User talk:Hawkeye7

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Requests for adminship and bureaucratship update
RfA candidate	S	O	N	S %	Status	Ending (UTC)	Time left	Dups?	Report
Toadspike	143	0	1	100	Open	16:26, 9 October 2025	5 days, 3 hours	no	report

TFA

Thank you today for Trinity (nuclear test), introduced (in 2014): This article is about the very first nuclear test, and the most famous. I promised last year that I would do my best to get it through FAC in time for the 70th anniversary on 16 July 2015. It has been nearly ten years since its previous nomination."! - I remember a 2016 TFA in today's story, in memory of 16 July 1916, and promise (myself) the next, to remember 31 October 1725, - it's about time to begin. -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:10, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

What happened on 17 October 1725? Hawkeye7 (discuss) 08:58, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

17? - 31: Bach led the first performance of Gott der Herr ist Sonn und Schild, BWV 79. I wanted to begin expanding, but now someone died whose article I had wanted to write for years, Claus Peymann. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:16, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunate that Gott der Herr ist Sonn und Schild, BWV 79 is only a GA and not an FA. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:43, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

What do you think I meant by "it's about time to begin"? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:45, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A song by Imagine Dragons. It can take up to three months for an article to get through FAC, and WP:TFA/R is currently taking bids for September slots. So I would strongly recommend (1) nominating it asap; (2) rounding up the usual suspects for reviews to fast track the process; and asking the TFA coordinators to hold the bus (and don't let the pigeon drive the bus! Good luck! Hawkeye7 (discuss) 22:12, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I know, but then - instead - someone dies and I am stuck with a major translation task. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:18, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Three Ukrainian topics were on the main page today, at least at the beginning, RD and DYK, - see my talk. I hope to nominate later today. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 17:08, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

On Bach's day of death, I decorated my user pages in memory of his music, and my story ends on "peace". --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:52, 28 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you today tor Harry Crerar, about "Canada's most senior field commander in the Second World War, who commanded the First Canadian Army in the campaign in North West Europe in 1944–1945."! - Thank you also for more featured content, and the source review for the cantata which made it possible to become FA! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 04:59, 28 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Your nomination of Operation Forager logistics is under review

Your good article nomination of the article Operation Forager logistics is under review. See the review page for more information. This may take up to 7 days; feel free to contact the reviewer with any questions you might have. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of PizzaKing13 -- PizzaKing13 (talk) 09:28, 27 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Your nomination of Operation Forager logistics has passed

Your good article nomination of the article Operation Forager logistics has passed; congratulations! See the review page for more information. If the article is eligible to appear in the "Did you know" section of the Main Page, you can nominate it within the next seven days. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of PizzaKing13 -- PizzaKing13 (talk) 08:01, 29 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

WikiCup 2025 September newsletter

The fourth round of the 2025 WikiCup ended on 29 August. The penultimate round saw three contestants score more than 800 points:

BeanieFan11 (submissions) with 1,175 round points, mainly from sports-related articles, including 17 good articles, 27 did you know articles, and 9 in the news articles
Arconning (submissions) with 1,090 round points, mainly from articles about athletes and politicians, including a featured article on Philippines at the 1924 Summer Olympics, 9 good articles, 28 did you know articles, and a wide assortment of featured and good article reviews
AirshipJungleman29 (submissions) with 854 round points, mostly from a high-scoring featured article on the Indian leader Rani of Jhansi and two good articles, in addition to 13 featured and good article reviews

Everyone who competed in Round 4 will advance to Round 5 unless they have withdrawn. This table shows all competitors who have received tournament points so far, while the full scores for Round 4 can be seen here. During this round, contestants have claimed 9 featured articles, 12 featured lists, 98 good articles, 9 good topic articles, more than 150 reviews, nearly 100 did you know articles, and 18 in the news articles.

In advance of the fifth and final round, the judges would like to thank every contestant for their hard work. As a reminder, any content promoted after 29 August but before the start of Round 5 can be claimed in Round 5. In addition, note that Round 5 will end on 31 October at 23:59 UTC. Awards at the end of Round 5 will be distributed based on who has the most tournament points over all five rounds, and special awards will be distributed based on high performance in particular areas of content creation (e.g., most featured articles in a single round).

Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. If you want to help out with the WikiCup, feel free to review one of the nominations listed on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges – Cwmhiraeth (talk · contribs), Epicgenius (talk · contribs), Frostly (talk · contribs), Guerillero (talk · contribs) and Lee Vilenski (talk · contribs) – are reachable on their talk pages. Good luck!

If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:48, 30 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Nomination for WikiProject Military history coordinators is now open!

Nominations for the upcoming Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history coordinator election have opened. A team of up to ten coordinators will be elected for the next coordination year. The project coordinators are the designated points of contact for issues concerning the project, and are responsible for maintaining our internal structure and processes. They do not, however, have any authority over article content or editor conduct, or any other special powers. More information on being a coordinator is available here. If you are interested in running, please sign up here by 23:59 UTC on 14 September! Voting will commence on 15 September. If you have any questions, you can contact any member of the current coord team. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:03, 1 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-36

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

The Editing team wants to compile a list of templates, jargon terms, and policies used in edit summaries when a copyright violation is removed. This will help them identify the number of edits reverted due to copyright issues. We invite community members from the following Wikis to list these terms in T402601, or to share their list with Trizek_(WMF): Arabic Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, Persian Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Vietnamese Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia. This project is open until September 9th 2025.

Updates for editors

The CampaignEvents extension has been enabled for all Wikisources. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. The extension has three features: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List. To request the extension for your wiki, visit the Deployment information page. [1]
The lists in the footer of the editing interface, such as "Templates used on this page," will now be organized into columns when there is enough space. This enhancement minimizes scrolling when editing lengthy articles on Wikipedia. [2]
On September 3rd, 2025 we will increase the sampling percentages of our group by toggle experiment of the Special:RecentChanges, Special:Watchlist, and Special:RelatedChanges pages on the Chinese, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias to 100 percent, allowing more editors to be part of this experiment. This adjustment is intended to ensure we have sufficient data to make informed decisions when evaluating the experiment results. [3][4]
Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users will see suggestions of articles for further reading on English Wikipedia beginning the week of September 22. The feature will be available on both desktop and mobile. All non-English wikis received this change in June and July. The goal is to make it easier for users to find articles. Learn more.
View all 37 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

Wikifunctions now has a new capability called "lightweight enumeration types", an enumeration type is simply a fixed set of values that's in the type's definition. This capability makes it quick and easy to define such a type, and allows for the reuse of values that are already present in Wikidata. Here is a newsletter to learn more.
The latest Readers Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: the formation of two new teams — Reader Growth and Reader Experience; insights into declining pageviews and account creations; highlights from the Wikimania Nairobi panel on improving the reading experience; upcoming experiments to engage new and existing readers; and more.

Meetings and events

Spotlight on some Wikimania 2025 Sessions:
- Identifying AI-generated text by searching for ISBNs whose checksums fail: Mathias Schindler of WMDE shared tools to help communities search for these.
- La durabilité du mouvement Wikimedia face aux défis actuels et futurs: This session explored how Wikimedia can stay a trusted source of knowledge in the age of generative AI, information overload, and disinformation.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:46, 1 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

DYK for E. Dale Jackson

On 5 September 2025, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article E. Dale Jackson, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that geologist E. Dale Jackson conducted experiments with Jello to test theories on the formation of the Hawaiian islands? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/E. Dale Jackson. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, E. Dale Jackson), and the hook may be added to the statistics page after its run on the Main Page has completed. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

— Amakuru (talk) 00:02, 5 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

DYK for Operation Forager logistics

On 8 September 2025, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Operation Forager logistics, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that logistical support for Operation Forager involved calling forward ammunition ships to replenish the fleet despite almost daily Japanese air attacks? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Operation Forager logistics. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, Operation Forager logistics), and the hook may be added to the statistics page after its run on the Main Page has completed. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

—Kusma (talk) 00:03, 8 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 9 September 2025

News and notes: Wikimedia Foundation loses a round in court

UK Online Safety Act remains undefeated.

In the media: Congress probes, mayor whitewashed, AI stinks

Plus Wiki rules, Wiki Spin, and physicists get street cred!

Disinformation report: A guide for Congress

The price of Liberty is eternal vigilance.

Recent research: Minority-language Wikipedias, and Wikidata for botanists

And other new research findings.

Technology report: A new way to read Wikisource

Tis true: there's magic in the web of it.

Traffic report: Check out some new Weapons, weapon of choice

With the usual mix of war, death, super heroes, a belt, and Wednesday.

Essay: The one question

It's an easy one.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:04, 9 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-37

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 is working on a new check: Paste check. This check informs newcomers who paste text into Wikipedia that the content might not be accepted. This check is an effort to increase the likelihood that the new content people are adding to Wikipedia is aligned with the Movement's commitment to offering information under a free content license. This check will soon be tested at a few wikis. If your community is interested in this test, please tell us in this task, or contact the team.

Updates for editors

Later this week, users of the "Improved Syntax Highlighting" beta feature will be able to use a linting tool to see errors or other potential problems in wikitext in real time. See the help page for more information. [5]
When browsing a wiki (like en.wikipedia.org), the software responds in one of two ways: a desktop page, or a redirect to a mobile version on an "m" domain (like en.m.wikipedia.org). Over the next three weeks, MediaWiki will start displaying the mobile version to mobile devices directly on the standard domain, without this redirect. This change does not affect existing m-dot URLs, or the "Desktop view" opt-out. Learn more. [6]
When an edit changes the categories of a page, the changes to the category membership counts are now happening asynchronously. This improves the speed of saving edits, especially when moving many pages to or from the same category, and reduces the risk of site outages, but it means that the counts can show outdated information for a few minutes. [7]
Edits on Wikidata to qualifiers (properties and values) and references (properties and values) in a Wikidata item statement will now not add entries to the RecentChanges or Watchlist pages on all other Wikis. This is a temporary change to improve performance while other solutions are created. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. Learn more. [8][9]
Japanese-language wikis have had a major upgrade to the way that search works. The new search should generally give more accurate and more relevant search results. [10]
View all 31 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 01:10, 9 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

WWII - Western Europe

One of my goals for next year is to branch out a bit more in my reading and pull together a decent 20th-century assortment of books to go with the 19th-century American history. My book spreadsheet currently shows 32 for WWII (including a 1943 radar manual), 6 for WWI, and 2 for the Korean conflict, compared to 335 for the American Civil War. The WWII books are of scattered variety in age and topic matter. What's some of the ones you'd recommend? Hog Farm _Talk 02:59, 10 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

For the war in North West Europe? I would recommend:

Buckley, John (2013). Monty's Men: The British Army and the Liberation of Europe, 1944-5. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-13449-0. OCLC 840803701.
Copp, Terry (2006). Cinderella Army: The Canadians in Northwest Europe. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-0-8020-9522-0. OCLC 64344744.
Higgins, David R. (2010). The Roer River Battles: Germany's Stand at the Westwall 1944-45. Havertown, Pennsylvannia: Casemate. ISBN 978-1-935149-29-3. OCLC 520771970.

These provide an overview of the campaigns. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 19:17, 10 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This Month in GLAM: August 2025

This Month in GLAM – Volume XV, Issue VIII, August 2025
Headlines
Albania report: Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos campaign 2025 in Albania and Kosovo Brazil report: Expanding Cultural Heritage in Brazil: School communities, Wikisource course, GLAM-Wiki Impact and Wiki Takes Alcântara India report: Digitization starts at two more libraries in West Bengal Indonesia report: Grant for GLAM Indonesia is open! Italy report: From food festivals to PhD courses: Wikimedia in Italian academia New Zealand report: NZ species edit-a-thons, a scholarly article, a course, and Auckland Museum editors at Wikimania Nigeria report: Highlights from Wiki Heritage Fellowship and Policy Advocacy in Nigeria North Macedonia report: Wiki Loves Film – Collaboration with MakeDox Film Festival Poland report: WikiChełmoński: When Wikipedia Becomes a Guide in the Museum Switzerland report: BAM Hackathon, 3D for Cultural Heritage, Wiki Cite UK report: Working towards more image sharing USA report: Wiknics Biodiversity Heritage Library report: News on BHL transition and updates on work by BHLWiki Working Group members AvoinGLAM report: Steps towards a sustainable cultural commons Memory of the World report: A pivotal month Wikisource report: Wikisource Reader app released on Google Play Store Calendar: September's GLAM events
Read this edition in full • Single-page
To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 18:24, 11 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Coordinator Nomination

Just a friendly reminder that this is the deadline day for nomination statements - unless you post one a day or so late as I have done in the past two years. You are no doubt aware of this but as I see no statement from you yet I am getting anxious about the absence of a statement from you. Thus, I add this note. Donner60 (talk) 10:03, 14 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the timely reminder!!! I have posted a nomination statement today. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:42, 14 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I left a note for Matarisvan. He has not been online since then. It appears that he became somewhat inactive rather abruptly over the past several weeks. He had only 3 edits in August and 11 this month, all but two on September 11. I see no note on his user page or talk page. But we have all seen some users' activity levels drop entirely or almost entirely over a long period without much if any explanation from them. I suppose, if he doesn't file even a late statement, he could be co-opted if he returns to active use and wants to still be a coordinator. As far as I can tell, he has made good contributions to the project over the last year. Donner60 (talk) 23:18, 14 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

He has made no reply to my talk page but has posted a "no" in the standing for re-election table on the coordinator election page. Donner60 (talk) 00:49, 17 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I updated the coordinator election page. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 01:09, 17 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Nomination of Riley Williams for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Riley Williams, which you previously marked as reviewed, is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted. The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Riley Williams (2nd nomination) until a consensus is reached, and you are welcomed to contribute to the discussion.SodiumBot (botop|talk) 22:29, 14 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

These updates are delivered by SodiumBot. To opt out of these messages, add {{User:SodiumBot/NoNPPDelivery}} to your talk page.

Lieutenant-Governor of Victoria

You should read POSTNOM in full before reverting: 'Post-nominals should not be added except to a biography subject's own lead sentence, in an infobox parameter for post-nominals, when the post-nominals themselves are under discussion in the material, and in other special circumstances such as a list of recipients of an award or other honour'

Given the article is not a biography page and is a list of office holders, not honours, it applies. Ecrm87 (talk) 23:48, 14 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

What a shame. Once again the MOS militates against our goal of building an encyclopaedia. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 00:04, 15 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Not at all, old print encyclopaedias did not include postnominals or prefixes in lists. I support their inclusion on biography pages, but on lists they're clutter, pure and simple. Ecrm87 (talk) 00:06, 15 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Restored your version without post-nominals. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 00:09, 15 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Voting for WikiProject Military history coordinators is now open!

Voting for the Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history coordinators is now open! A team of up to ten coordinators will be elected for the next coordination year. Voting closes at 23:59 UTC on 29 September. If you have any questions, you can contact any member of the current coord team. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:25, 15 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-38

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

References lists that are made using the <references/> tag will now automatically display with columns in Vector 2022 when readers are using its 'standard' settings for text-size and page-width. [11]
Starting in the week of October 6, on small wikis and medium wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled, all autoconfirmed users will be able to use Event Registration as an organizer. No changes will be made for large wikis unless requested in Phabricator. This change is being made to make it easier for more people to use Event Registration, especially on wikis that are less likely to have policies related to the Event Organizer right. Learn more.
Users that search using regular expressions (regex) can now use additional features including:
- for the intitle: keyword: metacharacters for start-of-line (^) and end-of-line ($) anchors [12]
- for both intitle: and insource: keywords: shorthand character classes for digits (\d), whitespace (\s), and word characters (\w); and escape codes for line feed (\r), newline (\n), tab (\t), and unicode (e.g. \uHHHH). [13]
When you search for text that looks like an IP, the system will now show search results. It used to take you to the contributions for that IP instead of showing search results. [14]
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 24. This is planned at 15:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests which happen twice a year. You can read more about the background and details of this process on the Diff blog.
View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that affected users who used the page-tabs to switch from wikitext editing of a section into the visualeditor. [15]

Updates for technical contributors

The MediaWiki Interfaces team is redesigning the Wikimedia REST API Sandbox with Codex. If you have feedback on improvements for the API documentation or what makes developer experiences smooth (or frustrating), you’re invited to join an upcoming discovery interview, or leave feedback onwiki. Learn more.
Edits to Wikidata aliases (an alternative name for an item or a property) will now be shown in RecentChanges and Watchlist entries on other wikis less often, reducing unnecessary notifications. This will reduce the overall quantity of 'noisy' entries. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. Learn more. [16]
The new Unicode 17.0 version has been released. The datasets on Commons for the Module:Unicode data have been updated. Wikipedias that do not use the Commons datasets should either update their own data or switch to the Commons datasets.
Users of the Wikimedia Enterprise Structured Contents endpoints can now access Parsed Tables. The new Parsed Tables feature extracts and represents Wikipedia tables in structured JSON. This improves machine accessibility as part of the Structured Contents initiative. Structured Contents output is freely available through the On-demand API, or through Wikimedia Cloud Services.
A dataset of English Wikipedia biographical information from Wikimedia Enterprise has been published on Kaggle, for evaluation and research. This provides structured data from more than 1.5 million biographies, including birth and death dates, education, affiliations, careers, awards, and more (from a June 2024 snapshot).
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

Scholarship applications for Wikimania 2026 in Paris, France, are open until October 31.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 17:02, 15 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Downlink Volume 3, Issue 8

⭠ Previous Issue ⭢ Following Issue

	The Downlink	The WikiProject Spaceflight Newsletter
	The Downlink	2025 1 — 31 August

Volume 3 — Issue 8

Spaceflight Project • Project discussion • Members • Assessment • Open tasks • Popular pages • The Downlink

In the News

The VC4S configuration of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur launch vehicle had a successful maiden flight on 13 August.

Article of the month

NAOS (satellite)

NAOS (National Advanced Optical System) is a high-resolution Earth observation satellite developed by OHB Italia for the Luxembourg Directorate of Defence as part of the Luxembourg Earth Observation System (LUXEOSys). Designed for dual-use governmental and military purposes, NAOS provides very high-resolution optical imagery for applications in defense, security, and humanitarian efforts, supporting organizations such as NATO, European Union, and the United Nations. The satellite was launched on August 26, 2025, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.

NAOS will be operated by LUXEOPs, consortium consisting of RHEA System Luxembourg, LUXSPACE, OHB and RHEA System.

Image of the month

Apollo 15 Lunar Module

Launched on 26 July, 1971, Apollo 15 was the fourth Apollo mission to successfully land on the moon, and the first of the longer, more science-focused J Missions. Landing at Hadley–Apennine on the 30, Commander David Scott and Lunar Module Pilot James Irwin (Irwin on left) stayed on the moon's surface until 2 August, while Command Module Pilot Alfred Worden stayed in orbit, collecting a variety of data on the moon. Apollo 15 was the first mission to use the Lunar Roving Vehicle (on right), which allowed Scott and Irwin to travel farther from the Lunar Lander (center) than previously possible.

On 4 August, the lunar orbiter departed from orbit at the end of Apollo 15's 74th lunar orbit. On the 5, Worden performed an EVA which lasted 39 minutes. This was the first of three deep-space EVAs, all performed during J Missions. The command module landed in the North Pacific Ocean on the 7, with the command module and crew being recovered by USS Okinawa. Apollo 15 was the longest Apollo mission, lasting for a total of 12 days and 7 hours, until Apollo 17, which lasted 12 days, 13 hours, and 52 minutes.

Members

New Members: No new members

Number of active members: 213. Total number of members: 439.

August Launches
All times stated here are in UTC. See a current list here.

Ariane 62 — MetOp-SG A1 (13 Aug. at 00:37) (success)
Vulcan Centaur VC4S — NTS-3 (13 Aug. at 00:56) (success)
Soyuz-2.1b — Bion-M No.2 (20 Aug. at 17:13) (success)
SpaceX Starship — 8 Starlink simulators (26 Aug. at 23:30) (success)

Article Statistics
This data reflects values from 31 August 2025.

Spaceflight articles by quality and importance
Quality	Importance
Quality	Top	High	Mid	Low	NA	???	Total
FA	7	28	15	8			58
FL		3	4	4			11
FM					124		124
A	1		2	1			4
GA	11	27	33	57		2	130
B	16	85	200	226		4	531
C	45	162	594	794		46	1,641
Start	16	140	1,017	2,615		463	4,251
Stub		6	203	2,022		246	2,477
List	10	119	109	236	1	37	512
Category					1,275		1,275
Disambig					48		48
File					260		260
Portal					55		55
Project					109		109
Redirect		2	42	140	1,246		1,430
Template					528		528
NA					1		1
Other					30		30
Assessed	106	572	2,219	6,103	3,677	798	13,475
Unassessed				10		129	139
Total	106	572	2,219	6,113	3,677	927	13,614

Monthly Changes

Since July 2025, there is one new top-importance, one fewer high-importance, two new mid-importance, 13 new low-importance, 47 new NA-importance, and seven new unknown-importance articles, for a total of 69 more articles. There is also one more GA-class article, two more B-class articles, 18 more C-class articles, 12 more Start-class articles, and 16 fewer Stub-class articles.

Discuss & propose changes to The Downlink at The Downlink talk page. To unsubscribe from the newsletter remove your name from the Mailing list.
Newsletter contributors: User:Ships&Space

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:22, 21 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

DYK for List of Saint-Cyr promotions

On 22 September 2025, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article List of Saint-Cyr promotions, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that the French Army initially named the Saint-Cyr class of 2016–2019 after Georges Loustaunau-Lacau, but backed down after a public outcry? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/List of Saint-Cyr promotions. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, List of Saint-Cyr promotions), and the hook may be added to the statistics page after its run on the Main Page has completed. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to nominate it.

Gatoclass (talk) 12:02, 22 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-39

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

On September 24th at 15:00 UTC, all Wikimedia sites users will experience a brief read-only period due to a scheduled datacenter server switchover. The Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team will redirect all traffic from one primary server to its backup. You can listen to the switchover using the "Listen to Wikipedia" tool, where you will hear edits stop for a few minutes during the read-only phase, then resume. This twice-yearly datacenter server switchover ensures reliability by testing the backup datacenter, so that our sites can stay online even if the primary datacenter fails. You can read more about the process on the Diff blog.

Updates for editors

Editors of 60 more Wiktionaries will soon be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them into their pages. A function takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, like adding numbers, converting miles to meters, calculating elapsed time, or declining a word into a case. They will join the other 65 Wiktionary language editions, which already have access to embedded Wikifunctions calls. Later this year, plans are in place to expand to more Wiktionaries and the Incubator.
A new parser function has been added: {{#contentmodel}}. Template editors and admins can use it to get the localized or canonical name of the content model of a specific page. The function makes it easier to create and edit system messages, such as MediaWiki:editinginterface, even when you switch types of pages, like wiki, JavaScript, CSS or JSON page. [17]
Adding or editing a DISPLAYTITLE for an article using VisualEditor will no longer be broken. Editors who use VisualEditor mode to modify the {{DISPLAYTITLE}} would no longer have the literal text "DISPLAYTITLE" or its localized variant added to their articles. A list of pages that may have been affected and might need cleanup is documented in this ticket.
Beta users of the Wikipedia Android app can now try the redesigned Activity tab, which replaces the Edits tab. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging.
View all 12 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

Wikifunctions users can now import many essential facts involving geo-coordinates, quantities and time values from Wikidata. This is made possible by the creation of Wikifunctions types for these values, which makes them available for use by functions in Wikifunctions. Learn more about how this works in this video and Wikifunctions' August 1 newsletter (for quantities) and August 22 newsletter (for geo-coordinates).

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:51, 22 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

About cleaning up article history templates

Hey Hawkeye7! I've noticed that FACBot folds relevant talk page banners into {{Article history}} when it updates them. I feel like this functionality would also be very useful to have as a script that editors can run browser-side (banner blindness can be a real issue on some talk pages). I know very little JavaScript and no Perl, so would creating this script be something you're interested in? If not, I would appreciate it if you could point me to the relevant code you wrote for FACBot so I can try my hand at adapting it. Let me know what you think! —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 19:25, 24 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You can clone the code with git from https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/toolforge-repos/milhistbot.git. The relevant Perl module is in the MilHist/ArticleHistory.pm module. However, it was written to run as part of a bot, rather than from the browser-side. We would need to think about how to implement it. It could be completely written in Javascript, which would be ideal, but neither of us has that much Javascript knowledge (which is why I write the bots in Perl and C#). What I could do is provide it as a web service that implements it, and then call it from Javascript. That would be much simpler. Your thoughts appreciated. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:25, 24 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Apologies for the delay, it's a busy week for me. Thanks for directing me to the relevant code. Please don't feel any obligation to work on this, by the way; it's not exactly a high priority. If there are other things you would rather get to, I'll workshop a solution on my own time. However, if you think it wouldn't be too much trouble, the external service you mentioned would also be greatly appreciated! If the wikitext is being processed by an external service, a script might not even be needed as long as it provides the result to be copied and pasted. I suppose it comes down to whatever is easier: a script or making a GUI on Toolforge. —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 04:47, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Notability for U.S. Army LtGen?

Is there a specific notability guideline for military persons? This came up when I found an article that had been created on U.S. Army Lt.Gen. Johnny K. Davis. It was a copy-and-paste of a public domain biography. I've done some clean-up. However, it has been nominated for deletion - Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Johnny K. Davis (2nd nomination) -- for lack of notability and significant coverage. In general, the highest level military leaders, unless leading combat units and getting political attention, do not make the national news. What are your thoughts? Stance of the WikiProject? — ERcheck (talk) 22:52, 24 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

We used to have one, WP:SOLDIER, but it was deprecated. Most Wikipedians now assume that military persons are non-notable. However, WP:GNG still applies. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 00:06, 25 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Hawkeye7 - In your estimation, does Johnny K. Davis meet notability? His position requires a 3-star rank. Similar to a politician, it seems like a "national" level office. — ERcheck (talk) 00:57, 25 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, he meets our notability requirement WP:GNG: A topic is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list when it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 01:05, 25 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Hawkeye7 - Sad to hear that "Most Wikipedians now assume that military persons are non-notable". — ERcheck (talk) 05:46, 25 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

(talk page stalker) Unfortunately, notability 'standards' keep getting cranked tighter and tighter, for...reasons, I guess. The days of "the sum total of human knowledge" are long gone. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 06:55, 25 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Central African Regiment

You have probably noted the FAC for the article on this interesting regiment, but, in case you had not, I would greatly appreciate your comments as I feel your insights would be invaluable. simongraham (talk) 22:44, 25 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Bugle: Issue 233, September 2025

Your Military History Newsletter

Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results
Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content
Book review: Hawkeye7 and Nick-D look at recent works
Timeline: This month in military history

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 11:53, 26 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

DYK for Alexander Kratz Rupp

On 27 September 2025, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Alexander Kratz Rupp, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that US Air Force pilot Alexander Kratz Rupp once kidnapped a goat? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Alexander Kratz Rupp. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, Alexander Kratz Rupp), and the hook may be added to the statistics page after its run on the Main Page has completed. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to nominate it.

RoySmith (talk) 00:04, 27 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-40

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

A major software upgrade has been made to Phabricator. The update introduces performance improvements, a refreshed search interface, enhancements to Maniphest task search, updates to user profile pages and project workboards, new Herald automation features, as well as general text input, mobile experience improvements and more. [18]

Updates for editors

The Community Tech team will release the new Community Wishlist extension on October 1, that will improve the way wishes will be submitted. The new extension will allow users to add tags to their wishes to better categorise them, and (in a future iteration) to filter them by status, tags and focus areas. It will also be possible to support individual wishes again, as requested by the community in many instances. The old system will be retired. There will be a brief period of downtime while the extension is deployed and wishes are migrated to the new system. You can read more about this in the latest update or you can consult the current documentation on MediaWiki.
As announced on Diff blog, the production trial of the hCaptcha service for bot detection has begun. The trial is currently using hCaptcha to protect account creation on Chinese, Persian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, and Turkish Wikipedias, where it will replace our existing CAPTCHA (FancyCaptcha). The goal with the trial is to better block bots while also improving usability and accessibility for users who encounter CAPTCHA challenges.
The CampaignEvents extension has been deployed to Wikimedia Commons. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. On Commons, anyone who is a registered user can use it as an event participant. To use it as an organizer, someone needs to have the event organizer right.
Sub-referencing, a new feature to re-use references with different details has been released to German Wikipedia. You can test the feature on testwiki or on betawiki as well. Please share your thoughts on using templates in sub-references or volunteer to become a pilot wiki.
On wikis using the Mentorship system, communities can now opt experienced editors out of Mentorship through Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship. Within this setting, communities may define thresholds, based on edit count and account age, to decide when an editor is considered experienced enough to no longer receive Mentorship. [19]
The Editing Team and the Machine Learning Team are working on a new check for newcomers: Tone 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 Tone language model for the following languages: Arabic, Czech, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Farsi, Italian, Norwegian, Romanian and Latvian. Users from these wikis interested in reviewing this model are invited to sign up at MediaWiki.org. The deadline to sign up is on October 3, which will be the start date of the test.
The rollout of multiblocks had the side effect that non-active block logs may have been shown on Special:Contributions and on blocked users' user and user_talk pages. This issue will be fully resolved in a few days. As part of the fix, messages prefixed with sp-contributions-blocked-notice will be removed and replaced with those prefixed with blocked-notice-logextract in a few weeks. Please help translate the new messages and update any local overrides if needed.
There was a bug with links added using visual editor if they included characters such as [ ] | after the fragment identifier (#). They were not encoded properly creating an incorrect link. This has been fixed. [20]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikiquote in Malay (q:ms:) [21]
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the User Info Card now displays currently active global lock/blocks. [22]

Updates for technical contributors

Later this week, editors using Lua modules will be able to use the mw.title.newBatch function to look up the existence of up to 25 pages at once, in a way that only increases the expensive function count once.
A new Unsupported Tools Working Group has been formed as part of ongoing efforts to collectively determine technical work priorities, similar to the Product & Technology Advisory Council (PTAC). The working group will help prioritize and review requests for support of unmaintained extensions, gadgets, bots, and tools. For the first cycle, the group will be prioritizing an unsupported Wikimedia Commons tool.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:48, 29 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Your nomination of Fernald Feed Materials Production Center is under review

Your good article nomination of the article Fernald Feed Materials Production Center is under review. See the review page for more information. This may take up to 7 days; feel free to contact the reviewer with any questions you might have. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of Dumelow -- Dumelow (talk) 07:08, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]