User talk:R'n'B

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The da Vinci Barnstar

		The da Vinci Barnstar
		For your recent exceptional work in kicking User:DPL bot in places which must have hurt. Narky Blert (talk) 21:15, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

Thank you! :-) R'n'B (call me Russ) 21:20, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Special Barnstar
	Thanks for you hard work in maintaining Wikipedia. Txantimedia (talk) 18:21, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

A pie for you!

For helping out fixing all those disambig links on all the new Hisatsu Orange Railway pages, much appreciated! :) RubenSchade (talk) 00:12, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

Some baklava for you!

G Hotors497F? (talk) 23:45, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Barnstar of Diplomacy
	Uepp Hotors497F? (talk) 23:47, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
	For running the disambiguation contest month after month, there are not enough barnstars in the world. BD2412 T 17:09, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Editor's Barnstar
	The GuaranÍ people thank you!! Cheers. Mamani1990 (talk) 18:24, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Template:Anton-surname

You have to delete invalid entries, ragter than create redlinks X (surname) with no evidence that such surname exists. --Altenmann >talk 16:16, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

What enwiki policy requires this? --R'n'B (call me Russ) 16:18, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

WP:NOTRED, MOS:DABRED. Some time ago a couple of zealous wikignomes worked hard to delete even reasonable redlinks (and BTW links to dab pages) from surname templates. I added them in order not to forget to create the corresponding surname pages, but eventually dgaf. BTW dab pages in navboxen do create problem and some bot will generate warning, kinda "this dab page is linked from a huge number of pages. Please get your act straight.", annoying the dabpage "owner" profusely. --Altenmann >talk 09:36, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-38

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

• References lists that are made using the <references/> tag will now automatically display with columns in Vector 2022 when readers are using its 'standard' settings for text-size and page-width. [1]
• Starting in the week of October 6, on small wikis and medium wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled, all autoconfirmed users will be able to use Event Registration as an organizer. No changes will be made for large wikis unless requested in Phabricator. This change is being made to make it easier for more people to use Event Registration, especially on wikis that are less likely to have policies related to the Event Organizer right. Learn more.
• Users that search using regular expressions (regex) can now use additional features including:
  • for the intitle: keyword: metacharacters for start-of-line (^) and end-of-line ($) anchors [2]
  • for both intitle: and insource: keywords: shorthand character classes for digits (\d), whitespace (\s), and word characters (\w); and escape codes for line feed (\r), newline (\n), tab (\t), and unicode (e.g. \uHHHH). [3]
• When you search for text that looks like an IP, the system will now show search results. It used to take you to the contributions for that IP instead of showing search results. [4]
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 24. This is planned at 15:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests which happen twice a year. You can read more about the background and details of this process on the Diff blog.
• View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that affected users who used the page-tabs to switch from wikitext editing of a section into the visualeditor. [5]

Updates for technical contributors

• The MediaWiki Interfaces team is redesigning the Wikimedia REST API Sandbox with Codex. If you have feedback on improvements for the API documentation or what makes developer experiences smooth (or frustrating), you’re invited to join an upcoming discovery interview, or leave feedback onwiki. Learn more.
• Edits to Wikidata aliases (an alternative name for an item or a property) 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. Learn more. [6]
• The new Unicode 17.0 version has been released. The datasets on Commons for the Module:Unicode data have been updated. Wikipedias that do not use the Commons datasets should either update their own data or switch to the Commons datasets.
• Users of the Wikimedia Enterprise Structured Contents endpoints can now access Parsed Tables. The new Parsed Tables feature extracts and represents Wikipedia tables in structured JSON. This improves machine accessibility as part of the Structured Contents initiative. Structured Contents output is freely available through the On-demand API, or through Wikimedia Cloud Services.
• A dataset of English Wikipedia biographical information from Wikimedia Enterprise has been published on Kaggle, for evaluation and research. This provides structured data from more than 1.5 million biographies, including birth and death dates, education, affiliations, careers, awards, and more (from a June 2024 snapshot).
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• Scholarship applications for Wikimania 2026 in Paris, France, are open until October 31.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 17:03, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-39

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

• On September 24th at 15:00 UTC, all Wikimedia sites users will experience a brief read-only period due to a scheduled datacenter server switchover. The Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team will redirect all traffic from one primary server to its backup. You can listen to the switchover using the "Listen to Wikipedia" tool, where you will hear edits stop for a few minutes during the read-only phase, then resume. This twice-yearly datacenter server switchover ensures reliability by testing the backup datacenter, so that our sites can stay online even if the primary datacenter fails. You can read more about the process on the Diff blog.

Updates for editors

• Editors of 60 more Wiktionaries will soon be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them into their pages. A function takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, like adding numbers, converting miles to meters, calculating elapsed time, or declining a word into a case. They will join the other 65 Wiktionary language editions, which already have access to embedded Wikifunctions calls. Later this year, plans are in place to expand to more Wiktionaries and the Incubator.
• A new parser function has been added: {{#contentmodel}}. Template editors and admins can use it to get the localized or canonical name of the content model of a specific page. The function makes it easier to create and edit system messages, such as MediaWiki:editinginterface, even when you switch types of pages, like wiki, JavaScript, CSS or JSON page. [7]
• Adding or editing a DISPLAYTITLE for an article using VisualEditor will no longer be broken. Editors who use VisualEditor mode to modify the {{DISPLAYTITLE}} would no longer have the literal text "DISPLAYTITLE" or its localized variant added to their articles. A list of pages that may have been affected and might need cleanup is documented in this ticket.
• Beta users of the Wikipedia Android app can now try the redesigned Activity tab, which replaces the Edits tab. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging.
• View all 12 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• Wikifunctions users can now import many essential facts involving geo-coordinates, quantities and time values from Wikidata. This is made possible by the creation of Wikifunctions types for these values, which makes them available for use by functions in Wikifunctions. Learn more about how this works in this video and Wikifunctions' August 1 newsletter (for quantities) and August 22 newsletter (for geo-coordinates).

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:52, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

Sock

I would like to bring to your attention that User:Krishnarthiindia, previously blocked on English Wikipedia as a sockpuppet of MediaTribe, is currently active on Hindi Wikipedia and creating multiple promotional pages.

🔗 User page on Hindi Wikipedia

I raised this issue with Hindi Wikipedia administrator सदस्य:संजीव कुमार, but his response suggests that the matter is being overlooked. Our discussion is here:

🔗 Talk page discussion

As an example, the article on Yohan Poonawalla has been repeatedly deleted on English Wikipedia due to COI and promotional issues:

• EN: Yohan Poonawalla (deleted multiple times)
• HI: योहान पूनावाला

This demonstrates a clear case of cross-wiki paid/COI editing.

Further evidence of promotional editing by this user includes:

• Abhay Singh (Jamshedpur politician) (created and later deleted)
• Anshuman Bhagat
• Yohan Poonawalla
• Ajay Mehgi (ऋतु मेंगी)

Given the user’s established connection to MediaTribe and a pattern of COI and promotional activity across projects, I kindly request an investigation into their activities on Hindi Wikipedia. The BO57! (talk) 15:32, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

I am neither an administrator nor a user on Hindi Wikipedia, so I cannot possibly do anything about this. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 15:34, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

"Transpeptidase (disambiguation)" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Transpeptidase (disambiguation) has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Anyone, including you, is welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 September 26 § Transpeptidase (disambiguation) until a consensus is reached. CheckNineEight (talk) 20:19, 26 September 2025 (UTC)

@CheckNineEight: You can't just stick a deletion template on the top of a page; you need to include your reason for proposing deletion on the discussion page (which you linked in the above message, even though you have not added a section for this proposal). In this case, please review WP:INTDABLINK before proceeding with (or, more likely, withdrawing) the nomination. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 20:26, 26 September 2025 (UTC)

Fixed now. It wasn't actually sent previously, for some reason. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?preload=Template%3ARfd_starter&title=Wikipedia%3ARedirects_for_discussion%2FLog%2F2025_September_26# CheckNineEight (talk) 21:02, 26 September 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. [8]

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. [9]
• 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. [10]
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikiquote in Malay (q:ms:) [11]
• View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the User Info Card now displays currently active global lock/blocks. [12]

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)

Dubious change to disambiguation links

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Exciter_(effect)&oldid=1315302032

The linked page is, in fact, titled "Exciter", not "Exciter (disambiguation)". Exciter (disambiguation)Exciter (disambiguation) is a redirect page.

The rationale of making disambiguation links more visible doesn't really make sense here, since {{Other uses}} is usually expected to link to a disambiguation page. Anselm Schüler (talk) 07:22, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

WP:D#HOWTODAB —R'n'B (call me Russ) 11:14, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

"Magic" disambiguation

Hi, I noticed that on Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links you moved the Magic link back to the To do section. Could you tell me which pages still need to be fixed? From what I can tell the pages from the Article and Template namespaces have all been fixed. Mravava (talk) 16:38, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

Hi, the only one I could find at the moment was a hidden link on the redirect page Magick, which I removed. Any others must have been fixed by other users in the interim. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 17:42, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

I believe that was the only one. I myself assumed the link on Magick wasn't a mistake. Thanks for answering! Mravava (talk) 09:48, 8 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. [13]
• 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. [14]
• 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. [15]
• 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. [16]
• 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. [17]

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. [18]
• 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. [19]
• 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)

Administrators' newsletter – October 2025

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

Administrator changes

• Billinghurst
• Crisco 1492
• DarkFalls
• Spike Wilbury
• Valereee
• Ergo Sum

CheckUser changes

Vanamonde93

Arbitration

• After a motion, arbitration enforcement page protections no longer need to be logged in the AELOG. A bot now automatically posts protections at WP:AELOG/P. To facilitate this bot, protection summaries must include a link to the relevant CT page (e.g. [[WP:CT/BLP]]), and you will receive talk page reminders if you forget to specify the contentious topic but otherwise indicate it is an AE action.

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• Discuss this newsletter
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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:57, 8 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. [20]
• 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. [21]
• 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. [22][23]
• 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. [24]

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 18:56, 13 October 2025 (UTC)