User talk:ToBeFree
Add topicLatest comment: 9 minutes ago by ToBeFree in topic Yes, bots and many other tools are down
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The Signpost: 13 October 2026
[edit]- News and notes: AELECT returns, Jimbo gives a union update, VisualEditor is now default
Plus a survey for North Americans, proposed changes to BoT elections, and developments in the Puerto Rican editing community.
- Serendipity: From a rare portrait of a female millionaire in Nancy to a Japanese painter in Lyon
Images from Leuven Libraries popular on Wiki.
- Obituary: Doug Weller
Twenty-year editor, long-term admin, dearly missed.
- In the media: A(I)pocalypses afoot
Cannibals, freeloaders, rogue agents, scams ... the usual.
- WikiConference Report: WikiConference 2026 & the importance of in-person community
Celebrating 12 years of WikiConference North America.
- By the numbers: Does the country of birth affect the likelihood of having a Wikipedia biography?
A cross-country and cross-wikipedia comparison of the likelihood of having a biography in Wikipedia.
- News from Diff: OpenAI "rogue" agent activities found on Wikimedia projects
CPO/CTO Selena Deckelmann explains the recent detection of AI agent activities on Wikimedia projects.
- On the bright side: Good people
Nice comments and real-life rescuers.
- Op-ed: Who are our readers?
The movement makes progress when we know what our scope is.
- Traffic report: This world is big and wild and half insane
Criminals, 9/11 25 years later, artists expelled for politics... we lived in troubled times.
- Comix: Fudging the numbers
Take 'em away, officers!
BLPPRIVACY question
[edit]Hi there! I noticed an unsupported date of birth for Anna of the North and have been looking for reliable sources to back it up. Best I've found is Apple Music – can it be used? –Skywatcher68 (talk) 14:14, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
- Hello Skywatcher68, I don't know for sure about Apple Music, but I know YouTube Music takes the data from Wikipedia (and says so openly). When in doubt, treat it as a case of citogenesis and/or user-generated content. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 14:41, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
- Okay, thanks. I noticed that the Norwegian article uses one of those "famous birthdays" sites, which is presumably even worse. –Skywatcher68 (talk) 14:56, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-43
[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
- To measure the impact of incorporating some community-requested features on logged-out reader retention, a test for Image Carousel will be pushed to logged-out readers. With the Image Carousel feature, readers browse community-uploaded images, selected by editors as relevant to specific articles. The test starts on November 20.
- An experimental notice will be pushed to 0.5% of logged-out mobile readers who come to English Wikipedia from Google, asking them to add Wikipedia as a Google Preferred Source. The test is to see if this notice increases reader retention and encourages people who use Google Search to visit Wikipedia more often. It will run from October 15–29 and will be assessed for its impact on retention and referrals.
View all 26 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where Quarry returned an “Access denied” error when users tried to run SQL queries, preventing queries from running normally, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
Due to a long-standing bug, applications that use the OAuth 2 client credentials flow to act on their owners’ behalf are treated as if they are logged out. This will be fixed for new applications registered on or after Monday, October 19. Some affected applications need to re-register. - Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- A proposal to hold the Wikimedia Hackathon every three years, with regional hackathons in between, has been shared. It explores making the event more accessible to technical communities in different regions. Share your feedback on the proposal’s talk page before November 6.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Hi, just giving you a heads up about this autobiography, which the creator evidently believes can be circumvented by their COI declaration. –Skywatcher68 (talk) 19:20, 21 October 2026 (UTC)
- Hello Skywatcher68, thanks for the notification. I guess someone should decline it for reasons beyond LLM generation, as the user does seem to (try to) address the decline reasons and LLM use is probably not the main problem. Notability perhaps? At the moment, we can't blame JBOYARTIST for retrying in their own words. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 21:22, 21 October 2026 (UTC)
Yes, bots and many other tools are down
[edit]Saw your e/s on AIV – updates are being shared on WP:PHP2026 (VPT thread) and wikitech:Incidents/2026-10-21 PHP security update/Community. This is due to a couple of critical/potentially catastrophic security issues in PHP which could affect up to two thirds of the internet (PHP2Shell), so it's not just us. —ClaudineChionh (she/her · talk · email) 00:17, 22 October 2026 (UTC)
- Beat me to it by 14 seconds!
- @ToBeFree: Anyhow, administrators are archiving AIV manually right now, which is keeping things in check. We have had a few random users archiving things trying to be helpful although that's less than ideal because it creates more work than it saves (sorry, but I am going to make sure reports removed by a non-administrator have been handled correctly) and it runs the risk of preventing an administrator from adding a quick reply before archiving, but only a few instances so far so I haven't felt the need to add a banner or anything yet. Daniel Quinlan (talk) 00:25, 22 October 2026 (UTC)
- Hi ClaudineChionh and Daniel Quinlan, thank you very much! Ah well, I've had a fun day at work with that PHP announcement. Didn't come to my mind that it might have affected bots at AIV. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 00:53, 22 October 2026 (UTC)
