured script
Updated scripts
Newly maintained scripts
Improve a script
Requested scripts
Miscellaneous
New scripts
