User talk:TheSandDoctor
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Coming here to ask about a block or other admin action that I have issued on another WMF wiki where I am an admin? Please discuss on your talk page there (if you have Talk Page Access) and ping me as it has nothing to do with enwiki and is outside of its processes. Please also do not assume that that WMF wiki has the same blocking policy or processes as enwiki. If you have any questions about another WMF wiki or my actions on such edition, please leave it on my talk page on that wiki and I will see it as a notification/get back to you. enwiki is not the appropriate place to discuss concerns from other WMF wikis |
No RfXs since 01:04, 20 July 2026 (UTC).—cyberbot ITalk to my owner:Online |
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Article policies
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 | This user talk page might be watched by friendly talk page stalkers, which means that someone other than me might reply to your query. Their input is welcome and their help with messages that I cannot reply to quickly is appreciated. |
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If you feel that I have reverted an edit or issued a warning in error, please let me know. I am human, and I do make mistakes. Please don't interpret an error on my part as a personal attack on you. It's not, I promise. I ask you to simply bring it to my attention; I am always open to civil discussion. Thank you. TheSandDoctor (talk) 04:52, 30 March 2017 (UTC)]] |
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If I see something such as a box, template, image, etc., on another user/user talk page that catches my eye, I will "borrow" it. More than likely without asking. ;) TheSandDoctor (talk) 04:52, 30 March 2017 (UTC)]] |
Happy Adminship Anniversary!
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- Thank you very much, @CAPTAIN RAJU, AlexHammeke, and DaniloDaysOfOurLives:! Much appreciated. Hard to believe it's been 8 whole years! --TheSandDoctor Talk 22:31, 9 July 2026 (UTC)
Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment
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Your feedback is requested at Talk:Jet Lag: The Game on a "All RFCs" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Question from ZaidAhmedWikiEditor on Intel Atom (06:24, 12 July 2026)
[edit]I cant find any mistakes iam new here --ZaidAhmedWikiEditor (talk) 06:24, 12 July 2026 (UTC)
- @ZaidAhmedWikiEditor: If you don't see any mistakes, that's okay. I suspect that the tool brought you there because the page is tagged as needing updates. However, you have no obligation to edit any one particular article. If you aren't feeling one, you can just pick another. TheSandDoctor Talk 05:46, 26 July 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-29
[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
- Revise Tone helps newcomers identify passages in Wikipedia articles that may contain non-encyclopedic language and encourages them to consider revising the tone. The feature was A/B tested on the Arabic, English, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias, where newcomer task completion rates increased by 38.7% compared to the default Copyedit task, with no decrease in edit quality. The test ended on July 9, and the feature is now available for everyone on these wikis, configurable via Community Configuration. The plan is to release Revise Tone to more wikis.
- The community configuration that allows automatic removal of inactive mentors based on configurable criteria will be enabled on Thursday 16, on some wikis to keep mentor lists up to date. Mentors are experienced contributors who opt in to help new users on-wiki through the Growth Features. Administrators can now prepare the settings via Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship; they will take effect starting Thursday.
View all 38 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where some users of the Wikipedia Android app were logged out immediately after signing in, preventing them from staying logged in and editing pages, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- Editing a page via user scripts or gadgets was causing watchlist labels that the user had assigned to that page to reset. This has now been fixed.
- To work around a Safari bug (see phab:T425211), on Parsoid-enabled wikis, wikilink hrefs now use absolute urls instead of protocol-relative urls. REST API output remains unchanged and continue to use protocol-relative urls. Gadgets, user scripts, bots, and CSS might need to be adapted if they relied on the presence of protocol-relative urls in wikilink hrefs.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The Wikimedia Foundation’s Experiment Platform Team has published a blog post reflecting on its first year of structured experimentation. It highlights successful experiments such as Paste Check, Reference Check, and Tone Check, which improved editing outcomes and have been rolled out to more users, as well as experiments that did not lead to product changes. Read more.
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Happy Adminship Anniversary!
[edit] | Happy adminship anniversary! Hi TheSandDoctor! On behalf of the Birthday Committee, I'd like to wish you a very happy anniversary of your successful request for adminship. Enjoy this special day! DaniloDaysOfOurLives (talk) 23:51, 15 July 2026 (UTC) |  |
Good evening, I was hoping to edit a citation on the page “Vero Man”. The final citation, regarding FAU joining excavation efforts, leads to a bot website. If i wanted to edit this, would I need the correct page to substitute it. Thank you for your time. --Con10021 (talk) 17:16, 16 July 2026 (UTC)
- @Con10021: That is a very good catch! I checked with the Internet Archive and was able to confirm that the site was usurped. I've implemented a fix by including the archived version and tagging the page as usurped. Thank you for bringing this to our attention, seriously. TheSandDoctor Talk 05:37, 26 July 2026 (UTC)
Articles for Creation backlog drive
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Hello TheSandDoctor:
WikiProject Articles for creation is holding a month long Backlog Drive in August!
The goal of this drive is to reduce the backlog of unreviewed drafts to less than a month of outstanding reviews from the current 3+ months. Bonus points will be given for reviewing drafts that have been waiting more than 30 days. The drive is running from 1 August 2026 through 31 August 2026.
You may find Category:AfC pending submissions by age or other categories and sorting helpful.
Barnstars will be given out as awards at the end of the drive.
There is a backlog of over 5000 pages, so start reviewing drafts. We're looking forward to your help! MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:38, 19 July 2026 (UTC)
- 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.
Tech News: 2026-30
[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
- The Reader Experience team has incorporated community feedback around the placement of watchstar and watchlist buttons for the Reading Lists beta feature, which would allow for saving articles for later reading – a wishlist item to bring the functionality to web. Editors are invited to enable the beta feature to test it out and share their thoughts.
- Suggestion Mode offers edit suggestions within the VisualEditor for improving Wikipedia articles. All suggestions are community-configurable. The TextMatch feature is a way for volunteers to create custom local suggestions. The feature searches in articles for strings of text, and now includes support for regular expressions. This gives volunteers greater precision and flexibility over the kinds of local suggestions they can create. Note: Suggestions can be targeted based on the edit count of the person editing as well as other aspects of the page. You can find examples from other communities for inspiration, including TextMatches that detect: typos, grammar-errors, potential advertisements, clichés, incorrect dash or hyphen usage, non-specific time keywords, outdated names, and more. Any feedback is appreciated.
- View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the SVG Translate tool could use an outdated version of a file, causing existing translations to be overwritten when new ones were uploaded, has now been fixed. Overall, in the last quarter from April – June 2026 about 337 community tasks were resolved by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Updates for technical contributors
- On Parsoid-enabled wikis, Parsoid now renders a maximum of 1,250 images per page. A new tracking category, "media-limit-reached", will be soon made available to identify pages where this limit is reached, making it easier to find content whose media output may have been restricted during rendering. See phab:T430854 for more information and to provide feedback.
- 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.
Question from Theindianhistorygeek (16:18, 21 July 2026)
[edit]Hello! I would like to ask you, how would you prefer to make an article which is either subtly biased or prominently biased, into a neutral article ? Suggest me some tips . Thank you, Yours Sincerely, Theindianhistorygeek --Theindianhistorygeek (talk) 16:18, 21 July 2026 (UTC)
- @Theindianhistorygeek: It is generally somewhat contextual. Do you have an article in mind? TheSandDoctor Talk 05:30, 26 July 2026 (UTC)
- not really. However, I can make an example, let us assume Article A on a war is controversial. Between two countries. Country A and B .
- When you read that article,you can understand that the sources lean towards Country A. But it is structured in a way, like,"Country A has captured 33 members." It may be a claim.
- So, my question is,do you remove the entire figure or provide both arguments. Theindianhistorygeek (talk) 17:54, 31 July 2026 (UTC)
Question from Jennifer albert Carolyn (22:47, 21 July 2026)
[edit]I'm a doctor from England --Jennifer albert Carolyn (talk) 22:47, 21 July 2026 (UTC)
- Jennifer albert Carolyn It's a pleasure to meet you. If you have any questions about getting started here, please let me know. TheSandDoctor Talk 05:31, 26 July 2026 (UTC)
Doctor 💊🏥
[edit]jenifer Albert Carolyn Jennifer albert Carolyn (talk) 22:49, 21 July 2026 (UTC)
Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment
[edit]Your feedback is requested at Talk:Venus on a "All RFCs" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment
[edit]Your feedback is requested at Talk:Magazine (firearms) on a "All RFCs" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Tech News: 2026-31
[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
Content Translation now supports dark mode, fulfilling a Community Wishlist request. This brings the tool in line with the accessibility features available in the Vector 2022 and Minerva skins, helping reduce visual fatigue for users translating content. - DiscussionTools' source mode and the 2017 wikitext editor will now offer autocomplete for links (
[[), templates ({{), HTML and parser tags (<), and magic words (__), making it quicker and easier to insert links, templates, and other wiki markup while editing. - The Readers Growth team has concluded its experiment with mobile page previews and will not roll out the feature. Page Previews are a pop-up bottom sheet that appears when readers tap a blue link, showing a thumbnail, lead paragraph, and an option to open the article. The experiment showed flat retention and negative indicator metrics, suggesting that mobile web readers preferred navigating directly to linked articles rather than using page previews.
- The Reader Experience team has seen encouraging early results from the Reading Lists feature, with 93% of participating users reporting that it was useful. Reading Lists help active readers save articles for future reading and support their learning goals on Wikimedia projects. The team plans further improvements before expanding the feature to more users.
- The Explore Feed Refresh initiative was tested with new and casual Wikipedia app readers. The refreshed feed helps readers discover new and relevant content. After a 10.5% increase in engagement with the feed, Wikimedia Apps team has decided to scale the Home Feed redesign to iOS with the learnings from the Android release applied.
- View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where subject names in the Article Guidance feature were displayed with incorrect capitalization on French Wikipedia, has now been fixed. Subject names will now follow the correct capitalization rules for the language.
Updates for technical contributors
- After running several Account Creation Experiments to improve registration completion rates, a new version of the username field on Create Account has been rolled out. It includes a popover summarizing the username policy to provide clearer guidance during account creation. As part of this change, the messages
createacct-helpusernameandcreateacct-username-helpthat several communities have configured will no longer be used. If communities want to customize the guidance shown in the new popover, they can instead edit the following messages:createacct-username-policy-popover-bullet1,createacct-username-policy-popover-bullet2, andcreateacct-username-policy-popover-bullet3. - Later this week, the CodeMirror syntax highlighter will offer themes. The themes can be picked from a dropdown menu in the full CodeMirror preferences dialog. For wikitext, available themes are default, colorblind-friendly (previously the colorblind preference option on Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing) and no-highlighting. For code languages (i.e., CSS/JavaScript/JSON/Vue/Lua), there are several themes available. These same themes will eventually be available for wikitext, too.
- From now on, wikis can restrict editing in the "User" namespace to only the page owner and certain user groups. Read the configuration documentation to learn more.
- 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.
Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment
[edit]Your feedback is requested at Talk:Vertex Holdings on a "All RFCs" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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hi there, i have no idea what I am doing, i wish to start a page about my achievements, but it was rejected, not sure how to proceed. --Ohtli01 (talk) 16:50, 29 July 2026 (UTC)
- @Ohtli01: Wikipedia isn't a place to promote yourself nor is it a personal website to list your achievements on. Articles must be written with a neutral point of view and demonstrate notability through the inclusion of reliable secondary sourcing that is independent of the article subject. There must be significant coverage of the subject in the aforementioned sources. Articles must also not be written by Large Language Models. Editors are strongly discouraged from writing about themselves. I do, however, commend you for declaring your conflict of interest on your user page. I would strongly encourage you to review the pages that I've linked here before proceeding any further. TheSandDoctor Talk 19:13, 7 August 2026 (UTC)
Precious anniversary
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| Nine years! |
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Notification of administrators without tools
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Greetings, TheSandDoctor. You are receiving this notification because you've agreed to consider endorsing prospective admin candidates identified by the process outlined at Administrators without tools. Recently, the following editor(s) received this distinction and the associated endearing title: |
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Tech News: 2026-32
[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
- The Reader Experience team has developed a patch demo that wraps the page toolbar onto two lines when there is not enough horizontal space for all the buttons. This aims to reduce crowding in the Vector 2022 toolbar, which can occur on some language Wikipedias at certain screen widths.
- The Reader Experience team is planning to launch Reading Lists, a Community Wishlist item, which is currently available to try in beta, as a full feature in September. Before then, volunteer translator help is needed for string translations into a number of languages. The feature supports reading and learning goals on Wikipedia.
- Next week, the table of contents on Wikimedia Commons file pages will be improved by consolidating the file page table of contents with the page table of contents. This will make it easier to understand a file page’s structure, navigate to specific sections, and share links to individual sections.
- View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where some TIFF images failed to load after clicking their thumbnail, causing a broken image to be displayed instead of the full-size image, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- The variable and function selector in AbuseFilter has been updated to support search and autocomplete. It will allow filter maintainers to find the desired variable or function more quickly.
- The MJPEG and VP8 formats are removed from the video player. The MP4 format (MPEG-4 Part 2) is added instead, which provides higher quality videos to older iPhone devices. It may take a few weeks to retroactively update all existing videos. The default format for modern devices stays the same (VP9/WebM).
- 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.
Posso fazer uma página sobre a biografia de um escritor que ainda não está na Wikipedia? --Danmules (talk) 22:12, 4 August 2026 (UTC)
- @Danmules: This is the English language Wikipedia. You are most likely looking for the Portuguese Wikipedia. (Click that blue link.)
- Esta é a Wikipédia em inglês. Provavelmente está à procura da Wikipédia em português. (Clique no link azul.) TheSandDoctor Talk 19:18, 7 August 2026 (UTC)
Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment
[edit]Your feedback is requested at Talk:Slavic migrations to the Balkans on a "All RFCs" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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The another User called User:Herobrine
[edit]Hey the User called User:Herobrine is here from the Wikipedia. Please block him. It is always the User called User:Minecraft. ~2026-43718-67 (talk) 08:10, 8 August 2026 (UTC)
Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment
[edit]Your feedback is requested at Talk:Homosexuality on a "All RFCs" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Administrators' newsletter – August 2026
[edit]News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2026).
Administrator changes
CheckUser changes
Guideline and policy news
- Following an RfC, the 30-day requirement for extended-confirmed status now begins after an account's first edit instead of its registration (T431060).
Technical news
- Inactive editors can now be removed as mentors at Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship automatically.
- The Suggested Edits' Revise Tone feature is now enabled. It encourages editors to identify and revise non-neutral language in articles.
Miscellaneous
- The Unreferenced articles August 2026 backlog drive is underway. Help to add references to 47,000 articles.
- The Articles for creation August 2026 backlog drive is under way. Help to review 4,500+ drafts.
Tech News: 2026-33
[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
- A new ChartWizard is now available on Wikimedia Commons for users interested in creating charts from their own data. The wizard makes the Chart extension more beginner-friendly by allowing editors to create charts, such as bar and pie charts, without needing to use JSON. Users can still switch to the JSON editor if they prefer. Feedback on the new tool is welcome on the wish talk page.
- View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the Wikipedia iOS app’s Picture of the Day widget displayed the same image every day instead of updating daily, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- Math formula SVG images will soon be generated in the browser instead of on the server. MathML continues to be generated on the server and renders in the browser without JavaScript. Wikibooks will see this change on 12 August, Wikisource on 19 August and Wikipedia from 20-27 August. You can try this by selecting "MathML with SVG image (client side MathJax rendering)" in your preferences. This change is part of deprecating RESTBase and deprecating Mathoid.
- Category pages will soon support sorting entries by the time they are added to a category. This will make it easier to find recently or long-standing categorized pages. It will also improve workflows for maintenance categories such as deletion backlogs and other time-based review tasks. You can use
cldsort=timestampURL argument in category view to sort the entries. - Gadgets and user scripts on Wikimedia wikis may now use ES2018 features and ES2019 features in JavaScript code. Previously, the platform only allowed up to ES2017. MediaWiki validates the source code to protect functionality from syntax errors and to ensure scripts are valid in all supported browsers.
- 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.