User talk:DMacks/Archive 68  | This is an archive of past discussions with User:DMacks. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
- By the way, you usually mention me in your edits. Rafael! (He, him) • talk • guestbook • projects 00:00, 13 July 2025 (UTC)
- Yes, I usually tag whomever's comment or edit I'm discussing. They might want to respond, provide additional ideas, learn a guideline for future reference, or use the idea in other places themselves. Wikipedia works best when people collaborate, rather than just doing something each on their own. DMacks (talk) 00:14, 13 July 2025 (UTC)
MediaWiki message delivery 20:05, 14 July 2025 (UTC)
Hi DMacks, it's been 13 years since you placed this article under semi-protection due to BLP violations, and I think it's time to unprotect it. Now that Coleman's been dead for almost three years, the reason for the protection no longer applies here. BriDash9000 (talk) 17:30, 15 July 2025 (UTC)
- Sounds reasonable. I unprotected it but will watchlist it for a while. DMacks (talk) 00:44, 16 July 2025 (UTC)
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 Translation Suggestions feature in the Content Translation tool now has another level of article filters added to the "... More" category. Translators who use the Suggestions feature can now select and receive article suggestions that are customized to geographical locations of their interest using the new "Regions" filter. [4]
- Administrators can now limit "Add a Link" to newcomers. The "Add a Link" Structured Task helps new account holders start editing, but some communities have requested the ability to restrict it to its intended audience: newcomers. Administrators can configure this setting within the Community Configuration feature.
 View all 29 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- For AbuseFilter editors on some wikis, it is now possible to filter edits based on the RevertRisk score of the edit being attempted. It is only populated if the action being evaluated is an edit. For more information, please see the ORES/AbuseFilter variables documentation.
- The Beta Cluster wikis have been moved from
beta.wmflabs.org to beta.wmcloud.org. Users may need to update URLs in any tools, or in their password managers. Any related issues can be reported in the task.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- WikiCite 2025 will take place from 29–31 August, both online and in-person in Bern, Switzerland. The event's goals are to reconnect communities, institutions, and individuals working with open citations, bibliographic data, and the Wikidata/Wikibase ecosystem. Registration is open and the call for proposals will be announced soon. [5]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:38, 21 July 2025 (UTC)
An editor has asked for a deletion review of Shyamambaram. Because you closed the deletion discussion for this page, speedily deleted it, or otherwise were interested in the page, you might want to participate in the deletion review. Owen× ☎ 22:58, 23 July 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks for the ping, OwenX. I responded there. DMacks (talk) 00:05, 24 July 2025 (UTC)
Hello DMacks
I apologize in advance if this is not the correct way to do this but I have never had this issue before. My phone is telling me I have been blocked from editing Wikipedia until October 21 2025 it also says that you are the one whom has blocked me. Because I have made a disruptive edit to an article. I only make occasional, minor edits and the last edit I made was 4 months ago. I have gone on to my computer to get into contact with you not to evade an block or ban. The Q&A post said under these circumstances to reach out to the admin for further assistance. Can you please inform me about what exactly I have done wrong as I don't even know what prompted my block. Thank you for you help. 173.68.199.192 (talk) 03:52, 25 July 2025 (UTC)
- Hi! I would need to know the exact Wikipedia account-name in order to check what its situation is. DMacks (talk) 03:56, 25 July 2025 (UTC)
- Hello I believe my username IP. Address is one of these things
- ipv6:
- 2600:387:15:3d 1a::3
- ipv4
- 206.171.36.123
- I've also noticed a number an block number.
- #25201847 173.68.199.192 (talk) 04:16, 25 July 2025 (UTC)
- 173.68.199.192, I think that what you are describing are range blocks. The answer to your problem is to create an account, and then edit logged in, instead of logging as an IP editor.-- Toddy1 (talk) 08:09, 25 July 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks for jumping in, Toddy1. Indeed, it's a case of collateral damage because 2600:387:15:3d1a::3 is part of a range that has been abused several different of our fairly active and disruptive trolls and other abusive editors. They were even still abusing our services and harrassing our editors despite several less stringent measures. I wish we didn't have to deal with those sorts of situations, but some people just suck. And I wish, given the ways we have to deal with them, there wasn't collateral damage from uninvolved persons who wish to help grow the encyclopedia. DMacks (talk) 11:48, 25 July 2025 (UTC)
- This has also happened to me too. It was the first edit I have ever made on Wikipedia as an IP editor, and all I changed was one word.
- If I remember correctly, the ban note said I was restricted from making an account. I will double check once I post this. 2600:1702:65C3:2900:C862:2390:CD79:CE5B (talk) 20:56, 26 July 2025 (UTC)
- Update:
- The following is what the ban note says:
- Block parameters
- anon. only
- account creation disabled
- email disabled
- cannot edit own talk page 2600:1702:65C3:2900:C862:2390:CD79:CE5B (talk) 20:59, 26 July 2025 (UTC)
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 Community Tech team will be focusing on wishes related to Watchlists and Recent Changes pages, over the next few months. They are looking for feedback. Please read the latest update, and if you have ideas, please submit a wish on the topic.
Updates for editors
- The Wikimedia Commons community has decided to block cross-wiki uploads to Wikimedia Commons, for all users without autoconfirmed rights on that wiki, starting on August 16. This is because of widespread problems related to files that are uploaded by newcomers. Users who are affected by this will get an error message with a link to the less restrictive UploadWizard on Commons. Please help translating the message or give feedback on the message text. Please also update your local help pages to explain this restriction. [6]
- On wikis with temporary accounts enabled and Meta-Wiki, administrators may now set up a footer for the Special:Contributions pages of temporary accounts, similar to those which can be shown on IP and user-account pages. They may do it by creating the page named
MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer-temp. [7]
- View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- Wikimania 2025 will run from August 6–9. The program is available for you to plan which sessions you want to attend. Most sessions will be live-streamed, with exceptions for those that show the "no camera" icon. If you are joining online to watch live-streams and use the interactive features, please register for a free virtual ticket. For example, you may be interested in technical sessions such as:
- The MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference, Fall 2025 will be held 28–30 October 2025 in Hanover, Germany. This event is organized by and for the third-party MediaWiki community. You can propose sessions and register to attend.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 00:23, 29 July 2025 (UTC)
This Month in Education
Volume 14 • Issue 7 • July 2025
In This Issue
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
- Editors can now enable the User Info card. This feature adds an icon next to usernames on history pages and similar user-contribution log pages. When you tap or click on the icon, it displays data related to that user account such as the number of edits, reverted edits, blocks, and more. It's part of a broader project to make it easier for moderators to evaluate account trustworthiness. The feature can be enabled in your global preferences, and later this week it will be available in local preferences. [8]
- Everybody is invited to share comments on Collaborative Contributions, a project recently launched by the Connection team. The project aims to create a new way to display the impact of collaborative editing activities (such as edit-a-thons, backlog drives, and WikiProjects) on the wikis. Post your comments on the project talk page. [9]
- Administrators can now define the default block duration for temporary accounts. To do that, they need to create a page named
MediaWiki:Ipb-default-expiry-temporary-account and use a value defined in MediaWiki:Ipboptions. This allows administrators to easily block temporary accounts for 90 days, which is functionally equivalent to an indefinite block. The advantage of this solution is that it does not clutter Special:BlockList. More documentation is available. [10]
- View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Gadgets can now include
.vue files. This makes it easier to develop modern user interfaces using Vue.js, in particular using Codex, the official design system of Wikimedia. Codex icons can be loaded through the gadget definition. The documentation has examples. For user scripts that use Vue.js, an API module now exists to load Codex icons. [11][12]
- Module developers can now use a Lua interface to simplify the preparation of Lua modules for translation on Meta-Wiki. This improvement makes it easier for translators to find and edit module strings without dealing with raw Lua code. It helps prevent mistakes that could break the module during translation. Module developers and translators are invited to watch the demo video, read more about translatable modules to understand how it works, refer to Meta-Wiki's Module:User Wikimedia project for example usage, and share their feedback on how well it addresses the challenges in their workflow. The interface still has some performance issues, so it should not be used in widely used modules yet. [13]
- Developers of external tools that connect to Wikimedia pages must set a user-agent that complies with the user-agent policy. This policy will start to be more strongly enforced in August because of external crawlers that are overusing Wikimedia's resources. Tools that are hosted on Wikimedia's Toolforge or Cloud VPS will not be affected by this for now, but should still set a user-agent. More technical details are available, and related questions are welcome in that task.
- Parsoid Read Views is going to be rolling out to some smaller Wikipedias over the next few weeks, following the successful transition of Wikivoyages and Wiktionaries to Parsoid Read Views. For more information, see the Parsoid/Parser Unification project page. [14]
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- Wikimania 2025 will run from August 6–9. The program is available for you to plan which sessions you want to attend. Most sessions will be live-streamed, with exceptions for those that show the "no camera" icon. If you are joining online to watch live-streams and use the interactive features, please register for a free virtual ticket. For example, you may be interested in technical sessions such as:
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 03:36, 5 August 2025 (UTC)
Restored revision 1300083225 by Citation bot (talk): Confirming the image is correct. Carbons are often not explicitly labeled "C" in skeletal diagrams.
Sorry that was my misunderstanding. As you say, the diagram is correct. From your input I now know that bond-line (or skeletal) notation simplifies the representation of organic molecules by using lines to show bonds and "corners/ends to represent carbon atoms". Each corner/end of a line segment represents a carbon atom and is not explicitly drawn. Each carbon atom is assumed to form four bonds. If a carbon atom has fewer than four bonds shown, the remaining bonds are assumed to be with hydrogen atoms. So it was correct after all! 🥴
I love Wikipedia, I learn something new everyday (if only I could remember it all 😁) and I am very grateful that knowledgeable people like yourself put in the effort to make this possible. Thank you so much. PhilC 212.159.119.112 (talk) 10:47, 7 August 2025 (UTC)
- You're welcome! DMacks (talk) 10:55, 7 August 2025 (UTC)
News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2025).
 Guideline and policy news
- Following a request for comment, a new speedy deletion criterion, G15, has been enacted. It applies to pages generated by a large language model (LLM) without human review.
- Following a request for comment, there is a new policy outlining the granting of permissions to view the IP addresses of temporary accounts. Temporary account deployment on the English Wikipedia is currently scheduled for September 2025, and editors can request access to the permission ahead of time. Admins are encouraged to keep an eye on the request page; there will likely be a flood of editors requesting the permission when they realize they can no longer see IP addresses.
 Technical news
 Arbitration
- The arbitration case Indian military history has been closed.
- South Asia (WP:CT/SA) is designated a contentious topic. The topic area is specifically defined as
All pages related to the region of South Asia (India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal), broadly construed, including but not limited to history, politics, ethnicity, and social groups.
- The contentious topic designations for Sri Lanka (SL) and India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan (IPA) are folded into this new contentious topic.
- The community-authorized general sanctions regarding South Asian social groups (GS/CASTE) are rescinded and folded into this new contentious topic.
- The arbitration case Article titles and capitalisation 2 has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case closed on 31 July.
- The arbitration case Transgender healthcare and people has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case will close on 11 August.
 Miscellaneous
- Wikimania 2025 is happening in Nairobi, Kenya, and online from August 6 to August 9. This year marks 20 years of Wikimania. Interested users can join the online event. Registration for the virtual event is free and will remain open throughout Wikimania. You can register here now.
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 WikiEditor toolbar now includes its keyboard shortcuts in the tooltips for its buttons. This will help to improve the discoverability of this feature. [15]
- The Product and Technology Advisory Council published a set of proposed experiments the Wikimedia Foundation can try to improve communication with community. Feedback on the proposals are welcomed until August 22 on this talk page.
- The search bar on the Minerva skin (mobile) has been updated to use the same type-ahead search component that is used on the Vector 2022 skin. There are no changes in search functionality but there are minor visual changes. Specifically, the close-search button has been changed from an "X" to a back arrow. This helps to distinguish it from the other "X" button that is used to clear any text. [16]
- Editors on some wikis will see a new toggle for "Group results by page" on watchlist, related changes, and recent changes pages. This is an A/B experiment that is planned to start on August 11, and will run for 3–6 weeks on the Bengali, Chinese, Czech, French, Greek, Portuguese, and Urdu Wikipedias. The experiment will examine how making this feature more discoverable might affect editors' ability to find the edits they are looking for. [17]
- View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- The multiwiki datasets of Unicode data have been moved to Category:Unicode Module Datasets on Wikimedia Commons, to follow the idea of "One common data source, multiple local wikis". Most wikis have been updated to use the Commons version. You can ask questions at the talkpage. [18]
- Lua code can add warnings when something is wrong, by using the
mw.addWarning() function. It is now possible to add more than one warning, instead of new warnings replacing old ones. If you maintain a Lua module that used warnings, you should check it still works as expected. [19]
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:25, 11 August 2025 (UTC)
I haven't edited much, I just want to know what I did to be blocked from editing. Lammccullars8307 (talk) 15:29, 16 August 2025 (UTC)
- Hi User:Lammccullars8307. I don't see any evidence of a block of this account.[20] If you are talking about a different account-name, please say what it is. If you are seeing a block that refers to an IP address or some other block-message, likewise I'd need to know those specific details in order to have any chance of understanding the situation. DMacks (talk) 18:05, 17 August 2025 (UTC)
Hello DMacks,
thank you for semi-protecting the page Ethnic groups in Afghanistan. However, I think we should go further as there have been many cases of sockpuppetry and edit wars in related pages such as Demographics of Afghanistan, Cabinet of Afghanistan and Districts of Afghanistan which include ethnic information, Languages of Afghanistan, Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks etc. since all of these are highly controversial topics in Afghanistan and lead to the desire of changing things in favor of their own claimed side. I think all of these pages should be extended-confirmed-protected just like the Hazaras page which also had multiple cases of sockpuppetry, edit wars and unsourced claims. Where can I request a change of protection status? Thank you. -- SdHb (talk) 09:26, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
- Hi User:SdHb. I'm seeing two different situations here. For Ethnic groups in Afghanistan, it's a current edit-war (that's bad) but the involved editors are all extended-confirmed. Therefore, EC-protection won't have any effect. None of the other specific pages you identified have current edit-wars (some don't even have any recent edits at all?). Standard protection-policy says that protection is usually not applied pre-emptively. The general topic-area could be covered by Wikipedia:Contentious topics/South Asia, which means we can take some additional measures that might solve edit-warring. I'll take a closer look later today (just got back from a few days' traveling with limited internet access). DMacks (talk) 18:20, 17 August 2025 (UTC)
Hello DMacks,
I hope you are doing well. I noticed your edits on Wikipedia and wanted to ask if you might be open to helping create a page for a company called iceDQ, which works in the data validation.
I understand that Wikipedia has strict guidelines for neutrality, verifiability, and notability, and I’m happy to provide reliable, independent sources for the content.
If you’re interested, I can share more details and references so the article can be built in line with Wikipedia’s standards.
Thank you,
iceDQ Team Icedq (talk) 13:39, 13 August 2025 (UTC)
- No, that would make me a proxy for a COI. DMacks (talk) 18:22, 17 August 2025 (UTC)
Good afternoon DMacks,
I’m writing due to some confusion with a recent editing ban I received. The reasoning was for “disruptive editing”, which I’m assuming may have happened accidentally. I was creating infoboxes in my personal sandbox, and copying current ones from their articles into my sandbox. Whatever editing that may have been disruptive was certainly accidental, and the article concerning disruptive editing (here) specifies that, when a mistake such as this happens, a friendly reminder may be better. I apologize for any unintended disruptive editing, but, with all due respect, a 3 month ban for a mistake seems extreme. Could you provide any insight on this? Philninja99 (talk) 20:10, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
- Hi User:Philninja99. I don't see any evidence of a block of this account.[21] If you are talking about a different account-name, please say what it is. If you are seeing a block that refers to an IP address or some other block-message, likewise I'd need to know those specific details in order to have any chance of understanding the situation. DMacks (talk) 18:07, 17 August 2025 (UTC)
- Hi @DMacks. After I published this comment, the ban was no longer there. I was really confused as to why I was banned, and am equally confused as to what mistake was made and quickly fixed. Not sure, but I am no longer banned, so I'll take it. Philninja99 (talk) 19:01, 17 August 2025 (UTC)
- The Wiki works in mysterious ways! Feel free to reach out again if you have problems in the future, being sure to copy-paste whatever actual error message you get. DMacks (talk) 21:39, 17 August 2025 (UTC)
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
- Later this week, people who are logged-in and have the "Discussion tools" Beta Feature enabled will gain the ability to "Thank" individual comments directly from talk pages, rather than needing to navigate to page history. Learn more about this feature. [22]
- An A/B test comparing two versions of the desktop donate link launched on testwiki on 12 August and on English Wikipedia 14 August for 0.1% of logged out users on the desktop site. The experiment will run for three weeks, ending on 12 September. [23]
- An A/A test to measure the baseline for reader retention was launched 12 August using Experimentation Lab. This measures the percentage of users who revisit a wiki after their initial visit over a 14-day period. No visual changes are expected. The experiment will run through 31 August. [24]
- Five new wikis have been created:
- View all 46 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- 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 00:34, 19 August 2025 (UTC)
An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Bonded Vault heist, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page East Providence.
(Opt-out instructions.) --DPL bot (talk) 18:09, 22 August 2025 (UTC)
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
 Template authors can now use additional CSS properties, since the CSS sanitizer used by TemplateStyles was updated. For example: width: fit-content; ruby-align; relative units such as lh; and custom strings in list-style-type. These improvements are a Community Wishlist wish. [30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39]- On large wikis, the default time period to display edits from, within the Special:RecentChanges page, has been changed from 7 days to 1 day. This is part of a performance improvement project. This should have no user-facing impact due to the quantity of edits on these wikis. [40]
- Administrators can now access the Special:BlockedExternalDomains page from the Special:CommunityConfiguration list page. This makes it easier to find. [41]
- Wikimedia Commons videos were not shown in the Videos tab in Google Search. The problem was investigated and reported to Google who have now fixed the issue. [42][43]
- One new wiki has been created: a Wiktionary in Betawi (
wikt:bew:) [44]
- View all 39 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Two fields of the recentchanges database table are being removed.
rc_new and rc_type are being removed in favor of rc_source. Queries to these older fields will start to fail starting this week and developers should use rc_source instead. These older fields were deprecated over 10 years ago and should not be in use. This is part of work to improve the performance and stability of queries to the recentchanges table. [45]
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: support for new languages in MediaWiki and translatewiki; the start of the Language Onboarding and Development project to help support the growth of new and small wikis; updates on research projects; and more.
Meetings and events
- The next Language Community Meeting is happening soon, August 29th at 15:00 UTC. This week's meeting will cover: the Avro keyboard developers from Wikimedia Bangladesh, who were recently awarded a national award for their contributions to this keyboard; and other topics.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 00:08, 26 August 2025 (UTC)
Hi DMacks, I might be unaware of certain rules in Wikipedia as I just made an account. Could you please let me know why did you remove my addition? The text had a link to a newly published peer-reviewed work in Angewandte Chemie, one of the most credible chemistry journals. Cina-foroutan (talk) 14:29, 27 August 2025 (UTC)
- @Cina-foroutan As DMacks said in his edit summary, yours is a primary source and for a general article like ylide Wikipedia uses almost exclusively secondary sources. You have an obvious conflict of interest in adding that citation to your own work, which is in any case only a theoretical proposal at this point: we need to see what other experts/reviewers say about it. Mike Turnbull (talk) 14:55, 27 August 2025 (UTC)
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