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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

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday, 23 September 2026 at 14:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests, which happen twice a year. During the switchover, all Wikimedia website traffic is shifted from one primary data center to the backup data center to test availability and prevent service disruption even in emergencies.

Updates for editors

• The Growth team tested a new post-edit notice designed to encourage Temporary Account holders to register for a permanent account. The new notice replaced multiple dialogs and a simultaneous welcome notification with a single message highlighting the benefits of creating an account. The experiment increased permanent account creation from 1.94% to 3.66%, an 87% relative increase. The change will now be released to all wikis.
• For Wikipedia editors using the "Suggestion mode" Beta Feature, there is a new opt-in user preference for showing "experimental" edit checks and suggestions. These types are listed at Special:EditChecks, and are intended for early developer-testing and for gathering feedback from experienced users. Administrators can change the configuration details for each suggestion as usual. Administrators can also use this feature to help test their community's ideas for locally created checks and suggestions. Experimental types will have a more distinct visual style later this week. Feedback is welcome.
• The CEE Technical Village Pump has been launched as a space for technical discussions and collaboration among Wikimedia communities in Central and Eastern Europe.
• A new tool, Starter Kit, is now available for new and small language Wikipedia communities. It brings together guided tasks, tools, and resources to help communities get started, monitor their progress, and collaborate with the broader Wikimedia community. Starter Kit is hosted on Wikimedia Toolforge and is designed for Wikipedias with fewer than 50,000 articles. Learn more about how Starter Kit works and how communities have been using it in this Diff blog post.
• The Reader Growth team is launching a retest of the image carousel experiment. The retest will use three new versions of the design, updated based on community feedback. The team will assess results and determine with communities whether or not to proceed with the feature. The experiment will begin the week of September 28 and will run on Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Czech, English, Farsi, French, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
• After successful rollouts to Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Czech, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias, the Reading Lists feature from the Reader Experience team will be available to all logged-in users on all Wikipedia wikis starting September 28.
• View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the mentor status script repeatedly updated mentors’ status even when nothing had changed, creating unnecessary Recent Changes entries, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The abusefilters list query API, used to retrieve specific details about active or historical abuse filters configured on a wiki, has been updated to support the formatversion=2 configuration parameter, thereby leading to breaking changes to the API response. All users who maintain user-scripts or other code need to check if they use the abusefilters list query API, and respond to any breaking changes.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• Users of default skins on desktop and mobile web (Vector 2022 and Minerva respectively) will now be informed if the search suggestions displayed as they type into Search come from page redirects. Previously, users could get confused when the top search suggestions did not match exactly what they had typed. The new redirect notice clarifies that these suggestions are not random, but related to the search. The suggested pages may be redirects to the most relevant destination articles being searched for.
• Logged-out Wikipedia users on mobile web will begin to see a bookmark button for saving articles to their reading lists instead of the current Watchstar button. When clicked, the bookmark button prompts users to log in or create an account to save an article for later. An earlier experiment found that the bookmark icon was four times more likely than the Watchstar button to encourage logged-out users to create an account. This change is part of efforts to encourage more readers to become account holders and use features that help them save and return to content.
• An experiment will begin on September 29 on Spanish, Arabic, English, and French Wikipedias to simplify the experience users encounter immediately after account creation. The test will explore whether removing friction from the current Welcome Survey helps new users understand what to do next more easily. The experiment will run through the end of October.

• The Product and Technology Advisory Council has put out a call for the community to suggest topics that it should consider and discuss with the Wikimedia Foundation. Editors and technical contributors are invited to add topics to the council's talk page.
• Later this week, it will be possible for communities to configure Edit Checks and Suggestions so that they are shown within additional namespaces, such as a Draft: namespace. Feedback is welcome.
• A bug in the Global Watchlist is causing the page to fail to load for users that have unseen changes on Wikimedia Commons. Developers are working on a fix. Until then, affected users can follow the workarounds described in the relevant help section.
• New magic words {{CATEGORYSORT:TIMESTAMP}} and {{CATEGORYSORT:RTIMESTAMP}} are now available for use. They are able to change the default sorting of categories to be based on timestamp of categorization.
• View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where Wikistats for Wikipedias was not reachable has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The datacenter switchover, scheduled on September 23, has been postponed. The equinox exercise revealed capacity issues, preventing the switch of all services to the other datacenter. The process has been paused, prioritizing investigating that issue, to ensure that we continue to be able to serve our users reliably. A new exercise will be scheduled. Meanwhile, all traffic and edits continue to work as usual.
• On September 23, a power loss briefly affected all wikis, creating intermittent issues on both reading and editing modes. This also affected Gerrit. This is unrelated to the datacenter switchover postponement.
• Produnto has been deployed to mediawiki.org and some Indic language wikis. We want to hear your feedback on this experimental product. Produnto allows users to use Lua modules hosted in Wikimedia's GitLab. It simplifies the sharing of Lua code between wikis. Instead of copying each individual Lua module from one wiki to another, users will be able to easily share packages across all wikis.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• A Cross-wiki code collaboration workshop will be held online on October 2 at 12:30 UTC, bringing together South Asian technical contributors to learn about Produnto and begin piloting it on Hindi, Punjabi, Odia, Telugu, and Malayalam Wikipedias. Produnto is a package manager for deploying Lua modules hosted on GitLab to Wikimedia wikis, and was recently deployed on some pilot wikis.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.