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FP Promotion

[edit]
 ★ This image has been promoted to Featured picture! ★

The image File:Haigerloch - Altstadt - Ansicht aus Süden vom Römerturm (2).jpg, that you nominated on Commons:Featured picture candidates/File:Haigerloch - Altstadt - Ansicht aus Süden vom Römerturm (2).jpg has been promoted. Thank you for your contribution. If you would like to nominate another image, please do so.

/FPCBot (talk) 05:01, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Einladung zu Wiki Loves Earth 2025 in Deutschland

[edit]

Hallo Aristeas,

auch in diesem Jahr beginnt am 1. Mai wieder der regionale Wettbewerb von Wiki Loves Earth (WLE) in Deutschland und läuft bis zum 30. Juni. Dabei können wie immer Nationalparks, Naturschutzgebiete, Landschaftsschutzgebiete und Naturdenkmäler oder andere Schutzgebiete fotografiert und die Fotos hochgeladen werden. Du hast an einem der vergangenen Fotowettbewerbe teilgenommen. Deshalb laden wir dich ein, auch dieses Jahr wieder mitzumachen. Wir freuen uns auf deine Fotos!

  • Sieger von Wiki Loves Earth 2024 in Deutschland
  • Kiefer im Elbsandsteingebirge auf dem Lilienstein
    Kiefer im Elbsandsteingebirge auf dem Lilienstein
  • Blühendes Strand-Milchkraut (Lysimachia maritima) am Strand von Norderney
    Blühendes Strand-Milchkraut (Lysimachia maritima) am Strand von Norderney
  • Ahbach (Ahr) im Naturschutzgebiet am Wasserfall Dreimühlen
    Ahbach (Ahr) im Naturschutzgebiet am Wasserfall Dreimühlen
  • Eine parasitische Sichelwespe (Therion circumflexum) bei der Eiablage in eine Raupe
    Eine parasitische Sichelwespe (Therion circumflexum) bei der Eiablage in eine Raupe
  • Naturschutzgebiet Hirschauer Berg beim Tübinger Stadtteil Hirschau
    Naturschutzgebiet Hirschauer Berg beim Tübinger Stadtteil Hirschau
  • Ein Kupfer-Rosenkäfer (Protaetia cuprea) im Naturschutzgebiet Rheinhänge von Burg Gutenfels bis zur Loreley
    Ein Kupfer-Rosenkäfer (Protaetia cuprea) im Naturschutzgebiet Rheinhänge von Burg Gutenfels bis zur Loreley

Der Wettbewerb ist zweigeteilt, das heißt, wir unterscheiden zwischen den beiden Wettbewerbskategorien Landschaft und Detail/Makro. Zur Wettbewerbskategorie Landschaft zählen auch geschützte Einzelbäume. In der Wettbewerbskategorie Detail/Makro werden Pflanzen, Tiere und Pilze in den Schutzgebieten bewertet.

Es sind wie immer viele spannende Motive überall in Deutschland zu finden. Neben als Naturdenkmal geschützten alten Bäumen oder den großen Nationalparks der Mittelgebirge und am Meer können auch kleine städtische Landschaftsschutzgebiete dokumentiert werden. Zu über 16.000 Naturdenkmalen und mehreren tausend Schutzgebieten haben wir noch keine Fotos. Wo noch Fotos fehlen, kannst du über die Karte oder die umfangreichen Listen in Wikipedia herausfinden.

In diesem Jahr wollen wir auch einen Fokus auf Geotope, wie Findlinge, Quellen oder Aufschlüsse, legen. Hierfür gibt es drei Sonderpreise zum Thema Geodiversität.

Damit es ab 1. Mai mit dem Upload schnell geht:

Upload your photos for WLE

Außerdem laden wir dich ein, vom 15. Mai bis voraussichtlich Ende Juli an der Vorjury teilzunehmen. Damit bewertest du die hochgeladenen Bilder und ermittelst so gemeinsam mit der Jury, die Ende August tagen wird, die Sieger von Wiki Loves Earth 2025 in Deutschland.


Zum Vorjury-Tool

Für Fragen steht das Organisationsteam gerne auf der Support-Seite zur Verfügung. Falls du im nächsten Jahr keine Einladung für Wiki Loves Earth in Deutschland haben möchtest, trag dich bitte hier ein. Wir würden das natürlich schade finden, da wir uns auf deine Fotos freuen.

More information about the contest (in German)

Viel Spaß und Erfolg beim Fotowettbewerb 2025 wünscht dir im Namen des Organisationsteams GPSLeo (talk) MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:03, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-17

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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

  • Wikifunctions is now integrated with Dagbani Wikipedia since April 15. It is the first project that will be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in articles. A function is something that takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, such as adding up two numbers, converting miles into metres, calculating how much time has passed since an event, or declining a word into a case. Wikifunctions will allow users to do that through a simple call of a stable and global function, rather than via a local template. [1]
  • A new type of lint error has been created: Empty headings (documentation). The Linter extension's purpose is to identify wikitext patterns that must or can be fixed in pages and provide some guidance about what the problems are with those patterns and how to fix them. [2]
  • Recurrent item View all 37 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Following its publication on HuggingFace, the "Structured Contents" dataset, developed by Wikimedia Enterprise, is now also available on Kaggle. This Beta initiative is focused on making Wikimedia data more machine-readable for high-volume reusers. They are releasing this beta version in a location that open dataset communities already use, in order to seek feedback, to help improve the product for a future wider release. You can read more about the overall Structured Contents project, and about the first release that's freely usable.
  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings and events

  • The Editing and Machine Learning Teams invite interested volunteers to a video meeting to discuss Peacock check, which is the latest Edit check that will detect "peacock" or "overly-promotional" or "non-neutral" language whilst an editor is typing. Editors who work with newcomers, or help to fix this kind of writing, or are interested in how we use artificial intelligence in our projects are encouraged to attend. The meeting will be on April 28, 2025 at 18:00–19:00 UTC and hosted on Zoom.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:56, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

FP Promotion

[edit]
 ★ This image has been promoted to Featured picture! ★

The image File:Abstract pattern on a tree stump.jpg, that you nominated on Commons:Featured picture candidates/File:Abstract pattern on a tree stump.jpg has been promoted. Thank you for your contribution. If you would like to nominate another image, please do so.

/FPCBot (talk) 05:03, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

FP Promotion

[edit]
 ★ This image has been promoted to Featured picture! ★

The image File:Bad Rappenau - Bonfeld - Evangelische Kirche - Kruzifix mit Kerzenbeleuchtung - Detail.jpg, that you nominated on Commons:Featured picture candidates/File:Bad Rappenau - Bonfeld - Evangelische Kirche - Kruzifix mit Kerzenbeleuchtung - Detail.jpg has been promoted. Thank you for your contribution. If you would like to nominate another image, please do so.

/FPCBot (talk) 05:02, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-18

[edit]

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

  • Event organizers who host collaborative activities on multiple wikis, including Bengali, Japanese, and Korean Wikipedias, will have access to the CampaignEvents extension this week. Also, admins in the Wikipedia where the extension is enabled will automatically be granted the event organizer right soon. They won't have to manually grant themselves the right before they can manage events as requested by a community.
  • Recurrent item View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • The release of the next major version of Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, is scheduled for 29 April 2025. Technical editors will have access to the release by the week of 5 May 2025. This update will include a number of breaking changes and minor visual changes. Instructions on handling the breaking and visual changes are documented on this page. Pre-release testing is reported in T386298, with post-release issues tracked in T392379 and T392390.
  • Users of Wiki Replicas will notice that the database views of ipblocks, ipblocks_ipindex, and ipblocks_compat are now deprecated. Users can query the block and block_target new views that mirror the new tables in the production database instead. The deprecated views will be removed entirely from Wiki Replicas in June, 2025.
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

Meetings and events

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:28, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

FPCBot - India images

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The bot keeps adding India images to Indonesia in the Natural scenes FP gallery: [3] [4] [5] [6] and India images to the US in the religious architecture gallery: [7] [8]. I'm not sure, but this may be happening to other galleries and other categories/countries too. Can this be looked into? UnpetitproleX (Talk) 02:10, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much for noticing this, UnpetitproleX, and for the hint! It’s great that you have also added the diff links, this makes everything clear. CC @W.carter: this is certainly of interest for you, too. – Well, I will try to study the issue. Sometimes such errors are caused by minor mistakes in the markup of the gallery pages. It’s also possible that you have found yet another bug in FPCBot, sigh. Maybe I can find the reason for it in the Python code of FPCBot; then I will try to forward a fix to the developers. But in any case, it’s very good to know about this issue; I have added it to the list of things I have to look out for when I inspect the galleries. If I cannot find the bug in the code of the bot, I may try to come up with an approximate check for this problem in my own fpgallerist program which checks the FP galleries for errors. Of course fpgallerist cannot prevent such errors, but it can flag them and help us to find and to repair them. – Looking into this issue may take some time, but I will contact you when I have found some concrete reasons or, even better, a solution. Thank you again and all the best, – Aristeas (talk) 07:38, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Writing down what we know about this problem in order to avoid that the knowledge gets lost.
  • FPCBot must identify the correct target section on the gallery page into which it must put a new FP. That’s not easy, of course, because of the variable structure of the Wikitext of our gallery pages. (Compared e.g. to valid XML or to a well-defined programming language, Wikitext is a very relaxed kind of markup with low formal structuring.) The bot just searches the Wikitext for the name of the target section (in your example: “India”). Please note that this also means that there will never be a perfect solution: Because of the relaxed structure of the Wikitext, any reasonably complicated search can only be an approximation.
  • This search can fail if another section contains the string the bot is searching for. This was also the reason why the bot has sometimes appended new FPs to the cross-reference section at the top of gallery pages. For example, the cross-reference section on Commons:Featured pictures/Places/Architecture/Exteriors contained two images with filenames containing “mexico” and “Estonia”; therefore the bot appended all Mexico and Estonia images right to the cross-reference section. I have fixed this here and have (hopefully) replaced all images in cross-reference sections with problematic names by unproblematic ones. (@Cart: We must remember that, whenever we create new cross-reference sections or add new images to such sections, that we never use an image with a filename that contains the name of any section on that page.)
  • The same problem can also occur when the filename of an image in another section on the same page contains the target section name. For example, on Commons:Featured pictures/Places/Interiors, the “Brazil” section contains File:Germany and Argentina face off in the final of the World Cup 2014 -2014-07-13 (5).jpg. You see the filename contains the substrings “Germany” and “Argentina”, these are also the names of sections on the same gallery page. Therefore FPCBot appends FPs for the “Germany” section to the “Brazil” section – it is just fooled by that filename. This problem is hard to fix, we cannot rename images just to avoid that the bot gets confused by their names ;–). Therefore we just have to check from time to time the “Brazil” section and to move all Germany FPs to the “Germany” section – like in this edit.
  • Until now I thought this problem is somewhat limited insofar the bot searches the gallery page Wikitext from top to bottom, so that the problem can only occur when the problematic filename occurs before the target section. In the example given before, I have often seen “Germany” FPs appended to the “Brazil” section, but never “Argentina” FPs appended to the “Brazil” section because the “Argentina” section occurs before the irritating filename.
  • But checking your second example – “India” images misplaced into the “United States” section in the religious architecture gallery: [9] [10] – makes me suspect that the problem is even more complicated. We can explain why the bot puts FPs into the “United States” section instead of the “India” section: it’s very probably because of this image Catedral de tradición escocesa, Indianápolis, Estados Unidos, 2012-10-22, DD 02 – the filename contains the substring “India[nápolis]”. (Sidenote: It should be easy to fix at least this especially nasty kind of error in the code of FPCBot – just put a \b after the name of the section in the RegEx which searches for the target section.) But this is terrible, because the “United States” section occurs after the “India” section. I do not understand at all why the bot misses the “India” section and searches on until it stops at the “India[nápolis]” subsection. If there is no other explanation this means that even irritating filenames after the correct section heading can confuse the bot – so the problem is even bigger.
  • And your first example – the bot adds “India” images to the “[[Commons:Featured_pictures/Places/Natural#Indonesia|Indonesia]” section in the “Natural scenes” FP gallery: [11] [12] [13] [14] – is even more puzzling. Why does the bot do this? The whole “Indonesia” section does not even contain the substring “India” (and did not in the past), and it occurs after the “India” section. The only explanation I can think of is that the bot is fooled by the {{FPGN|Nature of India}} or <section end=India/> text at the end of the “India” section. But why its search stops there (and therefore uses the following “Indonesia” section instead of the “India” section above of it) I do not understand. Either there is another problem here which is beyond of the substring search bug described above, or the search contains some weird error.
That’s it for now; I will continue if and when I get some more insights. The problem is that I have almost no free time right now, but sooner or later I must start with a thorough study of the code of FPCBot. If somebody else can help here – great, please do! (But please do not suggest to use “AI” for this or similar tasks. Using an AI engine would work, after good training, in ~ 95% of all cases, but (a) it would mean an incredible amount of wasted processor time, power, bandwidth, etc.; (b) it would fail in the remaining ~ 5% and would cause arbitrary, almost unpredictable errors and damages which would be much more difficult to handle than the errors of FPCBot. You can’t debug an “AI” like you debug a classic script or program. Therefore “AI” is great for lazy tech bros who do not have NI (natural intelligence) and just want to pretend that their solution works, but it is superfluous, irritating and ridiculous in cases where you can just use a classic procedural, algorithmic solution.) – Aristeas (talk) 10:10, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The Bot's issues are irritating to say the least! I've seen some similar cases over the last months while I've been sorting for new galleries, and it's always (so far) been images connected to a place name. I think the animals and other galleries are more "safe" since they have latin names and fanciful descriptions. It might be time to weed out some things that are no longer necessary.
  • The <section end (or begin)= /> are totally redundant and only used in a few galleries. I think such code should be removed.
  • The images in some of the sections redirecting to other galleries look nice, but we really don't need them since the links and images are at the top of the page too. I think a simple text is enough, the images only make for longer lists to scroll.
I have some time today and I can get on this cleaning if you like. --Cart (talk) 11:16, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you very much for your input, Cart!
  • In theory the <section begin=India/> ... <section end=India/> elements are a nice idea; they add more structure to the Wikitext and the bot could use them to identify the correct section more easily. But in reality the bot seems not to use these elements at all (I can’t find any reference to them the source code), there is a chance that they are confusing the bot (see the comment on the “Indonesia” vs. “India” section problem above), and we are indeed using them only on a few gallery pages. Therefore it would be great if you could remove all these elements; this means a significant reduction of the complexity of these pages and makes the gallery pages more consistent and uniform.
  • I am neutral regarding the images in some of the sections redirecting to other galleries, but I agree that we do not need them and they are another element which may irritate the bot. Therefore I am glad if you would remove them, this is another step to reduce complexity.
Best, – Aristeas (talk) 12:48, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Small steps towards a big goal

[edit]
  1. Have analysed the part of the FPCBot code which searches for the target section and drafted a new implementation which should fix the problems which we have encountered. I also want to fix a related problem, namely that FPCBot cannot sort FPs into a gallery section if the subheading of that section contains a link (this is common in the biology department of our gallery pages); there are several ways to handle this and I am currently looking for the most solid one. When that is done I must do extensive tests of the new code to make sure that it does not introduce any new bugs. (Note to the admins: Don’t worry, I will do all testing locally on my machine, not on Commons.) Only then I can try to contact the maintainers and suggest an improvement to them. – Aristeas (talk) 13:04, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Wrote a shell script to download and save the Wikitext of all FP gallery pages. Wrote a little program which allows to enter arbitrary gallery links (including broken ones), analyses them using the old code from FPCBot and generates a diff of the resulting gallery page changes (if any). This allows me to study the old implementation locally and in “live mode”. I will expand the program to compare the output of a new implementation with the output of the old one; to make sure that the new one works better and does not introduce new errors. – Aristeas (talk) 20:11, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  3. The test program works well and actually reproduces all the weird misplacing of FPs that we have described above. @W.carter and UnpetitproleX: (1.) Good news: I can reproduce the first issue (“bot keeps adding India images to Indonesia in the Natural scenes FP”) when I use an old version of the Commons:Featured pictures/Places/Natural gallery page, but I cannot reproduce it anymore when I use a copy of the current page. This means: My idea that the <section end=India/> confuses the bot was probably right; Cart, your hard work to remove all these useless <section begin/end=.../> elements was not in vain, but very useful; UnpetitproleX, I hope FPCBot will make less mistakes now that these elements are gone, but it would still be great if you could keep an eye on the sorting of India FPs. (2.) Not so good news: I can also reproduce the second issue (“India images to the US in the religious architecture gallery”), and it is still present also with the newest version of the gallery page. So this is really a bug in the code of FPCBot, not a problem of the gallery page formatting. – Aristeas (talk) 08:43, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Observed that resolving a gallery link to Commons:Featured pictures/Places/Architecture/Religious buildings#India and adding a FP to the (wrong) section on that page consumes astonishingly much processor time and power on my machine. The peak of processor usage happens at this line: m = re.search(section_search_R, old_gallery_text) of the addToCategorizedFeaturedList() method. This must mean that the RegEx which is crafted in the previous lines of code from the gallery link becomes quite inefficient. But IMHO it would be a waste of time to optimize it because it yields faulty results anyway. – Aristeas (talk) 08:56, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Coded the first version of a new implementation to determine the correct gallery page and section, comparing the results immediately with the results of the old implementation borrowed from FPCBot. First results are promising: All gallery links currently used on COM:FPC are analysed and handled correctly; gallery links to Commons:Featured pictures/Places/Natural#India are handled correctly; unlike the old implementation (= FPCBot), the new implementation handles gallery links to Commons:Featured pictures/Places/Architecture/Religious buildings#India correctly (and without any delay or high processor usage :–), likewise gallery links to Commons:Featured pictures/Places/Interiors#Germany. This means the new implementation shows already some significant improvements over the old one. But much more testing is necessary. – Aristeas (talk) 14:24, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  6. Wrote a little script to extract the gallery links from all FP nominations from January to April 2025; 627 results or so. It’s important to test with the real data exactly as entered by the nominators or maintainers (including any oddities or errors) because the bot needs to handle the real data, too. Expanded my test program by a batch mode which is able to analyse all these gallery links both with the old code from FPCBot and with my new implementation and to print a list of all gallery links for which the results are different, together with a comparison between these differing results. This allows me to check manually whether the new code has introduced any regressions over the old implementation or not. – Aristeas (talk) 19:27, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  7. My adaption of the old code from FPCBot freezes on any attempt to handle the gallery link Commons:Featured pictures/Animals/Birds/Pelecaniformes#Family : Ardeidae (Herons) – the generated, quite complicated RegEx never comes to an end when searching the current text of that gallery page for that section (tested with Python 3.13.3). Yes, such things can happen, depending on the RegEx and the RegEx engine (for the general background see Jeffrey E. F. Friedl, Mastering Regular Expressions, Sebastopol CA et all.: O’Reilly, 3rd ed. 2006). I hope this is just an artefact of my adaption of the FPCBot code – but I can’t see any substantial difference from the original code in FPCBot, and so it doesn’t surprise me anymore that our bot sometimes runs into problems … Of course that gallery link is not great (there are subheadings for the different genera of Ardeidae below of the “Family : Ardeidae (Herons)” heading, and so a good gallery link should link immediately to the correct subheading for the genus), but nevertheless handling that gallery link should not freeze. The new code handles this gallery link without any problems, of course: it identifies it as sloppy (because “Family : Ardeidae (Herons)” is a general heading without its own <gallery>...</gallery>) and appends the new FP to the ‘Unsorted’ section. This is how it should be. – Aristeas (talk) 08:56, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  8. Among the 627 gallery links used in FP nomination from January to April 2025, the results of the new implementation differ in 87 cases from the results of the old FPCBot code. Some of these differences are surprising – for example, the old code fails to handle some of the date sections on Commons:Featured pictures/Historical/People (confirmed e.g. by this bot edit). On the other hand the new code sometimes fails when the old code found a gallery section. In some of these cases this is fine because the old code was too generous and handled also sloppy gallery links (for example, when the section anchor of a gallery link matches just the beginning of a subheading on the gallery page, the old code happily added the FP to that section – this has caused quite some confusion in the past). But in some other cases the section anchor looks fine, this means that the new implementation needs more work. That was to be expected, of course. – Aristeas (talk) 10:24, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  9. Fixing a stupid typo in the new implementation and improving the comparison of the results has removed many of its failures and reduced the count of differing results to 44. Everybody makes mistakes and I have a subscription for especially stupid ones. ;–) But it starts to pay off to have written a test utility first: we can study and track any mistakes and should immediately notice it if we introduce a regression. – Aristeas (talk) 14:10, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  10. Inspection of these remaining 44 gallery links which are handled differently by the old code from FPCBot and by the new implementation shows that all of them belong to one of the following cases:
    1. OK The old implementation just freezes when it tries to process the gallery link. This happens only with Commons:Featured pictures/Animals/Birds/Pelecaniformes#Family : Ardeidae (Herons), see above; but it is still causing concern that such a thing can happen at all. (Of course this could also be a bug in Python 3.13.3. But in any case it’s nice that the new implementation has no problems to process this link.)
    2. OK The gallery link is correct, but the old implementation fails to find the correct target section on the gallery page and puts the FP either into the ‘Unsorted’ section or into the very first (sub)section on the page. Typical examples: Commons:Featured pictures/Historical/People#1940-1949, Commons:Featured pictures/Photo techniques/Black and White#Portraits. The new implementation handles these gallery links correctly.
    3. OK The gallery link is correct, but the old implementation is confused by an image with a filename or a label that contains the text of the section anchor, and therefore the bot puts the new FP into the section of that image instead of the correct section. Typical examples: Commons:Featured pictures/Places/Interiors#Germany, Commons:Featured pictures/Places/Architecture/Religious buildings#India. The new implementation handles these gallery links correctly.
    4. OK The gallery link is sloppy: it aims at a general heading which does not have its own <gallery>...</gallery> element, but rather resides over several subheadings. In this case the gallery link should better have pointed to one of these subheadings. This happens often in the biology department of the gallery pages: people use e.g. the heading for a class or order as section anchor, but should have used the subheading for one of the families as section anchor. In such a case the bot puts the new FP just into the <gallery>...</gallery> element of the first subsection below of the heading. In most cases this is wrong, because often the FP does not belong to the family etc. of this subsection (and even if it belongs to it, the sorting was just accidentally correct). This means the bot often misplaces FPs into the wrong subsection, and this causes very inconspicuous, hard to find errors in the sorting of the gallery pages. Therefore the new implementation handles such “too general” section anchors just as invalid and puts the new FP into the ‘Unsorted’ section; that’s IMHO much better because it allows to find and sort these images easily. Typical example: Commons:Featured pictures/Animals/Fish#Class : Actinopterygii (Ray-finned Fish).
    5. OK The gallery link is sloppy or the bot handles it as if it was sloppy. This happens if the section anchor corresponds to the beginning of a heading on the gallery page, but not to its full text, or if it corresponds to the beginning of several headings on the same page. The old code from the bot has no problems with this and just puts the new FP into the first section which has a (sub)heading that begins with the section anchor. Sometimes this is correct because the section anchor was really just sloppy – e.g. Commons:Featured pictures/Objects#Books; today the correct link would have been Commons:Featured pictures/Objects#Books and Paper, but the old code does not care for this and appends the FP to the end of that section, probably correctly. But sometimes this is also plain wrong, e.g. with the gallery link Commons:Featured pictures/Objects/Architectural elements#Other: whoever has authored the gallery link probably wanted to put the new FP into the section Commons:Featured pictures/Objects/Architectural elements#Others (i.e., the section for other kinds of architectural elements), but the old code stops searching for the correct section already at the subheading Commons:Featured pictures/Objects/Architectural elements#Other ceilings and appends the new FP to that section, and that is wrong. But it is impossible to decide just on the basis of a gallery link like Commons:Featured pictures/Objects/Architectural elements#Other which of these possibilities is correct. Therefore the new implementation never accepts it if the section anchor of a gallery link corresponds just to the beginning of some (sub)heading, but demands that the section anchor corresponds exactly to the full text of a (sub)heading on the gallery page. If this is not the case, the new implementation puts the FP into the ‘Unsorted’ section. So the new implementation is again pickier than the old one, and this helps us to avoid hard to find misplacing of FPs.
    6.  Not OK Obsolete The gallery link is correct, but points to a heading which contains a link; e.g. Commons:Featured pictures/Animals/Birds/Passeriformes#Family : Nectariniidae (Sunbirds and Spiderhunters) which points to the subheading “Family : Nectariniidae (Sunbirds and Spiderhunters)”. The code of FPCBot tries to handle subheadings which contain links, and in such simple cases this works correctly, at least in my test copy of the old code. (Very often it does not work, especially with more complex links targeting a category etc.; therefore FPCBot often puts FPs with a gallery link that points to a section with a linked subheading just into the ‘Unsorted’ section instead of the desired section.) The new implementation does not yet handle this case. – Aristeas (talk) 15:12, 2 May 2025 (UTC) Marked as obsolete according to the following discussion with Cart. – Aristeas (talk) 16:08, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  11. This means the new implementation handles most of the tested 627 gallery links equally well or better than the old implementation, with the sole exception that it does not yet handle gallery links which point to a heading containing a link. This is intentional: a reliable handling of such gallery links makes the code much more complicated, therefore I have first excluded this problem. But it seems we have already reached the point at which it is necessary to tackle this problem. – Aristeas (talk) 15:18, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Can't we just remove the section headings that contains links? Like at Commons:Featured pictures/Animals/Birds/Anseriformes. Given that so few people actually use the galleries to find photos and that there is a link to a category below every section, I think they are redundant by now. Many of the photos in such galleries have links in their description too, so I don't think we miss much by removing them. Whatever we can do to simplify the code on the pages, must be done. What do you think? It's one of those "boring" jobs I can safely do now. ;-) Or should they be kept per your "intentional"... --Cart (talk) 15:26, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Great! Cart, I did not even dare to ask whether this was possible or not. But if you think we could consider this without seriously annoying our fellows, I have to say that this would be great, wonderful, fantastic, whatever. The links in the section headings are certainly nice to have, but they are the central problem for anybody who wants to add recently promoted FPs to the correct section with a computer program. One of the contributors to the code of FPCBot has commented this issue (line 655 of the current version) as follows: “[Us]er[s] have linked the section to categories. Why ? To make our lives harder”. And it is indeed quite difficult to handle these linked section headings in a reliable manner. After looking into all these issues I understand very well why FPCBot often fails to sort a new FP into a section with a linked heading and appends the image instead to the ‘Unsorted’ section – the programmers of FPCBot did a good job and wrote nice code to handle this problem, but it just can’t cope with all the possible variants of such links. Therefore it would be great if we could just remove the links from all headings and subheadings. First, because right from that moment FPCBot should work much more reliably than before (without any change to its code!) and handle many more gallery links correctly. Second, because then my new implementation of the gallery link handling was already complete. (Of course I will do more testing etc., but it would be a great relief if I could do without handling these links — coping with them in a reliable manner would require to change the code I have already written completely and make it much more complicated, therefore also much harder to understand, and even hold the danger that I introduce new bugs and problems.) So yes, if you think this is possible without causing a revolt, we should definitely just comb out all links from headings and subheadings on FP gallery pages. Best, – Aristeas (talk) 15:40, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I think, by now that people understand that all our work with the galleries is made to make it as good as we can. Old customs that no longer have practical applications needs to be fixed. Once this is done, it should of course be explained on the FPC talk page, at the same time as explaining what alternatives exists, like making sure the links to categories are correct (they seldom are at the moment) and that you can put links in the file description instead. I will also place a little commented out warning on each page I clean up. I'll get started and let you know when I'm done. --Cart (talk) 15:47, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    That would be wonderful, thank you very much, Cart! This means I can do some other urgent things now. Next week I will do additional tests, polish my code, adapt it for the use in FPCBot and try to find out how to forward it to the developers … – Aristeas (talk) 16:15, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Having links in the section headings is actually a remnant from the time when the Bot only placed the files in the 'Unsorted' on each page, and everything was sorted into sections by hand. This changed some years ago when the FPCBot was re-educated to sort files directly into sections. I don't think anyone thought about this clash of systems when the new improved Bot was activated. This is also why so many old/longtime users have such a hard time adding the section to a nom, they are used to the old system. Clean-up is ongoing. This whole thing will be a good page to link to when we are done and announce this on the FPC talk page. ;-) --Cart (talk) 16:16, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I think I've cleaned them all out now. It was mostly in the bird galleries, and some main headings in other. Hopefully this will work better. --Cart (talk) 17:38, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Great! Thank you so much! – Aristeas (talk) 08:50, 3 May 2025 (UTC) Update: I have done a search for remaining links in headings and subheadings on the gallery pages; that’s a bit tricky, but I found just a single one (on the obsolete Commons:Featured pictures/Sets page) and replaced it with a {{See also}}. So it seems you have got all of them, wonderful, thank you again! I will add a quick test to my fpgallerist program which reports any recurring links in gallery page (sub)headings, so that we get an alert if some overeager fellow adds them back ;–). – Aristeas (talk) 09:44, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Thanks! I went trough the gallery pages with what search tricks I could use here on Commons since I don't have your sophisticated programs, so I'm surprised I only missed one. --Cart (talk) 10:26, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Use of image

[edit]

I have used the image identified below in a blog/essay at https://skeltonshelton.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-great-american-dumb-down.html and on the writing websight at https://medium.com/@kenshel717/the-great-american-dumb-down-288417915410. Thank you for providing it. The photo: Photo By Roman Eisele — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=87283346 2600:1700:B3D0:B3B0:7574:1CAB:D971:8BB6 12:30, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much for noticing me, Ken! Thank you also for the attribution, that’s perfect. By the way, this is a very interesting essay, I really enjoy it to read your text. All the best, – Aristeas (talk) 13:07, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Renaming

[edit]

THank you for your help i.e. here! 201.150.118.26 04:55, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You are welcome! The names of these files were actually completely useless (did not say anything about the photos) and at the same time may be considered to be advertising, so this was a clear case for renaming. Best, – Aristeas (talk) 07:41, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

More fun and games with FPCBot

[edit]

I knew I had seen another erratic behavior from the FPCBot, I just didn't remember exactly where. Now I've found it! When closing this nom, the Bot added a totally different gallery to the closing box than the one in the nom. I went and corrected it later. No idea what it was up to. Looking at the Commons:Featured pictures/chronological/2025-A there weren't any photos destined for that gallery before it. Just thought I should mention this while you are "Bot-wrangling". ;-) --Cart (talk) 17:39, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much, Cart! Sigh, this is a completely different issue and (together with the whole flock of gallery link issues and the “bot forgets to add ‘featured=1’ to the {{Assessments}} template if it is already present” issue) at least the third important and independent FPCBot bug we are aware of. I have a vague intuition what could be the reason. (When data from processing item A turns up unexpectedly in the results of processing item B, this is often a hint to the typical Python problem that some mutable variable, normally a list or dictionary, is reused and changed inadvertently; e.g. when one uses an empty list [] or dict {} as default value for a function argument, or when one assigns a mutable value which is intended to be constant to a variable that is changed later and hence also accidentally changes the ‘constant’). But even if this idea is true one needs to find where in the code that happens. I will try to tackle this later. But it’s excellent and very helpful that you have described the issue and even found the exact nomination and step where the bot has shown this fault. Best, – Aristeas (talk) 18:25, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
PS: Cart, don’t worry about the weird stuff in my answer. I have mentioned lists and dicts, mutable variables and [] or dict {} not in order to confuse or annoy you, but to note down my idea that the problem you have discovered could be related to that stuff, and for the rare case that somebody else with higher coding power stumbles over this page. All the best, – Aristeas (talk) 19:30, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Don't worry, I read these notes more as your own notes to keep track of your progress. Of course I realize that much of the stuff is for those more versed in coding than me, but I like to read it anyway and follow the progress best I can. I like to see that you are happy with your results and that you work is ongoing. --Cart (talk) 19:36, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Cart, I have found the reason for this issue. There is a bug in the method Candidate.findGalleryOfFile() of FPCBot. The current code is quite complicated and uses a complicated regular expression which searches for the word ‘Gallery’ and then for a link beginning with [[Commons:Featured[_ ]pictures/, but does not limit that search to the same line on which the word ‘Gallery’ occurs (as I would have expected, because normally the gallery link should appear right after the word ‘Gallery:’). The code also applies the regular expression repeatedly and then uses the last match. Now the text of this nomination contains three links which start with [[Commons:Featured[_ ]pictures/:
The code in Candidate.findGalleryOfFile() finds all three links and returns the last one.
It is quite easy to fix this bug. I have written a new version of Candidate.findGalleryOfFile() which is also much simpler and assumes that the gallery link is the first link that starts with [[Commons:Featured[_ ]pictures/ and appears in the same line after the word “Gallery”. I have tested the new code with all 627 nomination subpages from January to April 2025 and it works well. I will submit a pull request with the new code as soon as the maintainers of FPCBot have processed my first pull request.
Thank you very much for finding this bug and for your accurate description! Only thanks to your description and the failed example nomination I was able to track down and fix the bug. All the best, – Aristeas (talk) 14:28, 3 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Very glad I could be of help. You see, only understanding part of what you write in your Bot-notes, can work too. ;-D The more info you get, the easier it is to fix things. --Cart (talk) 14:36, 3 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Cart, it’s really great that you have observed and reported this problem because it happens more often than we would have expected. I have tested all 627 nomination subpages which were created from January to April 2025 both with the current FPCBot code and with my new one. The gallery link as found by the old code was wrong in 4 cases and incomplete (without section anchor) in 1 case:

In these cases users had to intervene manually, either by fixing the gallery link in the {{FPC-results-reviewed}} template on the nomination subpage (like you did here and BigDom did there) or later by moving the FP to the correct gallery page and section (like Radomianin did here). The results of the new code were correct in all these cases, so it should save us the effort for manual corrections. I will make a pull request for it soon. – Aristeas (talk) 09:34, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

FP Promotion

[edit]
 ★ This image has been promoted to Featured picture! ★

The image File:Beilstein - Kaisersbach - Oberes Höllwäldle - Birnbaum mit Blick über Schmidbachtal (1).jpg, that you nominated on Commons:Featured picture candidates/File:Beilstein - Kaisersbach - Oberes Höllwäldle - Birnbaum mit Blick über Schmidbachtal (1).jpg has been promoted. Thank you for your contribution. If you would like to nominate another image, please do so.

/FPCBot (talk) 05:02, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

FP Promotion

[edit]
 ★ This image has been promoted to Featured picture! ★

The image File:Broken window, Ponte de Sor, Portugal julesvernex2.jpg, that you nominated on Commons:Featured picture candidates/File:Broken window, Ponte de Sor, Portugal julesvernex2.jpg has been promoted. Thank you for your contribution. If you would like to nominate another image, please do so.

/FPCBot (talk) 05:03, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-19

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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

Updates for editors

  • For wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled, two new feature improvements have been released:
    • Admins can now choose which namespaces are permitted for Event Registration via Community Configuration (documentation). The default setup is for event registration to be permitted in the Event namespace, but other namespaces (such as the project namespace or WikiProject namespace) can now be added. With this change, communities like WikiProjects can now more easily use Event Registration for their collaborative activities.
    • Editors can now transclude the Collaboration List on a wiki page (documentation). The Collaboration List is an automated list of events and WikiProjects on the wikis, accessed via Special:AllEvents (example). Now, the Collaboration List can be added to all sorts of wiki pages, such as: a wiki mainpage, a WikiProject page, an affiliate page, an event page, or even a user page.
  • Recurrent item View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Developers who use the moment library in gadgets and user scripts should revise their code to use alternatives like the Intl library or the new mediawiki.DateFormatter library. The moment library has been deprecated and will begin to log messages in the developer console. You can see a global search for current uses, and ask related questions in this Phabricator task.
  • Developers who maintain a tool that queries the Wikidata term store tables (wbt_*) need to update their code to connect to a separate database cluster. These tables are being split into a separate database cluster. Tools that query those tables via the wiki replicas must be adapted to connect to the new cluster instead. Documentation and related links are available. [15]
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

  • The latest Chart Project newsletter is available. It includes updates on preparing to expand the deployment to additional wikis as soon as this week (starting May 6) and scaling up over the following weeks, plus exploring filtering and transforming source data.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:11, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-20

[edit]

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 "Get shortened URL" link on the sidebar now includes a QR code. Wikimedia site users can now use it by scanning or downloading it to quickly share and access shared content from Wikimedia sites, conveniently.

Updates for editors

  • The Wikimedia Foundation is working on a system called Edge Uniques, which will enable A/B testing, help protect against distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks), and make it easier to understand how many visitors the Wikimedia sites have. This is to help more efficiently build tools which help readers, and make it easier for readers to find what they are looking for. Tech News has previously written about this. The deployment will be gradual. Some might see the Edge Uniques cookie the week of 19 May. You can discuss this on the talk page.
  • Starting May 19, 2025, Event organisers in wikis with the CampaignEvents extension enabled can use Event Registration in the project namespace (e.g., Wikipedia namespace, Wikidata namespace). With this change, communities don't need admins to use the feature. However, wikis that don't want this change can remove and add the permitted namespaces at Special:CommunityConfiguration/CampaignEvents.
  • The Wikipedia project now has a Wikipedia in Nupe (w:nup:). This is a language primarily spoken in the North Central region of Nigeria. Speakers of this language are invited to contribute to new Wikipedia.
  • Recurrent item View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Developers can now access pre-parsed Dutch Wikipedia, amongst others (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese) through the Structured Contents snapshots (beta). The content includes parsed Wikipedia abstracts, descriptions, main images, infoboxes, article sections, and references.
  • The /page/data-parsoid REST API endpoint is no longer in use and will be deprecated. It is scheduled to be turned off on June 7, 2025.
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

  • The IPv6 support is a newly introduced Cloud virtual network that significantly boosts Wikimedia platforms' scalability, security, and readiness for the future. If you are a technical contributor eager to learn more, check out this blog post for an in-depth look at the journey to IPv6.

Meetings and events

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MediaWiki message delivery 22:34, 12 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Lil question

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Thank you for the constructive criticism on FPC. May I ask your opinions on the images below, and if you think they'd pass FP?

Really broad selection, I know, lol. But I think that they all look good and I hope that you enjoy looking at them just like I did 𐩣𐩫𐩧𐩨 Abo Yemen (𓃵) 10:43, 15 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Abo Yemen, since I know it can be a daunting experience getting involved in FPC at first and you had a rough start. If you are not an experience photographer, it's a bit much to take in. I've left you some tips on your talk page about how to find good photos for FPC. All the best, --Cart (talk) 19:38, 16 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-21

[edit]

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 Editing Team and the Machine Learning Team are working on a new check for newcomers: Peacock check. Using a prediction model, this check will encourage editors to improve the tone of their edits, using artificial intelligence. We invite volunteers to review the first version of the Peacock language model for the following languages: Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Japanese. Users from these wikis interested in reviewing this model are invited to sign up at MediaWiki.org. The deadline to sign up is on May 23, which will be the start date of the test.

Updates for editors

  • From May 20, 2025, oversighters and checkusers will need to have their accounts secured with two-factor authentication (2FA) to be able to use their advanced rights. All users who belong to these two groups and do not have 2FA enabled have been informed. In the future, this requirement may be extended to other users with advanced rights. Learn more.
  • Wishlist item Multiblocks will begin mass deployment by the end of the month: all non-Wikipedia projects plus Catalan Wikipedia will adopt Multiblocks in the week of May 26, while all other Wikipedias will adopt it in the week of June 2. Please contact the team if you have concerns. Administrators can test the new user interface now on your own wiki by browsing to Special:Block?usecodex=1, and can test the full multiblocks functionality on testwiki. Multiblocks is the feature that makes it possible for administrators to impose different types of blocks on the same user at the same time. See the help page for more information. [16]
  • Later this week, the Special:SpecialPages listing of almost all special pages will be updated with a new design. This page has been redesigned to improve the user experience in a few ways, including: The ability to search for names and aliases of the special pages, sorting, more visible marking of restricted special pages, and a more mobile-friendly look. The new version can be previewed at Beta Cluster now, and feedback shared in the task. [17]
  • The Chart extension is being enabled on more wikis. For a detailed list of when the extension will be enabled on your wiki, please read the deployment timeline.
  • Wikifunctions will be deployed on May 27 on five Wiktionaries: Hausa, Igbo, Bengali, Malayalam, and Dhivehi/Maldivian. This is the second batch of deployment planned for the project. After deployment, the projects will be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in their pages. A function is something that takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, such as adding up two numbers, converting miles into metres, calculating how much time has passed since an event, or declining a word into a case. Wikifunctions will allow users to do that through a simple call of a stable and global function, rather than via a local template.
  • Later this week, the Wikimedia Foundation will publish a hub for experiments. This is to showcase and get user feedback on product experiments. The experiments help the Wikimedia movement understand new users, how they interact with the internet and how it could affect the Wikimedia movement. Some examples are generated video, the Wikipedia Roblox speedrun game and the Discord bot.
  • Recurrent item View all 29 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a bug with creating an account using the API, which has now been fixed. [18]

Updates for technical contributors

  • Gadgets and user scripts that interact with Special:Block may need to be updated to work with the new manage blocks interface. Please review the developer guide for more information. If you need help or are unable to adapt your script to the new interface, please let the team know on the talk page. [19]
  • The mw.title object allows you to get information about a specific wiki page in the Lua programming language. Starting this week, a new property will be added to the object, named isDisambiguationPage. This property allows you to check if a page is a disambiguation page, without the need to write a custom function. [20]
  • Advanced item User script developers can use a new reverse proxy tool to load javascript and css from gitlab.wikimedia.org with mw.loader.load. The tool's author hopes this will enable collaborative development workflows for user scripts including linting, unit tests, code generation, and code review on gitlab.wikimedia.org without a separate copy-and-paste step to publish scripts to a Wikimedia wiki for integration and acceptance testing. See Tool:Gitlab-content on Wikitech for more information.
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

  • The 12th edition of Wiki Workshop 2025, a forum that brings together researchers that explore all aspects of Wikimedia projects, will be held virtually on 21-22 May. Researchers can register now.

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MediaWiki message delivery 23:09, 19 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

FP Promotion

[edit]
 ★ This image has been promoted to Featured picture! ★

The image File:Sachsenheim - Ochsenbach - Dorfkern - Dorfstraße 20 - Ansicht von Osten (1).jpg, that you nominated on Commons:Featured picture candidates/File:Sachsenheim - Ochsenbach - Dorfkern - Dorfstraße 20 - Ansicht von Osten (1).jpg has been promoted. Thank you for your contribution. If you would like to nominate another image, please do so.

/FPCBot (talk) 21:01, 21 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

FP Promotion

[edit]
 ★ This image has been promoted to Featured picture! ★

The image File:Low-key photograph of light bulb, Straume, Norway julesvernex2.jpg, that you nominated on Commons:Featured picture candidates/File:Low-key photograph of light bulb, Straume, Norway julesvernex2.jpg has been promoted. Thank you for your contribution. If you would like to nominate another image, please do so.

/FPCBot (talk) 21:02, 21 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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