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Tech News: 2026-10

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

• Wikipedia 25 Birthday mode is now live on Betawi, Breton, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, Gorontalo, Indonesian, Italian, Luxembourgish, Madurese, Sicilian, Spanish, Thai, and Vietnamese Wikipedias! This limited-time campaign feature celebrates 25 years of Wikipedia with a birthday mascot, Baby Globe. When turned on, Baby Globe is shown on ~2,500 articles, waiting to be discovered by readers. Communities can choose to turn Birthday mode on by getting consensus from their community and asking an admin to enable the feature and customize it via community configuration on the local wiki.

Updates for editors

• Sub-referencing, a new feature to re-use references with different details has been released to Swedish Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia and a couple of other wikis. You can try the feature on these projects or on testwiki and betawiki. Learnings from the first pilot wiki German Wikipedia have been published in a report. Reach out to the Wikimedia Deutschland team if you are interested in becoming a pilot wiki.
• Paste Check will become available at all Wikipedias this week. The feature prompts newcomers who are pasting text they are not likely to have written into VisualEditor to consider whether doing so risks a copyright violation. Paste Check tags all edits where it is shown for potential review. Local administrators can configure various aspects of the feature via Special:EditChecks. Research across 22 wikis found that Paste Check resulted in an 18% decrease in relative reverted-edits compared to the control group. Translators can help to localize this and related features.
• The Reader Experience team will be standardizing the user menu in the top right for all mobile users so that it is closer to the desktop experience. Currently this user menu is only visible to users with Advanced Mobile Controls (AMC) turned on. The only change is that a couple buttons previously in the left-side menu will move to the top right for users who do not have AMC turned on. This change is expected to go out March 9 and seeks to improve the user interface.
• Starting in the week of March 2, the emails sent out when an email address was added, removed, or changed for an account will switch to a substantially nicer and clearer HTML email from the prior plaintext one.
• Notifications are currently limited to 2,000 historic entries per user, and extend back to 2013 when the feature was released. This is going to be changed to only store Notifications from the last 5 years, but up to 10,000 of them. This will help with long-term infrastructure health and help to prevent more recent notifications from disappearing too soon.
• The Global Watchlist which lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on a single page continues to see improvements. The latest update improves label usage experience. The extension now allows activating the language fallback system for Wikidata items without labels in the viewed language, and showing those labels in the user’s preferred Wikidata language if no uselang= URL parameter is provided.
• The Wikipedia Android team has started a beta test of hybrid search on Greek Wikipedia. Hybrid search capabilities can handle both semantic and keyword queries enabling readers to find what they’re looking for directly on Wikipedia more easily.
• For security reasons, members of certain user groups are required to have two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled. Currently, 2FA is required to use the group, but not to be a member of it. Given that this model still has some vulnerabilities, the situation will gradually change in March. Members of these groups will be unable to disable last 2FA method on their account, and it will be impossible to add users without 2FA to these groups. Users will still be able to add new authentication methods or remove them, as long as at least one method is continuously enabled. In the second half of March, users without 2FA will be removed from these groups. This applies to: CentralNotice administrators, checkusers, interface administrators, suppressors, Wikidata staff, Wikifunctions staff, WMF Office IT and WMF Trust & Safety. Nothing will change for other users. See the linked task for deployment schedule.
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue preventing users from creating an instance in Wikibase.cloud has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• To help ensure fair use of infrastructure, over the next month the Wikimedia Foundation will implement global API rate limits across our APIs. In early March, stricter limits will be applied to unidentified requests from outside Toolforge/WMCS and API requests that are made from web browsers. In April, higher limits will be applied to identified traffic. These limits are intentionally set as high as possible to minimise impact on the community. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits.
• The Wikidata Query Service Linked Data Fragment (LDF) endpoint will be decommissioned in February. This endpoint served limited traffic, which was successfully migrated to other data access methods that were better suited to support existing use cases. The hardware used to support the LDF endpoint will be reallocated to support the ongoing backend migration efforts.
• The new Parsoid parser continues to be deployed to additional wikis, improving platform sustainability and making it easier to introduce new reading and editing features. Parsoid is now the default parser on 488 WMF wikis (268 Wikipedias), now covering more than 10% of all Wikipedia page views.
• The process and criteria for requesting exceptional access to the high volume feed of the Wikimedia Enterprise APIs (at no cost for mission-aligned usecases), have now been published. This is to provide more thorough and clearer documentation for users.
• Tech Blog, the blog dedicated to the Wikimedia technical community will be migrating to Diff, the community news and event blog. The migration should be complete in April 2026, after which new posts will be accepted for publishing. Readers will be able to access posts – old and new – on the landing page at https://diff.wikimedia.org/techblog.
• 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 17:50, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

Question from Javith Dulnita (07:05, 5 March 2026)

Hello.How to add an image to a wikipedia site --Javith Dulnita (talk) 07:05, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

You may upload an image to Wikimedia Commons, and then you can use it on Wikipedia by inserting the image. ~ rusty ^meow ~ 15:20, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-11

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, 25 March 2026 at 15:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests, which happen twice a year. During the switchover, all Wikimedia website traffic is shifted from one primary data center to the backup data center to test availability and prevent service disruption even in emergencies.
• Last week, all wikis had 2 hours of read-only time, and extended unavailability for user-scripts and gadgets. This was due to a security incident which has since been resolved. Work is ongoing to prevent re-occurrences. For current information please see the post on the Stewards' noticeboard (translations).

Updates for editors

• Users facing multiple blocks on mobile will now see the reasons for each block separately, instead of a generic message. This helps them understand why they are blocked and what steps they can take to resolve the issue. For example, users affected for using common VPNs (such as iCloud Private Relay) will receive clearer guidance on what they need to do to start editing again.
• Later this week, Suggestion Mode will become available as a beta feature within the visual editor at all Wikipedias. This feature proactively suggests various types of actions that people can consider taking to improve Wikipedia articles, and learn about related guidelines. The feature is locally configurable, and can also be locally expanded with custom Suggestions. Current settings can be seen at Special:EditChecks and there are instructions for how administrators can customize the links to point to local guidelines. The feature is connected to Edit check which suggests improvements while someone is writing new content. In the future, the Editing team plans to evaluate the feature's impact with newcomers through a controlled experiment.
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where the cursor became misaligned during the use of CodeMirror’s syntax highlighting, which makes wikitext and code easier to read, has now been fixed. This problem specifically affected users who defined a font rule in a custom stylesheet while creating a new topic with DiscussionTools.

Updates for technical contributors

• API rate limiting update: To help ensure fair use of infrastructure, global API rate limits will be applied this week to requests without a compliant User-Agent that originate from outside Toolforge/WMCS and to unauthenticated requests made from web browsers. Higher limits will be applied to identified traffic in April. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits.
• The new GraphQL API has been released. The API was developed as a flexible alternative to select features of the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS), to improve developer experience and foster adaptability, and efficient data access. Try it out and give feedback. You can also sign up for usability tests.
• The PTAC Unsupported Tools Working Group continued improvements to Video2Commons in February, with fixes addressing authentication errors, large-file handling, task queue visibility, and clearer upload behavior. Work is still ongoing in some areas, including changes related to deprecated server-side uploads. Read this update to learn more.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The Article Guidance team invites experienced Wikipedia editors from selected pilot wikis and interested contributors from other Wikipedias to fill out this questionnaire which is available in English, Arabic, Bengali, Japanese, Portuguese, Persian, and Turkish. Your answers will help the team customize guidance for less experienced editors and help them learn community policies and practices while creating an article. Learn more on the project page.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 18:51, 9 March 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 10 March 2026

• Interview: Bernadette Meehan, new Wikimedia Foundation CEO
  Part 2.

• News and notes: Security testing unleashes computer worm on Meta-wiki
  Dormant worm awakes; a sketchy archiving site struck; ether burns.

• Special report: What actually happened during the Wikimedia security incident?
  A horrifying exploit took place, which could have had catastrophic and far-reaching consequences if used maliciously; instead, it seems to have happened by accident and was used for childish vandalism. How did this happen, and what did the script actually do?

• In the media: Indonesian government blocks Wikimedia logins; archive site scoured from Wikipedia after owner runs malware
  As well as controversy over LLM translations.

• Recent research: To wiki, perchance to groki
  Comparisons continue.

• Obituary: Madhav Gadgil, Fredrick Brennan, Mark Miller, Chip Berlet
  Rest in peace.

• Opinion: Interface administrators and trusting trust
  Potential attacks are the logical consequence of giving a group of users unlimited control over JavaScript.

• Technology report: English Wikipedia deprecates archive.today after DDoS against blog, altered content
  After the archive site launched a DDoS campaign against a small blog in January 2026, a request for comment was started, with consensus to deprecate the site used almost 700 thousand times.

• Op-ed: Why is "Trypsin-sensitive photosynthetic activities in chloroplast membranes" cited in "List of tallest buildings in Chicago"?
  The answer is slop.

• Essay: The pursuit of a button click
  Volunteering for Wikipedia has its rewards. The thank-button, for example.

• In focus: Short descriptions: One year later
  A discussion of the challenge set forth to the Wikipedia community one year ago!

• WikiProject report: Unreferenced articles backlog drive
  Unreferenced articles in English Wikipedia - help us in the backlog drive!

• Community view: Speaking of planning ...
  The WMF planning process is underway.

• Traffic report: Over the mountain, kissing silver inlaid clouds
  Death and the Winter Olympics.

• Crossword: "It will never happen"
  Want to take a break?

• Comix: BRIEn't
  Or is it.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:12, 10 March 2026 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 73

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 73, January–February 2026

• Four new partnerships
• User survey thanks

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team – 12:06, 11 March 2026 (UTC)

Question from Emeraldpilot (01:04, 11 March 2026)

Hello I am Emeraldpilot --Emeraldpilot (talk) 01:04, 11 March 2026 (UTC)

I want to know how to start a wikipedia group Emeraldpilot (talk) 01:05, 11 March 2026 (UTC)

@Emeraldpilot: Hey! Welcome to Wikipedia! What do you mean by a wikipedia group? I'm not sure what you mean so could you describe what you mean by a wikipedia group to me? Thanks! ~ rusty ^meow ~ 03:29, 11 March 2026 (UTC)

I was reading a line of entries on a random page where people were mentioning creating separate groups with Wikipedia users, I think chats, I honestly have no idea. Emeraldpilot (talk) 03:31, 11 March 2026 (UTC)

@Emeraldpilot: Are you thinking of a WikiProject which is a group of editors working together to improve a specific area of Wikipedia? Those generally aren't created, because there are already so many of them ~ you could search for one at this link.

Happy editing, ~ rusty ^meow ~ 14:27, 11 March 2026 (UTC)

Question from Abulhawl (12:32, 15 March 2026)

Note: Abulhawl's mentor GGOTCC is away.

How do I create a citation and link? --Abulhawl (talk) 12:32, 15 March 2026 (UTC)

@Abulhawl: Hello! Please take a look at Help:Referencing for beginners on how to create a citation.

Now, to create a link, you put two brackets on the left and right side of the word or words you want to link, like this:

[[Cat]] → Cat

If you want to a link to go to a different location than the words say, you can also do that:

[[Calico cat|Calico]] → Calico

Happy editing! Don't hesitate to ask if you have another question. ~ rusty ^meow ~ 14:28, 15 March 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-12

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 ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽ beta feature, also known as CodeMirror 6, has been used for wikitext syntax highlighting since November 2024. It will be promoted out of beta by May 2026 in order to bring improvements and new features to all editors who use the standard syntax highlighter. If you have any questions or concerns about promoting the feature out of beta, please share.
• Some changes to local user groups are performed by stewards on Meta-Wiki and logged there only. Now, interwiki rights changes will be logged both on Meta-Wiki and the wiki of the target user to make it easier to access a full record of user's rights changes on a local wiki. Past log entries for such changes will be backfilled in the coming weeks.
• On wikis using Flagged Revisions, the number of pending changes shown on Special:PendingChanges previously counted pages which were no longer pending review, because they have been removed from the system without being reviewed, e.g. due to being deleted, moved to a different namespace, or due to wiki configuration changes. The count will be correct now. On some wikis the number shown will be much smaller than before. There should be no change to the list of pages itself.
• Wikifunctions composition language has been rewritten, resulting in a new version of the language. This change aims to increase service stability by reducing the orchestrator's memory consumption. This rewrite also enables substantial latency reduction, code simplification, and better abstractions, which will open the door to later feature additions. Read more about the changes.
• Users can now sort search results alphabetically by page title. The update gives an additional option to finding pages more easily and quickly. Previously, results could be sorted by Edit date, Creation date, or Relevance. To use the new option, open 'Advanced Search' on the search results page and select 'Alphabetically' under 'Sorting Order'.
• View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the bug that prevented UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons from importing files from Flickr has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• A new special page, Special:LintTemplateErrors, has been created to list transcluded pages that are flagged as containing lint errors to help users discover them easily. The list is sorted by the number of transclusions with errors. For example: Special:LintTemplateErrors/night-mode-unaware-background-color.
• Users of the ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽ beta feature have been using CodeMirror instead of CodeEditor for syntax highlighting when editing JavaScript, CSS, JSON, Vue and Lua content pages, for some time now. Along with promoting CodeMirror 6 out of beta, the plan is to replace CodeEditor as the standard editor for these content models by May 2026. Feedback or concerns are welcome.
• The CodeMirror JavaScript modules will soon be upgraded to CodeMirror 6. Leading up to the upgrade, loading the ext.CodeMirror or ext.CodeMirror.lib modules from gadgets and user scripts was deprecated in July 2025. The use of the ext.CodeMirror.switch hook was also deprecated in March 2025. Contributors can now make their scripts or gadgets compatible with CodeMirror 6. See the migration guide for more information.
• The MediaWiki Interfaces team is expanding coverage of REST API module definitions to include extension APIs. REST API modules are groups of related endpoints that can be independently managed and versioned. Modules now exist for GrowthExperiments and Wikifunctions APIs. As we migrate extension APIs to this structure, documentation will move out of the main MediaWiki OpenAPI spec and REST Sandbox view, and will instead be accessible via module-specific options in the dropdown on the REST Sandbox (i.e., Special:RestSandbox, available on all wiki projects).
• The Scribunto extension provides different pieces of information about the wiki where the module is being used via the mw.site library. Starting last week, the library also provides a way of accessing the wiki ID that can be used to facilitate cross-wiki module maintenance.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The 2026 Coolest Tool Award celebrating outstanding community tools, is now open for nominations! Nominate your favorite tool using the nomination survey form by 23 March 2026. For more information on privacy and data handling, please see the survey privacy statement.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:34, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

Question from T0mDeary (22:49, 18 March 2026)

Hi Rusty, this may sound weird and very random. But I have recently watched the Netflix documentary on Jimmy Savile, and when I searched his name into google there is no mention on the overview from Wikipedia about his sexual offences. This concerns me as I believe if someone searched him up who didn’t know who he was, it is worded that he was a good person. Would it be possible for you to edit it in some way as I am unable to as it is protected from editing? --T0mDeary (talk) 22:49, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

@T0mDeary:

If you click on the Wikipedia link to read the full article (Jimmy Savile), it's mentioned in the first paragraph (emphasis is mine):

Sir James Wilson Vincent Savile (/ˈsævɪl/; 31 October 1926 – 29 October 2011) was an English media personality and DJ. He was known for his eccentric image, charitable work, and hosting the BBC shows Top of the Pops and Jim'll Fix It. After his death, hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse made against him were investigated, leading the police to conclude that he was a predatory sex offender, possibly one of the United Kingdom's most prolific. There had been allegations during his lifetime, but they were dismissed and accusers were ignored or disbelieved. Savile's victims allegedly included young children and elderly individuals.

Unfortunately, we cannot control how Google uses the content of an article on Wikipedia. You might want to use the "Feedback" link in the bottom right corner of the "Overview" sidebar to let Google know about the issue.

Thanks! ~ rusty ^meow ~ 23:06, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

That is horrible. Why would Sir James Wilson Vincent Savile do such things like that? I never want to be like him! He is a pedophile and a gerontophile! I might like his shows, but not his crime activity! Actually, it got me confused. You are right. He’s actually a good person unlike Jeffrey Epstein. I got confused! Dang! CoachIsMyName2014 (talk) 02:52, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

Nevermind. He’s still bad. CoachIsMyName2014 (talk) 02:55, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-13

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

• Wikimedia site users can now log in without a password using passkeys. This is a secure method supported by fingerprint, facial recognition, or PIN. With this change, all users who opt for passwordless login will find it easier, faster, and more secure to log in to their accounts using any device. The new passkey login option currently appears as an autofill suggestion in the username field. An additional "Log in with passkey" button will soon be available for users who have already registered a passkey. This update will improve security and user experience. The screen recording demonstrates the passwordless login process step by step.
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday, 25 March 2026 at 15:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests, which happen twice a year. During the switchover, all Wikimedia website traffic is shifted from one primary data center to the backup data center to test availability and prevent service disruption even in emergencies.

Updates for editors

• Wikimedia site users can now export their notifications older than 5 years using a new Toolforge tool. This will ensure that users retain their important notifications and avoid them being lost based on the planned change to delete notifications older than 5 years, as previously announced.
• Wikipedia editors in Indonesian, Thai, Turkish, and Simple English now have access to Special:PersonalDashboard. This is an early version of an experience that introduces newer editors to patrolling workflows, making it easier for them to move from making edits to participating in more advanced moderation work on their project.
• The Special:Block now has two minor interface changes. Administrators can now easily perform indefinite blocks through a dedicated radio button in the expiry section. Also, choosing an indefinite expiry provides a different set of common reasons to select from, which can be changed at: MediaWiki:Ipbreason-indef-dropdown.
• Mobile editors at several wikis can now see an improved logged-out edit warning, thanks to the recent updates from the Growth team. These changes released last week are part of ongoing efforts and tests to enhance account creation experience on mobile and then increase participation.
• View all 36 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the bug that prevented mobile web users from seeing the block information when affected by multiple blocks has been fixed. They can now see messages of all the blocks currently affecting them when they access Wikipedia.

Updates for technical contributors

• Images built using Toolforge will soon get the upgraded buildpacks version, bringing support for newer language versions and other upstream improvements and fixes. If you use Toolforge Build Service, review the recent cloud-announce email and update your build configuration as necessary to ensure your tools are compatible.

• The API Portal documentation wiki will shut down in June 2026. API keys created on the API Portal will continue to work normally. api.wikimedia.org endpoints will be deprecated gradually starting in July 2026. Documentation on the API Portal is moving to mediawiki.org. Learn more on the project page.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• WMDE Technical Wishes is considering improvements to automatically generated reference names in VisualEditor. Please check out the proposed solutions and participate in the request for comment.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 16:49, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

Question from Kumovi (03:46, 24 March 2026)

Why didn't the article about Natasa Miljanovic Zubac get published? --Kumovi (talk) 03:46, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

@Kumovi: It looks like you wrote an article on your user page, which is meant to tell other editors about you.

I've moved it to your sandbox (User:Kumovi/sandbox) and added a button you can use to submit it, but please note that this is the English wikipedia and we do not accept articles in other languages. If you want to write a Polish article, you should write it on the Polish Wikipedia.

Happy editing! ~ rusty ^meow ~ 04:15, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

Can't find source

About this edit, and this and maybe more I don't know. Have you looked in The Wikipedia Library? I can't access it right now otherwise I would check. --not-cheesewhisk3rs ≽^•⩊•^≼ ∫ (pester) 10:04, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

Ok so you have the wikipedia library newsletter so the answer is probably yes but just in case: the WP library has had every school library journal source I've needed so far. It might have those ones if you haven' checked. --not-cheesewhisk3rs ≽^•⩊•^≼ ∫ (pester) 10:06, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

I'll take a look. The second quotation might be harder though, since it doesn't cite a specific source. ~ rusty ^meow ~ 14:20, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

Wait no I just found the source to the first one without even using TWL haha

I just thought to search up the reviewer's name instead of trying to quote from the review, and that seemed to work ~ rusty ^meow ~ 14:22, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

Not the same luck on the second one though--I haven't found it, and while the Warriors Wiki uses the same quote I can't find the review on their citation. ~ rusty ^meow ~ 14:26, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

Question from Sunshineshimmer (05:03, 26 March 2026)

I was wondering about the process for images, I wanted to add an image to the page about Heba Elswedy but couldn't find any on wikimedia, is there a way people go about finding images for biographical pages? --Sunshineshimmer (talk) 05:03, 26 March 2026 (UTC)

@Sunshineshimmer: If there aren't any on Wikimedia Commons, you may wish to find one and upload it to Commons. If it's under copyright, however, you'll need to upload it to Wikipedia as a non-free file.

Happy editing, ~ rusty ^meow ~ 14:22, 26 March 2026 (UTC)

Speedy delete articled marked as Reviewed

Hey Rusty,

Hope all is well. I noticed that you marked one of the articles I nominated for Speedy Deletion (Outline of the Armenian genocide) as reviewed. I believe this was a genuine error but wanted to make you aware in any event that articles marked for speedy deletion should not be marked as reviewed as they either result in the article being deleted or the speedy deletion tag is removed (if the tag is removed, the article usually requires further review before being marked as reviewed). Articles nominated at AfD being marked reviewed is fine though due to the nature of that process which results in a review by fellow editors anyhow who decide whether the article should remain or not and the AfD tag also has a noindex tag (preventing the article from being indexed on search engines).

I am sure you already knew all this but thought I'd leave a comment to say that I marked the article as unreviewed pending speedy deletion tag. Nyxion³⁰³💬 Talk 14:09, 28 March 2026 (UTC)

@Nyxion303: I previously incorrectly assumed it was okay to mark all articles nominated for deletion as reviewed. Thanks for letting me know that this isn't the case! ~ rusty ^meow ~ 14:18, 28 March 2026 (UTC)

All good, we all make little mistakes, thank you for being so understanding! Nyxion³⁰³💬 Talk 14:20, 28 March 2026 (UTC)

Popstar! TV

The page should be deleted and should never have been created as a erroneous redirect to pornographic magazine company. I've put some simply text there. If you don't like that and have the time to waste to go though WP:RFD then do it yourself, but don't put the erroneous redirect back. Xeditboy (talk) 01:39, 29 March 2026 (UTC)

@Xeditboy:

While I appreciate your boldness, I also acknowledge that there's no consensus for the removal of the redirect. WP:RFD is a place to build consensus.

Also, Wikipedia is not about who is right, Wikipedia is about sources. Note that Popstar is listed in two sources on the Magna page.

I'm not the one who thinks that the redirect is potentially erroneous, so I won't put in an RFD. I do encourage you to start an RFD though, and I do hope you keep in mind that it's more than just a "waste of time". You've been warned for edit warring before; I hope you won't continue this behavior. ~ rusty ^meow ~ 04:14, 29 March 2026 (UTC)

Women in Red – April 2026

Women in Red | April 2026, Vol 12, Issue 4, Nos 358, 359, 367, 368, 369 Online events: New: Countries starting with D, E and F | Women's Works: Written works | Cascading Women Continuing (year-long initiatives): #1day1woman | Sports Announcements from other communities: CEE women Tip of the month: When creating a new article, take a moment to ensure any notable woman is redlinked. Someone might be inspired to create an article for her. Other ways to participate: Become a member. You can always opt-out of notifications. Join the conversations on our talkpage. Help us plan future events and add any general ideas on developing the project. Follow us on social media: Instagram | Pinterest

--Chocmilk03 (talk) 20:17, 29 March 2026 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Tech News: 2026-14

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 Beta version of Abstract Wikipedia a new Wikimedia project which is language-independent, was launched last week. The project allows communities to build Wikipedia articles in their native language, which can be readily accessed by other users in their own languages. The wiki is powered by instructions from Wikifunctions and also based on structured content from Wikidata. Read more.

Updates for editors

• The Growth team is running an A/B test to evaluate a clearer, more user-friendly message that promotes account creation on wikis. Currently when logged-out mobile users begin editing, they see a jarring warning message that can feel abrupt and discouraging. This also presents temporary account editing as the default rather than encouraging account creation. The test is running on ten Wikipedias, including Arabic, French, Spanish and German. Read more.
• The Wikimedia Apps team is inviting feedback on how editing should work on the Wikipedia mobile apps. The discussion focuses on improving how users access editing tools when they tap "Edit". This is part of a broader effort to convert readers who develop an interest in editing, to access a more user-friendly pathway to start contributing.
• View all 45 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where citation fetching from the large newspaper archive Newspapers.com was no longer working, due to a block in Citoid requests, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• 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 19:24, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 March 2026

• News and notes: Entirety of Wikinews to be shut down
  All languages to be shut down in May; first AI agent blocked; new name for AfD?

• In the media: AI ban, newspapers disrupt archiving; and antisemitism complaints
  Perennial challenges with AI, demographic representation, and attacks from people buying media influence.

• Community view: Videos from WikiConference North America 2025 in NYC
  In attendees' own words.

• Disinformation report: Cleaning up after Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Nygard, and Mohamed Al-Fayed
  Countering the edits of the rich and dangerous.

• WikiConference report: WikiConference North America 2025 in NYC review
  About the conference series, and this conference particularly.

• Obituary: Dr. Subas Chandra Rout
  Rest in peace.

• Traffic report: Call in the dogs of war, soldier of fortune
  Though of course the picture needs to be Chuck Norris...

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Question from Geminitoast (23:03, 2 April 2026)

hello! Glad to have you as a mentor :) I was looking at an article on Crawford Power Station which needed more references, and I found a good source for it. However, the entire article was literally just copied and pasted from that website. Not a single change - even the citations were the same. But did the wiki article or did the outside article come first? And if the other article came first, can I use that as a citation? https://everything.explained.today/Crawford_Station/ thats the outside reference. --Geminitoast (talk) 23:03, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

@Geminitoast: It looks like the Wikipedia article Crawford Station came first. At the bottom of the other article, it says:

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Crawford Station".

(they're allowed to use our article as long as they use the proper license and give credit.) ~ rusty ^meow ~ 23:17, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

CS1 error on Ravenpaw's Path

Hello, I'm Qwerfjkl (bot). I have automatically detected that this edit performed by you, on the page Ravenpaw's Path, may have introduced referencing errors. They are as follows:

• A dates error. References show this error when one of the date-containing parameters is incorrectly formatted. Please edit the article to correct the date and ensure it is formatted to follow the Wikipedia Manual of Style's guidance on dates. (Fix | Ask for help)

Please check this page and fix the errors highlighted. If you think this is a false positive, you can report it to my operator. Thanks, Qwerfjkl (bot) (talk) 02:38, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – April 2026

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

Administrator changes

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Checkuser changes

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Oversight changes

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Guideline and policy news

• The content of Wikipedia:Writing articles with large language models has been updated following a request for comment. It now prohibits using LLMs to generate content, with exceptions for translation and copy-editing.

Arbitration

• Following a motion, the GSCASTE extended-confirmed restriction in the Indian military history case has been narrowed. It now applies to caste-related topics in South Asia, and the preemptive protection remedy has been amended accordingly.
• The arbitration case Pbsouthwood has been closed.
• The arbitration case Maghreb has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case will close on 7 April.

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Tech News: 2026-15

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 CampaignEvents extension now includes a new group goal-setting feature, enabling organizers to set and track event goals such as the number of articles created and participating contributors in real time. Similarly, participants can work toward shared targets and see their collective impact as the event unfolds. The feature is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. Learn more in the documentation.
• The new watchlist labels feature (announced in Tech News 2026-07) is now available via VisualEditor, the source editor, and the 'watchstar' (or watch link, for skins that don't have a star icon). Previously it was only possible to assign labels via EditWatchlist. In all three places it is a new field following the expiry field.
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where talk pages on mobile with Parsoid are unusable after empty section headers, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The sub-referencing feature, which lets editors add details to an existing reference without duplicating it, will be gradually rolled out to more wikis later this year. Wikis using the Reference Tooltips gadget are encouraged to update their version (typically at MediaWiki:Gadget-ReferenceTooltips.js as shown here) to ensure compatibility. Other reference-related gadgets may also be affected.
• All Wikinews editions will be closed and switched to read-only mode on 4 May 2026. Content will remain accessible, but no new edits or articles can be added. This closure was approved by the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation following extended discussions. Read more.
• The Action API has had several formats for requested output. One of them, format=php, is being removed soon. Please ensure your scripts or bots use the JSON format. This removal should affect very few scripts and bots.
• The Special:NamespaceInfo page now includes namespace aliases. For example "WP" for the "Project" ("Wikipedia") namespace on the German Wikipedia.
• 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 16:17, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

Question from Katie Hilborn on Wikipedia:IRC help disclaimer (18:46, 8 April 2026)

Hi and good day! We added articles by Katie to this Wikipedia page. I would like to know why it says the reason it was declined is that it is not adequately supported by reliable sources. I have added the newspaper and magazine interviews. Thanks. --Katie Hilborn (talk) 18:46, 8 April 2026 (UTC)

@Katie Hilborn: Hello and welcome to Wikipedia!

The reason that the article was declined is because it did not have enough of what we consider reliable sources; the notability guidelines, or standards of inclusion, for articles about people. Basically, a person is notable if they are have significant coverage in multiple independent, reliable sources.

As an example from your draft, I would say that the Anthem Awards source does not go in-depth enough about Hilborn.

The other references don't seem to mention Hilborn at all, with the exception of the Speakers Associates source, though that is not considered an independent source.

Some of your links in the "External Links" section do provide significant coverage; though they're local news (newspapers covering a wider area would demonstrate more notability), they may be able to contribute.

Finally, I want to let you know about Wikipedia's guideline on autobiographies and conflict-of-interest editing. Although the draft reviewer didn't mention this, I did notice that your username is the same as the name of the person you're writing about. It is strongly discouraged to write about yourself, or someone you know personally; if someone is truly notable, they usually will have an article written on them sooner or later. Note that Wikipedia shouldn't be used as a tool to promote yourself, or "put yourself out there." I hope you understand.

Thanks, ~ rusty ^meow ~ 00:39, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

Speedy deletion declined: User:CalebandJESUS/sandbox

Hello Rusty Cat. I am just letting you know that I declined the speedy deletion of User:CalebandJESUS/sandbox, a page you tagged for speedy deletion, because of the following concern: Not U7 elegible as it is not more than 6 months old. Thank you. Whpq (talk) 00:33, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

@Whpq: Thanks for letting me know! ~ rusty ^meow ~ 17:48, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Question from Ilovemycatmouse (20:40, 10 April 2026)

Hey Rusty Cat I need some Help How do I make a title?? I can't figure it out If you could help would do? --Ilovemycatmouse (talk) 20:40, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

@Ilovemycatmouse: Hello and welcome to Wikipedia! I don't know what you mean by making a title. Do you mean creating a page? Or changing the title of an article? If you give me more details, I might know what you mean and be able to help you. ~ rusty ^meow ~ 21:33, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Question from Ilovemycatmouse (17:34, 11 April 2026)

I am trying to change the title of the article but I believe I have found the answer to my question thanks a lot anyway though! --Ilovemycatmouse (talk) 17:34, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

You're welcome and happy editing! ~ rusty ^meow ~ 23:18, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

Speedy deletion of Draft:Roblox Plus

If this was the first article that you created, you may want to read the guide to writing your first article.

You may want to consider using the Article Wizard to help you create articles.

The page Draft:Roblox Plus has been speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This was done under section G11 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the page seemed to be unambiguous advertising which only promoted a company, group, product, service, person, or point of view and would need to have been fundamentally rewritten in order to become encyclopedic. Please read the guidelines on spam and Wikipedia:FAQ/Organizations for more information.

Please do not recreate the material without addressing these concerns, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. If you think this page should not have been deleted for this reason, or you wish to retrieve the deleted material for future reference or improvement, then please contact the deleting administrator. — rsjaffe 🗣️ 18:55, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

@Rsjaffe: should post this on User talk:Wlfqa, article was created on their behalf ~ rusty ^meow ~ 21:43, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

Sorry, automated tools strike again. — rsjaffe 🗣️ 21:52, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

No worries! ~ rusty ^meow ~ 23:18, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-16

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

• Experienced editors are invited to test the Article guidance feature, designed to help less-experienced editors create well-structured, policy-compliant Wikipedia articles. Testing instructions are available. Also, after reviewing the outlines, please provide feedback on the project talk page. Based on your input, the feature will be refined and transferred to the pilot Wikipedias to translate and adapt. Check out the video explaining the feature.

Updates for editors

• On most wikis, all autoconfirmed users can now use Special:ChangeContentModel page to create new pages with custom content models, such as mass message lists, making custom page formats more accessible. Check Special:ListGroupRights for the status of your wiki.
• The Growth team has launched an account creation experiment to evaluate whether adding an account creation button to the mobile web header increases new account registrations and encourages more mobile users to contribute to the wikis. The experiment is currently live on Hindi, Indonesian, Bengali, Thai, and Hebrew Wikipedia, and targets 10% of logged-out mobile web users.
• View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where VisualEditor could get stuck loading on Windows devices with animations turned off, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• Starting later this week, Edit filter managers who have the ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽ beta feature enabled will have CodeMirror instead of CodeEditor as the editor at Special:AbuseFilter. This is part of the broader effort to make the user experience more consistent across all editors.
• Tools and bots that access the Notifications API (action=query&meta=notifications) will need to update their OAuth or BotPassword grants to also include access to private notifications.
• Due to a library upgrade, listings on category pages may be displayed out of order starting on Monday, 20th April. A migration script will be run to correct this, and will take hours to days depending on the size of the wiki (up to a week for English Wikipedia).
• 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 15:17, 13 April 2026 (UTC)

Updates

Hi Rusty Cat,

Hope all is well. I want to add some recent news to the article Truly Adams. Is it simply adding a new references to the page? Also I need to add a profile pic. What is the best option for the different Common choices? It's a little confusing. Thanks! Karmel Humphrey (talk) 22:21, 13 April 2026 (UTC)

@Karmel Humphrey:

To add the news, you should just be able to add some content and a source and be good to go.

To upload to image to Commons, I'll first want to know where the image came from.

• If it's taken by you, you can go ahead and upload it. Choosing any of the three license options CC0, CC BY 4.0, or CC BY-SA 4.0 should be fine.
• If it's taken by someone else, they need to release it under a license that gives everyone the right to use the image freely (e.g. Public Domain, CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA).

Feel free to follow up if you have any questions. ~ rusty ^meow ~ 22:38, 13 April 2026 (UTC)

Awesome. Thank you Rusty! Karmel Humphrey (talk) 00:04, 14 April 2026 (UTC)

Question from MatrxCN (13:16, 14 April 2026)

Note: MatrxCN's mentor Seawolf35 is away.

Hello! Ok. --MatrxCN (talk) 13:16, 14 April 2026 (UTC)

About the draft "Konankeri, Belagavi"

The article I made, "Konankeri, Belagavi" was moved to draftspace. Then I realized an article "Konankeri" is about the same topic so I want to turn the page a redirect to the "Konankeri" page, but when I tried that, you declined the submission. So I'm asking how can I make the page a redirect and should I? 𝕷𝖆𝖛𝖆𝕾𝖆𝖑𝖙𝕬𝕺𝖅 - 𝖑 (talk) 18:14, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

@LavaSalt402: According to my decline message you should use Wikipedia:Article_wizard/Redirects for redirects.

Thanks, ~ rusty ^meow ~ 19:06, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

Dave Horrigan’ wiki article

RC,Billy Bishop you are correct in that I wrote the article myself. Apologies for the delay in responding. I am preparing for the Sea Air and Space military conference next week. I was selected to speak there two years ago. One hundred applicants, six selected to present. Therein lies the issue. There is no easily accessible public reference other than email or texts. Even the Inventor of the Year awards from the San Diego Inventors Forum failed to publish those awards to the general public. The books - one published by Home Planet Books (HPB has since closed), the other is available on Apple Books. The South China Morning Post has all my articles online, but I believe you must register to view them. The San Diego Union-Tribune was caught selling my articles to other newspapers and, as a result of losing the lawsuit, removed all my columns from their website.

My patents are available in the public domain and they are a big deal but I am not seeking glory. Aside from the fact that no one else knows of all these events, I have people asking. I have a BLOG site (futureinsights.blob) it only briefly covers my accomplishments through my nonfiction postings.

Given that this is a time-consuming project and it is, at best, a frail wisp of my accomplishments, I am going to let it go for now. My late wife, Bonnie Horrigan, who published in numerous peer-reviewed, indexed medical journals, always had trouble with ill-informed Wikipedia editors, and I don’t really have time for the dozens of little battles that would follow here. I am working with an agent for my books, and they will provide all the celebrity I can tolerate.

Thank you for your time and insight.

David Horrigan (talk) 17:10, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

@David Horrigan: Sometimes, Wikipedia might not be the best place for something, and no amount of trying will get you there. I'm not trying to demotivate you, but as you said yourself, the problem lies in the lack of sources.

If you'd like to contribute information from your topics of expertise to Wikipedia, that'd be excellent, but you don't have to.

Finally, on ill-informed Wikipedia editors. Wikipedia revolves around its core policies and guidelines, which require sources (verifiability). If I accepted the draft, sooner or later it would get deleted by someone else (probably someone more experienced than me).

However, it's not an uncommon occurrence for someone's article to be declined for the same reasons as yours. Also, know that it's not personal.

Thanks, ~ rusty ^meow ~ 13:57, 19 April 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-17

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

• After two years of development, ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽, also known as CodeMirror 6, is to be promoted out of beta on Tuesday, April 21. It brings better code and wikitext readability, reduction in typing errors, and other benefits to all users of the standard syntax highlighter. A huge thank you to volunteer Bhsd who developed many of the new features, including code folding, autocompletion, and linting.
• A major update to the Wikipedia app for iOS is now rolling out, redesigning the interface to align with Apple's latest "Liquid Glass" visual design. Download the latest version and explore the update.

Updates for editors

• Reading lists is a feature which allows readers to save articles to a list for reading later. This feature is now in beta on Arabic, French, Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Chinese Wikipedias and by default for all new accounts on all Wikipedias.
• An experiment which explores extending Page Previews to mobile web will be launched in the week of April 20 on Arabic, English, French, Italian, Polish, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. Page Previews are pop-ups that display a thumbnail, lead paragraph, and a link to open the full article of a blue link, thereby improving content discovery. The feature is already available on desktop and in the apps. Read more about this experiment and others.
• On several wikis, logged-in editors who haven't confirmed their email addresses can now see a banner encouraging them to do so. Having the email address confirmed allows a user to restore access to the account if they lose it. Learn more.
• View all 15 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where editing very large wiki pages in the 2017 wikitext editor caused slow loading, preview and scrolling lag, and performance issues when selecting, cutting, or pasting content, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• As part of the promotion of CodeMirror from a beta feature, all users will use CodeMirror instead of CodeEditor for syntax highlighting when editing JavaScript, CSS, JSON, Vue and Lua content pages.
• The mirrors.wikimedia.org service for Debian and Ubuntu users will sunset and stop working on May 15. The resources for the service will be replaced with new and better options. Some users may need to switch to a different server which should take about a minute. You can read more.
• The image and oldimage table will be removed from wikireplicas. If your tools or queries access image or oldimage directly, please update them to use the file and filerevision table before 28 May.
• Following the recent implementation of global API rate limits on unidentified traffic, the Wikimedia Foundation will continue efforts to ensure fair use of infrastructure by applying global limits to identified API traffic beginning the last week of April. These limits are intentionally set as high as possible to minimise impact on the community. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits and Frequently Asked Questions.
• The Attribution API is now available as a beta. The API fetches information for crediting Wikimedia articles and media files wherever they are used. Reference documentation is available through the REST Sandbox special page available on all Wikimedia wikis (such as the REST sandbox on English Wikipedia). Share your feedback on the project talk page.
• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 14:59, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

Question from RDalitz (10:00, 20 April 2026)

Hi, I was looking for information on the Ford Model T transmission. I find that the paragraph is not clear, for example I suspect that the "lever mounted to the road side of the drivers seat" is the same as the "floor lever" but cannot be sure, and there are at least four more issues which I cannot fix because I do not have the information.

I would like to bring these questions to the attention of someone who does have detailed knowledge of the Model T. | did find a place to add comments before I had problems logging and now created a new account, but I seem to have lost it, and it miht not have been the best way to handle this, anyway.

Can you please give me advice?

Following this, I hope to create a page for "ordre des cols durs" which is a cycling organisation - I started to do that around 15 years ago!

Cheers, Rod --RDalitz (talk) 10:00, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

@RDalitz:

I don't see any recent comment on the discussion page for Ford Model T (the discussion page is Talk:Ford Model T), so you could give posting there a try; it won't necessarily draw the attention of someone with detailed knowledge of the car at first, but at least more experienced editors know about the issue. If that doesn't work, let me know and I can provide you with some other places to try.

For creating an article: Take a look at Help:Your first article. It's a useful page that provides everything you need to know about how to create a Wikipedia article.

Feel free to ask if you have any questions!

Happy editing, ~ rusty ^meow ~ 23:52, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

Question from Flyboyflyer (20:20, 20 April 2026)

Hi. I’m very new to this and I would like to add my name and details to a couple of posts Iv seen. I did try but it didn’t seem to work. Can you advise how I go about it. Cheers malc --Flyboyflyer (talk) 20:20, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia!

In general, Wikipedia requires everything to be cited to reliable sources, so unless you can share a source proving that you flew Harriers, it won't be accepted.

Also, lists in articles generally only include people who already have an article, which requires meeting our notability guidelines (in other words, standards of inclusion).

Thanks for your understanding, ~ rusty ^meow ~ 23:55, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

Question from Billy bishop1 (21:59, 16 April 2026)

Hi Mentor, I’m new to Wikipedia and would like to contribute and post my personal article on here some day. How do you recommend I best start contributing to the community? and what are some guidelines you can provide for editing and posting articles.

Also I would like some guidance on editing using sandbox.

Thank you

Looking forward to hearing from you. --Billy bishop1 (talk) 21:59, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

@Billy bishop1: Hello and welcome to Wikipedia! You could check out your homepage and the Task Center for some beginner-friendly tasks to do.

If you're looking to create an article, check out Help:Your first article for some helpful resources on writing an article, including--most importantly--whether the subject is notable, or warrants an article in the first place.

The sandbox is a place to practice editing. There are two types of sandboxes--the community sandbox (at Wikipedia:Sandbox) and your personal sandbox (accessible via the user dropdown in the top right, then "Sandbox"). If you want to write an article, you could either start it in your personal sandbox, or create a draft article (through Articles for Creation)--but the review/publishing process will be the same either day.

Happy editing, ~ rusty ^meow ~ 20:53, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

Sorry I have been logged out for a while. Thank you for the guidance. This will really be helpful. Billy bishop1 (talk) 03:33, 21 April 2026 (UTC)

Of course! ~ rusty ^meow ~ 04:53, 21 April 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 21 April 2026

• News and notes: Six Serbian Wikipedia editors banned following controversy about political bias
  Plus, new bans for AI-generated content in place, a new drop in active admins, pranks on pranks, May admin election, and other news from the Wikimedia world.

• In the media: Could Wikipedia be involved in Massachusetts' proposed social media ban for minors?
  Another regulate-the-internet attempt casts a wide net.

• Gallery: March equinox
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Question from Browsekid (14:06, 25 April 2026)

Hello how do I create a citation --Browsekid (talk) 14:06, 25 April 2026 (UTC)

@Browsekid: Hello and sorry for the late reply!!

You can see how to create a citation at Help:Referencing for beginners.

Happy editing! ~ rusty ^meow ~ 15:23, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Random Acts of Kindness Barnstar
	Hey, Rusty! I’ve been a bit less active for the past few days and honestly forgot to set my mentor status to inactive; I logged on today, remembered I have mentees, and panicked for a moment before realising you’d answered their questions. Thanks so much for your work as a talk page stalker :) 𝔰𝔥𝔞𝔡𝔢𝔰𝔱𝔞𝔯 (𝔱𝔞𝔩𝔨) -⃝⃤ (they/he) 05:22, 25 April 2026 (UTC)

@Shadestar474: Of course! Thanks for the barnstar! ~ rusty ^meow ~ 16:10, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

Correcting a "date error"

Hi Rusty, hope you're well.

I'm curious, how do I go about correcting a "date referencing error" on an edit ?

the bot flagged my edits, and recommended making the following corrections: (please see context below)

"Hello, I'm Qwerfjkl (bot). I have automatically detected that this edit performed by you, on the page Military applications of artificial intelligence, may have introduced referencing errors. They are as follows:

• A dates error. References show this error when one of the date-containing parameters is incorrectly formatted. Please edit the article to correct the date and ensure it is formatted to follow the Wikipedia Manual of Style's guidance on dates. (Fix | Ask for help)

here are the flagged references:

1.  {{cite web}}: no-break space character in |title= at position 19 (help)
2. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date=(help); no-break space character in |first4= at position 6 (help)

Please let me know. Thanks Billy bishop1 (talk) 06:20, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

Billy bishop1, did you use an AI to generate the edit? --Gurkubondinn (talk) 10:13, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

Ok course not. My edits are clearly not AI generated and I'm ready to provide proof of the credibility of my work. Billy bishop1 (talk) 16:25, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

@Billy bishop1: Your edit has been reverted by another editor on suspicion of being AI-generated. However, here's what happened:

1. "No-break space character in ___" indicates that there was a non-breaking space ( ), a special kind of character that looks like a space sometimes found in AI output. You'll have to replace it one way or another, or just avoid using AI.
2. "Check date values in" -- I noticed one of your templates introduces a source with the date of "June 2, 2026" but it's only April right now.

There are also other problems that may or may not be caused by AI, such as one of your sources being a "Not Found" page.

Even if this doesn't count as AI usage, it does mean you need to double-check your edits and sources carefully before you make an edit.

Thanks, ~ rusty ^meow ~ 15:22, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

Thank you rusty. I'm very concerned why my edits were reverted. My edits were clearly not AI generated yet this user as reverted my edits without any basis. I'm extremely concerned about the integrity of the decision to revert my work. This draft too lots of hours to put together.

Please let me know the best way to proceed. Thank you Billy bishop1 (talk) 16:28, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

Pinging reverting user Gurkubondinn here, as they may be able to provide more insight.

However, here's what I noticed after a quick check:

• Some grammatical errors that are indicative of a human writing, not an AI.
• Some language feels a bit promotional, but this alone is not a sign of AI.
• You did put in "In conclusion" at the end, which is an indicator of AI.

~ rusty ^meow ~ 17:14, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

Thank you Rusty. Billy bishop1 (talk) 17:40, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

For me, it was a mix of different factors;

• The huge 10k byte edit. Not showing your work and just pasting in a giant edit is not typically how humans work. Usually people make incremental edits, and saving their work. Especially if you commit the hours/days that it would take to write this text, you don't want to loose your work and have to start over. I've had AI-using editors claim to me that they wrote it somewhere else/saved it in their email/did it in word, etc etc. Not saying that's the case here, but to me this just isn't have a reasonable person work. Anyone who's made substantial contributions to Wikipedia know how you usually structure your editing and save incrementally.
• Adding a ref tag to a header. Some chatbots do this sometimes. I doubt that a person would ever do this, unless they've never read a Wikipedia article first. Again, obviously this could happen, but I think it's unlikely.
• One of the references doesn't resolve. Common with AI-editing. Of course human mistakes can happen, that's why it should be thought of in the full context.
• The source titled "Not Found" that leads to a 404. I don't think that a person would sit down and type out |title=Not Found after trying to open a web page that didn't exist. The CS1 template also has |last=Canada |first=Service, and I just can't see what reasoning a person would have for typing that out. Of course it could happen, but I'm not seeing it.
• The missing |title= parameters in two of the CS1 templates. You'd see that in the preview as you are working on it. You wouldn't type up a 10k byte edit without checking the preview.
• The In conclusion, (including the comma), that's showing up all over the place now that it's become normalized to think that computers write better than people. But it's followed by a capital letter, so it's (probably) not generated wholesale by an AI.
• The sentence The challenge identifies Swap-constrained edge deployment as a desired capability. is not backed up by the source, as far as I can see. I don't see the paper making the point that being constrained in swap as a desired capability, and it doesn't mention memory paging at all (or the Linux-specific term "swap"), but it talks about "memory constraints", so my guess is that this is some kind of WP:SYNTH. This is also typical WP:SUPERFICIAL analysis that AI models do, it doesn't explain why that would be "desired".

I saw the same grammatical and spelling errors (there's a nested parenthetical that's missing the closing parenthesis, punctuation errors, microneutralizations, and WP:CITEPUNCT errors for example. So I don't think that the text was written wholesale by AI. My guess is that an LLM was used to generate the references, and to "enhance" some sentences (maybe an AI like Grammarly was used). I'm not rejecting the edit on a basis of the material subject, but it needs improved before inclusion. There's too many vague terms, badly explained concepts and promotional phrasing. If AI was used for "formatting references", I usually suggest that editors read WP:REFBEGIN try using the WP:VISUAL editor.

--Gurkubondinn (talk) 19:32, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for your feedback. I can appreciate your honesty that "material subject" was not the basis for reverting my edits, this definitely gives some note of credibility to my work. With the clarification provided, I can definitely see room for improvement. I think it's clear to see my work was in no way AI generated, this is proven by the level of detailed breakdown of the R&D scope, also the in-depth analysis of the "Challenge" and proposed "Solution"clearly in context with the topic. Your feedback does highlight, they were no clear Indications of the use LLM, I'd like to clarify this was indeed the case.

However I will take the feedback as a nudge for improvement, citing strong references in my next edit/article.

I take all feedback from a view of constructive intent, so no hard feelings on this matter.

Billy bishop1 (talk) 20:28, 26 April 2026 (UTC)