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New Central Notice admins

Together with WMF, a small group of current CentralNotice admins has been working to streamline and improve the processes behind CentralNotice. Our work is still ongoing, and after the two trainings for requesting and administering CN's in the past 4 months, we see new users are starting to apply for the right, and sign up to become CN admins.

We would like your advice on how future participants in the training should be selected. The current process, like many on-wiki election processes, includes both formal and informal expectations for this role. We could use your feedback on the following questions:

• What are the typical characteristics you are looking for when voting for this role?
• What are “must have” experiences for folks you would expect to see when selecting new CN admins?
• What else should we be paying attention to as we continue iterating on such a project?

Please join the conversation and give your feedback at Meta talk:Requests for adminship#Feedback on identifying future Central Notice Admins. Ciell (talk) 06:51, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

And in that regard: should we agree to some basic requirements for new Central Notice admins? Please join @ Meta talk:Central notice administrators#'Requirements for Central Notice admins'? Ciell (talk) 08:14, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

Email notifications, confusion with the Meta company

Should email notifications be rephrased to avoid confusion with Facebook's parent company, which I assume the wording pre-dates? I had an email from "Meta" today announcing that a user had "left you a message on Meta" and didn't expect it to relate to a Wikimedia project, from that. Belbury (talk) 12:07, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

Would be better to call it "Meta-wiki" or something. —— Eric Liu_（Talk） 12:08, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

I'm not exactly sure which message this is coming from, is this the mail notification if you opt in to "Edit to my talk page" email notifications? — xaosflux ^Talk 12:47, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

I think it is coming from Echo's translations (use the "filter list" box to search for "sitename" within that listing). 'Sitename' itself is defined in InitialiseSettings. I forget and can't find where 'sitename' is translated (unless it always just displays the canonical name?). HTH. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 23:12, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

I would prefer that this always said "Meta-Wiki". WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:25, 14 July 2025 (UTC)

Seems like we should have a discussion about changing our wgSitename from "Meta" to "Meta-Wiki"? — xaosflux ^Talk 17:34, 14 July 2025 (UTC)

Probably. An RFC, maybe? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:25, 15 July 2025 (UTC)

Technically, it should be a trivial change (I asked a dev).

Socially, it's already used in the site-logo here ("Meta-Wiki"), so might not even need a discussion? But it might be good to get a quick lightweight community-consensus for it, so perhaps someone could propose it briefly at Wikimedia Forum, give it a couple of weeks, and then file a task? HTH. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 17:06, 16 July 2025 (UTC)

• I've opened Meta:Requests for comment/Change our sitename value from meta to meta-wiki. Ping to prior commenters: @Belbury, Ericliu1912, Quiddity (WMF), and WhatamIdoing: — xaosflux ^Talk 17:24, 16 July 2025 (UTC)

A global prohibition to edit in languages that one doesn't know

I've been thinking about making a more comprehensive RFC about it, but before that, I'd like to ask here quickly:

Is there an explicit written global prohibition to edit pages in a language that someone doesn't actually know?

I cannot find anything quite like this. I couldn't find an explicit prohibition of this kind in the Universal Code of Conduct or in the Terms of Use at all.

The page Global locks talks about "abuse on multiple wikis", and the page Global blocks talks about "widespread cross-wiki vandalism", "Cross-wiki promotional editing", and "Cross-wiki disruptive editing that may be in good faith". All of these examples have quite a lot of overlap with editing in languages that a user doesn't know. However, I believe that there should be a more explicit prohibition of this.

There is something like this in the Incubator (see incubator:Help:Manual). It was proposed by me and supported by other users there. I believe that it should be global, however.

So, before even discussing whether this idea of mine is good or bad, I'd like to verify: is there really no such global prohibition now?

Thanks! Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 10:18, 6 July 2025 (UTC)

A global blanket prohibition? No. As a global sysop you likely run in to the need to make contributions to many pages on projects you don't know the language for - for anything from reverting vandalism, making technical improvements, etc. — xaosflux ^Talk 11:42, 6 July 2025 (UTC)

Indeed, there are a lot of gray areas in which editing wikis whose main content language you don't know is acceptable. Defining these gray areas more clearly would be the topic of a more comprehensive RFC.

My current question is whether there is anything at all about it except what I've already mentioned. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 12:55, 6 July 2025 (UTC)

There's not. Quite the opposite, our general default behavior is to welcome anyone to contribute to any of our projects - so long as they are doing so constructively. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:37, 6 July 2025 (UTC)

As in doing unverified machine translation and/or content creation abuse on cross-wiki projects? Yes. Otherwise, not really, or one could simply not remove hoaxes and other byproducts of xwiki vandalism. I'd be interested in a RfC – in fact this is needed as the proposal impacts areas far beyond of what we can do here – and can bring additional brainstorming in as well. A09|(pogovor) 13:22, 6 July 2025 (UTC)

As in doing unverified machine translation and/or content creation abuse on cross-wiki projects? Yes.

@A09, do you mean that you agree that it should be prohibited? Or that there is already a written explicit rule against it? Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 13:30, 6 July 2025 (UTC)

I agree it should be prohibited. Sorry for that linguistic fallacy. While we do have some precedent on deleting xwiki machine translation abuse there is no formal rule to protect endangered languages and their respective Wikimedia projects via deleting such pages, so I support a RfC going forward. A09|(pogovor) 13:38, 6 July 2025 (UTC)

Well that is a completely different question from a completely barring someone from making any contribution to a project where they don't have a language skill. However the statement above predisposes that it is about abusive contributions, even furthering narrowing the scope. — xaosflux ^Talk 18:00, 6 July 2025 (UTC)

That's why I intentionally said "language" and not "project". But yet again, the debate itself can wait until an RFC. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 18:29, 6 July 2025 (UTC)

Well sure, but almost all of our projects are single-language. — xaosflux ^Talk 19:41, 6 July 2025 (UTC)

Why in principle can I not replace a PNG with an SVG in a Hungarian wiki? Why is that a good rule? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:56, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

I didn't say that you shouldn't be able to do it. As I already wrote above, that's why I wrote "language" and not "wiki" or "project". If it's a technical edit that doesn't require the knowledge of the language, it's okay in my book (I have more things to say there about such edits, but not here). When I write the detailed proposal, I'll make sure that it's addressed clearly.

I didn't even want to discuss the merits of the idea here, and I only wanted to know whether there is already a written rule about it. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 10:15, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

I appreciate that you're trying to discuss a hypothetical and you're interested in the form not the content of the proposal, but it's hard to ignore the content entirely. If I said, "I want to propos a ban on anyone editing while winking, how do I do that?", of course other users will respond to the proposal itself. So, I'm sorry if this was a tangent, but it's hard to answer the question in principle without understanding what it is you're even looking to propose. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:32, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

@Amire80, why do you want to ban me from fixing wikitext errors at htwiki? There is no such rule, and consequently I can edit that wiki, despite not knowing Haitian Creole (or even French, which would be very helpful). WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:29, 14 July 2025 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing, that's not what I want to ban. But I see that several people here think that that's what I want, so I guess that when I raise the actual question more seriously, I'll have to explain it more clearly.

Fixing wikitext errors is usually OK. I can imagine some cases in which it isn't, but that's mostly a different issue. (Also, the need for such fixing is itself an issue, but this is even more distant from this discussion.)

I'm talking about writing prose in a language that one doesn't know. If you don't know Haitian Creole, then you shouldn't contribute prose in it. Some people try to do it, sometimes with good intentions, and sometimes with bad ones, and the result in both cases is usually not great. The wikitext errors that you are talking about are not prose. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 23:49, 14 July 2025 (UTC)

If I may conjecture and insert myself a bit, this seems to be a reaction to the debacle at the Scots Wikipedia, but that seems very unlikely to be duplicated and this seems mostly a solution in search of a problem. Plus, the WMF are generally pretty reluctant to have top-down rules that apply to 800+ distinct editing communities, who are generally pretty able to self-police. But yes, agreed that if you decide to move forward, having a really clear proposal will be necessary. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:58, 14 July 2025 (UTC)

Indeed, the Scots affair is a very big example of what I'm trying to reduce. Maybe it won't be repeated in the same form, and I'm not even sure about that, but lots of smaller things of this kind happen all the time.

And I have to disagree that the projects are generally able to self-police—some are, many aren't, and it's hard to say how many exactly. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 00:20, 15 July 2025 (UTC)

Htwiki might be a good example of a small instance of this. The reason I have wikitext to fix is that some editors seem to use this method for 'writing' in Haitian Creole:

1. Copy the entire wikitext of an article at the English or French Wikipedia.
2. Paste the entire wikitext of that article into Google Translate.
3. Copy and paste the results that Google Translate provides into a page at the Haitian Creole Wikipedia.
4. Notice all kinds of malformations and red warning messages (e.g., [[Link]] getting 'translated' into [ Lyen]], or the [[File:Name.jpg|thumb]] getting 'translated' into [[fichye:non.jpg|pouce]], when we don't have an image called "non.jpg", or it's not the image you want, and "pouce" isn't the wikitext for a thumbnail) – but do nothing to fix them.

I don't think that this project is able to self-police, as that would require having people who can both read Haitian (I can't) and also delete it (we lost our lone admin). WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:22, 15 July 2025 (UTC)

And now people can just take an article from one wiki, ask ChatGPT/Gemini/Copilot to translate it, and it's practically undetectable. That is even more of an issue. 96.79.100.209 03:01, 15 July 2025 (UTC)

If ChatGPT/Gemini/Copilot don't mangle the wikitext, I would honestly consider that to be an improvement. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:24, 15 July 2025 (UTC)

And eventually end up with another Scots Wikipedia ... Sorry, but seeing current unfolding in Meta community and how much does it care about regulation we better end up just straightforward banning AI usage than regulate it – plainly because no one dares to come up with a sensible policy. Sorry, but your comment just endangers already endangered languages of all sorts, something that's dangerous both to WMF mission (and vision) as well as to small wiki set. A09|(pogovor) 07:46, 16 July 2025 (UTC)

Just a note: I'm not necessarily talking about "AI" and machine translation. These are not the only ways to write in languages that one doesn't know. To the best of my knowledge, the Scots Wikipedia affair did not involve "AI" or machine translation at all, for example. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 11:30, 16 July 2025 (UTC)

Of course, but if we won't dam influx of bad AI contributions and regulate unverified AI machine translations/AI abuse the next Scots-like scenario will definitely include AI to some extent. A09|(pogovor) 16:49, 16 July 2025 (UTC)

@A09, I don't think that's true, because machine translation seems to be more available than AI translation for smaller languages.

More relevantly, though, what do you think a ban on AI abuse will accomplish in practice? Let's say that we all get together and harrumph about the evils of AI for a while. We issue an edict that declares every editor who uses AI to be a Very Bad™ Person Indeed and we ban anything and everything related to AI. A few hundred editors (out of ~1.5 million registered accounts editing each year, BTW) unanimously agree that AI is terrible and destructive and will cause the end of the world. Furthermore, we will agree that there is scientific evidence that every time someone posts an AI-generated article or an AI-translated on wiki, a child goes hungry.

Now what?

I think what will happen is:

1. The people who happily use AI will keep using AI no matter what the policy says, because (a) most of them – probably 99% of them – won't even know about the rule, and (b) the sad fact is that humans do what they believe works for them in the short term. Not everyone follows rules just because they exist. For example, we require people to affirm that the images they're uploading are "own work". The software refuses to upload the images when editors honestly say "No, I copied this cool photo from a copyrighted website". We have serious policies about this all over the place ...and yet we spend all day deleting copyright violations because editors lied about them. If ticking a box that says "I solemnly swear that I wrote this myself, on a computer with no access to AI tools at all, cross my heart and hope to die" is necessary to accomplish the user's goal, then the AI users will cheerfully tick that box.
2. I'll still see non-AI-generated machine translations with broken wikitext at the Haitian Creole Wikipedia (and since I don't speak the language at all, I still won't be able to tell you whether the machine translations are any good – and they might be, especially if they're coming from French or English originals).

What do you think will happen? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:16, 16 July 2025 (UTC)

Even understanding that this is a question leading up to a policy discussion, I would recommend that you focus any RfC on this topic around explicitly banning specific types of problematic behaviour, rather than trying to find a one-size-fits-nobody rule that would need many exemptions. Also be prepared to clearly show why such a new rule is needed, why current processes are insufficient in addressing the abuse, why local communities should not have a say, etc. – Ajraddatz (talk) 19:19, 14 July 2025 (UTC)

And why the rule would realistically be enforced, because if there's a community there that is capable of enforcing it, they likely already are. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:23, 15 July 2025 (UTC)

Global ban for Chealer

Hello, this message is to notify that Chealer has been nominated for a global ban at m:Requests for comment/Global ban for Chealer. You are receiving this notification as required per the global ban policy as they have made at least 1 edit on this wiki. Thanks, --shb (t • c) 11:22, 28 July 2025 (UTC)