User talk:TheSandDoctor

Coming here to ask why I deleted your article? Please read this page first...

Coming here to ask about a block or other admin action that I have issued on another WMF wiki where I am an admin? Please discuss on your talk page there (if you have Talk Page Access) and ping me as it has nothing to do with enwiki and is outside of its processes. Please also do not assume that that WMF wiki has the same blocking policy or processes as enwiki. If you have any questions about another WMF wiki or my actions on such edition, please leave it on my talk page on that wiki and I will see it as a notification/get back to you. enwiki is not the appropriate place to discuss concerns from other WMF wikis

RfA candidate S O N S% Ending (UTC) Time left Dups? Report RfB candidate S O N S% Ending (UTC) Time left Dups? Report No RfXs since 17:28, 3 November 2025 (UTC).—cyberbot ITalk to my owner:Online

• This user dreams that their talk page will be full of cookies, cake, pie, and every other delicious delicacy
  

Question from Tynashki (16:02, 5 December 2025)

How can I join the club --Tynashki (talk) 16:02, 5 December 2025 (UTC)

@Tynashki: What club are you referring to? TheSandDoctor ^Talk 17:05, 7 December 2025 (UTC)

Question from CustomCreatorOVi (15:26, 7 December 2025)

How Do I Create A Custom Page For Free? --CustomCreatorOVi (talk) 15:27, 7 December 2025 (UTC)

(talk page watcher) TheSandDoctor hasn't edited for a few days. What do you mean by a custom page? If you're talking about an article, WP:FIRST is a useful start. Girth Summit _(blether) 15:49, 7 December 2025 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – December 2025

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

Administrator changes

• Chaotic Enby
• Rjjiii

Valereee

• Fathoms Below
• Tamzin

CheckUser changes

Spicy

Technical news

• Starting on November 4, the IP addresses of logged-out editors are no longer being publicly displayed. Instead, they will have a temporary account associated with their edits.
• 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). T382958

Miscellaneous

• The December 2025 administrator elections are scheduled from Nov 25 – Dec 15.
• An Articles for Creation backlog drive is happening in December 2025, with over 1,000 drafts awaiting review from the past two months. In addition to AfC participants, all administrators and new page patrollers can help review using the Yet Another AFC Helper Script, which can be enabled in the Gadgets settings. Sign up here to participate!

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• Discuss this newsletter
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Sent byMediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:45, 8 December 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-50

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

• Anybody who wishes to secure their user account can now use two-factor authentication (2FA). This is available to all registered users of all Wikimedia projects. This is part of the Account Security initiative. Later, 2FA will be required for all users who can take security- or privacy-sensitive actions.

Updates for editors

• Following last week's deployments, the Add a link feature, which allows editors to add suggested links during editing, will be available to an additional 33 Wikipedias starting on 9 December. This expansion is possible thanks to the new prediction model that now supports all languages, including those that were previously not covered. While the feature has been available on most Wikipedias for some time, this rollout brings us closer to using the improved model everywhere. If you have any questions or would like more details please contact Trizek (WMF).
• Last week, the Search Platform team added transliterated as-you-type search suggestions to Georgian wikis. If there are only a few regular search suggestions, then queries in Latin or Cyrillic script are now rewritten into Georgian script to look for more matches. For example, searching for either bedniereba or бедниереба will now suggest the existing article about ბედნიერება ("happiness"). You can recommend other languages where transliterated suggestions would be useful on Phabricator for future development.
• Later this week, a controlled experiment will begin for editors on the 100 largest Wikipedias who are editing a section in the mobile web visual editor. 50% of these editors will notice a new "Edit full page" button that will enable them to expand their editing session to the whole page. This feature is intended to make it easier for people on mobile web to edit any article section, regardless of which section-edit icon they tapped to begin. The experiment will last ~4 weeks. You can find more details about the project.
• Later this week, the Reader Growth team will launch a mobile web experiment to expand all article sections by default (currently they are collapsed by default) and pin the section header the user is currently reading to the top of the page. The experiment will affect 10% of users on Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. [1]
• The Wikipedia Year in Review 2025, a feature in the Wikipedia mobile apps (iOS and Android) that provides users with a personalised summary of their engagement with Wikipedia over the year, is now available on the iOS and Android apps. This edition includes expanded personalised insights, improved reading highlights, new donor messaging, and updated designs. Open the app to view your Year in Review and explore your reading journey from 2025.
• A recent software bug caused edits made with VisualEditor to make unintended changes to wikitext, including removing whitespace and replacing spaces with underscores in wikilinks inside citations. This was partially fixed last week, and further fixes are in progress. Editors who used VisualEditor between November 28 and December 2 should review their edits for unexpected modifications. [2]
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the incorrect handling of URLs copied from the address bar of Microsoft Edge users, has been resolved. [3]

Updates for technical contributors

• Starting this week, users of the "Improved Syntax Highlighting" beta feature will have CodeMirror as the editor for Lua, JavaScript, CSS, JSON and Vue content models, instead of CodeEditor. With this, the linters will be upgraded. This is part of a larger effort to eventually replace CodeEditor and provide a consistent code editing experience. [4]
• Developers are encouraged to take the 2025 Developer Satisfaction Survey, which remains open until 5 January 2026. If you build software for the Wikimedia ecosystem and would like to share your experiences or feedback, your participation is greatly appreciated. [5]
• 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 17:43, 8 December 2025 (UTC)

Question from Curejm (02:34, 9 December 2025)

can you please help me create a wiki page? --Curejm (talk) 02:34, 9 December 2025 (UTC)

@Curejm: Are you referring to Draft:Cure JM Foundation? If so, would recommend following the advice left by QEnigma. Please also identify a new username that you would like to use for your account. Based on that draft, your current username is not permissible under our username policy. I can help you fix that, though! I just need you to reply here with your choice of a new username (one with no results if you search here) and I can fix that for you. The username needs to represent you as an individual person (though pseudonyms are allowed/encouraged); it can't be a username that implies shared use. For example, "Mark at Curejm" would be an example of an acceptable username, as would FacebookFanatic87, etc.

Happy to answer any questions you might have! TheSandDoctor ^Talk 05:55, 9 December 2025 (UTC)

Question from M.molati (19:58, 12 December 2025)

Greetings, how do I edit this articles😫 --M.molati (talk) 19:58, 12 December 2025 (UTC)

@M.molati: Please see this interactive guide! It should help you get started. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 21:43, 13 December 2025 (UTC)

Voting is now open for military historian of the year and newcomer of the year awards for 2025!

Voting is now open for the WikiProject Military History newcomer of the year and military historian of the year awards for 2025! The top editors will be awarded the coveted Gold Wiki. Cast your votes here and here respectively. Voting closes at 23:59 on 30 December 2025. On behalf of the coordinators, wishing you the very best for the festive season and the new year. MediaWiki message delivery via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:55, 15 December 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-51

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

• View all 18 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, one of the fixes addressed an issue for temporary accounts adding an external URL, which triggered an hCaptcha request in more cases than intended, and did not display the required popup on the first attempt to publish the edit. [6]

Updates for technical contributors

• To improve database and site performance, external links to Wikimedia projects will no longer be stored in the database. This means they will not be searchable in Special:LinkSearch, will not be checked by the Spam Blacklist or AbuseFilter as new links, and will not be in the externallinks table on database replicas. In the future this may be extended to other highly-linked trusted websites on a per-wiki basis, such as Creative Commons links on Wikimedia Commons. [7]
• 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 19:01, 15 December 2025 (UTC)

Question from Besmellah Amiri on Help:Getting started (19:26, 16 December 2025)

Can you I help me --Besmellah Amiri (talk) 19:26, 16 December 2025 (UTC)

@Besmellah Amiri: What do you have a question about? TheSandDoctor ^Talk 17:10, 21 December 2025 (UTC)

Question from AHMED ZIDAN S ALANAZI (19:50, 19 December 2025)

مرحبا --AHMED ZIDAN S ALANAZI (talk) 19:50, 19 December 2025 (UTC)

@AHMED ZIDAN S ALANAZI: Welcome to Wikipedia! This is the English Wikipedia where the English language is used for content. If you wish to contribute, you might be more at home on the Arabic Wikipedia, though you are welcome here as well.

أهلاً بكم في ويكيبيديا! هذه هي النسخة الإنجليزية من ويكيبيديا، حيث تُستخدم اللغة الإنجليزية في المحتوى. إذا كنتم ترغبون في المساهمة، فقد تجدون النسخة العربية من ويكيبيديا أكثر ملاءمة، ولكننا نرحب بكم هنا أيضاً. للوصول إلى النسخة العربية من ويكيبيديا، اضغطوا على الرابط الأزرق أعلاه. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 17:13, 21 December 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-52

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

• From January, edit filters can be set to automatically suppress their details such as rules and list of attempted edits and actions. This will help oversighters use edit filters to prevent doxxing or other suppressible material. [8]
• The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 12 January 2026 because of the end of year holidays. Thank you to all of the translators, and people who submitted content or feedback, this year.
• View all 16 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the crash that occurred when tapping "First Steps" in the Wikipedia Android Year in Review has now been fixed, and the feature opens as expected. [9]

Updates for technical contributors

• Interface elements such as diffs and categories generated by MediaWiki used to have the attribute data-mw="interface" to distinguish from wiki content. The attribute has been replaced with data-mw-interface="", to avoid potential conflicts with other data-mw attributes, which are generated by Parsoid. [10]
• There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.

Meetings and events

• The Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026 will take place on 13-14 March 2026 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Applications just opened mid-December and will close in mid-January or earlier if capacity is reached. With space for approximately 100 participants, early application is encouraged.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 21:43, 22 December 2025 (UTC)

Happy holidays

		Hi TheSandDoctor Season's Greetings and all the best for 2026
		Wherever you are and whatever you believe in (or don't), reach out for peace on this little planet of ours! HAPPY HOLIDAYS 🥳 Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:55, 21 December 2025 (UTC)

@Kudpung: Thank you very much! It's been a hot minute. I hope you're doing okay, Kudpung. --TheSandDoctor ^Talk 17:57, 23 December 2025 (UTC)

Hi

Wikipedia assigned you to be my mentor. I've been running into problems. I've made some pretty poor editorial judgements lately that I thought were completely fine at the time. I don't know. I think I'm either done as an editor or I'm about to become the greatest editor this site has ever seen. Are you still available to help me? I got extremely arrogant and I'm realizing I'm just a really sloppy editor and I got alot to learn. Lofi Gurl (talk) 15:50, 25 December 2025 (UTC)

@Lofi Gurl: Apologies for the delay in responding. I am glad to see that you have acknowledge mistakes and express a willingness to learn. I have definitely accidentally stumbled into a few bees nests myself, particularly when starting out. Article creation is probably one of the hardest things on Wikipedia, especially when it comes to getting a handle on this vague concept of "notability"—and none of us always make the right call, either, but taking on feedback is how you grow and learn. I would strongly recommend that, for now, you focus on improving existing articles. There is a lot to learn about Wikipedia, and even I am still discovering things periodically as an admin for ~7(!) years now and an editor for (in a few days) 8. On that vein, I am glad to see that your more recent edits to pages like Modern Baseball and Unwritten Law have incorporated the feedback given.

What I would say for actionable next steps to get you started is two-fold:

1. Try to keep citations you add relatively close to the content they are supporting. This isn't an exact science, as others have alluded to, but in general if you are quoting something? You want to have your citation almost always immediately following it.
2. When you add material, be sure that it is sourced, either to new citations you add or via existing ones on the page (that can be reused). In Unwritten Law you referenced Consequence but the material wasn't supported by a citation, so I tagged it as needing a reference. In Modern Baseball you had the Consequence reference following the Pitchfork mention but also didn't add a citation for Pitchfork to support the direct quote. I moved the Consequence citation closer to the mention of Consequence and tagged the Pitchfork quote as needing a citation.

We just need to be really careful about citing what we are adding and ideally putting the citations in the right spot. I hope that this helps for starters. If you have any questions on this or other matters/hurdles you come across, feel free to reach out. I am always happy to help if I can. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 09:35, 28 December 2025 (UTC)

New pages patrol January–February 2026 Backlog drive

January–February 2026 Backlog Drive | New pages patrol
New Pages Patrol is hosting a one-time, two-month experimental backlog drive aimed at reducing the backlog. This will be a combo drive: both articles and redirects will earn points. The drive will run from 1 January to 28 February 2026. The drive is divided into two phases. Participants may take part in either phase or across both phases, depending on availability. Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles and redirects patrolled during the drive. Two-month drive-exclusive barnstars will be awarded to eligible participants. Each article review earns 1 point, while each redirect review earns 0.2 points. Streak awards will be granted based on consistently meeting weekly point thresholds. Barnstars will also be awarded for re-reviewing articles previously reviewed by other patrollers during the drive. Interested in participating? Sign up here.
You are receiving this message because you are a New Pages Patrol reviewer. To opt out of future mailings, please remove yourself from here.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:23, 27 December 2025 (UTC)

	Happy New Year!
	Hello TheSandDoctor: Did you know ... that back in 1885, Wikipedia editors wrote Good Articles with axes, hammers and chisels? Thank you for your contributions to this encyclopedia using 21st century technology. I hope you don't get any unnecessary blisters. CAPTAIN RAJU(T) 15:26, 31 December 2025 (UTC)

Spread the WikiLove; use {{subst:Happy New Year elves}} to send this message

CAPTAIN RAJU^(T) 15:26, 31 December 2025 (UTC)

Thank you so much, CAPTAIN RAJU! I hope that your New Year was a good one and that 2026 is a good year for us both—both on and offline. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 19:56, 3 January 2026 (UTC)

Question from FPS215 (10:14, 3 January 2026)

Hello. How do I create a citation? Also, where can I get great sources for my edits? Also, how can I add hyperlinks? Thanks! --FPS215 (talk) 10:14, 3 January 2026 (UTC)

@FPS215: Please see this guide to referencing. When it comes to hyperlinks, that depends on if you mean internal links to another article (called wikilinks) or external links (e.g. to Google or another external website). In the case of wikilinks, see Help:Wikilink. If you are referring to external links, it is best to read WP:EXTLINKS. In short (for external links), very rarely is it appropriate to have external links in the body of an article. I hope that helps. If you have any questions, please let me know. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 19:56, 3 January 2026 (UTC)

Question from Wii Pedia Woo (08:11, 4 January 2026)

How do I create a Wikipedia page? --Wii Pedia Woo (talk) 08:11, 4 January 2026 (UTC)

Hi Wii Pedia Woo! I wouldn't start editing Wikipedia by jumping straight into creating a new article or draft. There are a lot of ins and outs of the site and its guidelines/policies around notability and sourcing etc and you're better off learning those first by working on improving existing articles. What sort of topic areas are you most interested in? TheSandDoctor ^Talk 18:39, 4 January 2026 (UTC)