User talk:HouseBlaster

Welcome to my talk page!

• My pronouns are he/they.
• I prefer to keep discussions unfragmented, so I'll reply where you left me a message.
• I am an administrator—if you need help, please ask! If I am offline, you can find a recently active admin.
• Talk page watchers are welcome to add their input!

Thank you! Leave me a message.

Tech News: 2026-34

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 Worklist feature for the Event Registration tool is now live on all Wikimedia wikis. With Worklist, event organizers can add the articles their event will focus on directly to the event page. The Worklist also powers Event Pathways which notifies other editors of the upcoming or ongoing event when they edit an article featured in the event's Worklist. This is the minimum viable version (MVP), and feedback is welcome. Organizers are encouraged to try the feature. A hands-on Worklist Setup Workshop will take place on 18 August at 16:00 UTC and 19 August at 11:00 UTC.

Updates for editors

• Special:ShortPages displays short pages by their size, but in many cases it gets filled with disambiguations and soft redirects, making it harder to find the short articles themselves. Starting this weekend, you will be able to choose not to include an article in the special page by adding the magic word __EXPECTSHORTPAGE__.
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Bole (w:bol:)
• Starting the week of August 17, the page toolbar will wrap onto two lines when there is not enough horizontal space for all the buttons. This is a fully merged patch from the Reader Experience team which aims to reduce crowding in the Vector 2022 toolbar, that may occur on some language Wikipedias at certain screen widths.
• View all 16 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, uploading large files to Wikimedia Commons has become more stable and less prone to failure following some fixes related to the “Could not acquire lock” upload error.

Updates for technical contributors

• Debian Bullseye will reach the end of its Long Term Support on 31 August 2026. Some Cloud VPS projects still have instances running Debian Bullseye. Maintainers of those projects are encouraged to migrate to Debian Bookworm or Debian Trixie. A migration guide is available to help with the process, and users may also want to consider whether their workload is better suited to Toolforge. If you need help or cannot complete the migration by 31 August, please contact the Cloud VPS admins as soon as possible. Read more.
• 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 21:01, 17 August 2026 (UTC)

Growth/Newsletters/36

Updates from the Growth team on our work to improve the new editor experience.

Recent releases

Account creation experiments

Several experiments to increase successful account creation have delivered significant results.

• An updated message shown to logged-out mobile users who try to edit produced a 27% relative increase in account creation and is being scaled to all wikis. (T424595)
• A new account menu button in the mobile web header, A/B tested across five Wikipedias with nearly 8 million participants, made logged-out mobile users 25% more likely to create an account, with no significant difference in constructive editing behavior. (T428220)
• A simpler post-edit dialog for temporary account holders increased permanent account creation by 87% (relative), converting more temp editors into registered ones. (T416418)

  

  The redesigned account creation form increases registration by a relative 24.4%

• We also redesigned the account creation form itself (T409236): adding real-time username validation, a concise summary of the username policy, a "reveal password" option, and a simplified design aligned with Codex guidelines. In an A/B test on English Wikipedia mobile, users who saw the redesigned form created permanent accounts at a rate of 20.4%, compared to 16.4% for the control group (a 24.4% relative increase).

Revise Tone structured task

Revise Tone helps newcomers identify passages that may contain non-encyclopedic language and guides them through revising the tone. In A/B testing on Arabic, English, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias, newcomer task completion rates were 38.7% higher than the default Copyedit task, with no decrease in edit quality. The test ended July 9, and the feature is now available to everyone on these wikis, configurable via Community Configuration. We plan to release Revise Tone to more wikis.

Automated mentor list cleanup

Communities can now automatically mark inactive mentors as away or remove them from mentorship entirely (which automatically reassigns their mentees). Inactivity is based on edits, and talk page responses count, so mentors answering mentee questions remain active. We recommend enabling both options together; administrators can enable them via Special:CommunityConfiguration and review the mentor list at Special:ManageMentors.

Growth features for Wikidata

Growth features are now available at Wikidata, including a simplified Newcomer Homepage, Mentorship, the Impact module, Community Updates and the Help Panel.

Work in progress

Early concepts for evolving the Newcomer Homepage into a personalized 'Home' that grows with contributors.

Home

The Growth and Moderator Tools teams are developing Home (T419358): a unified, personalized landing page intended to replace the Newcomer Homepage. Rather than remaining a newcomer-only feature, Home will evolve with users as they gain experience, surfacing Suggested Edits, edits to review, and moderation workflows at the right moment.

Research

The Wikimedia Research team, in partnership with the Growth Team, published findings from two projects on how new editors learn and integrate into the community:

• Understanding newcomer mentorship on Wikipedia
• Successful Newcomers Survey

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

13:17, 18 August 2026 (UTC)

Organized Labour September Editing Event

You're invited to join the Organized Labour community editing event, a cross-wiki event taking place throughout September 2026!

The campaign brings together Wikimedians interested in improving coverage of organised labour, workers, trade unions, and labour history. We have confirmed collaborations with Wikipedia language editions in English, Dutch, Persian, Serbo-Croatian and French. If you want to add other language editions or other wiki projects you are strongly encouraged to do so! This event spans geography and languages!

This is a one-time invitation. You're receiving it because you previously signed a petition related to Wiki Workers United (WWU). We hope you'll join us!

Regards ~ Shushugah (talk) 14:19, 19 August 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-35

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 Special:CreateAccount page has been simplified as part of ongoing work to modernize the account creation experience. The panel showing project statistics no longer appears next to the form on desktop and mobile web. Multiple account creation experiments show that a simpler form helps newcomers complete registration.
• In order to improve page performance, images now load when they are viewed. This means images lower down an article will not load if a reader never scrolls to that part of the page, which may affect some image-related metrics.

• View all 42 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where image thumbnails in Abstract Wikipedia could fail to display after the corresponding file was moved on Wikimedia Commons, has now been fixed. Thumbnails will now update correctly when files are moved.

Updates for technical contributors

• User Info card is a feature that helps patrollers see information about user accounts. So far, it has been available only in places such as page history, logs and recent changes. Now, it's possible to place it in the page content as well, using the {{#uic:}} parser function. It can be particularly useful in templates like {{Userlinks}} (or their specialized variants), as it will make it easier to see the context about a user on various noticeboard pages. The card will be displayed only to users who have it enabled in their preferences.
• Due to user security and privacy risks, we have disabled access to Special:MyPage URLs when specifically using action=raw. If you are impacted by this, consider whether you can use an alternative approach. Special:MyPage URLs can still be accessed and used without action=raw. Specified user page URLs (e.g. User:Myusername) can still be used with action=raw.
• Due to an update, the thumbnailing software has been improved. This includes upgrading librsvg to 2.60 and ImageMagick to 7, as well as resolving a number of long-standing thumbnailing bugs like rendering errors.

• 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 20:43, 24 August 2026 (UTC)

New pages patrol September 2026 Backlog drive

September 2026 Backlog Drive | New pages patrol
On 1 September 2026, a one-month backlog drive for new pages patrol will begin at a particularly important time for NPP. The backlog has now passed 30,000 unreviewed articles, a level that has been described in current NPP discussions as exceptionally high and potentially difficult to overcome through normal reviewing alone. Backlog drives are one of the few measures that have historically produced a noticeable reduction in the backlog, so the participation of as many active patrollers as possible will matter this month. If you can review during September, please make articles your priority. Every article that is reviewed is a meaningful reduction in the backlog. With the queue at its current size, even a relatively small increase in the number of articles each patroller reviews can add up to a substantial difference over the course of the month. This is a hybrid drive, so redirect reviewing is still included. Redirects can be a useful way for newer patrollers to get comfortable with NPP and can help people build up to reviewing articles. However, the main goal of this drive is to tackle the article backlog, and experienced patrollers are particularly encouraged to spend as much of their available reviewing time on articles as they can. Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles and redirects patrolled. Each article review will earn 1 point, while each redirect review will earn 0.2 points. Streak awards will be given out based on consistently hitting point thresholds for each week of the drive. Barnstars will also be granted for re-reviewing articles previously reviewed by other patrollers during the drive. If you have been thinking about doing more NPP, this is an especially good month to jump in. Whether you can review a few pages or hundreds, every review helps. And if you are already an active patroller, please consider whether you can put in some additional time during September to help bring the backlog back under control. Interested in taking part? Sign up here.
You're receiving this message because you are a new page patroller. To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:50, 24 August 2026 (UTC)

Could you do me a favor?

Hi, could you remove me from the AutoWikiBrowser checkpage because I lost interest in it? Thanks! Hamimh2 (talk) 01:03, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

Of course!  Done :) HouseBlaster (he/they) 01:05, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

Thanks! Hamimh2 (talk) 01:06, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

For whatever it's worth

With respect to your remarks at VPP, that is actually a few years off, and it was EdJohnston who was responsible for proposing the earliest version of ECR, which started as a bespoke remedy for a single specific ARBAA AE case, essentially as a soft version of 1RR, though with a 3-month tenure minimum rather than 30 days (Old AE discussion). And there was indeed some admittedly limited discussion as to the appropriate duration of tenure and regarding what types of edits should count and as is so often the case those exact same things are still being discussed all these years later. But yes, from there we get the ARBGG, PIA3, and eventually ECP stuff though my activity was intermittent throughout that period so others are probably better placed to relay the full tale.

So there it is, hopefully you can help with the transmission of institutional memory because I certainly don't have the time for it anymore.

Pings to Czarking0, since you commented there, and to The Bushranger since you've expressed an interest in this kind of stuff in the past, with my apologies if you already knew this one. ~2026-46960-97 (talk) 17:09, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

Huh. TIL! Thank you for enlightening me :) HouseBlaster (he/they) 17:10, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

No problem, happy to help. ~2026-46960-97 (talk) 17:11, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-36

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 new format for the Community Wishlist is open for feedback. You can read the proposed ideas on Meta. This new process plans to improve how wishes are triaged, voted on, and prioritized in a way that is transparent and balanced across project families and language editions. This consultation is open for two weeks.

Updates for editors

• The latest release of the Wikipedia Android app includes updates to the Saved feature, bringing the app’s saving experience closer to iOS and Web. The update redesigns the Saved tab with an “All articles” view, removes the default “Saved” reading list, renames reading lists to “Collections,” and modernizes the article-saving experience.
• The Reading Lists feature was enabled for all logged-in users on Bengali, Chinese, Czech and Vietnamese Wikipedias on August 25, after several months as a beta feature. Reading Lists will be available to all logged-in users on Arabic, French and Indonesian Wikipedias on September 1, followed by English Wikipedia on September 14, and all other Wikipedia wikis on September 28.
• At the end of the month, some logged-out readers on Bengali, Czech, Persian, English, and Polish Wikipedias using the Minerva skin on mobile will see an updated navigation bar in an A/B test. The test will compare the current navigation bar with a new version designed to make it easier to find information more quickly. The goal is to determine whether these changes encourage readers to return more often. This experiment will not change the experience for logged-in readers and/or editors.
• Editors who maintain redirects, templates, and categories used on redirect pages now have improved ways for finding and curating redirects. Previously, redirects pages could not be searched. Two new search keywords, onlyredirects: and withredirects:, now allow redirects to be searched directly and can be combined with existing keywords such as incategory:, intitle:, and insource:.
• The ISBN lookup tools for generating citations were recently not working because of external service problems. Developers are working on solutions.
• View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where searching for pages by category using deepcat could return no results or unrelated results has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The domain of URLs for thumbnails is changing from upload.wikimedia.org to thumb.wikimedia.org. The old URLs will continue to work for the foreseeable future but MediaWiki will advertise the new domain instead. URLs to other types of media such as original files, videos and transcodes will still be served from upload.wikimedia.org.
• The Wikimedia Math API is now deprecated. These endpoints will be fully sunset by the end of September 2026. Developers who call these endpoints should transition to alternative math rendering solutions, such as the native MathML or MathJax. Third-party MediaWiki installations that utilize the Math extension for formula rendering are required to upgrade to v1.43+ to avoid disruption of service.

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• Read more about TextMatch in a Diff post titled, Custom edit suggestions for every wiki: How communities are shaping Suggestion Mode with TextMatch.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:51, 31 August 2026 (UTC)