User talk:HouseBlaster

Welcome to my talk page!

• My pronouns are he/they.
• I prefer to keep discussions unfragmented. If you leave me a message here, I will respond to it here as an effort to keep the entire conversation in one place. By the same token, if I leave a comment on your talk page, please respond to it there.
• I am an administrator, which just means I have some extra tools to help you out. If you need help, ask! If I am not online and you need help urgently, you can find a recently active admin using this tool.
• Talk page watchers are welcome to add their input!
• I am aware of all contentious topics which exist as of August 23, 2025. (If you don't know what this means, feel free to ignore this bullet point!)

Thank you!

September music

story · music · places

Thank you for Floc thanks! - My story today is about a composer and his ballerina wife, pictured as I saw them in 2009. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:18, 2 September 2025 (UTC)

And thank you for saying thank you! That sounds lovely, Gerda :) HouseBlaster (he/they) 18:59, 2 September 2025 (UTC)

It's just what I feel ;) - Today another giant's music: Canto General. Listen if you like it really big and emotional, with the composer as the conductor, in Chile, after years of suppression. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:07, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

Oh this sounds lovely! I love the backstories from music :) HouseBlaster (he/they) 22:35, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

You made my day, DYK? I enjoy a DYK that pictures a person together with achievements in art. It took much energy to achieve the same for the Canto. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:34, 7 September 2025 (UTC)

<3 glad I could make your day. Wow, a great story. I love how he felt art had a bigger impact than sermons. In a way, it does. May he rest in peace. Thank you for your work on it, Gerda :) HouseBlaster (he/they) 13:19, 7 September 2025 (UTC)

Thank you! As you may know, Arvo Pärt is 90 today, alive - I met him once. Did you know that it tool me some trouble to get him to the main page? Listen! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:50, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

An awesome article with a really cool story :) HouseBlaster (he/they) 14:47, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

Thank you! - Today is the birthday of the 16th Thomaskantor after Bach, remembered. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:56, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

A beautiful story. Happy birthday to Georg! HouseBlaster (he/they) 15:44, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

Heavenly birthday? - My 100th biography to the Main page in 2025 is Siegmund Nimsgern. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:05, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

I see he passed recently; may he rest in piece. A lovely biography, and congrats on 100 pages on the Main Page! HouseBlaster (he/they) 17:13, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

John Rutter 80 today! I sang his major choral works with four choirs, and many of his uplifting anthems, 13 DYK? I watched him explain his Magnificat in person in 1998, and now see it on Youtube: he wore the same outfit. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:07, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

Happy happy birthday to him! The article John Rutter is a great example of what I call small-g good articles: not Good, but still high quality and thorough. Well done with your work on it! An awesome, interesting video; my knowledge and understanding of musical composition is quite limited, and it's always great to learn and grow :) HouseBlaster (he/they) 22:40, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

Question from Honorable Letsho (15:21, 24 September 2025)

Hello good afternoon am Honorable Letsho from Namibia hope you doing fine as well, Please how do we add images on our Wikipedia --Honorable Letsho (talk) 15:21, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

Hello, and welcome! Help:Introduction to images with VisualEditor contains information about using images on Wikipedia. To upload images, please see the upload wizard on our sibling project. Best, HouseBlaster (he/they) 15:25, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

Mathematics

Computation Honorable Letsho (talk) 15:24, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

Not sure what your question is; I am a real person so I can't autocomplete like ChatGPT. Best, HouseBlaster (he/they) 15:29, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

giraffe Giraffer (talk) 22:03, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

...r HouseBlaster (he/they) 22:24, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

A goat for you!

Thanks for helping out with the CfD backlog! Cheers,

GoldRomean (talk) 19:01, 28 September 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for your help as well :) HouseBlaster (he/they) 19:27, 28 September 2025 (UTC)

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. [1]

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. [2]
• 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. [3]
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikiquote in Malay (q:ms:) [4]
• View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the User Info Card now displays currently active global lock/blocks. [5]

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)

October 2025 GAN Backlog Drive

October 2025 GAN Backlog Drive
On 1 October 2025, a one-month backlog drive for good article nomination reviews will begin in hopes of addressing the growing backlog and to reduce old nominations. Barnstars will be awarded based on the number, length, and age of nominations reviewed. Each article review will earn 1 point; for each 90 days an article has been in the backlog, an additional half-point is awarded; one extra point will be awarded for every 2500 total reviewed words. Interested in taking part? Sign up here.
If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself from the mailing list or alternatively to opt-out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:57, 29 September 2025 (UTC)

Question from Lcvr4147 (14:58, 30 September 2025)

Any guidance on how to post a photo of an entry person? I tried a few times, with photos received by the entry person, but they were taken down. --Lcvr4147 (talk) 14:58, 30 September 2025 (UTC)

Hi Lcvr4147, and welcome! Thank you for helping illustrate Wikipedia. Photos on Wikipedia need to be suitably licensed. We require that image licenses permit unlimited reuse by others, including for commercial purposes completely unrelated to Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0 is an example of such a license which qualifies, and that is also the license that Wikipedia's text is released under! The copyright holder must explicitly release their image under a compatible license. Note that the copyright holder is, by default, the photographer, so the subject does not hold the copyright unless either the photographer legally transferred the copyright or the photo is a selfie. Wikipedia:A picture of you explains how to get a photo of yourself on Wikipedia, including the license requirements.

Please note that we have particular rules for editors with conflicts of interest. Conflicts of interest are occur when editing Wikipedia articles about yourself, family, friends, clients, employers, or your financial and other relationships. If you have a conflict of interest, please see our simple guide to conflicts of interest which explains how to disclose and edit with one. Best, HouseBlaster (he/they) 15:48, 30 September 2025 (UTC)

The Signpost: 2 October 2025

• News and notes: Larry Sanger returns with "Nine Theses on Wikipedia"; WMF publishes transparency report
  

This time "not merely negative".

• In the media: Extraordinary eruption of "EVIL" explained
  

Wickedpedia wrangles post-truth politics.

• Disinformation report: Emails from a paid editing client
  

Unexpected news!

• Discussion report: Sourcing, conduct, policy and LLMs: another 1,339 threads analyzed
  

Fifty hot topics from fourteen noticeboards.

• Community view: The pressing questions of the modern WWW, as seen from the Village Pump
  

Policy, politics, icons, captchas, and LLMs.

• Recent research: Is Wikipedia a merchant of (non-)doubt for glyphosate?; eight projects awarded Wikimedia Research Fund grants
  

And other recent publications.

• Opinion: Some disputes aren't worth it
  

When to walk away.

• Obituary: Michael Q. Schmidt
  

Rest in peace.

• Traffic report: Death, hear me call your name
  

Celebrities, deaths and software.

• Comix: A grand spectacle
  

All invited!

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:50, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

Question from IzanagiMK (10:06, 2 October 2025)

Hi!! Does Wikipedia supervise/approve our edits or does the edit stay unnoticed until a moderator sees it? --IzanagiMK (talk) 10:06, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

@IzanagiMK: Edits rarely go unnoticed for long because most articles/pages are on at least one person's watchlist, just like how I saw your edit here! Some articles are indeed protected, and edits by differing levels of users might have to be approved. For example, 388 people are watching the page for nuclear accidents but it's not protected so anyone can edit it. Hope that helps! Aluxosm (talk) 11:29, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

Question from DrefromItaly (14:15, 2 October 2025)

Hello HouseBlaster! Its been quite a while since I last edited on Wikipedia, and after translating from the Italian Wiki more informations to the article about Assago and creating an article from scratch about Nu Genea, I'm translating and adding things to the article about Pieve Emanuele. I wanted to ask, since this is the third article I work on, if what I was doing was good enough. Sorry for any errors in my english: pretty tired... --DrefromItaly (talk) 14:15, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

Hello again! Good to hear from you—your contributions look good! I would add a reliable source to this edit, but otherwise I think you are in great shape :) HouseBlaster (he/they) 14:21, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

Categorization of AE protection actions needed (2 October 2025)

Hello HouseBlaster,

I'm a bot that helps log arbitration enforcement (AE) protection actions on behalf of the Arbitration Committee. As a result of a September 2025 motion by the Arbitration Committee, administrators are no longer required to manually log AE protection actions. Instead, this bot is responsible for logging AE protections to the AE protection log.

This bot detected that you recently took the following page protection actions:

• 14:17, 2 October 2025 (UTC) (Template:Arbitration case navigation/status)

These action(s) seemed to be AE actions based on the edit summaries, but the bot wasn't able to tell which arbitration case they related to. If these were AE actions, please take a moment to log the appropriate topic code at the AE protection log. If they were not, feel free to remove the actions from the AE protection log.

Going forward, in order to help this bot categorize AE actions, please include a link to the contentious topic under which the action was taken in the protection edit summary (for example, [[WP:CT/BLP]] or [[Wikipedia:Contentious topics/Biographies of Living Persons]]).

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to the bot operator or to the arbitration clerks at the arbitration clerks' noticeboard.

Thank you! ClerkBot (talk) 21:23, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

Your email

You have the wrong guy I’m afraid. Stephen 00:09, 4 October 2025 (UTC)

My sincere apologies! Thanks, HouseBlaster (he/they) 00:37, 4 October 2025 (UTC)

Question from Dr.Taiwo (02:15, 4 October 2025)

Thanks HouseBlaster for accepting to by my mentor --Dr.Taiwo (talk) 02:15, 4 October 2025 (UTC)

Of course—welcome to Wikipedia! Let me know if you need anything; I am here to help you :) Best, HouseBlaster (he/they) 02:16, 4 October 2025 (UTC)

Survey

Hi and thanks for your recent participation in AfD. I would like to hear your thoughts about the process. Please check this survey if you are willing to respond.Czarking0 (talk) 02:18, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

Question from Anshuman7Dutta (09:06, 6 October 2025)

When someone fires vandalism? --Anshuman7Dutta (talk) 09:06, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

Hi Anshuman7Dutta! We have a guide to dealing with vandalism at Wikipedia:Cleaning up vandalism. Note that vandalism on Wikipedia has a very particular definition: vandalism is when an editor is trying to harm Wikipedia. Even if misguided, willfully against the rules, or a net-negative edit, it is not vandalism unless the editor wanted to cause harm. Best, HouseBlaster (he/they) 22:00, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-41

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

• Paste Check is a new Edit Check feature to help avoid and fight copyright violations. When editors paste text into an article, Paste Check prompts them to confirm the origin and licensing of the content. Starting Wednesday, 8 October, 22 wikis will test Paste Check. Paste Check will help new volunteers understand and follow the policies and guidelines necessary to make constructive contributions to Wikipedia projects.

Updates for editors

• Mobile devices will receive mobile articles directly on the standard domain (like en.wikipedia.org), instead of via a redirect to an "m" domain (like en.m.wikipedia.org). This change improves performance. This week it will be enabled on Wikipedias. The existing mobile URLs and the "Desktop view" opt-out remain available. Learn more. [6]
• New date filters, creationdate: and lasteditdate:, are now available in the wiki search engine. This allows users to filter search results by a page's first or last revision date. The filters support comparison operators (e.g. >2024) and relative dates (e.g. today-1d), making it easier to find recently updated content or pages within specific age ranges. [7]
• Wikifunctions now supports rich text in embedded calls across the 150 wikis where it's enabled. To showcase this, the team created a Latin declination table that Wiktionary editors can use to automatically generate noun forms, producing clear, formatted results — see an example output. If you need any help or have any feedback, please contact the Wikifunctions Team. [8]
• An edit link will now appear inside the categories box on article pages for logged in users, which will directly launch the VisualEditor category dialog. [9]
• View all 34 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a problem downloading pdf files last week and that has been resolved. [10]

Updates for technical contributors

• The field rev_sha1 in the revision database table is being removed in favor of content_sha1 in the content database table. See the announcement for more information.
• The Reader Experience team will roll out Dark Mode user interface on all Wikimedia sites on October 29, 2025. All anonymous users of Wikimedia sites will have the option to activate a color scheme that features light-colored text on a dark background. This is designed to provide a more comfortable reading experience, especially in low-light situations. Template authors and technical contributors are encouraged to learn how to make pages ready for Dark mode and address any compatibility issues found in templates in their wiki before the enablement. Please contact the Web team for questions or any support on this talk page before the enablement. [11]
• Starting on Monday, October 6, API endpoints under the rest.php path will be rerouted through a new internal API Gateway. Individual wikis will be updated based on the standard release groups, with total traffic increased over time. This change is expected to be non-breaking and non-disruptive. If any issues are observed, please file a Phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board. [12]
• 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 17:19, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

Question from Nelly Kazeundja (19:16, 6 October 2025)

Hello, i want to write a biography for all the members of the wikipedia account, how do i do that --Nelly Kazeundja (talk) 19:16, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

@Nelly Kazeundja: Are multiple people using this account? HouseBlaster (he/they) 22:01, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
	Thanks a million for keeping track of these! [13] ~ ToBeFree (talk) 23:53, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

Of course, TBF—thank you for the barnstar HouseBlaster (he/they) 00:26, 7 October 2025 (UTC)

~ ToBeFree (talk) 00:33, 7 October 2025 (UTC)

Question from Holy khalif (02:41, 7 October 2025)

can i still make out an international business mail from wikipedia --Holy khalif (talk) 02:41, 7 October 2025 (UTC)

No, you may not use Wikipedia for promoting a cause. HouseBlaster (he/they) 02:41, 7 October 2025 (UTC)

September 2025 NPP backlog drive – Points award

	The Working Man's Barnstar
	This award is given in recognition to HouseBlaster for accumulating at least 10 points the September 2025 NPP backlog drive. Your contributions played a part in the 19,000+ articles reviewed during the drive. Thank you so much for taking part and contributing to help reduce the backlog! Utopes (talk / cont) 03:48, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

@Utopes: thank you for doing the legwork for this drive :) HouseBlaster (he/they) 03:49, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – October 2025

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2025).

Administrator changes

• Billinghurst
• Crisco 1492
• DarkFalls
• Spike Wilbury
• Valereee
• Ergo Sum

CheckUser changes

Vanamonde93

Arbitration

• After a motion, arbitration enforcement page protections no longer need to be logged in the AELOG. A bot now automatically posts protections at WP:AELOG/P. To facilitate this bot, protection summaries must include a link to the relevant CT page (e.g. [[WP:CT/BLP]]), and you will receive talk page reminders if you forget to specify the contentious topic but otherwise indicate it is an AE action.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:57, 8 October 2025 (UTC)