Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

TWAFI coming to the Main Page soon

Hello! Articles for improvement is almost ready to implement the addition of this week's article for improvement on the Main Page. Our target is this Sunday at the earliest, with the article "Confectionery store". The section can be previewed at Wikipedia:Main Page/sandbox, which is transcluding {{Article for improvement}}. Feel free to suggest changes and give feedback below.

Courtesy pings: FaviFake, 7amithorn, Chaotic Enby, Hason-LEK-SIN, InfernoHues, fifteen thousand two hundred twenty four, NewAccount7295, ScienceD90, Wil540 art who all participated in the discussions. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 04:52, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

FYI: For best results preview the Main Page sandbox in wide view (on Vector 2022), since that's what the actual Main Page is displayed in. In any case, happy we all worked on putting this together! :) Hason-LEK-SIN ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 06:25, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

Interesting. It looks good, but as an ITN editor it does make me sad to see the section be pushed down “below the fold”, so to speak. On a similar note, how will this affect MPBALANCE? It seems like we’d need to either expand TFA and DYK, or cut down on entries in ITN and OTD. I certainly hope it’s not the latter. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 11:55, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

That's kind of an unanswered question at the moment. I believe there were discussions at ITN and DYK related to this. The DYK one especially said they didn't have the ability to do more daily hooks than are already done. I think for now we should just have an imbalance, and if all goes well with the new section different ideas to fix it can be discussed. InfernoHues (talk) 13:30, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

That's a shame. At ITN we've always wanted to have more room to be able to run either more detailed RDs, more Ongoings, or something like that. If TWAFI had gone on the other side, that could have been possible while still following MPBALANCE. But with it being on the right, we are left with no opportunity to expand other sections, and an ugly, off-balance Main Page. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 13:33, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

Nothing is set in stone yet. We need to add the TWAFI to the main page, and for that we're using the placement chosen at the RfC, but its position can always be changed in a future discussion. As is often the case with new proposals, not everything is perfect in the first attempt. FaviFake (talk) 14:29, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

Also noting that the Main Page is historically skewed in terms of section widths (with the left side being 55% of the width, and the right side being 45%), and this offers us an opportunity to rebalance it. If there's support to move TWAFI on the left side after seeing how it performs in practice, it can absolutely be reconsidered! Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 15:07, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

That's good to hear. We'll just have to see how it turns out in practice. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 15:21, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

I want to make sure it's on someone's radar to also add this to Wikipedia:Main Page/Tomorrow and similar pages (e.g. the queue) given that this is week-based and not day like everything else? I think it would be good to do it before it "tomorrow" as staging.

I bring this up because /Tomorrow is used to implement cascading protection 1-day ahead of time (including for Commons images) so people can't e.g. sneak in vandalism right before midnight. Legoktm (talk) 18:03, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

@Chaotic Enby If Sunday is the start date the template should go up on the Main Page at about 00:00 18 October UTC. So you or another administrator will need to add it then. NewAccount7295 (talk) 22:52, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

Well if the goal is to have it go live at exactly midnight UTC I would suggest putting in the code ahead of time, just conditionally wrapped by a parser function. But it wasn't clear to me that was what was desired. Legoktm (talk) 23:28, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

I've added it to Wikipedia:Main Page/Tomorrow. I'm okay with putting in the code ahead of time (the condition can then safely be removed tomorrow), although it won't be in sync with the width rebalancing (a minor issue all things considered). Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 23:29, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

Pardon if this is an ignorant question, but isn't Main Page/Tomorrow the 17 Oct edition? I thought the intention was for it to go live on 18 Oct. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 23:33, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

Main Page/Tomorrow is mostly there to cascade-protect things in advance (meaning, everything transcluded on it gets automatically protected before it moves on to the Main Page). However, content on that page doesn't automatically replace the current Main Page at midnight, so there isn't a risk of AFI going live one day too soon because it was placed there before midnight UTC. In a few minutes, both the Main Page and Wikipedia:Main Page/Tomorrow will be updated automatically thanks to the templates they invoke, and the latter will have AFI alongside the rest of the 18 Oct content. Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 23:44, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

Ah, thank you very much for the explanation. I see, that it is just to preempt its posting and to protect it early. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 23:53, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

And also, the AFI article isn't the one that is protected, because that would defeat the purpose of AFI. WP:AGF is really showing here. Hason-LEK-SIN ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 01:26, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

Yeah. The technical reason for why it's not protected is because it will not be transcluded into the main page. FaviFake (talk) 01:27, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

AIUI {{#time:W}} will change on Mondays and not Sundays; is that what y'all want?

I checked the sandbox on as many devices/browsers as I have access to and it looks reasonable enough. This is exciting :) Legoktm (talk) 05:40, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

Great catch! I did not realize that, but yes, ISO 8601's weeks start on Monday. I think this would be fine (we might want to push back deployment by a day then?), but pinging @Chaotic Enby for their thoughts. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 05:45, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

I can't find any documentation about if {{CURRENTWEEK}} (which TWAFI currently uses for its automation) follows ISO 6801 at all. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 05:54, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

{{CURRENTWEEK}} seems to be implemented as $ts->format( 'W' ) so it would follow the same ISO 8601 week logic unless I am misreading something. taavi (talk!) 07:25, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

Nice catch! I assumed that it worked the same way as {{CURRENTDOW}} (which starts anew on Sunday and not Monday). The discrepancy is surprisingly resolved by looking at #time, which output the ISO 8601 week (W) and weekday (N), cycling from 1 to 7, alongside the {{CURRENTDOW}} weekday (w), cycling from 0 to 6.

Note that these only update alongside the page cache, with a maximum interval of 3600 seconds (one hour) between updates, so they might not make for the smoothest of transitions. Not sure how often the Main Page's cache is purged? Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 14:12, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

My understanding is that there are bots/scripts that'll purge the main page at midnight, in addition to the normal cache purges that come with DYK rotation. If that was what you were asking. Legoktm (talk) 14:37, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

Where is all this information about changing the Main Page documented? FaviFake (talk) 14:39, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

Great to hear! Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 16:48, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

@Chaotic Enby Is it specifically set to go up on the Main Page at the beginning of tomorrow? NewAccount7295 (talk) 15:08, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

For now, it's not set up to go anywhere as far as I know, but the plan is to set it up on the Main Page itself Sunday in the evening with code that activates to display it at midnight on Monday. Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 16:49, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

I think it would be best to actually delay the deployment until Monday. Looking at the AFI pages, it looks like it also starts weeks on Monday, so I think that instead of starting AFI on Sunday we should start it on Monday. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 16:20, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

(commment moved at 14:53, 19 October 2026 (UTC))

Can we please keep this thread focused on the technical implementation and instead make comments about (lack of) notification elsewhere? Legoktm (talk) 14:46, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

 Done, they have been ...

Moved to #Complaints about the RfC itself

 – FaviFake (talk) 14:52, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Complaints about the RfC itself

Moved from the section above

 – FaviFake (talk) 14:51, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

I love that this is coming to the main page. However, even as a long-time editor, I think the main page should be oriented to readers more than us editors. The encyclopedia here is for the readership, after all. So, I would suggest putting this block beneath "In the news" and "On this day". the Stefen 𝕋ower 05:02, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

The position seems to be pretty set-in-stone per the RfC linked above, as that position had the most support. That isn't to say that it can't be changed, but doing so would likely involve more discussion. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 05:24, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

Hmmm, then my next suggestion is for Wikipedians to be better informed about current RfCs, but I'm not the first to whine about that. :) At any rate, I'm glad to see this coming to the main page. the Stefen 𝕋ower 05:27, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

You can subscribe to the Feedback request service to receive a notification when a new RfC about a topic you are interested is created. Alternatively, you can add {{cent}} to your watchlist. FaviFake (talk) 12:06, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

On further consideration, having read much of the RfC, and realizing a lot of nominated articles (including one I nominated) have been summarily removed from consideration, I am withdrawing my above support for this effort. Slapping the faces of many editors to build this new feature is frankly repulsive. the Stefen 𝕋ower 08:01, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

If TWAFI isn’t performing well on the main page (e.g. few new accounts are actually editing the week’s article) then its placement could always be reconsidered at a later date. Maybe after 10 weeks? Some1 (talk) 09:33, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

As the person who implemented that change, I'd like to point out that the project has few active participants, so I made practically all my changes under WP:BOLD. If anyone wants to WP:BRD my changes, feel free - we do have more than a week before we need another article. 7amiþ = reform(solidarity).__init__(t, c) 15:46, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

The issue is that the criteria is getting stricter and stricter. I understand how you feel, but the entire project shouldn't have to go because of that. This does need to be resolved though. NewAccount7295 (talk) 16:05, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

Two questions: where was the width rebalancing discussed? And, on this confectionary TWAFI specifically, why do we have a bullet point for re-ordering the already chronological history section to be chronological? Putting an encouragement at useless edits to 6 million people (I would have put the latter at errors but there is no section for TWAFI). 1brianm7 (talk) 03:04, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

For your first question: It is true that changing the balancing percentages wasn't discussed, although I think it was necessary to resolve the imbalance at least partially. Compare the current imbalance to how it looks with the old percentages, and it won't look very good.

For your second question: Good idea to add a section at Errors for this. I'm not a sysop so I can't change the wording. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 03:12, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

Whose idea even was this? I use wikipedia fairly regularly and this came out of nowhere; if there was some sort of comment period, it wasn't well displayed to the average user. Also, I have some reservations about it displacing ITN and OTD to explicitly show off a less-than-perfect article on the main page. Joseph Zadeh (talk) 02:05, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Adding this week's article for improvement to the Main page. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 02:08, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

The discussion is very, very scant in comparison to a major change on the front page visited millions of times a day. wound theology◈ 05:35, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

This was overall a bad idea. Not that creating an AFI box was a bad idea, but implementing it with very little input from the userbase in proportion to the importance of the article was a bad idea. We get notifications and such for admin requests, so why not a major change to the front page? I for one do not like that the news has been pushed down for what is ostensibly a reverse featured article. I and many other people read the news blurbs when I first log on to Wikipedia. This sort of action is why new editors feel like there is a WP:CABAL. wound theology◈ 05:39, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

We tried to implement it as close as possible to the RfC result. The closer found that consensus was to place it above ITN, so that's where we placed it. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 05:50, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Of course, the consensus was weak for that spot. However, it seemed most logical to put it in the place that the RfC had the most support for, and then once it was there for a bit and people gave feedback, we could revisit it. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 05:53, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

There were what, 100 people or so who participated in the RfC, which includes B votes and non-voters? To change a page which receives 6 million views daily, and has 130,193 page watchers? It's just insane to me that so little input could so drastically change the very face of our project. wound theology◈ 06:46, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

The discussion was open for more than a month, and advertised on channels such as {{centralized discussion}}. However, the low participation in the discussion was acknowledged, with the closing statement specifying that the decisions reached in this RfC may be ripe for revisiting in a few months for that reason.

At some point, when there just isn't as much input as we'd like in a widely advertised discussion, we have to bite the bullet and make a first change, which in turn may attract more people into a follow-up discussion on how to reposition ourselves and make adjustments to the original findings. Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 07:50, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Again, I get a notification for administrator elections and proposals all the time, which are a routine and necessary part of the wiki's function. The fact that we can't do something similar for something far more impactful to everyday editors and daily readers is insane. wound theology◈ 08:00, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

But it did send centralized discussion notifications (not sure about watchlist notifications though)? However, these notifications were sent back in July, when the change was discussed, and the implementation lagged by a few months. Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 08:27, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

There were no watchlist notices. But TBH, would using that be overkill? Then again we are making changes to the very visible Main Page, so... Hason-LEK-SIN ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 12:36, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

​There are dozens of similarly significant changes being proposed every month. For the TWAFI proposal, every possible venue was used (including RFC, CENT, VPP, and WT:MAIN). If you are not set up to receive notifications from any of these, then we can't really do anything about it. FaviFake (talk) 08:44, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

If that is the case, then it shows a major problem with the way that editors are informed of significant changes. Clearly we have the infrastructure to do better than this. wound theology◈ 09:22, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

> every possible venue was used

The editor in question mentioned getting pings for administration elections. Clearly, not every venue was used if they didn't receive a ping for this. ~2026-55973-77 (talk) 10:28, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

​They did not receive a talk page message because they were likely not subscribed to the Feedback request service for Wikipedia proposals. 99% of registered accounts couldn't care less about these changes, that's why interested editors need to opt in.

And you don't even need to subscribe to anything in order to view CENT. FaviFake (talk) 11:45, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

I was not aware the FFS even existed and I've been editing Wikipedia most of my life. Again, this just shows a major problem with the way editors are informed of significant changes. wound theology◈ 19:05, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Thanks! Where could we have advertised it in a way that you would've noticed? FaviFake (talk) 19:13, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

When I check my watchlist, I see the following:

I don't vote in administrator elections nor do I read The Signpost, so I haven't opted-in to either of these. If there were a similar notification, something like "There is a RfC discussing a major change to the Main Page" would have caught my eye and I would have certainly participated. wound theology◈ 19:32, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

I never check my watchlist, so I never knew that there were watchlist notifications myself... 7amiþ = reform(solidarity).__init__(t, c) 19:45, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Fascinating. I’ve never seen those - from looking, it seems like that’s because I have my language set to EN-GB instead of just EN. I should probably change that . Chorchapu (talk | edits) 19:58, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Yes, this has been an issue for several years. FaviFake (talk) 19:58, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Here's the problem, as I see it. A major change should be advertised in a place that gets at least about as many views as the place to be changed, so that (ideally) everyone seeing the place to be changed sees the proposed change. So... what page on Wikipedia has as many views as the Main Page (and is in scope)? 7amiþ = reform(solidarity).__init__(t, c) 19:18, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

At this point, honestly, just put WP:CENT on the Main Page. Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 20:08, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

I like being able to edit CENT too much, but, honestly, some form of curated CENT/newsletter might be nice in the "other areas of Wikipedia" section.

Certainly more useful than portals, and now there's a very prominent link to the Teahouse in the AFI section, we could remove it from that section there as well to make more space. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸 20:14, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Yep, I was being a bit hyperbolic but a version of it adapted for newcomers would be best. In general, we don't want to limit the ability of editors to update CENT, but having a protected "Main Page-friendly" version of it (that admins update once the main CENT is updated, while taking care to make the descriptions more accessible to newcomers) would be a good stopgap to keep the current fluidity while preventing vandalism on the Main Page. Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 20:46, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

XD Hason-LEK-SIN ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 23:11, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Really, wound theology? You started editing Wikipedia when you were nine (or younger)? — JohnFromPinckney (talk / edits) 22:45, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Yes. I am 27 years old and made my first edits on the account Runestatue (talk · contribs) in 2008, 18 years ago, when I had just turned 9. My edits were deleted as a WP:HOAX (talking about my micronation at the time), but in reality they were actually in good faith and I just lacked WP:COMPETENCY. I have edited on various accounts since then, I stuck with this one since it was the one I was using when I turned 18 and started taking Wikipedia more seriously. wound theology◈ 23:20, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

What was your micronation called? FaviFake (talk) 23:22, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

You can find it if you dig, but I'd prefer you didn't. It's a little bit like naked baby pictures for me. I was a very weird child (and a weird teenager, and a weird adult) and most of it is supremely embarrassing to me. wound theology◈ 23:29, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Wound theology: when visiting somebody else's user talk page, have you noticed messages like this? That's the feedback request service in action. There are two links to it in the edit summary, and two more in the text of the message, four in all - some might say that's three too many. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:50, 20 October 2026 (UTC)

Nope, I have not noticed it. wound theology◈ 09:35, 20 October 2026 (UTC)

Should we take another page from our beloved explainxkcd.com and put a notice on top of the Main Page when major discussions are underway? Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 12:11, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

That would certainly have helped. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 14:38, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Perhaps, but that banner idea itself would be a major change to the Main Page and where would you advertise its RfC? Truly a chicken and egg type of situation. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 16:32, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Agreed. This re-design significantly reduces my (and many others?) use of the main page. At work I could very quickly load the main page (despite work VPN servers being on the other side of the world) and right at the top see links to ongoing wars or significant events I need to have overview on. Now I have to scroll down and find links in a sea of links. But I guess for the diehard wiki editors this AFI section is important song congrats on your victory and making it worse for everyone else.Oathed (talk) 08:34, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

It's surprising that Oathed and others get so much out of ITN when it posts so little, ITN seems to average about one new blurb every other day and often goes for days without posting anything new. And many of these items are routine WP:ITN/R events while much of the novel news doesn't get covered. That's fine by several of the ITN regulars who keep asserting that ITN is not a news ticker and that reporting the news is not its function.

To keep up with the news, you'd get a lot more out of Portal:Current events. That posts about 20 news items per day which is about 40 times more than ITN. And it lists all the ongoing conflicts, elections, sporting events, etc. in a more comprehensive and systematic way than ITN.

Andrew🐉(talk) 19:49, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

ITN (was) the first thing that readers saw on Wikipedia, on the top right corner of the page. Many readers, like it or not from us at the project, use ITN to get their news and read more about these topics. P:CE is not as prominently displayed, being located on a different page, and is less well-known to readers. I myself didn't know about it until after I started contributing to ITN. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 19:51, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

The daily readership of Portal:Current events is about 50K. It's not clear what the readership of ITN as it's part of the main page rather than being separate. The number that glance at it after loading the main page is uncertain. But the number that engage with it by clicking through to its articles seems to be of the order of 10K, which is comparable. For example, the readership of 2026 Bangkok floods jumped from about 5K to 20K when it was posted to ITN. The readership then fell away to about 1500 before it scrolled off. ITN doesn't lead millions of readers to articles -- just a few thousand. Andrew🐉(talk) 22:22, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Yes, even if there are some people who click through to the articles, as a comprehensive source of news it's utterly subpar,and I can't imagine very many people rely on it as their main window on the world. Not to mention that it's in contradiction to WP:NOTNEWS, which is supposed to he one our guiding principles in how to build the encyclopedia. I will probably vote to abolish ITN in the upcoming RFC, it generates far more heat than light, is a waste of editor time and resources, and won't be missed if it goes. Cheers  — Amakuru (talk) 22:34, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

I completely agree. There appears to be a dividing line in Wikipedia, where people who know a lot of the inside baseball say that ITN sucks and AFI is better, while the less-engaged reader likes seeing the news and is completely blind to things like P:CE. Joseph Zadeh (talk) 05:19, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

Never saw this RfC advertised. My 2 cents is to move the ITN back to its original position. A reverse featured article taking up that much space on the Main Page is far less valuable than providing brief, informative news blurbs for readers.  Spy-cicle💥  ^Talk? 00:33, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

An RfC is likely coming at some point in the future. I suppose the biggest lesson is to advertise it more widely. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 00:42, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

When there's a TfD, we put a little notice in small print at the top of the template advertising the TfD. What if we did this with the Main Page templates when they have RfCs? It could just be a little grey note at the top or bottom linkng to the RfC, without being too obtrusive. It would allow readers to be aware of ongoing discussions affecting the Main Page, and it would also serve to advertise it to editors who don't check the likes of CENT and the FRS. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 00:49, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

I can see some advantages to doing that. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸 00:52, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

There's also an ITN RfC coming up, so if this sort of notice were to happen it could be used there as well. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 01:01, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

@GreenLipstickLesbian and Axolitl: I've made a mockup at Template:Article for improvement/sandbox. Of course, it will need some copyediting and such, but what do you think about it in general? Chorchapu (talk | edits) 02:04, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Oh, and mark my words, the RfC for ITN has just started. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 02:17, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Also agree with a TfD-like notice on ITN for the ongoing RfC. Really like your mockup of the notice! Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 04:36, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Ah, now I can see it! Looks good for me, too. Good solution to the "I wasn't informed" problem. BTW, anyone else getting 503s left and right? I tried to thank CE but couldn't.nvm there's a topic right at the bottom of the page.  Self-trout 7amiþ = reform(solidarity).__init__(t, c) # Leave a talkback, TWAfI's wild rn 04:44, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

I messed with it a bit to make it a bit more similar to TfD notices. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 04:54, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Yes, that looks great! Do we want to deploy it, for both the ITN mega-RfC right now and the AFI RfC in a few weeks? Chorchapu (talk | edits) 11:51, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

I think we should deploy it for the AFI RfC. NewAccount7295 (talk) 14:20, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Why AFI but not ITN? The ITN reform RfC will (hopefully) have effects visible to the Main Page and could benefit from the input of readers. If not for this reform RfC, I think we should definitely use it for the abolition RfC in a few months if that ends up happening. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 14:24, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

If you want it can be used for the ITN RfC as well. I was just saying we should at least deploy it on the AFI one. NewAccount7295 (talk) 14:26, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Oh yes, sorry. I misunderstood. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 14:28, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Probably both! The change is relatively minor, and serves to get more input for broader changes, so I don't think we should be bogged down into a whole discussion to deploy it. Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 14:58, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

See {{In the news/sandbox}} and Wikipedia:Main Page/sandbox. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 15:15, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

When comparing page views for the Main Page with even the TFA average, the clear conclusion is that if readers have been telling us anything for many years now, it's that they'd be perfectly happy if we replaced the entirety of the Main Page with a simple search box.

But a lot of contributors are here primarily for Main Page activities, and again the overwhelming number of readers don't care at all about what's on the main page, so the value question is going to be more what more encourages people to contribute. Difficult to come up with a suitable assessment criteria for that, and very little data anyway.

Aesthetically it strikes me as a little off, but that may just be because I'm not used to it yet. From a web design perspective the entire model is so dated that any assessment based on contemporary criteria will grade both options rather low. ~2026-46960-97 (talk) 16:21, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Preparing for a short-notice security update to our services

Hey everyone – due to a critical security advisory about the PHP language (which we depend on), many Wikimedia services are going to be affected. We are hoping to avoid downtime to the wikis, but some supporting tools and services are unfortunately going to be impacted. This is a complex operation on short notice and we are still figuring out the details. More information will come later this week. Johan (WMF) (talk) 21:55, 20 October 2026 (UTC)

Some tools (not using PHP) are now back up and working. You can see more at wikitech:Talk:Incidents/2026-10-21 PHP security update/Community.

There's also an FAQ aimed at technical contributors at wikitech:Incidents/2026-10-21 PHP security update/Community#FAQs. Johan (WMF) (talk) 08:59, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for your patience as we've been dealing with this security issue. It's been a lot of hard work, for the Wikimedia technical community and the web in general.

Toolforge and Cloud VPS have been back up since last Thursday, 22 October. Many key tools the editing communities depend on have been gradually restored.

Some tools need the respective volunteer maintainers to restart them. Others still need to upgrade to a patched PHP version – some tools were using older versions of PHP which are not supported by the recent security patches, and these will require maintainers to carefully upgrade to a more recent version, which might require additional effort to make them compatible. You can follow the work on Wikitech. Johan (WMF) (talk) 15:57, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

reFill down?

Resolved

 – Restored. https://refill.toolforge.org/ –Novem Linguae (talk) 20:35, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

I just keep getting a no healthy upstream error? GiantSnowman 20:53, 22 October 2026 (UTC)

Likely #Toolforge and Cloud VPS temporarily offline. Shubinator (talk) 21:00, 22 October 2026 (UTC)

All my non-PHP tools on toolforge required a webservice restart to get rid of that error. Refill looks like it's node.js based, so Novem Linguae probably just has to give it a good kick to get it running again. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 21:51, 22 October 2026 (UTC)

It uses a php image, with vue.js as the front end framework. Ill try a restart when im back at a computer –Novem Linguae (talk) 02:29, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

Restart didn't work. I think Toolforge is up but PHP is still down. Details of what I tried at phab:T441973#12464513. Will try again another time. –Novem Linguae (talk) 05:47, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

Even though Toolforge is back up, for the most part, AIUI the owners of each tool/bot still need to update their individual tool to get it working again. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 22:23, 22 October 2026 (UTC)

For non-PHP tools nothing needs to be done other than a restart. For PHP tools, if they're using a patchable version it should be similar once WMCS updates the images over the next few days, but otherwise tool owners will need to update their scripts to support a more modern version of PHP. That being said, for non-PHP tools, this is a good opportunity for tool owners to update them to the latest versions of their languages. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 23:41, 22 October 2026 (UTC)

OK thanks - didn't even think the PHP issue would affect this! GiantSnowman 08:11, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

It's up now. I put in a temporary non-PHP server for the static files. – SD0001 (talk) 10:47, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

excel2wiki

Resolved

 – Restored. https://excel2wiki.toolforge.org/ –Novem Linguae (talk) 20:38, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

The Excel-to-Wikitable tool on Toolforge is still down. When I copy a spreadsheet into the tool, it says no healthy upstream. Do I need to ask the owner of the tool when it will be available, or can that question be answered? Robert McClenon (talk) 05:18, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

I think Toolforge PHP is still disabled. We should circle back to this when the cloud-announce mailing list says that safe PHP versions on Toolforge have been restored. –Novem Linguae (talk) 05:50, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

I am the owner of a tool. That tool also says no healthy upstream. If you asked me when it will be available I wouldn't know the answer. I think owners are meant to add the tool to this list. I think that has already happened for Excel2Wiki Sean.hoyland (talk) 05:53, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

...apparently owners can now manually restart non-PHP tools themselves. Sean.hoyland (talk) 05:57, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

@Robert McClenon: excel2wiki is written in PHP, so I'm waiting on the new PHP images to be made available on Toolforge before I can re-enable it. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 14:12, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

It's back up, and I took the opportunity to rewrite it entirely in Javascript so there's no server-side processing or dependency on PHP. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 21:24, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

Comment on excel2wiki

As User:Ahecht notes, the tool has been rewritten. There is no longer a button to push to request the conversion. The conversion happens immediately on pasting the spreadsheet into the space. This is good, but is a surprise. Existing links to the tool work, but existing pages of the tool do not work, and must be relaunched from links. Thank you. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:29, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

Wikipedia library

Resolved

 – Restored. https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/ –Novem Linguae (talk) 20:40, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

I'm a big user of the Wikipedia Library wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org which is not available currently. Same problem? Any timeline to fix it? Thanks.Bob (talk) 20:13, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

TWL is apparently now accessible, according to Dare2Leap's comment above. LightNightLights (talk • contribs) 20:22, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

Can confirm, the Wikipedia Library is fully active. Biologo-in-erba (talk) 20:24, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

Incorrectly shown difference between revisions on mobile

See this diff and select mobile view (this is on Wiktionary). From Line 88 onwards, it doesn't show that I moved the * {{pedia}} part (no yellow or blue highlighting) under a new heading, it shows two unaltered * {{pedia}}. There is also an extra space after both headings. Is this normal behaviour? Aloysius Jr (talk) 10:18, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

@Aloysius Jr: It's a bug I reported in March in phab:T419530. There are supposed to be curved arrows where you moved * {{pedia}} from and to. The arrows appear in desktop view but not in mobile. The necessary indicators to make the arrows are there so it could be fixed locally in wikt:MediaWiki:Minerva.css with the code I posted at Phabricator. There may still be many users who don't notice the arrows or understand their meaning but it would help. Maybe we should also add my fix to our own MediaWiki:Minerva.css when Phabrictor shows no sign of work. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:05, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

You have to select "Inline" in the desktop diff to see how mobile should have looked. Here is a local example where {{norse-myth-stub}} was moved down. I personally see the arrows in mobile because I added this to Special:MyPage/minerva.css:

.mw-diff-movedpara-left::after, .rtl .mw-diff-movedpara-right::after {
  content: '↪' !important;
}

.mw-diff-movedpara-right::after, .rtl .mw-diff-movedpara-left::after {
  content: '↩' !important;
}

PrimeHunter (talk) 12:29, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

You have my gratitude! Aloysius Jr (talk) 21:15, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

Semantic search experiment on web

Hi all,

We’re sharing this update to let you know about the Reader Growth team’s upcoming experiment to test out bringing semantic search capabilities to the web version of Wikipedia.  This is part of our cross-platform initiative to make finding information easier on the wikis.

Semantic search, or natural language search, means retrieving information based on the meaning, concepts, or contextual relationships of someone’s query. Currently Wikipedia search does not support semantic search, and instead fully relies on lexical retrieval, which is based on exact search terms, or keyword matching.

Why we think this is important:

• Currently, only 0.8–2% of pageviews are from internal search. Compare this with the fact that 78% of reading sessions originate from external search engines, and 90% of those are from Google Search alone.
  • With the increased usage of AI summaries or chatbot answers, people are less likely to click through to the Wikipedia article in their search results.
• 4–7% of all search queries on Wikipedia are phrased as natural language questions (e.g. “What”, “Who”, “How”), even as people do searches in natural language more and more over time. We suspect this is because question-style searches like "Who invented planes?” or queries such as “Biggest city in South America” are significantly less successful at leading users to the right article compared to simple keyword-based searches.

Many readers currently default to external search engines or AI-powered tools to reach Wikipedia content, or even to get synthesized answers based on Wikipedia rather than starting their search here. With pageviews to Wikipedia on the decline, we have fewer readers to become invested in the platform and contribute to it. If we improve our on-platform search, we hope to encourage people to treat Wikipedia as a knowledge destination they visit directly. Making it easier for readers to find information during their first visits helps them experience Wikipedia as a place for discovery rather than just a background knowledge source reached through others.  

What we found on the apps:

This summer, the Apps team ran an experiment with adding semantic, or natural language, results to search, which were surfaced alongside traditional keyword results in a beta feature mode. Their experiment yielded 3.6 million search sessions from more than 300,000 readers, the first real evidence we now have of how people search Wikipedia when meaning-based results are available to them. They found that adding semantic results raised search engagement by 6.9–7.9% consistently across all four pilot Wikipedias, without harming overall app retention. Based on these promising results, we are ready to kick off experimentation on the web, alongside continuing explorations on the apps.

How web is different:

The apps and the web are different digital spaces. On the apps, search is already highly utilized. As mentioned above, internal search accounts for under 2% of pageviews on web, so a better web search experience will be limited in impact until readers can find the search in the first place. That is a discoverability problem as much as a retrieval one, and it needs its own work (coming soon). We will be brainstorming in this space and encourage you to share your ideas and thoughts with us.

However, there is progress that can be made now on the web. In parallel with the app experiments, we will make semantic search retrieval available to a sample of readers in a test so that we can start seeing how web readers react to semantic search.

How the experiment will work:

We are planning an A/B test on desktop and mobile web for 1% of English Wikipedia in mid November, allowing us to see how web readers react to semantic search results.

The test's primary success metric will be whether readers use search more after interacting with the semantic search results. We will also track whether readers are more likely to come back to Wikipedia after trying semantic search, as well as qualitative feedback that readers give about semantic search results.

The test will be turned off in mid December. If early results are successful based on this criteria, we hope to return here and discuss a limited rollout for December.

This test will be shown to readers typing in the search bar, who will see the existing "Search for pages containing..." call to action (CTA) as usual below the typeahead suggestions. Clicking that CTA or hitting enter on their query will take readers in the test's treatment group to an advanced search results page that will include semantic results.

The information retrieval project page has a ton more information about all of our thinking, research, and progress in this area.

Please check it out if you’re interested in learning more. We would love to hear thoughts and feedback from you, particularly around risks and edge cases. EBlackorby-WMF (talk) 20:25, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

Is there a way to disable this if I actually want to search for specific terms in articles? If I click thumbs down to "are these results useful" will that make them go away, or will it just be logged in a database somewhere? --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 21:32, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

Hi @Ahecht, good question! During the test, the usual lexical results will be available under the semantic results, and there will also be a link back into Special:Search at the bottom of the page. EBlackorby-WMF (talk) 16:01, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

I also hope the ability to limit searches to keyword-based is maintained, as these can be useful for editing (eg. finding places a wikilink might help). However, thank you for the statistics on natural language searches. Is it possible to somehow opt-in and test semantic searches ourselves? CMD (talk) 23:13, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

@Chipmunkdavis, thanks for the note. We are definitely conscious of the need to maintain a high-powered keyword-based search, so noted on that request.

For testing, we don't yet have a way to test now but we will share the URL param for the treatment when we go live here on this post. EBlackorby-WMF (talk) 16:06, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

I think it would be good to have both options: the semantic search for readers to find information to answer their questions, and the keyword/filter search for power users and editors to find pages with precise criteria.

As for sharing the URL parameter, I'm not sure what your current practice is, but to ensure that your data is statistically representative, I would recommend distinguishing between the users who are given the treatment randomly, and those who purposefully go to test it, especially since they're likely to have different usage patterns.

Solomon Ucko (talk) 16:14, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

Navigation templates break the "What links here" tool

When someone clicks Special:WhatLinksHere from the sidebar of a Wikipedia article, they expect to find the pages which link to the page, or one of its redirects. But, for many pages, what they get instead is mostly noise consisting of all pages transcluding some navigation template, among which the actual inbound wikilinks are hiding and difficult to find. In my opinion this is a serious bug which makes the "What links here" tool cumbersome and frustrating to use for many pages, sometimes to the point that it is basically unusable.

Instead, the "What links here" page should only show linking pages for which the link is directly contained in the source, excluding the content of template transclusions where the template directly contained the wikilink. The template itself should show up in the "What links here" list, but we don't need dozens to hundreds of list items for a single inbound link defined in a template.

This should not affect links generated by other types of template. (E.g. if someone uses the {{slink}} template to link to a section, that should not be excluded).

(The example that came up recently was a new user complaining that they couldn't easily find the articles linking to Intersecting chords theorem because it is included in the navigation footer template Template:Ancient Greek mathematics, which is transcluded by hundreds of pages.) –jacobolus (t) 17:32, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

While we're here, it would also be extremely helpful if the "What links here" tool would separate inbound links pointed at specific sections of the linked-to page, and explicitly show which anchor each inbound link was pointed at. –jacobolus (t) 17:36, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Update: After running a search, I see that people have been complaining about this over and over again since 2004. Here's a partial list of past complaints/requests about this issue:

How can we get the WMF / Mediawiki developers to fix this bug? –jacobolus (t) 17:52, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Sounds like this community wish (?) Ponor (talk) 18:01, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Or m:Community Wishlist/W338 Ponor (talk) 18:03, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

This has been a known problem for longer than I've been editing navboxes (1 August 2009). --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:15, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Yeah, hee's a complaint from 2004. Among dozens if not hundreds of others since then. It's absurd that this has never been fixed, since it is obvious to everyone that it fundamentally breaks the "What links here" tool. –jacobolus (t) 18:24, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

The links table does not distinguish between links that come directly from the wikitext for the page and those that come via templates. This is because the links table is updated after all templates have been expanded, and so are essentially part of the final wikitext. But consider also that links may also be made by templates that are not navboxes - for example I might put {{tlx|not done}} which makes a link - is that link due to the template, or due to the wikitext of this page? In short, how would the links table generator know the difference? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:55, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Templates such as navboxes which always include a specific wikilink as part of their output are clearly different from templates which generate a wikilink based on their inputs, and should not be treated the same way.

One possibility would be to have some kind of dedicated marker for templates such as navboxes (a start could even be as simple as flagging any template built on top of {{Navbox}}) which causes them to be excluded by whatever process is building and analyzing pages to compute the link tree. –jacobolus (t) 19:50, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

How about a hybrid approach, similar to what we currently do for redirects? This might be more complicated to implement, though, since the target page can be variable.

• Template:Section link
  • [usages that result in a link to the page in question]
• Template:Navbox foo
  • ...
• ...

Solomon Ucko (talk) 16:21, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

This should not affect links generated by other types of template. (E.g. if someone uses the {{slink}} template to link to a section, that should not be excluded). Already you're realizing why "fixing" this would be more difficult than it seems. Anomie⚔ 18:58, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

It may be difficult to fix, but the current state, since the beginning of Wikipedia, has been profoundly broken. It's ridiculous for Mediawiki developers to just mark this as WONTFIX and the let thousands of people repeatedly hit the same catastrophic bug over and over again until the end of time. –jacobolus (t) 19:44, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Meh, I mean, it's not necessarily trivial, but I assume there's an HTML class used by most navboxes; exclude links coming from that (or make a new class), or preferably a box to tick as an option of whether to include them or not.

Yes, the tree view mentioned in Meta:Community_Wishlist/W185 would be more complicated to implement, but I suspect that simpler fix would cover most people's concerns. LittlePuppers (talk) 19:52, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

User:PrimeHunter/Source links.js finds links which are made with wikilink syntax [[...]] in the source text. On Intersecting chords theorem it produces Source links. It doesn't find links made with templates which specify the page name like {{slink}} and {{tl}}. It uses JavaScript to produce the link but wikitext can also do it so we could add such a link to MediaWiki:Linkshere which is displayed on Special:WhatLinksHere/Intersecting chords theorem. {{Source links}} makes a similar but currently not identical search to the script. {{Source links|Intersecting chords theorem}} produces Source links. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:05, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Although not a navigation template (but another form of template), this is the exact reason why using the IMDb template on actresses links to IMDb (identifier) which in turn redirects to IMDb. Same with good articles when clicking on the green circle on the top right; it leads to Wikipedia:Good articles* (with an asterisk at the end) rather than just Wikipedia:Good articles. And then you have links to periodicals like The Guardian often using a citation template, but it would break the 'what links here' feature if one isn't used. But anyway, I do agree that the feature shouldn't include links from navigation templates, but its just quite difficult to implement. Because of that, I'm surprised it isnt currently listed at Wikipedia:Perennial proposals JuniperChill (talk) 10:22, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

I'm apparently unable to edit from my user account

I am User:IGAEB. Something appears to be wrong with my account, and I don't know what the situation is. I log in, then whenever I make an edit, it says I'm logged out. It then posts my edit as an edit from a temporary account, as it has done here. Whenever I try to edit protected pages, it says I can't do it because I'm not logged in (even though I am an extended confirmed editor). One WP how to page said that it might work if I cleared my cookies, but I did that and the problem persists. And, this is not just my computer -- the same thing has happened when I attempt to make edits from many computers. Often, when I edit, it says, "You are centrally logged in as IGAEB. Reload the page to apply your user settings." But, when I refresh the page, it does the same thing. How do I edit from my account? What it the problem, and how do I fix it? ~2026-56871-02 (talk) 20:04, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Are you logged out when you click edit or when you save the edit? Does it happen if you select "Always enable safe mode" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering? Does it happen at other wikis like commons:Commons:Sandbox? PrimeHunter (talk) 20:12, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

When I click "Edit source" it says I am still logged in. But then, when I click "publish changes" it says I'm logged out. I did log in and then went to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering and I selected "Always enable safe mode." But then, after I clicked "save" on that page it again said I was logged out again. So, apparently, this is a Catch-22. I can't select "Always enable safe mode." Nothing like this has ever happened to me on Wikipedia before. It started happening two nights ago (Thursday). Then, on Friday, I was again able to edit under my user account. But then on Friday afternoon, I was again unable to edit from my user account. This morning (Saturday morning) I could at first edit from my user account. But, later today, I couldn't edit from my user account.

This all started just after I made an edit to Wiktionary. I don't know if that did something to cause this, but I'd like to be able to again edit from User:IGAEB. An admin said I wasn't blocked, so I don't know what the problem is.

But now a new problem has arisen. I tried to post this comment using a temporary account. But it said it couldn’t create a temporary account due to throttling. So, I created this new account just so I could post this comment. I believe that this is a legitimate use of an alternative account, but I would really like my old account back so I could just stick with one account. IGAEB2 (talk) 22:04, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Safemode is automatically enabled while you are at Special:Preferences so if it happens there then I guess it wouldn't help to always enable safemode. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:42, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Then what do I do? IGAEB2 (talk) 23:57, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Could it be due to Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts/WikiBreak Enforcer? Hason-LEK-SIN ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 02:05, 25 October 2026 (UTC)

They don't have any user scripts. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 12:36, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

I just successfully made an edit; I made this edit. So apparently my editing ability has been restored. I'm not sure this will continue, however; in the past few days, I have made some edits, and then later on I was unable to do so. IGAEB (talk) 02:30, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

However, a few minutes after I made the above mentioned edit, it wouldn't let me make any more edits. Every time I would try to edit, a message would pop up saying something like "Server error HTTP 503 forbidden." It wouldn't let me log out either, when I would try to log out, it would also say Server error HTTP 503 forbidden. But, when I closed the page, it did log me out. But I still couldn't make edits while logged out; even while logged out, when I tried to edit with a temporary account, it also said Server error HTTP 503 forbidden. Then, I tried to log in under my makeshift alternative account, User:IGAEB2. When I tried to edit from that account, it still said Server error HTTP 503 forbidden. But, if this post gets posted, it will show that I can edit now.

I've not had this happen before. Does anyone know what might be causing this, and how I can stop it from happening in the future? IGAEB (talk) 13:28, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Since you may not be able to make edits even after switching accounts, it sounds like a device issue.
Have you tried doing your edits on another device and/or internet connection?

• If you can edit from your phone but not your computer it's likely your device.
• If you can't edit from both your computer and phone, and both are connected to the same Wi-Fi network, then it's likely your network's firewall is blocking Wikipedia.
  • Try whitelisting *.wikipedia.org.

Hason-LEK-SIN ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 14:14, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

"File missing" in recent uploads

Initially noticed at Commons (see c:Commons:Village pump/Technical § "No file by this name exists") but also present for local uploads here, so probably a general Mediawiki issue; and I'm also reporting this issue here, as local audience is usually more active than at Commons.

If you go to the Gallery of new files and search for "File missing", you will notice several files that are "missing" but (temporarily) reappear if their description page is purged. Somebody with access to technical information, please see what happens with such files and create a ticket at Phabricator (I don't have enough information and reproducibility to do this myself). — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 22:13, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

I have noticed this with my recently uploaded file at File:Raccoin Coin Pusher Roguelike screenshot.jpg. In CodeMirror's preview, it also appears as a red link, but renders fine in the actual article. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 04:41, 25 October 2026 (UTC)

I was just about to ask about this myself. Yesterday I uploaded File:NZ Outdoors and Freedom Party logo.png. The description page says "No file by this name exists...", but it's showing up fine on the NZ Outdoors & Freedom Party page. I uploaded a replacement image, and that seemed to fix it briefly, but now it's back to saying it doesn't exist on the description page.-Radicuil (talk) 22:57, 25 October 2026 (UTC)

Recent edits to HeLa...

Could some of you experts please take a look at this recent edit to this article. It's already a Rated C article but this anon sort-of added +53,289 bytes of content without any explanation. I think it's all the same as a previous version, but did they just re-jigger the content and move sections around? They also today changed {{Use mdy dates|date=December 2022}} to {{Use mdy dates|date=October 2015}}. - Shearonink (talk) 01:27, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

Looks like they copypasted a previous version onto the current one. Not sure what the policy here is. ғѳmɑɭʱɑυե (Any pronouns)ᵀᵃˡᵏ 02:12, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

Another editor has removed the duplicated content. I suppose originally the duplicated content was just a mistake. There also doesn't seem to be a good reason to have changed the 2022 date to 2015, so I changed that back to 2022. - Shearonink (talk) 04:06, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

When receiving a large number of notifications, only 25 are shown when I click the "Your notices" tab

I'm sure this has been brought up before but I can't seem to find it from searching this page's archives. Say, I receive 40 notifications from 5 discussions, 8 replies in each. I will only see 25 of these, and replies from each discussion aren't able to be selected all at once. I have to tediously read the replies from, for example while I was sleeping, in little bits and pieces. This is very annoying and makes following lengthy discussions very difficult. Is this a known issue, and how can it be fixed? Chorchapu (talk | edits) 17:15, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

If you want to see more than 25 just click on the "All notifications" at the bottom left. KylieTastic (talk) 19:21, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

I know that, but then I can’t click to see them in groups. I have to read them one by one, and that’s really impractical for long discussions. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 19:22, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

This also annoys me and I was sure there had to be existing issues or old discussions. (AI disclaimer/warning) I got ChatGPT to look for issues; the two most relevant seem to be T317365 (Change maximum unread notifications allowed in notification tray dropdown from 25 to 200) and T145250 (Consider requesting more notifications if the popup only has bundles) (opened ten years ago!). —ClaudineChionh (she/her · talk · email) 20:06, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

Yes, those I believe are the problem I’m experiencing. Thanks very much for finding them. I do note that Community Wish intake is open right now; if this is a problem that many people seem to be experiencing I may submit a wish on this topic. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 20:21, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

If you submit a wish I'd vote for it and I don't think I'd be alone in that. —ClaudineChionh (she/her · talk · email) 20:27, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

It sounds like there’s support for such a wish. I’ll see about submitting it once I get home. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 20:43, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

@ClaudineChionh: I've just submitted it: meta:Community_Wishlist/W606. 21:54, 26 October 2026 (UTC) Chorchapu (talk | edits) 21:54, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

Request-an-account service is down

There is a pink banner at WP:Request an account marking the service as down. I learned of this from this discussion by a TA asking for help with an IP range block who tried but was unable to use the service. Mathglot (talk) 18:02, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

We know. Fallout from WP:PHP2SHELL. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 18:15, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

Oops; thanks. I guess this can be merged as another subsection. Meanwhile, is there one best resource to monitor to watch the response, given that Phab is down also? Mathglot (talk) 18:24, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

It's working again as of a few days ago: Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#c-Pppery-20261021151800-Pppery-20261021010200. Solomon Ucko (talk) 18:28, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

Thanks. Clarification: by "it", you mean Phabricator; WP:Request an account is still down. A propos of that: is an admin able to create an account without recourse to that service, so that this TA user could exceptionally get an account by going through a manual process with a particular admin, rather than through the service? Or do admins use that service as well to create accounts? Mathglot (talk) 18:47, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

@Mathglot Anyone can use Special:CreateAccount to create an account for others (just check the box to email a temporary password). You just need to be an admin, account creator, or event coordinator to do more than 6 in 24 hours. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 18:59, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

Great; thanks! Mathglot (talk) 02:17, 27 October 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-44

MediaWiki message delivery 18:54, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

Harv warnings at Cultural impact of Beyoncé

Reference #54 is a single ref# with Harv warnings for 8 of its 12 cites with "There is no link pointing to this citation. The anchor is named CITEREF" notices. Why? I can't figure out how to fix it so the article won't be in Category:Harv and Sfn no-target errors. Help appreciated with the warnings - trying to work on the orphaned Harv/Sfn errors of Nittle 2023 & Rivers 2017 in the meantime. Thanks - Shearonink (talk) 22:44, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

Did you mean reference #154? For those eight, did you try setting |ref=none? Have we not talked about this same issue before? Where are you seeing anchors named only 'CITEREF'? For references 133 (Nittle 2023) and 134 (Rivers 2017) there are no matching long-form references.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 23:06, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

Yes, I do run into this issue occasionally it is true. And sometimes I can fix it and sometimes the exact issue escapes me. Thanks for the hint, though, greatly appreciated. Already took care of the Harv errors, yes I know they did not have a complete citation to target. Had to run down the full source for the citation to fix the problem. - Shearonink (talk) 23:14, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

The CITEREF/Harv warnings only show up when the page is in editing mode. - Shearonink (talk) 23:19, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

I'm not sure that I believe that. When I look at this version of the article, reference 154 shows the eight warnings and references references 133 and 134 show the error messages. 'Editing mode', whatever that is, is not special.

You did not answer may question: Where are you seeing anchors named only 'CITEREF'?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 23:41, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

I didn't answer your question? I was giving an example of what the notices for the 8 refs had in common, but seeing as there's been some misunderstanding - here are the complete notices as they appeared before I "ref=none'd" them:

• For the Susan Haigh cite... Harv warning: There is no link pointing to this citation. The anchor is named CITEREFHaigh2024
• For the Savannah Taylor cite... Harv warning: There is no link pointing to this citation. The anchor is named CITEREFTaylor
• For the D. Mariah cite... Harv warning: There is no link pointing to this citation. The anchor is named CITEREFMariah2024.
• For the Constance Grady cite... Harv warning: There is no link pointing to this citation. The anchor is named CITEREFGrady2022.
• For the Caché McClay cite... Harv warning: There is no link pointing to this citation. The anchor is named CITEREFMcClay2024.
• For the Mesfin Fekadu cite... Harv warning: There is no link pointing to this citation. The anchor is named CITEREFFekadu2019
• For the Caspar Llewellyn Smith cite... Harv warning: There is no link pointing to this citation. The anchor is named CITEREFSmith2009.
• For the Taylor Bryant cite... Harv warning: There is no link pointing to this citation. The anchor is named CITEREFBryant2019.

There you go. - Shearonink (talk) 03:28, 27 October 2026 (UTC)

@Shearonink: These are warnings, not errors. They don't show up to logged-out users, and only show up to logged-in users who have certain preferences set. No action is required. If you want more detail, all that these warnings mean is that there are some {{Cite news}}/{{Cite magazine}}/{{Cite web}}/{{Cite news}} templates but there are no {{harvnb}}/{{sfn}} templates having the same surnames and year. This is not an issue. It would only be an issue if the article was set up to use WP:CITESHORT exclusively, like NBR 224 and 420 Classes, where it would highlight the inconsistent use of a long-form ref. However, by making this edit, you have suppressed the warnings, even for those without the appropriate settings. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:10, 27 October 2026 (UTC)

Yeah, I know they're not Errors, they're just warnings. Clearing up Harv errors & warnings is just my particular wiki-gnoming contribution these days, especially the errors since that funs afoul of verifability. Bunched/bundled refs with both errors & warnings do show up together in the same Category:Harv and Sfn no-target errors articles. - Shearonink (talk)

Listing very infrequently auto-archived pages?

Is there a tool or database page which lists Talk pages which have an autoarchiving config (for any bot), where the bot hasn't run for a very long time? (To list pages where archiving may be broken or which may not need autoarchiving at all due to long-term inactivity,) – Scyrme (talk/solidarity) 04:38, 27 October 2026 (UTC)

Easy enough to make one. How long is "a very long time"? (And which archiving bots are you interested in?) quarry:query/110613 has a proof of concept for User:Lowercase sigmabot III; the absolute oldest are 21 pages not archived since 3 November 2013, and the thousandth-oldest was archived on 14 February 2017. —Cryptic 05:04, 27 October 2026 (UTC)

Great! Anything that hasn't seen a bot run in over 10 years seems like a good place to start, though setting an exact age cut-off isn't really important and fetching the 1000 oldest regardless of age works too. All these pages that haven't seen a bot run since 2013/14/15/16 are exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for.

I'm particularly interested in Lowercase sigmabot and Cluebot, as they're the most commonly used and I'm more familiar with how to fix them if the reason for them not being archived in ages in due to something on the page preventing them from running as intended. – Scyrme (talk/solidarity) 07:34, 27 October 2026 (UTC)

quarry:query/110629 for tagged pages that have never been edited by Lowercase sigmabot III. The ones that nobody's edited since 2007 are probably more of a problem than the ones edited in the last week; but there's no way for this tool to tell when the template was added, so some of the later pages on the list might have had broken archiving for a long time too.

quarry:query/110630 and quarry:query/110631 for the equivalents for User:ClueBot III. —Cryptic 15:10, 27 October 2026 (UTC)

Thanks so much! – Scyrme (talk/solidarity) 15:38, 27 October 2026 (UTC)

Notifications not being cleared and "Mark all as read" button missing

503 and API errors

Some sort of server issue is causing 503 and API errors when performing a variety of operations right now. Staff are aware of the issue and working on it. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:47, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Thank you, Jonesey95. I thought it was an issue with Twinkle but now the top of the article doesn't have a Page tab on the regular menu either so I don't see a way to delete pages. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 03:53, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

• That sort of answers my question about HTTP 503 errors. I think I will do something else for a while and then come back. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:55, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Thanks, thought it was me and my connection when I kept getting 503s on previewing my changes, but other sites were working great with no issues. Will come back tomorrow. Zinnober9 (talk) 03:59, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

I'm still having problems trying to carry out tasks with red error messages about the API. Sometimes if I do the same edit two or three times, it works but other times, I just have to move on. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 04:18, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

I have been encountering these kind of errors too. EnDeeDoubleYou (talk) 05:09, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Outdated thumbnail in file history

Hello, the thumbnail for the latest version of this file shows the previous image, even though opening the revision shows the correct one.

File (Elektronika 60) screenshot.png

Could someone help fix this? Thanks! Carloseow (talk) 13:35, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

This might be related to § "File missing" in recent uploads above. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 14:19, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Template generating categories mess

Can someone familiar with overly convoluted templates have a look at Template:Category U.S. State elections by decade/core and fix a problem? The US elections categories are being renamed en masse, basically from STATENAME elections to elections in STATENAME (see Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Working/Large) but they're populated by messy templates and attempts to adjust them are creating oddities - see Category:1912 elections in Alabama for one of numerous such cases where the template generates category names like "1910s elections i elections", "Elections in elections i by year" and "1912 in elections i". Thanks in advance. Timrollpickering (talk) 14:51, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Also Template:Category U.S. State elections by year/core is a potential pain. Timrollpickering (talk) 15:00, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

I think the problem is the lines | place = {{{place|{{#invoke:string|sub|{{BASEPAGENAME}}|5|-10}}}}} and | year = {{{year|{{#invoke:string|sub|{{PAGENAME}}|1|4}}}}} in Template:Category U.S. State elections by year (and the similar ones in "by decade"). I'll see if I can make it a bit more robust. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 15:12, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

I have done quick (non-robust) fixes to both pages that seem to be working. There will be some red categories until the category moves are complete, but the category names should all make sense. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:13, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

The one problem I can spot involves the ones with "(state)" in the name - see Category:1953 New York (state) elections and Category:1953 Georgia (U.S. state) elections for examples. I don't know if this will fix when those ones are renamed. Timrollpickering (talk) 15:18, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Seems to be fixed when I moved Category:1996 elections in New York (state) manually. Timrollpickering (talk) 15:23, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

We can't have the old set of categories and the new set working at the same time. Old category names will be broken until all of the pages have been moved by the bot. I have also adjusted {{Category U.S. State elections by decade}}, which will break existing pages until all of the category pages have been moved. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:29, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

The bot is working at a rate of very roughly one state per hour, and there are 50+ states and territories, so these updates might take a day or three. Pinging Bearcat, who will probably notice. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:38, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

@Jonesey95, Timrollpickering: I implemented a much more robust fix that can handle either format ("#### elections in Foo" and "#### Foo elections") and correctly handles "(state)" and "(U.S. state)".--Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 16:29, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

There are indeed a pile of related categories on the current run of Special:WantedCategories, but entirely so far of the "[State] special elections" → "Special elections in [State]" variety that seems to be handled by a different template than the one under discussion, specifically {{United States House of Representatives special elections in state category header}}. Could somebody more versed in template coding than I am look into that template, since it doesn't appear to have been updated in conjunction with this? (It hasn't been edited at all since May.)

I'd also like to note that at least officially, we have a rule that template-generated categories aren't supposed to be speedy-moved by bots, precisely to avoid pages being left sitting in the redlinked old categories due to the template not being updated — but when this has been raised in the past, the maintainer of the bot that does speedy moves complained about the added burden that would be placed on his shoulders if he had to verify the template-generatedness of every category before throwing it to the bot. (Yet the added burden that's placed on my shoulders as Cleaner-Upper-of-Redlinked-Categories if this isn't done seems not to be a concern at all, as if his time is more valuable than mine?) So could we at least compromise on a new rule that the bot has to speedy-move categories with a categoryredirect from the old name instead of deleting the old names outright, and then the old category can be deleted after we've been able to confirm that it's been fully emptied instead of before? Bearcat (talk) 16:49, 28 October 2026 (UTC)