User talk:Bamyers99

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Quesiton about Template Parameters

Howdy! I have recently discovered your amazing Template parameters tool and had a question about it. I am trying to use it to analyze {{Infobox college football player}} specifically the Category:Pages using infobox college football player with unknown parameters (0). I added the template data but am still getting a “template not found” error on the template param tool. Does it take a little while for that to update? How does that all work. Thanks in advance! —Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 08:06, 4 September 2025 (UTC)

@Zackmann08: The parameters are updated once a month near the beginning of the month. I reran Septembers scan and the football template is now available here. --Bamyers99 (talk) 14:00, 5 September 2025 (UTC)

Awesome! Thank you so much! —Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 23:20, 5 September 2025 (UTC)

Follow up question for ya. I’m now working on {{Infobox football league season}}. Long story short a bunch of the parameters were missing from the TemplateData. If I wanted to get an updated report is it a pain for you to run for just one template? Is that something I can request or would you rather I just wait until the report regenerates next month… —Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 08:45, 9 September 2025 (UTC)

@Zackmann08: The program is designed to scan all templates in the 7 million articles. It is resource intensive on my server when it is run. So you will have to wait for Octobers run. --Bamyers99 (talk) 12:45, 9 September 2025 (UTC)

Totally understood. Appreciate the explanation. Didn’t realize it ran across all articles. Makes sense that you only want to run that once a month. Thanks for the explanation. — Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 20:45, 9 September 2025 (UTC)

Hey… Remember me? I’m back. Hate to be a bother, but any chance you can run the code for October? I’ve got a number of projects I’m waiting on starting until I have updated param reports. Really appreciate it!!! — Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 07:35, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

@Zackmann08: It runs automatically when the monthly data dump is available from Wikipedia. --Bamyers99 (talk) 14:17, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

Stellar!! Thanks a ton. - Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 17:54, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

Hi. Is there any chance you keep archives of the monthly runs? I poked around your site and couldn't find it. I was recently involved in a discussion with a user who was determined by other Wikipedia editors to have used a large language model to generate fake sources to justify their edits, and it got me curious about how often the "Collapse AI top" template has been used historically. The current monthly run is just 27, which doesn't seem like a lot. SharkJumperNYC (talk) 15:39, 27 October 2025 (UTC)

@SharkJumperNYC: No archives. Gigabytes of template parameter data are generated for each wiki that it processes. The count of 27 transclusions is only for template invocations that have a parameter. "Collapse AI top" is usually used without a parameter as evidenced by what links here from the Talk namespace. Only certain namespaces are processed as listed here Namespaces.tsv (GitHub). --Bamyers99 (talk) 19:02, 27 October 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-40

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

• A major software upgrade has been made to Phabricator. The update introduces performance improvements, a refreshed search interface, enhancements to Maniphest task search, updates to user profile pages and project workboards, new Herald automation features, as well as general text input, mobile experience improvements and more. [1]

Updates for editors

• The Community Tech team will release the new Community Wishlist extension on October 1, that will improve the way wishes will be submitted. The new extension will allow users to add tags to their wishes to better categorise them, and (in a future iteration) to filter them by status, tags and focus areas. It will also be possible to support individual wishes again, as requested by the community in many instances. The old system will be retired. There will be a brief period of downtime while the extension is deployed and wishes are migrated to the new system. You can read more about this in the latest update or you can consult the current documentation on MediaWiki.
• As announced on Diff blog, the production trial of the hCaptcha service for bot detection has begun. The trial is currently using hCaptcha to protect account creation on Chinese, Persian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, and Turkish Wikipedias, where it will replace our existing CAPTCHA (FancyCaptcha). The goal with the trial is to better block bots while also improving usability and accessibility for users who encounter CAPTCHA challenges.
• The CampaignEvents extension has been deployed to Wikimedia Commons. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. On Commons, anyone who is a registered user can use it as an event participant. To use it as an organizer, someone needs to have the event organizer right.
• Sub-referencing, a new feature to re-use references with different details has been released to German Wikipedia. You can test the feature on testwiki or on betawiki as well. Please share your thoughts on using templates in sub-references or volunteer to become a pilot wiki.
• On wikis using the Mentorship system, communities can now opt experienced editors out of Mentorship through Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship. Within this setting, communities may define thresholds, based on edit count and account age, to decide when an editor is considered experienced enough to no longer receive Mentorship. [2]
• The Editing Team and the Machine Learning Team are working on a new check for newcomers: Tone check. Using a prediction model, this check will encourage editors to improve the tone of their edits, using artificial intelligence. We invite volunteers to review the first version of the Tone language model for the following languages: Arabic, Czech, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Farsi, Italian, Norwegian, Romanian and Latvian. Users from these wikis interested in reviewing this model are invited to sign up at MediaWiki.org. The deadline to sign up is on October 3, which will be the start date of the test.
• The rollout of multiblocks had the side effect that non-active block logs may have been shown on Special:Contributions and on blocked users' user and user_talk pages. This issue will be fully resolved in a few days. As part of the fix, messages prefixed with sp-contributions-blocked-notice will be removed and replaced with those prefixed with blocked-notice-logextract in a few weeks. Please help translate the new messages and update any local overrides if needed.
• There was a bug with links added using visual editor if they included characters such as [ ] | after the fragment identifier (#). They were not encoded properly creating an incorrect link. This has been fixed. [3]
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikiquote in Malay (q:ms:) [4]
• View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the User Info Card now displays currently active global lock/blocks. [5]

Updates for technical contributors

• Later this week, editors using Lua modules will be able to use the mw.title.newBatch function to look up the existence of up to 25 pages at once, in a way that only increases the expensive function count once.
• A new Unsupported Tools Working Group has been formed as part of ongoing efforts to collectively determine technical work priorities, similar to the Product & Technology Advisory Council (PTAC). The working group will help prioritize and review requests for support of unmaintained extensions, gadgets, bots, and tools. For the first cycle, the group will be prioritizing an unsupported Wikimedia Commons tool.
• 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 20:48, 29 September 2025 (UTC)

The Signpost: 2 October 2025

• News and notes: Larry Sanger returns with "Nine Theses on Wikipedia"; WMF publishes transparency report
  

This time "not merely negative".

• In the media: Extraordinary eruption of "EVIL" explained
  

Wickedpedia wrangles post-truth politics.

• Disinformation report: Emails from a paid editing client
  

Unexpected news!

• Discussion report: Sourcing, conduct, policy and LLMs: another 1,339 threads analyzed
  

Fifty hot topics from fourteen noticeboards.

• Community view: The pressing questions of the modern WWW, as seen from the Village Pump
  

Policy, politics, icons, captchas, and LLMs.

• Recent research: Is Wikipedia a merchant of (non-)doubt for glyphosate?; eight projects awarded Wikimedia Research Fund grants
  

And other recent publications.

• Opinion: Some disputes aren't worth it
  

When to walk away.

• Obituary: Michael Q. Schmidt
  

Rest in peace.

• Traffic report: Death, hear me call your name
  

Celebrities, deaths and software.

• Comix: A grand spectacle
  

All invited!

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:48, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-41

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

• Paste Check is a new Edit Check feature to help avoid and fight copyright violations. When editors paste text into an article, Paste Check prompts them to confirm the origin and licensing of the content. Starting Wednesday, 8 October, 22 wikis will test Paste Check. Paste Check will help new volunteers understand and follow the policies and guidelines necessary to make constructive contributions to Wikipedia projects.

Updates for editors

• Mobile devices will receive mobile articles directly on the standard domain (like en.wikipedia.org), instead of via a redirect to an "m" domain (like en.m.wikipedia.org). This change improves performance. This week it will be enabled on Wikipedias. The existing mobile URLs and the "Desktop view" opt-out remain available. Learn more. [6]
• New date filters, creationdate: and lasteditdate:, are now available in the wiki search engine. This allows users to filter search results by a page's first or last revision date. The filters support comparison operators (e.g. >2024) and relative dates (e.g. today-1d), making it easier to find recently updated content or pages within specific age ranges. [7]
• Wikifunctions now supports rich text in embedded calls across the 150 wikis where it's enabled. To showcase this, the team created a Latin declination table that Wiktionary editors can use to automatically generate noun forms, producing clear, formatted results — see an example output. If you need any help or have any feedback, please contact the Wikifunctions Team. [8]
• An edit link will now appear inside the categories box on article pages for logged in users, which will directly launch the VisualEditor category dialog. [9]
• View all 34 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a problem downloading pdf files last week and that has been resolved. [10]

Updates for technical contributors

• The field rev_sha1 in the revision database table is being removed in favor of content_sha1 in the content database table. See the announcement for more information.
• The Reader Experience team will roll out Dark Mode user interface on all Wikimedia sites on October 29, 2025. All anonymous users of Wikimedia sites will have the option to activate a color scheme that features light-colored text on a dark background. This is designed to provide a more comfortable reading experience, especially in low-light situations. Template authors and technical contributors are encouraged to learn how to make pages ready for Dark mode and address any compatibility issues found in templates in their wiki before the enablement. Please contact the Web team for questions or any support on this talk page before the enablement. [11]
• Starting on Monday, October 6, API endpoints under the rest.php path will be rerouted through a new internal API Gateway. Individual wikis will be updated based on the standard release groups, with total traffic increased over time. This change is expected to be non-breaking and non-disruptive. If any issues are observed, please file a Phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board. [12]
• 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 17:19, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-42

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

• Last week, improvements to account security and two-factor authentication (2FA) features were enabled across all wikis. These changes include user interface improvements for Special:AccountSecurity, the support of multiple 2FA methods via authenticator apps and portable security keys (previously users could only enable one method), and a new Recovery Codes module which facilitates fewer account lockouts due to lost two-factor apps and devices. As part of the Account Security project, work is continuing through the rest of 2025 on further user experience improvements, and support for passkeys as an alternate second factor.

Updates for editors

• Another part of the Account security project is making 2FA generally available to all users. Along with editors with advanced privileges, such as administrators and bureaucrats, 40% of editors now have access to 2FA. You can check if you have access at Special:AccountSecurity. Instructions for activation are on the linked page. The plan is to continue increasing availability if it is determined that the user support capabilities are able to support global usage. [13]
• This week, users at wikis where talk page Usability Improvements are already available by default (everywhere except the 12 wikis listed in T379264) will gain the ability to Thank a comment directly from the talk page it appears on. Before this change, Thanking could only be done by visiting the revision history of the talk page. You can learn more about this change. [14]
• Users who have not verified their email address will soon be receiving monthly Notification reminders to do so. This is because users who have verified their email can more easily recover their account. These reminders will not be sent if the user is inactive or removes the unverified email from their account. [15][16]
• View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a fix was made for an occasional error with saving translated paragraphs in the Content Translation tool, and the related error messages are now easier to see. [17]

Updates for technical contributors

• The Unsupported Tools Working Group has chosen Video2Commons as the first tool for its pilot cycle. The group will explore ways to improve and sustain the tool over the coming months. Learn more on Meta.
• 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 18:55, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-43

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

• To optimize how user data is stored in our databases, the saved preferences of users who haven't logged in for over five years and have fewer than 100 edits will be cleared. When those users return, default settings will apply. [18]
• View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a broken link from the GlobalContributions interface message to the XTools GlobalContributions page which has now been fixed. [19]

Updates for technical contributors

• The work to reroute all traffic to API endpoints under the rest.php route through a common API gateway is now complete. If any issues are observed, please file a phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board.
• Edits to Wikidata references or qualifiers will now be shown in RecentChanges and Watchlist entries on other wikis less often, reducing unnecessary notifications. This will reduce the overall quantity of 'noisy' entries. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. [20]
• 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 19:32, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

The Signpost: 20 October 2025

• News and notes: Board shuffles, LLM blocks increase, IPs are going away
  

And the "Global Resource Distribution Committee" emerges.

• Special report: The election that isn't
  

Two shortlisted WMF Board candidates removed from the ballot.

• Interview: The BoT bump
  

Who was bumped and why?

• In the media: An incident at WikiConference North America; WMF reports AI-related traffic drop and explains Wikipedia to US conservatives
  

...while Musk prepares to launch "Grokipedia".

• Traffic report: One click after another
  

Serial-killer miniseries, deceased scientist, government shutdowns and Sandalwood hit "Kantara" crowd the tubes.

• Humour: Wikipedia pay rates
  

Don't get too excited before you read this.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:40, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-44

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 Wikipedia iOS app has launched an A/B/C test of improvements made to the tabbed browsing feature for select regions and languages. The test, named “More dynamic tabs”, explores new tab experiences and includes “Did you know” and “Because you read” article recommendations. You can read more on the project page.
• Autoconfirmed users on small and medium wikis with the CampaignEvents extension can now use Event Registration without the Event Organizer right. This feature lets organizers enable registration, manage participants, and lets users register with one click instead of signing event pages.
• View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue of flashing colors when holding or pressing the arrow keys under the dark mode settings in Vector 2022 has been fixed. [21]

Updates for technical contributors

• The CampaignEvents extension will be deployed to all remaining wikis during the week of 17 November 2025. The extension currently includes three features: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List. For this rollout, Invitation List will not be enabled on Wikifunctions and MediaWiki unless requested by those communities. Visit the deployment page to learn more.
• The SwaggerUI-based REST sandbox experience is now live on all wiki projects. The sandbox can be accessed through the Special:RestSandbox page. Please report any issues to the MediaWiki Interfaces team board, or join the discussion on the project launch page. [22]
• Transform endpoints with a trailing slash path in the MediaWiki REST API are now marked as deprecated. They will remain functional during this time, but removal is expected by the end of January 2026. All API users currently calling them are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. Both endpoint variations can be found and tested using the REST Sandbox. See the MediaWiki REST API Deprecation page for more detailed information about the API deprecation policies and procedures.
• A dedicated changelog now exists for the MediaWiki REST API. The changelog provides an overview of these changes, making it easier for developers to keep track of improvements and iterations. Announcements will also continue to flow through the standard communication channels, including Tech News and email distribution lists, but can now be more easily referenced from a central location. If you have feedback about the style, structure, or content of this changelog, please join the discussion.
• Administrators can delete the tracking category which was previously added by the JsonConfig extension, as it is no longer used. See the categories linked from Q130635582. It is OK if there are still pages listed in the category as that is just a caching issue, and they will be automatically cleared out the next time each page is edited. [23]
• 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 19:27, 27 October 2025 (UTC)