This user is busy in real life and may not respond swiftly to queries.
This is an archive of past discussions with User:CAPTAIN RAJU. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2026-02-02. Missed the previous one? See issue #716.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: Sapper-bot 2 - Task: Monthly updates of the Dead Sea level and the "lowest point" property for Israel, Jordan, and Asia.
Closed request for permissions/Bot: LiteraryWorksMetaDataUploadBot - Task: Upload metadata for literary works from research project. (Approved)
Africa Wiki Women 1st Newbies Community Meetup - held an orientation for new members on editing Wikidata, Wikipedia, and Commons, to help bridge knowledge gaps of African women on Wiki platforms.
Mapping Africa: Visualizing Knowledge and Communities - explores how African communities use maps and geospatial data to enhance Wikidata, improve Wikimedia articles, and make local knowledge more visible globally.
Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects:
We are making progress with identifying additional ways in which we can reduce the number of irrelevant changes from Wikidata showing up in recent changes and watchlist on Wikipedia and co.
We are discussing with pilot Wikipedias about turning on showing Wikidata changes by default in watchlist and recent changes (moving it from opt-in to opt-out)
GraphQL: We are putting the last touches on a GraphQL endpoint for Wikidata. We are planning to get it live later this month for feedback.
LDF endpoint: We are planning to decommission the endpoint in preparation for the migration away from Blazegraph on the 18th of February (phab:T415696)
Mobile statement editing:
We are almost done with adding support for editing statements with quantity and monolingual text datatype and finished support for mathematical expression statements. We started support for editing coordinate statements.
We are continuing the work on showing constraint violations.
Wikibase Ecosystem: We are in the process of setting up a demo system for ontology federation (i.e. using Wikidata Items as values in statements on another Wikibase instance)
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
The "Page information" feature, which gives validating information about a page (example), now automatically includes a table of contents. If there is a local MediaWiki:Pageinfo-header page created by individual users, it can now be removed.
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, VisualEditor previously added bold or italic formatting inside link descriptions, making the wikicode complex. This has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
There was no XML dump on 20 January. Additionally, from now on, dumps will be generated once per month only.
The MediaWiki Interfaces team removed support for all transform endpoints containing a trailing slash from the MediaWiki REST API. All API users currently calling those endpoints are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. If you have questions or encounter any problems, please file a ticket in phabricator to the #MW-Interfaces-Team board.
Users are reminded that the Wikimedia Foundation has shared some guiding questions for the July 2026–June 2027 Annual Plan on Meta and Diff. These focus on global trends, faster and healthier experimentation, better support for newcomers, strengthening editors and advanced users, improving collaboration across projects, and growing and retaining readership. Feedback and ideas are welcome on the talk page.
Annual planning: The Annual Plan is the Wikimedia Foundation’s description of what we hope to achieve in the coming year. This is a time of urgency and focus for the Wikimedia projects and we invite you to shape this plan together with us.
Account security: All users with registered accounts can now use passkeys for two-factor authentication (2FA), providing a simple and secure way to log in.
Tech News: Latest updates from Tech News week 03, 04 and 05 include unregistered contributors on blocked IPs can now interact on-wiki to appeal a block by creating a temporary account.
Structured task: The Revise Tone Structured Task is now live in A/B testing on pilot wikis: English, Arabic, Portuguese, and French Wikipedia. It helps new editors improve promotional language in existing articles through a quiz style onboarding experience and a guided in article suggestion.
"The Birthday Cake Song" is an original song created for Wikipedia's 25th Birthday, performed by the WikiChoir, featuring Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons content.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletinwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
(Papiamento) Add a different language Label to a Wikidata Item Wikipedia Above Aruba|Ep. 9 - it's not always obvious how to add labels, descriptions and aliases of different languages to Wikidata items, this short video demonstrates how.
Wiki Clarity Tool: Clarity Tool is a lightweight web application built to empower editors across Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons. It helps contributors identify missing information in articles and suggests structured data from Wikidata to fill those gaps.
Mobile editors can now edit String and External ID datatypes directly in the mobile view. To help improve this new interface, Wikimedia Deutschland is looking for volunteers for UX testing sessions. Participants will be compensated for their time. Sign up here (greatquestion) and learn more on the project page: Mobile editing of statements
Mobile editing: We are finalizing the support for quantity, monolingual text, mathematical expression and musical notation statements as well as a first version for coordinate statements.
Wikidata integration in the Wikimedia projects: We have continued our investigation into existing Lua modules in order to find more ways in which we can reduce unwanted entries from Wikidata in Recent changes and watchlists on Wikipedia and co. We found a number of options that we are looking into now. (phab:T416822, phab:T416825, phab:T416826, phab:T416827)
Wikidata Vector embedding: We added German to the embedding (next to English, French and Arabic)
WikiWednesday is back, and please register soon if you want a scholarship for this year's WikiConference North America, being held in September 2026 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada!
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
Logged-in contributors who manage large or complex watchlists can now organise and filter watched pages in ways that improve their workflows with the new Watchlist labels feature. By adding custom labels (for example: pages you created, pages being monitored for vandalism, or discussion pages) users can more quickly identify what needs attention, reduce cognitive load, and respond more efficiently. This improves watchlist usability, especially for highly active editors.
A new feature available on Special:Contributions shows temporary accounts that are likely operated by the same person, and so makes patrolling less time-consuming. Upon checking contributions of a temporary account, users with access to temporary account IP addresses can now see a view of contributions from the related temporary accounts. The feature looks up all the IPs associated with a given temporary account within the data retention period and shows all the contributions of all temporary accounts that have used these IPs. Learn more.
When editors preview a wikitext edit, the reminder box that they are only seeing a preview (which is shown at the top), now has a grey/neutral background instead of a yellow/warning background. This makes it easier to distinguish preview notes from actual warnings (for example, edit conflicts or problematic redirect targets), which will now be shown in separate warning or error boxes.
The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension continues to improve — it now properly supports more than one Wikibase site, for example both Wikidata and testwikidata. In addition, issues regarding text direction have been fixed for users who prefer Wikidata or other Wikibase sites in right-to-left (RTL) languages.
The automatic "magic links" for ISBN, RFC, and PMID numbers have been deprecated in wikitext since 2021 due to inflexibility and difficulties with localization. Several wikis have successfully replaced RFC and PMID magic links with equivalent external links, but a template was often required to replace the functionality of the ISBN magic link. There is now a new built-in parser function{{#isbn}} available to replace the basic functionality of the ISBN magic link. This makes it easier for wikis who wish to migrate off of the deprecated magic link functionality to do so.
A new global user group has been created: Local bots. It will be used internally by the software to allow community bots to bypass rate limits that are applied to abusive web scrapers. Accounts that are approved as bots on at least one Wikimedia wiki will be automatically added to this group. It will not change what user permissions the bot has.
The MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference, Spring 2026 will be held March 25–27 in Salt Lake City, USA. This event is organized by and for the third-party MediaWiki community. You can propose sessions and register to attend.
Due to the result of a recent motion, a rough consensus of administrators at the arbitration enforcement noticeboard may impose an expanded topic ban on Israel, Israelis, Jews, Judaism, Palestine, Palestinians, Islam, and/or Arabs, if an editor's Arab-Israeli conflict topic ban is determined to be insufficient to prevent disruption. At least one diff per area expanded into should be cited.
Bro why you reverted, all of the claims the user who made are unsourced and were also reverted previously by User: Staryu as well, why support unsourced claims addition? ~2026-10079-57 (talk) 22:54, 14 February 2026 (UTC)
Upcoming events: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session 17 February, 2026: We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Session on Tuesday, February 17 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET (Time zone converter). Wikiproject P244 maintenance uses SPARQL queries to identify and resolve two types of constraint violations in Wikidata: instances of Wikidata items with more than one LCNAF identifier and instances of the same LCNAF identifier existing on more than one Wikidata item. The February 17th session will walk participants through how to resolve the former issue, while the March 3rd session will focus on the latter. Event page: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_LD4_Wikidata_Affinity_Group/Project_Series/LCNAF_Duplicate_Detection_P244_Maintenance
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs:
Wiki for Botanists, why thematic engagement matters: WMNZ/Aotearoa on how sustained outreach with botanists via Wikidata workshops, edit-a-thons, and conferences is improving plant-related knowledge on the Wikimedia projects and building strong collaborative relationships with scientific communities.
EMCO Wikidata CoP meeting (2026-01-28) - participants discuss progress on the early adopter phase, incl. how to categorise and track contributions, what statistics to measure and progress on MCO application profiles (persons + corporate bodies)
Tool of the week
Queer Memory multilingual web app that explores global queer history through live Wikidata timelines, places, rights, culture, and activism. Currently available in English, French, and Spanish.
The Wikibase REST APIsearch endpoints are now available on v1 and considered stable! It's important to note that the older v0, which has been live on Wikidata since July 2025, will remain available for a two month transition period until mid-April 2026. We encourage all users to migrate to the new v1 endpoints during this time to ensure that their applications can continue to work seamlessly.
The WMF Wikidata Platform team has published its February 2026 newsletter. It includes result of an initial evaluation of open-source triple store candidates as part of the migration away from Blazegraph, the next Blazegraph migration office hour, and more. To have new issues of the WDP monthly newsletter delivered to your user talk page, Subscribe to WDP newsletter!
Showcase Lexemes: collection (L3941) - English noun (kəˈlɛkʃən) meaning "a group of gathered items", "money gathered for charity/church", or "the act of acquiring"
Development
Mobile statement editing:
We are putting finishing touches on editing support for external ID, URL, monolingual text, quantities and coordinate statements.
We worked on visually highlighting preferred and deprecated statements on the mobile site similar to how it is done on desktop.
We worked on showing more than one constraint violation when a statement violates multiple constraints.
Ontology Federation: We continued working allowing other Wikibase instances to use Wikidata Items in their statements (and later from other Wikibase instances). You can see a demo video of the current development state at ontology federation demo.
GraphQL: We worked on documentation to get get the GraphQL endpoint ready for a first release.
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
The SRE Team will be performing a cleanup of Wikimedia's Etherpad instance, the web-based editor for real-time collaborative document editing. All pads will be permanently deleted after 30 April, 2026 – if there are still migration projects in progress at that point the team can revisit the date on a case by case basis. Please create local backups of any content you wish to keep, as deleted data cannot be recovered. This cleanup helps reduce database size and minimize infrastructure footprint. Etherpad will continue to support real-time collaboration, but long-term storage should not be expected. Additional cleanups may occur in the future without prior notice.
Updates for editors
The Information Retrieval team will be launching an Android mobile app experiment that tests hybrid search capabilities which can handle both semantic and keyword queries. The improvement of on-platform search will enable readers to find what they’re looking for directly on Wikipedia more easily. The experiment will first be launched on Greek Wikipedia in late February, followed by English, French, and Portuguese in March. Read more on Diff blog.
The Reader Growth team will run an experiment for mobile web users, that adds a table of contents and automatically expands all article sections, to learn more about navigation issues they face. The test will be available on Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
Previously, site notices (MediaWiki:Sitenotice and MediaWiki:Anonnotice) would only render on the desktop site. Now, they will render on all platforms. Users on mobile web will now see these notices and be informed. Site administrators should be prepared to test and fix notices on mobile devices to avoid interference with articles. To opt out, interface admins can add #siteNotice { display: none; } to MediaWiki:Minerva.css.
View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue on Special:RecentChanges has been fixed. Previously, clicking hide in the active filters caused the "view new changes since…" button to disappear, though it should have remained visible. The button now behaves as expected.
Updates for technical contributors
New documentation is now available to help editors debug on-site search features. It supports troubleshooting when pages do not appear in results, when ranking seems unexpected, and when you need to inspect what content is being indexed, helping make search behavior easier to understand and analyze. Learn more.
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on January 30. Please help translate.
Highlights
Wikipedia Library: Wikipedia Library gained new content partnerships, restored access to the British Newspaper Archive, and added an Arabic language academic resource with more than 7 million records.
Gender gap: The Celebrate Women 2026 campaign will run from March 1–31 to advance the achievements of the women’s rights and gender equity movement globally.
Annual Planning: The Annual Plan is the Wikimedia Foundation’s description of what we hope to achieve in the coming year. We invite you to shape this plan together with us. Between now and the end of June 2026, we will have continuous conversations about how global trends may shape our future, how we can experiment, adapt and respond together.
Patrolling improvements: A new feature available on Special:Contributions shows temporary accounts that are likely operated by the same person, and so makes patrolling less time-consuming.
Suggestion Mode: A new Beta Feature for the VisualEditor, Suggestion Mode, is now available on English Wikipedia for experienced editors. This features proactively suggests actions that people can consider taking to improve Wikipedia articles, such as "add citation", "improve tone", or "fix an ambiguous link".
WDQS Blazegraph Migration: As part of the migration away from Blazegraph (the current backend of the Wikidata Query Service), an initial evaluation of open-source triple store candidates has been completed. Using the published evaluation methodology, performance, stability, and compatibility was assessed.
Tech News: Latest updates from Tech News week 06 and 07 include the new Watchlist labels feature that allows logged-in contributors to organise and filter watched pages in ways that improve their workflows. They also link to the 44 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
Open Knowledge: Why the Open Knowledge Movement and Public Interest Journalism must unite forces. Shared principles and interdependence, points of convergence and the path forward.
Journalism Awards: Applications for the Open the Knowledge Journalism Awards are now open until March 1. Presented by the International Center for Journalists in partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation, the awards seek to recognize African journalists whose reporting helps close knowledge gaps about Africa on Wikipedia.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletinwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
(Catalan) They were not witches, they were women from Andorra - a Wikimarathon for Witches edit-a-thon to make biographies of Andorran women accused of witchcraft more visible on Wikidata and Wikipedia. Sign-up on Meta: 09:30 – 12:30 UTC, 7 March 2026.
Papers: The Wikidata Query Logs Dataset (WDQL) - presenting a dataset of 200,000 question-query pairs intended to help train Natural Language questions into SPARQL. By S. Walter, H. Bast (2026).
Videos: 3rd Wikidata Training of the On Wiki Skill Mentorship Program by Africa Wiki Women. Dives deeper into the core data modelling concepts, Wikidata-speciifc terminology and practical editing tips for beginners. Led by User:King ChristLike
Tool of the week
Dagbanli dictionary - a monolingual Dagbanli dictionary built using Wikidata lexemes, with 20000 native audio recordings as usage examples pulled from Mozilla Common Voice. This means when you look up a word, you can hear it spoken in example sentences. See this in action here: suɣulo
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikimania:2026 - The call for submissions for the program is open until March 1, 2026.
IBAN countries (The country which the bank with this property may create accounts in. For example "MyBank" can create bank accounts in "France" with the prefix "FR".
Some banks have a single country they may create accounts in and other have many.)
Kloekecode (identifier for locations in the Netherlands, Flanders, French Flanders, and north-western Germany)
ICAO 24-bit aircraft address (Unique 24-bit ICAO aircraft address assigned to an individual aircraft’s Mode S transponder, expressed as a six-character hexadecimal code and used in ADS-B and air traffic surveillance systems.)
Schema examples: federally recognized tribe (E502): required and optional properties for items representing federally recognized Native American tribes in the United States.
Showcase Lexemes: чурка (L179567) - Russian noun (ˈtɕurkə) meaning "a wooden block or stump", "a short piece of wood used in games", or "an offensive term for a person"чурка (L179567) - Russian noun (ˈtɕurkə) meaning "a wooden block or stump", "a short piece of wood used in games", or "an offensive term for a person"
Development
Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are preparing to reach out to editors about improving specific templates that are written in a way that creates a lot of unnecessary entries in Recent Changes and Watchlists.
Mobile statement editing: We are getting close to having editing support for all datatypes. We are currently still working on the support for globe coordinates. We also added support for showing constraint violations on qualifiers and references.
Data quality: We are doing technical investigations about how to make constraint violations available for querying again.
GraphQL: We are getting ready to make GraphQL available on Wikidata later this week.
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
Reference Check has been deployed to English Wikipedia, completing its rollout across all Wikipedias. The feature prompts newcomers to add a citation before publishing new content, helping reduce common citation-related reverts and improve verifiability. In A/B testing, the impact was substantial: newcomers shown Reference Check were approximately 2.2 times more likely to include a reference on desktop and about 17.5 times more likely on mobile web.
Updates for editors
The InterwikiSorting extension, which allowed for the sorting of interwiki links, has been undeployed from Wikipedia. As a result, editors who had enabled interwiki link sorting in non-compact mode (full list format) will now see links reordered. The links moving forward will be listed in the alphabetical order of language code.
Later this week, people who are editing a page-section using the mobile visual editor, will notice a new "Edit full page" button. When tapped, you will be able to edit the entire article. This helps when the change you want to make is outside the section you initially opened.
The Reader Experience team is inviting editors to assess whether dark mode should still be considered "beta" on their wiki, based on their experience of how well it functions on desktop and mobile. If the feature is deemed mature, editors can update the interface messages in MediaWiki:skin-theme-description and MediaWiki:Vector-night-mode-beta-tag to indicate that dark mode is ready and no longer considered beta.
The improved Activity tab which displays user-insights is now available to all users of the Wikipedia iOS app (version 7.9.0 and later). Following earlier A/B testing that showed higher account creation among users with access to the feature, it has been rolled out to 100% of users along with some updates. The Activity tab now shows your edited articles in the timeline, offers editing impact insights like contribution counts and article view trends, and customization options to improve in-app experience for users.
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug that prevented DiscussionTools from working on mobile has now been fixed, restoring full functionality.
Updates for technical contributors
The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension that makes this possible continues to improve. The latest upgrade is the inclusion of a new hook, ext.globalwatchlist.rebuild, which fires after each watchlist rebuild. This allows you to run gadgets and user scripts for the Special page.
--Rosiestep (talk) 09:27, 25 February 2026 (UTC) via MassMessaging
WikiCup 2026 March newsletter
The first round of the 2026 WikiCup ended on 26 February. As some of you may have noticed, good article nomination reviews now receive 10 points, an increase from 5 points in the previous year, as per a consensus at WT:CUP. This point increase has been retroactively applied to all good article reviews for which competitors have claimed points in this round. Peer reviews, which continue to be worth 5 points, are now listed in the same section as featured article candidate reviews, rather than with good article reviews. Everyone who competed in round 1 will advance to round 2 unless they have withdrawn or been banned. No other changes to the round-point system have been made for this year.
Round 1 was competitive. Three contestants scored more than 1,000 round points, and the top 16 contestants all scored more than 300 round points. The following competitors scored more than 800 round points:
Generalissima(submissions) with 1,095 round points, largely from 3 featured articles, 6 good articles, and 5 did you know articles;
MCE89(submissions) with 848 round points, largely from 1 featured article, 8 good articles, 1 did you know article, and 32 FAC and GAN reviews; and
Rollinginhisgrave(submissions) with 838 round points, largely from 1 featured article, 8 good articles, 1 did you know article, and 14 FAC, GAN, and peer reviews.
The full scores for round 1 can be seen here. During this round, contestants have claimed 7 featured articles, 16 featured lists, 2 featured-topic articles, 168 good articles, 13 good-topic articles and more than 50 Did You Know articles. In addition, competitors have worked on 14 In the News articles, and they have conducted nearly 700 reviews. The tournament points table will be updated within the next few days.
Remember that any content promoted after 26 February but before the start of Round 2 can be claimed in Round 2. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. If you want to help out with the WikiCup, feel free to review one of the nominations listed on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages. 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) 14:56, 27 February 2026 (UTC)
A request for comment is open to discuss retiring CSD criterion R3 in favour of handling such redirects through RfD.
Arbitration
Following a motion, remedy 9.1 of the Conduct in deletion-related editing case has been amended to limit TenPoundHammer to one XfD nomination or PROD per 24-hour period.
Following a motion, the Iskandar323 further POV pushing motion has been rescinded.
The Arbitration Committee has passed a housekeeping motion rescinding a number of outdated remedies and enforcement provisions across multiple legacy cases. In most instances, existing sanctions remain in force and continue to be appealable through the usual processes, while some case-specific remedies were amended or clarified.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session 3 March, 2026: We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Session on Tuesday, March 3 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET (Time zone converter). Wikiproject P244 maintenance uses SPARQL queries to identify and resolve two types of constraint violations in Wikidata: instances of Wikidata items with more than one LCNAF identifier and instances of the same LCNAF identifier existing on more than one Wikidata item. The February 17th session walked participants through how to resolve the former issue, while the March 3rd session will focus on the latter. This session will be more discussion-focused, since instances where two LCNAF identifier have the same Wikidata item can be difficult to resolve because of Wikidata’s innate quirks. Maybe your ideas will become the official best practice! Event page: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_LD4_Wikidata_Affinity_Group/Project_Series/LCNAF_Duplicate_Detection_P244_Maintenance
Bring-Your-Own-Data-Lab, on 24.04.2026, the HERMES Data Competence centre hosts an online BYODL. Dr. Katrin Moeller and Dr. Olaf Simons will share how to enrich your own personal data with standard data and the Wikibase FactGrid. Click the link for registration and more information.
Wikidata Workshop w/ Wikipedia Riba Aruba + University of Aruba Research Center (UARC), March 2, 12 - 2pm GMT-4. Click here to register.
(Dutch) Wikipielen: an informal mini-hackathon for the GLAM sector, Olaf Janssen (WM coordinator at National Library of Netherlands) on the 10th edition of this micro-hackathon for people in cultural and heritage sector interested in Wikidata, Wikibase, SPARQL, OpenRefine and other technical skills.
Boundary Issues—Michal Migurski on representing disputed boundaries using Wikidata and OpenStreetMap.
Jukun Wikipedia Outreach, day 2 took attendees through adding interwiki links, Wikidata essentials and adding Databox templates to Jukun Wiki articles.
New General datatypes property proposals to review::
Objectif plumes (Database managed by the General Service for Literature and Books, a department of the Cultural Administration of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation (basically the Ministry of Culture for the French-speaking part of Belgium). The database currently includes entries on books by more than 8.000 Belgian writers.)
usual forename (A name usually derived from a given name used to address a person in everyday life.)
apportionment diagram (image that displays the representation of seats won by party in an election to an assembly)
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
Wikipedia 25 Birthday mode is now live on Betawi, Breton, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, Gorontalo, Indonesian, Italian, Luxembourgish, Madurese, Sicilian, Spanish, Thai, and Vietnamese Wikipedias! This limited-time campaign feature celebrates 25 years of Wikipedia with a birthday mascot, Baby Globe. When turned on, Baby Globe is shown on ~2,500 articles, waiting to be discovered by readers. Communities can choose to turn Birthday mode on by getting consensus from their community and asking an admin to enable the feature and customize it via community configuration on the local wiki.
Paste Check will become available at all Wikipedias this week. The feature prompts newcomers who are pasting text they are not likely to have written into VisualEditor to consider whether doing so risks a copyright violation. Paste Check tags all edits where it is shown for potential review. Local administrators can configure various aspects of the feature via Special:EditChecks. Research across 22 wikis found that Paste Check resulted in an 18% decrease in relative reverted-edits compared to the control group. Translators can help to localize this and related features.
The Reader Experience team will be standardizing the user menu in the top right for all mobile users so that it is closer to the desktop experience. Currently this user menu is only visible to users with Advanced Mobile Controls (AMC) turned on. The only change is that a couple buttons previously in the left-side menu will move to the top right for users who do not have AMC turned on. This change is expected to go out March 9 and seeks to improve the user interface.
Starting in the week of March 2, the emails sent out when an email address was added, removed, or changed for an account will switch to a substantially nicer and clearer HTML email from the prior plaintext one.
Notifications are currently limited to 2,000 historic entries per user, and extend back to 2013 when the feature was released. This is going to be changed to only store Notifications from the last 5 years, but up to 10,000 of them. This will help with long-term infrastructure health and help to prevent more recent notifications from disappearing too soon.
The Global Watchlist which lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on a single page continues to see improvements. The latest update improves label usage experience. The extension now allows activating the language fallback system for Wikidata items without labels in the viewed language, and showing those labels in the user’s preferred Wikidata language if no uselang= URL parameter is provided.
The Wikipedia Android team has started a beta test of hybrid search on Greek Wikipedia. Hybrid search capabilities can handle both semantic and keyword queries enabling readers to find what they’re looking for directly on Wikipedia more easily.
For security reasons, members of certain user groups are required to have two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled. Currently, 2FA is required to use the group, but not to be a member of it. Given that this model still has some vulnerabilities, the situation will gradually change in March. Members of these groups will be unable to disable last 2FA method on their account, and it will be impossible to add users without 2FA to these groups. Users will still be able to add new authentication methods or remove them, as long as at least one method is continuously enabled. In the second half of March, users without 2FA will be removed from these groups. This applies to: CentralNotice administrators, checkusers, interface administrators, suppressors, Wikidata staff, Wikifunctions staff, WMF Office IT and WMF Trust & Safety. Nothing will change for other users. See the linked task for deployment schedule.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue preventing users from creating an instance in Wikibase.cloud has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
To help ensure fair use of infrastructure, over the next month the Wikimedia Foundation will implement global API rate limits across our APIs. In early March, stricter limits will be applied to unidentified requests from outside Toolforge/WMCS and API requests that are made from web browsers. In April, higher limits will be applied to identified traffic. These limits are intentionally set as high as possible to minimise impact on the community. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits.
The Wikidata Query Service Linked Data Fragment (LDF) endpoint will be decommissioned in February. This endpoint served limited traffic, which was successfully migrated to other data access methods that were better suited to support existing use cases. The hardware used to support the LDF endpoint will be reallocated to support the ongoing backend migration efforts.
The new Parsoid parser continues to be deployed to additional wikis, improving platform sustainability and making it easier to introduce new reading and editing features. Parsoid is now the default parser on 488 WMF wikis (268 Wikipedias), now covering more than 10% of all Wikipedia page views.
The process and criteria for requesting exceptional access to the high volume feed of the Wikimedia Enterprise APIs (at no cost for mission-aligned usecases), have now been published. This is to provide more thorough and clearer documentation for users.
Tech Blog, the blog dedicated to the Wikimedia technical community will be migrating to Diff, the community news and event blog. The migration should be complete in April 2026, after which new posts will be accepted for publishing. Readers will be able to access posts – old and new – on the landing page at https://diff.wikimedia.org/techblog.
Birthday mode: This limited-time campaign feature celebrates 25 years of Wikipedia with a birthday mascot, Baby Globe. When turned on, Baby Globe is shown on ~2,500 articles, waiting to be discovered by readers. The feature is available for all Wikipedias to customise through Community Configuration until 6 April 2026. So far 17 Wikipedias have joined in the fun.
Wikipedia's 25th birthday party celebrated on Commons: Content from the January 15th global birthday party selected as Media of the day.
Etherpad cleanup: For security and performance reasons, all current pads on Wikimedia’s Etherpad instance, the web-based "ephemeral" editor for real-time collaborative document editing, will be permanently deleted after 30 April. We will continue running this Etherpad instance to support events and other short-term collaboration, but will be periodically deleting data going forward. If you have content in Etherpad you want to keep, please create local backups, as data will be permanently deleted and will not be able to be recovered.
Activity tab: Wikipedia iOS app has rolled out the improved Activity tab to all users in version 7.9.0. A/B test results showed increased account creation among users with access to the feature. Updates include enhanced editing impact insights, module customization, and relocation of History into the Search tab.
Reference Check: The feature Reference Check has been deployed to all Wikipedias. In A/B testing, the impact was substantial: newcomers shown Reference Check were approximately 2.2 times more likely to include a reference on desktop (or acknowledge/explain why they did not) and about 17.5 times more likely on mobile web.
Semantic search: The Foundation has launched a limited Android mobile app experiment that tests hybrid search capabilities which can handle both semantic and keyword queries. The Phase 1 beta is now live on Greek Wikipedia. The goal is to understand whether combining meaning-based retrieval with keyword search helps readers find information more effectively. Testing will expand to English, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias in March.
Navigation experience: The Foundation will run an experiment for mobile web users, that adds a table of contents and automatically expands all article sections, to learn more about navigation issues they face. The test will be available on Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
Screenshot of the current prototype of Abstract Wikipedia, showing a two sentence article about Kolkata.
Site notices: Site notices (MediaWiki:Sitenotice and MediaWiki:Anonnotice) now will render on all platforms, not just on the desktop site. Users on mobile web will now see these notices and be informed.
Tech News: Latest updates from Tech News week 08 and 09 include the new “Edit full page” button for people who are editing a page-section using the mobile visual editor. They also link to the 40 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
Wikifunctions: Abstract Wikipedia is going to have its public preview within the next few weeks, here is the preview.
Gender gap: The Celebrate Women 2026 is coming! The Wikimedia Foundation will host a kick-off celebration that will work as a welcome session for both organizers and participants on March 5 at 13:00 UTC.
Let’s Connect Learning Clinic: Watch the recordings of past learning clinics about Wikipedia’s 25th Birthday Tool and Strengthening Local-Language Admin Communities.
Digital Safety: The next edition of Digital Safety Office Hours will be on Mar 27 at 9:00 UTC and 19:00 UTC. The session will explore practical threat modelling: a structured way to think about risks, assess your exposure, and make informed choices.
Human centered AI: Members of the Wikimedia Enterprise team presented on "Wikipedia in the Age of AI and Bots" at the seminar of Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletinwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Did you mean to undue the draftification or was this a edit conflict? I draftified the article due to sourcing and promotional concerns. Let me know either way. Best, GPL93 (talk) 22:38, 3 March 2026 (UTC)
Hi @CAPTAIN RAJU. I've noticed recently that when listing AfD discussions you have been updating the AfD with individual entries, such as here. This causes unnecessary clogging of the discussion. If you would be able to use the formatting that allows for multiple WikiProjects to be listed on one line, the code for which is provided under point II at WP:AFDHOWTO, that would be much appreciated!
I understand that you clear messages off your talk page once they are seen, so I will assume that this has been acknowledged once that happens. No need to reply here directly. Thanks! 11WB (talk) 06:35, 9 March 2026 (UTC)
