This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump.
This is a redesign of the current Community Portal.
It is expected to be ready to replace the current one by the end of this month. Nothing above this line will eventually make it onto the redesign.
For help on reading and editing Wikipedia see the Help menu.
For technical discussions, assistance, policy, proposals and other news see the Village pump - Wikipedia's discussion forum.
How to add to the community bulletin board
The community bulletin board has 2 sections that can be used by Wikipedians for announcements: "Events and projects" and "WikiProject notices". In general, keep it concise (under 2 lines), refrain from fancy formatting, and new entries should be placed at the top of their section.
Events and projects: In this section, only organized events, projects, and/or competitions should be listed. These are organized by how often they occur:
The Yearly section is for uncommon events, like events that only occur every year, once, or irregularly. The Monthly section is for events that occur each month, or are always ongoing.
WikiProject notices: In this section, any announcement, request for help or other notice from a WikiProject should be listed here.
Entries should be signed, and ordered from newest to oldest.
Entries are to be removed after a period of 6 months.
Welcome to the community bulletin board, which is a page used for announcements from WikiProjects and other groups. Included here are coordinated efforts, events, projects, and other general announcements.
Monthly contest, WikiProject Military history. The contest department of the Military history WikiProject aims to motivate increased quality in military history articles by offering a form of friendly competition for project members making improvements to them. The primary contest available is a simple rolling competition that awards points for improving articles. The contest runs from the first to last day of each month.
Guild of Copy Editors' editing blitz. The October 2024 editing blitz was a one-week-long effort by the Guild of Copy Editors to reduce its backlog. The themes were: articles on the GOCE Requests page from June to August 2024, and articles on the June 2023 and July 2023 backlog. It began on 13 October, 00:00 (UTC), and ended on 19 October, 23:59 (UTC). Stay tuned for the next event.
Also consider posting WikiProject, Task Force, and Collaboration news at The Signpost's WikiProject Report page.Please include your signature when adding a listing here.
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 Mobile Apps team has released an update to the iOS app's navigation, and it is now available in the latest App store version. The team added a new Profile menu that allows for easy access to editor features like Notifications and Watchlist from the Article view, and brings the "Donate" button into a more accessible place for users who are reading an article. This is the first phase of a larger planned navigation refresh to help the iOS app transition from a primarily reader-focused app, to an app that fully supports reading and editing. The Wikimedia Foundation has added more editing features and support for on-wiki communication based on volunteer requests in recent years.
Updates for editors
Wikipedia readers can now download a browser extension to experiment with some early ideas on potential features that recommend articles for further reading, automatically summarize articles, and improve search functionality. For more details and to stay updated, check out the Web team's Content Discovery Experiments page and subscribe to their newsletter.
Later this month, logged-out editors of these 12 wikis will start to have temporary accounts created. The list may slightly change - some wikis may be removed but none will be added. Temporary account is a new type of user account. It enhances the logged-out editors' privacy and makes it easier for community members to communicate with them. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 12 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts. Guidance on how to update the code is available. Read more about the deployment plan across all wikis.
It is now possible to create functions on Wikifunctions using Wikidata lexemes, through the new Wikidata lexeme type launched last week. When you go to one of these functions, the user interface provides a lexeme selector that helps you pick a lexeme from Wikidata that matches the word you type. After hitting run, your selected lexeme is retrieved from Wikidata, transformed into a Wikidata lexeme type, and passed into the selected function. Read more about this in the latest Wikifunctions newsletter.
Updates for technical contributors
Users of the Wikimedia sites can now format dates more easily in different languages with the new {{#timef:…}} parser function. For example, {{#timef:now|date|en}} will show as "21 October 2024". Previously, {{#time:…}} could be used to format dates, but this required knowledge of the order of the time and date components and their intervening punctuation. #timef (or #timefl for local time) provides access to the standard date formats that MediaWiki uses in its user interface. This may help to simplify some templates on multi-lingual wikis like Commons and Meta. [6][7]
Commons and Meta users can now efficiently retrieve the user's language using {{USERLANGUAGE}} instead of using {{int:lang}}. [8]
The Product and Tech Advisory Council (PTAC) now has its pilot members with representation across Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America. They will work to address the Movement Strategy's Technology Council initiative of having a co-defined and more resilient technological platform. [9]
In depth
The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: an upcoming Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module, new Community Configuration options, and details on new projects.
The Wikimedia Foundation is now an official partner of the CVE program, which is an international effort to catalog publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities. This partnership will allow the Security Team to instantly publish common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) records that are affecting MediaWiki core, extensions, and skins, along with any other code the Foundation is a steward of.
The Community Wishlist is now testing machine translations for Wishlist content. Volunteers can now read machine-translated versions of wishes and dive into discussions even before translators arrive to translate content.
20–22 December 2024 - Indic Wikimedia Hackathon Bhubaneswar 2024 in Odisha, India. A hackathon for community members, including developers, designers and content editors, to build technical solutions that improve contributors' experiences.
You can help improve the articles listed below! This list updates frequently, so check back here for more tasks to try. (See Wikipedia:Maintenance or the Task Center for further information.)
WikiProjects are ongoing collaborations to improve articles having to do with a particular subject. Hundreds exist; find one that interests you! There are also many other fine projects listed below.
List of WikiProjects - Topics include art, business and economics, games, geography, history, humanities, law, literature, mathematics, music, politics, science, sports, technology, transportation, and more.
Lee Arthur Smith (born December 4, 1957 in Shreveport, Louisiana) was a pitcher in Major Leagues. Smith played for eight teams in both the NL and AL in his 18-year career, beginning with the Cubs in 1980. Smith led the league in saves four times during his career and by the time of his retirement in 1997 (with the Expos), he was the all-time leader with 478 saves. Smith used his fastball and size (he stood 6'6") to intimidate batters during the late innings of the game and became one of the premier closers of the 1980's and early 1990's.
Twelve-year-old Aang is the last surviving Airbender, a monk of the Air Nomads' Southern Air Temple, and is a supercentenarian at the incarnation age of 112.[1] He is the current incarnation of the Avatar, the spirit of the planet manifested in human form. Aang, as the Avatar, controls the elements and is tasked with keeping the Four Nations at peace.
Elvis Aaron Presley began his career as one of the first performers of rockabilly, an uptempo fusion of country and rhythm and blues with a strong back beat. His novel versions of existing songs, mixing "black" and "white" sounds, made him popular—and controversial—as did his uninhibited stage and television performances. He recorded songs in the rock and roll genre, with tracks like "Hound Dog" and "Jailhouse Rock" later embodying the style. Presley had a versatile voice and had unusually wide success encompassing other genres, including gospel, blues, ballads and pop. To date, he is the only performer to have been inducted into four separate music halls of fame.
Wikipedia is written by volunteer editors and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that also hosts a range of other volunteer projects: