User talk:AmandaNP

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Tech News: 2025-45

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

Administrators will now find that Special:MergeHistory is now significantly more flexible about what it can merge. It can now merge sections taken from the middle of the history of the source (rather than only the start) and insert revisions anywhere in the history of the destination page (rather than only the start). [1]
For users with "Automatically subscribe to topics" enabled in their preferences, starting a new topic or adding a reply to an existing topic will now subscribe them to replies to that topic. Previously, this would only happen if the DiscussionTools "Add topic" or "Reply" widgets were used. When DiscussionTools was originally launched existing accounts were not opted in to automatic topic subscriptions, so this change should primarily affect newer accounts and users who have deliberately changed their preferences since that time. [2]
Scribunto modules can now be used to generate SVG images. This can be used to build charts, graphics and other visualizations dynamically through Lua, reducing the need to compose them externally and upload them as files. [3]
Wikimedia sites now provide all anonymous users with the option to enable a dark mode color scheme, featuring light-colored text on a dark background. This enhancement aims to deliver a more enjoyable reading experience, especially in dimly lit environments. [4]
Users with large watchlists have long faced timeouts when editing Special:EditWatchlist. The page now loads entries in smaller sections instead of all at once due to a paging update, allowing everyone to edit their watchlists smoothly. As part of the database update, sorting by expiry has been removed because it was over 100× slower than sorting by title. A community wish has been created to explore alternative ways to restore sort-by-expiry. If this feature is important to you, please support the wish! [5]
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the fixing of the persisting highlighting when using VisualEditor find and replace during a query. [6]

Updates for technical contributors

Since 2019 the Wikimedia URL Shortener at https://w.wiki is available for all Wikimedia wikis to create short links to articles, permalinks, diffs, etc. It is available in the sidebar as "Get shortened URL". There are 30 wikis that also install an older "ShortUrl" extension. The old extension will soon be removed. This means /s/ URLs will not be advertised under article titles via HTML class="title-shortlink". The /s/ URLs will keep working. [7]
On Thursday, October 30, the MediaWiki Interfaces and SRE Service Operations teams began rerouting Action API traffic through a common 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.
MediaWiki Train deployments will pause for the final two weeks of 2025: 22 December and 29 December. Backport windows will also pause between Monday, 22 December 2025 and Thursday, 2 January 2026. A backport window is a scheduled time to add things like bug fixes and configuration changes. There are seven deployment trains remaining for 2025. [8]
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

In 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation reported that AI systems and search engines increasingly use Wikipedia content without driving users to the site, contributing to an 8% drop in human pageviews compared to 2024. After detecting bots disguised as humans, Wikimedia updated its traffic data to reflect this shift. Read more about current user trends on Wikipedia in a Diff blog post.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:30, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – November 2025

News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2025).

Administrator changes

Toadspike

CheckUser changes

asilvering

Guideline and policy news

The speedy deletion criteria U5 has been repealed, with U6 and U7 replacing it. See the FAQ for more clarifications.
Community-designated contentious topics may now be enforced and appealed at the arbitration enforcement noticeboard (AE) as a result of an RfC.

Technical news

You can enable a handy user info card next to usernames, which when clicked displays edit count, blocks, thanks, and other information. To enable this feature, visit Preferences → Appearance → Advanced options → Enable the user info card

Arbitration

The arbitration case Transgender healthcare and people has been closed
- Uninvolved administrators may impose an AE participation restriction on any thread at the Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard.

Miscellaneous

An unreferenced articles backlog drive is happening in November 2025 to reduce the backlog of articles tagged with {{Unreferenced}}. You can help reduce the backlog by adding citations to these articles. Sign up to participate!

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:34, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Temporary accounts

A false positive at UAA which may just be unfortunate, or may require some tinkering to skip temporary accounts.

~2025-31422-88 (talk · contribs · deleted · filter log · SUL · Google) • (block · soft · promo · cause · bot · hard · spam · vandal)
This username matched "Used 2 instead of s attempting to skip filter: 14[^0-9]*88. Violating string: ~s0s5-314ss-88" on the blacklist. -- DQB (owner / report) 09:30, 5 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Note on file 1488 is a well known Neo-Nazi symbol -- DQB (owner / report) 09:30, 5 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Cabayi (talk) 10:18, 5 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I came to report the same. Saw the "1488" false-positive, and another different one yesterday, (did not save it so I don't remember what triggered it). The point is that the new temporary account naming system is generating false-positives. They basically need to be ignored by the bot as it is a collection of numbers with no meaning. -- Alexf^(talk) 12:39, 5 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

And it's not chosen by the editor either. Secretlondon (talk) 12:40, 5 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I fixed two false positive issues for temporary accounts in the current regex list. I It's difficult to say there won't be others because of how the similar characters matching is done so it would still be a good idea to exempt temporary accounts entirely. I looked at using the whitelist, but the whitelist code doesn't use regex matching so we can't exclude temporary accounts that way without giving people a way to evade the blacklist.

@AmandaNP: @The Anome: I looked at the code in DeltaQuadBot and I believe my changes will work, but I'd appreciate it if someone familiar with the matching code could look over the changes. I ended up using NO_SIM_MATCH to avoid overcomplicating the regex, but based on past reports to WP:UAA/BOT, it doesn't look like the change will lose any true positives from the last 8 years. Thanks! Daniel Quinlan (talk) 23:59, 5 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Everything on the blacklist looks ok at glance. My first thought was to use the whitelist, but yes, you are right it doesn't use regex...I feel like there was a reason I did that...but I'd have to think on it. A good potential change if I can't think of a reason not to. -- Amanda (she/her) 01:25, 6 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Naming conventions (technical restrictions)#Restrictions on usernames states, & an experiment by one of the renamers confirms, that temporary accounts are identified by starting with the two characters ~2 which may simplify things? Cabayi (talk) 11:33, 6 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It would be a simple fix if the whitelist check looked at only the start, but it uses the phython in command, meaning if it finds that anywhere in the string, it would exempt it. -- Amanda (she/her) 16:08, 6 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I had some time to think about making the whitelist regex. My concern (and I think originally) is: 1) If you get into regex level exemptions, it really modifies the blacklist entry, and doesn't really congregate the two well, providing a history or a clear line of reasoning if things ever have to be diagnosed. 2) The program takes long enough to run, and making each blacklist line go through a regex'd whitelist risks even more compute time, especially if the list gets bigger. The idea is to report these usernames in real time, and that's too much a risk for an issue handled by sim flags. Both of those said, I'd be open to running a skip everything on a ~202[digit of year] starter. When I have an extra minute I'll sit down and plug that in. -- Amanda (she/her) 08:58, 11 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

DeltaQuadBot code

Hi Amanda. Is https://github.com/dqwiki/DeltaQuadBot still the code being used for DeltaQuadBot? Thanks. Daniel Quinlan (talk) 21:50, 5 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Broken up into repos - https://github.com/dqwiki?tab=repositories -- Amanda (she/her) 01:19, 6 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Happy First Edit Day!

Hey, AmandaNP. I'd like to wish you a wonderful First Edit Day on behalf of the Wikipedia Birthday Committee!
Have a great day! DaniloDaysOfOurLives (talk) 06:49, 7 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-46

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

Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.

Starting November 12, users will see a change in the appearance of talk pages on some Wikipedias. Almost all wikis have received this design change; English Wikipedia will get these changes later. You can read more on Diff. Users can opt out of these changes in their user preferences in "Show discussion activity". [9]
MediaWiki can now display a page indicator automatically while a page is protected. This feature is disabled by default. It can be enabled by community request. [10]
Using the "Show preview" or "Show changes" buttons in the wikitext editor will now carry over certain URL parameters like 'useskin', 'uselang' and 'section'. This update also fixes an issue where, if the browser crashed while previewing an edit to a single section, saving this edit could overwrite the entire page with just that section’s content. [11][12][13]
Wikivoyage wikis can use colored map markers in the article text. The text of these markers will now be shown in contrasting black or white color, instead of always being white. Local workarounds for the problem can be removed. [14]
The Activity tab in the Wikipedia Android app is now available for all users. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging. [15]
The Reader Growth team is launching an experiment called "Image browsing" to test how to make it easier for readers to browse and discover images on Wikipedia articles. This experiment, a mobile-only A/B test, will go live on English Wikipedia in the week of November 17 and will run for four weeks, affecting 0.05% of users on English wiki. The test launched on November 3 on Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese wikis, affecting up to 10% of users on those wikis. [16]
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example the inability to lock accounts on mobile sites has been fixed. [17]

Updates for technical contributors

Nominations are open on Wikitech for new Toolforge standards committee members. The committee oversees the Toolforge Right to fork policy and Abandoned tool policy among other duties. Nominations will remain open through 2025-11-28.
The JWT issuer field in OAuth 2 access tokens for SUL wikis has been changed to https://meta.wikimedia.org. Old access tokens will still work. [18]
The JWT subject field in OAuth 2 access tokens will soon change from <user id> to mw:<identity type>:<user id>, where <identity type> is typically CentralAuth: (for SUL wikis) or local:<wiki id> (for other wikis). This is to avoid conflicts between different user ID types, and to make OAuth 2 access tokens and the sessionJwt cookie more similar. Old access tokens will still work. [19]
MediaWiki's block messages (blockedtext, blockedtext-partial, autoblockedtext, systemblockedtext, blockedtext-tempuser, autoblockedtext-tempuser) now support additional parameters indicating whether the user is blocked from editing their own user talk page $9 or emailing other users $10. [20]
A REL1_45 branch for MediaWiki core and each of the extensions and skins in Wikimedia git has been created. This is the first step in the release process for MediaWiki 1.45.0, scheduled for late November 2025. If you are working on a critical bug fix or working on a new feature, you may need to take note of this change. [21]
The process for generating CirrusSearch dumps has been updated due to slowing performance. If you encounter any issues migrating to the replacement dumps, please contact the Search Platform Team for support. [22][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 20:35, 10 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

User:Muthulk

Now I'm starting to think he may not be Bhargav. Maybe he just copied the plot of a different film, based on the unsourced claim that this film was a remake? I may be wrong now. Kailash29792 (talk) 10:36, 11 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You've got mail

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It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template. Surayeproject3 𖢗 19:13, 14 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]