Wikimedia Forum/Archives/2026-02

Error on creating pages

I saw on SRUC#See also that archive of all years except 2026 were created so that I want to create the page with the same format of 2025. However, I cannot create the page. Can someone help me to create the page? ~2026-74067-0 (talk) 02:32, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

This section was archived on a request by: — xaosflux ^Talk 02:39, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

Testing simpler New Account creation

New account creation on Android is significantly better than on other platforms. It is just "username, password, repeat password, email" with a captcha after you enter that. On mobile and desktop web, there are 10-20 unnecessary extra lines of text, images, and headers. One has to scroll down the page to find a button to submit. And there are a number of common ways that your account creation request could be rejected (password too short, password too simple) which don't show up as an inline password-strength visual but instead intrude into pageflow as a red error message after you leave a textarea to go to the next.

At an experiment lab we're discussing testing alternate flows for desktop and mobile, testing on Meta. Please share your thoughts and comments here: User:Sj/Design chats/Create account

— The preceding unsigned comment was added by Sj (talk) 11:55, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

• Hi @Misaochan, RitikaPahwa4444, Doc James, and Clovermoss: you may want to look what Sj mentioned in case it's relevant to your interests. I believe that all of you are interested in mobile editing topics such as mobile web & the Commons app. ↠Pine (✉) 02:33, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

  Interesting, I never really noticed this difference, but I'm usually clicking the stay signed in for a year option and editing on my phone anyways. I'm not against the idea of simplifying the process. I'd imagine some of the links appear in the welcome notification from echo when you register anyways. Clovermoss (talk) 02:36, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for starting this topic! The WMF Growth team is currently working on a closely related effort focused on improving the account creation experience: Account_Creation_Experiments.

We are planning a series of small, iterative tests. The first experiment, tracked in Phabricator task T415659, focuses on simplifying the interface without fundamentally redesigning the form. In parallel, we are exploring additional improvements, including clearer inline validation and reducing disruptive or poorly timed error messages.

I would appreciate feedback on the proposed approaches, either here or on MediaWiki. Beyond reducing disruptive error states and simplifying the form, which additional improvements do you think would have the greatest impact on the account creation experience?

@Sj, I will follow up directly as well. We are very open to collaborating and exploring ideas from this discussion, provided they are technically feasible and aligned with broader product goals. Best - KStoller-WMF (talk) 03:01, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

Etherpad is going to be deleted without backup?

per Talk:Etherpad, a WMF ops team is planning to delete the etherpad instance at etherpad.wikimedia.org without making a backup, on April 30 2026. Any pads that people want to save need to be migrated to meta or somewhere else. This doesn't seem like a good resolution, though clearly the pads have become bloated with spam. A script that captures the latest revision of all non-spam pages (and filters out obvious spam) would likely reduce the total size of the data by 100x.

To discuss, see also task T415237. –SJ talk  01:00, 24 February 2026 (UTC)

It* has been backed up (semi-manually) by someone. It would be good if those backup could be restored to their original URLs after the reset to avoid ~5.000 broken links. (*'It' being public pads in the wikiverse) ✒ Bennylin 17:44, 13 March 2026 (UTC)

How to see pages without categories

I've noticed many pages about research projects and other meta pages do not have categories or only a few generic default ones set. This makes it even harder to find these pages which often have interesting / useful findings and statistical images etc.

Is there a way to see relevant pages that are missing categories?

And since it's probably many, is there a way to return the pages sorted by number of pageviews?

For some types of pages, it would be better to show pages without topical categories / just with default categories – e.g. pages in Category:Completed research projects that only have categories like Category:2019 projects, Category:Completed research projects, Category:Wikimedia Research project (similar to this report on Commons for category pages).
By the way, I have the view that there has been more than enough research by now and it evidently is not read or used much so focus should be on technical development of Community Wishlist items and other issues but to make the resources spent on the research more worth it, it should at least be easier to find these pages/results.

Maybe this is possible using the Quarry query tool or some sophisticated use of a tool like the Massviews Analysis.

If sorting the pages by pageviews can't be done or if it works only if one enters a manually-compiled list of pages, then maybe one could use the search engine for it. So for example -insource:[[Category: shows pages with no category at all. Problems with it include that it does not exclude pages with cats set via templates, that it shows the translated pages, that it can't show pages with just nontopical default categories, etc. The Massviews Analysis would need some maintenance category to be added to pages without categories to be able to show their pageviews.

The same problem also exists on Wikidata where lots of even large meta pages miss their main category or categories at all. Further ideas on this would be welcome. Prototyperspective (talk) 18:08, 26 February 2026 (UTC)

Special:UncategorizedPages — xaosflux ^Talk 19:04, 26 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks. These are not sorted by pageviews though and additionally one can't use this also for seeing those with just nontopical default categories. It's not more useful than the linked search and possibly less so (only advantage is that it does exclude pages where the cats have been set via template). Prototyperspective (talk) 19:19, 26 February 2026 (UTC)

The general theory is for maintenance, that all pages should be categorized, so you can use that list to have a place to start working. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:23, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

Well, it's not what I was asking about and I have more than enough things to do but thanks. And as said having a category does not mean it has a topical category. Prototyperspective (talk) 00:31, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

Another idea about this is seeing pages sorted by number of categories in Category:Completed research projects (and Category:Active research projects maybe too) so at least first of all these are properly categorized and thereby more readily findable and displayed at the place where relevant and where some people may look for the things on the subject. There's already this query for seeing files sorted by number of nonhidden categories and it can probably be modified to do this. Then maybe similar approaches could be done for other subsets instead of looking at uncategorized and undercategorized pages overall. Prototyperspective (talk) 11:28, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

On this topic, is there a way to list all pages that doesn't have not-hidden categories? Many pages in my home wikis doesn't have visible categories, but since they have not-so-useful maintenance categories, they were not listed in the special page. I want to find them all. ✒ Bennylin 17:41, 13 March 2026 (UTC)

This is what I was asking about basically. I think one could modify this query linked above for this. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:06, 16 March 2026 (UTC)