The Apple Wiki:Community portal

Welcome to The Apple Wiki's community portal. If you have questions about editing the wiki, you can start a new topic. You can also find us on Discord.

Bot traffic abuse

Due to ongoing abuse from bots crawling the wiki, we are starting to ban some bots. There was one bot in particular that caused the wiki to become increasingly unstable over a period of about 12 hours, because it was fetching gigabytes of data very quickly, ignoring our robots.txt, which would have prevented that from happening. (edit: This was in fact going on for more than 48 hours. 518,336 requests were made.)

This should not affect "good" bots. Regular web search engines (Google, Bing, Yandex, etc) are still allowed to index the site, and ChatGPT's web search mode will still load results it finds from the wiki. Requests made by some AI services for training purposes are now being blocked because their behavior has been particularly abusive of the sites they're harvesting for training data. This has been echoed across the internet by various sites recently (here's one example). I don't believe the problematic bot today was an AI company, but it was still denying others access to the wiki due to the volume of requests (i.e., a DoS), which is unacceptable.

Actual wiki bots (those that use MediaWiki APIs) should be unaffected. It's only bots attempting to crawl the entire wiki via regular HTML pages that should be impacted. If you come across an issue, please let us know. If you need bulk access to wiki content, use Special:Export instead, or contact the admins about what you're working on. —kirb (talk) 11:27, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

We had another instance of an abusive scraper bot today, with the offender making 197,278 requests without any delays in between, which consumed all of the server's resources. They also attempted a further 1.19 million requests after being blocked. (That's an impressive collection of Cloudflare block pages...)

We run this wiki at our expense because we care about having this information discoverable and able to be collaborated on. The content on this wiki is, indeed, under a generous Creative Commons license. This does not grant the right to create unhealthy and disrespectful levels of traffic that amount to a DDoS. If you do this, we will be required to block your traffic patterns to ensure access for legitimate users and bots.

We've spent a lot of time (too much honestly) optimising the wiki's performance recently. While this held together better than before, this bad actor revealed some points we hadn't considered. As a result, logged-out users may now receive Cloudflare captcha challenge walls on pages that are particularly "expensive" for the server to render. We're hoping this won't be too annoying. Typical browsing around the wiki should not be affected by this - it's only when digging further into the tools of the wiki that you might run into the challenge wall.

If you have a need for large amounts of data from us, please use one of these options:

1. Use Special:Export.
2. Use the MediaWiki API, which can query large amounts of data in a single request.
3. Contact us on Discord about your requirements, if they exceed what the API and exporter are capable of, and we can work something out.

If you have a legitimate bot that's now being blocked, please contact us and we can figure out whitelisting it. —kirb (talk) 16:35, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

Wiki updates

Hi everyone! We've made a handful of updates to the wiki:

1. MediaWiki has been updated from 1.41 to 1.43: Hot off the git tag (officially released yesterday), the wiki is now on MediaWiki 1.43. Perhaps of particular interest is that MediaWiki has better native dark mode support now, especially if you use Vector 2022. There is also an edit recovery feature, which saves your unfinished edits in your browser for 30 days in case you ever close the tab. Other than that, things just work better. There's a good summary of what's new in these pro.wiki blog posts for 1.42 and 1.43.
2. Permissions overhaul: I've redone how user rights are configured on this wiki. Particularly, I wanted to make sure each of the user groups are clear about what permissions they're providing. (There were some issues with this change earlier this week that should be fixed now.)
3. Better performance: The wiki is much better at caching now, making the entire site way faster. This has helped performance across the board, because annoying bots hitting the wiki (see above...) are actually mostly being absorbed by the Cloudflare edge cache. We also decided it's worth the expense to upgrade to Cloudflare Pro, because it gives us higher-priority access to their caching features.
4. Better file uploads: Still a work in progress (not live yet), but I'm working on adding UploadWizard to help make image uploads more consistent.

There are currently a few issues from the upgrade we're working through:

• Special:RecentChanges isn't updating automatically. For now, we've set up a cron to trigger updating it every so often. Fixed.
• Citizen, our default skin, has implemented its own version of dark mode for a long time. As I said above, MediaWiki has now caught up with its own dark mode. There are some places where they're currently conflicting, e.g. dark text on a dark background. In the opposite way, there's also some things that won't be styled correctly in Vector 2022 dark mode just yet.

If you think you've found something not mentioned above, please reply here or mention it on Discord.

We're also welcoming ROSeaboyer into our new moderator role. Thanks for your awesome work so far!

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to the wiki so far - I'm so glad about how well it's been going. A special shoutout to Alistair3149, who has been a huge supporter on the admin/infrastructure side of things. —kirb (talk) 12:10, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

Ground rules update

I'm drafting a rewrite of our ground rules, which you can find at User:kirb/Sandbox/Ground rules. The goal is to make the document clearer - the spirit of most rules hasn't changed. Much of the ground rules were written in the very early days of the wiki, around 2008 - 2012. (My personal favorite is that it references the drama around ZiPhone.) A lot has changed since then, both on and off the wiki, so it's pretty well the time to update this.

Overview of what's changed:

• License: May move this to its own separate page, but I included the deed of the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. I figure it's reasonable that someone considering our rules also wants to know what other people are allowed do with their work.
• Organisation: Made two clear sections: Basic ground rules and Additional policies. The key takeaway for new editors should be the basic ground rules. The further policies are important to lay out, but they get very specific about sections of the wiki. Sections that touch on similar topics have also been merged together.
• Copyrighted material: Split this into three sections: Not allowed, Acceptable, and Exceptions. Hopefully this makes it more clear what is and isn't allowed.
• AI: Luckily I don't believe AI copy-paste spam has ever shown up on the wiki, but I wanted to make sure our policy on it is clear. Content should not directly come from AI tools, and research via AI tools should be verified.
• Formatting: Added a new section about how articles should be laid out, how wikitext should be used, how dates are presented, etc.
• Other updates: Added more instructions for creating software articles, key pages, and tutorials, and tried to be more specific in the note on user pages.

Before putting it into effect, I'd like to make sure the community can have a say about it. You can do so by replying here. I'll consider it ready to take effect once all questions are resolved.

I also want to brainstorm how we can make the "Does it need an article?" section more useful - it feels too vague currently. Any suggestions are appreciated. —kirb (talk) 11:38, 29 December 2024 (UTC)

The new ground rules are now in effect. I worked on "Does it need an article?" and think it looks fine now, but if anyone has any suggestions on that (or any other section), you're always welcome to mention them here. —kirb (talk) 14:29, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

Help opening file

How do I open this file on my phone?

file:///var/mobile/Library/SMS/Attachments/79/09/370D9E32-95C0-40BA-85D1-57B16553B7E6/vpbFDGhIatLkUry Jacbur3 (talk) 14:34, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

This isn't the place to ask that really. However it depends if you are jailbroken or not. If you are, you can use Filza File Manager. --IAdam1n (talk) 16:02, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

I'd like to make a version translated into Japanese...

If it is possible to make it, how should I do it...? How about making it like this: (original article name)_ja... Himais0giiiin (talk) 09:03, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

Hi, and welcome! Some articles have been translated in the past, see Dev:Theos/de for an example. At some point I'll set up a better system for translations, but for now, adding /ja on the end of your address bar is the way to do it. Make your translation there, then add a link to it at the top of the English page, like you can see on Dev:Theos. Hope that makes sense, feel free to ask if you need more guidance! —kirb (talk) 11:05, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

Hello, thank you for your response. I translated the main page, but upon further thought, I realized I can't edit it. Is this something I have to give up on? Himais0giiiin (talk) 15:25, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

Sorry for the late response. Main Page is going to be one of the trickiest to translate, because it's made up of a whole bunch of templates, including the firmware status tables we update very frequently. I'm also looking at redesigning it to be a bit more welcoming / less dense with links.

Personally I'd suggest holding off on those until I have a chance to add Translate to the wiki. That would allow us to edit the Main Page as often as we need to, while allowing your translations to automatically show up for anyone whose device language is set to Japanese. It adds a pretty handy toolbar at the top of the page that shows if there are any missing translations, and a wizard where you can update each sentence.

Still, please feel free to translate other pages. My best recommendation would be to translate pages with lots of body paragraph text, rather than those with tables or heavy use of templates, for the time being. —kirb (talk) 06:28, 25 February 2025 (UTC)

Understood, thank you for your response. Himais0giiiin (talk) 06:31, 25 February 2025 (UTC)

AI-written content

We've seen a fairly sharp increase in AI-written content being posted on the wiki. Just to reiterate from the ground rules, this is not allowed, and any content we suspect to be written by AI will be deleted. We strive for quality and accuracy of our information, and AI simply is not capable of either of these things - especially when its user doesn't have much knowledge of the topic themselves. Large language models are also built on top of many billions of copyrighted sources, so we simply can not accept direct output from them under our Creative Commons license.

We're incredibly appreciative of any contributions that can be made to the wiki, but we do also need to see some indication that you're bringing something of value to the table. While we do have plenty of wanted pages I'd love to see filled out, due to the increase in AI-written articles I'm quite a lot less interested in that now. General summaries of apps where the article just lists a few feature bullet points, in the wrong tone, with the wrong syntax (markdown), etc., just aren't that useful.

Think of it this way - if someone Googles the article name, and sees an AI summary, and then a link to the article on The Apple Wiki, will they learn anything more from us than they already saw from the AI summary?

If you're looking for ideas of things you can do to help out this wiki, I'd suggest taking a look at the 2,606 existing articles that could all do with some TLC. Take a look at the Contributing tab of the main page for some starting points. You don't even need to be knowledgeable in a lot of the topics - sometimes, all an article needs is some grammar cleanup, or some information you can find and reference by searching online.

I'm thinking we should come up with a shared to-do list for the wiki. There's a lot of things anyone with some spare time can do to help us out, but I can understand the current suggestions feel too broad and not as easy for a new editor to dive into, which leads to the "easy" path of the low-quality AI articles we've seen. —kirb (talk) 03:21, 14 April 2025 (UTC)