Happy New Year and Happy New WikiCup! The 2026 competition has just begun and all article creators, expanders, improvers and reviewers are welcome to take part. Even if you are a novice editor, we hope the WikiCup will give you a chance to improve your editing skills as you go. If you have already signed up, your submissions page can be found here. If you have not yet signed up, you can add your name here, and a bot will set up your submissions page within one day, ready for you to take part. Any questions on the scoring, rules or anything else should be directed to one of the judges, or posted to the WikiCup talk page.

For the 2026 WikiCup, the highest-ranking contestants will receive tournament points at the end of each round, and final rankings are decided by the number of tournament points each contestant has. This is the same scoring system that we had last year. If you're busy and can't sign up in January, don't worry: Signups are open throughout the year. To make things fairer for latecomers, the lowest-scoring contestants are no longer eliminated at the end of each round.

The first round will end on 26 February. The judges for the WikiCup this year are: Cwmhiraeth (talk · contribs · email), Epicgenius (talk · contribs · email), Frostly (talk · contribs · email), Guerillero (talk · contribs · email) and Lee Vilenski (talk · contribs · email). Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:38, 1 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

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

Administrator changes

• Epicgenius
• Left guide
• LEvalyn
• MPGuy2824
• The4lines
• Yue

Fathoms Below

• BaronLarf
• Firefly
• kelapstick
• Opabinia regalis
• Pbsouthwood
• Sethant
• UtherSRG
• Whouk

CheckUser changes

• Giraffer
• HouseBlaster
• SilverLocust

• Liz
• Worm That Turned
• Z1720

Oversight changes

• Asilvering
• Giraffer
• Girth Summit
• Guerillero
• HouseBlaster
• Izno
• SilverLocust

• Liz
• Worm That Turned
• Z1720

Guideline and policy news

• All general sanctions imposed by the community may now be enforced at the Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard (WP:AE) as a result of a recent RfC.
• Due to the result of a recent RFC, the administrator recall process is amended to extend the deadline for a re-request for adminship to 30 days or the next administrator election, whichever is later.
• Changes to the Access to Temporary Account IP Addresses Policy's disclosure rules include broadening the consecutive-blocks exception to cover all admin actions and removing the requirement to revision-delete permissible disclosures once they become unnecessary (instead requiring only their removal). See WP:TAIVDISCLOSE for more information.

Arbitration

• Following the 2025 Arbitration Committee elections, the following editors have been elected to the Arbitration Committee: Aoidh, Asilvering, Girth Summit, Guerillero, HJ Mitchell, HouseBlaster, Izno, Sdrqaz, SilverLocust.
• The arbitration case Pbsouthwood has been suspended.

Hi, Matthew. After noticing the ACC Welcome template text on some user talk pages, I was able to track it down to you thanks to the help of Illusion Flame (here). Just wanted to let you know that I've included ACC Welcome in the list of useful user-hosted welcome templates at WP:Welcoming committee/Welcome templates/User-hosted. (Are there others that ought to be listed there?) In addition, I've added a hidden comment to the code to identify subst-only welcome templates in the standard way; this will make the template discoverable post-substitution, for any future placements (not for previous ones, obviously). At some future point, this template-generated search link will provide useful data, although it is empty now:

{{find substed templates notice|User:Matthewrb/Templates/ACC Welcome|noyears=yes|after=no}} → Find subst count and examples of this template on User talk pages using this advanced search.

As an example of what you might see down the road a bit, see the results from this link:

{{find substed templates notice|Welcome-retro|after=no}} → Find subst count and examples of this template on User talk pages using this advanced search.^{[2026; 2025; 2024]}

A template upgrade will be required to handle user subspace templates, but when the time comes that will not be an obstacle.
P.S., I created redirect {{ACC WelcomeTemplate:ACC Welcome}} to save some keystrokes for manual use of the template. Cheers, Mathglot (talk) 00:03, 10 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

MediaWiki message delivery 19:31, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Your feedback is requested at User talk:CabinetCavers on a "Wikipedia technical issues and templates" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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(replacing Yapperbot) SodiumBot (botop|talk) 23:32, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

MediaWiki message delivery 00:30, 14 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]