This is the place where newsletters are meant to go.
Tech News: 2021-06
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Wikipedia app for Android now has watchlists and talk pages in the app.
Changes later this week
You can see edits to chosen pages on Special:Watchlist. You can add pages to your watchlist on every wiki you like. The GlobalWatchlist extension will come to Meta on 11 February. There you can see entries on watched pages on different wikis on the same page. The new watchlist will be found on Special:GlobalWatchlist on Meta. You can choose which wikis to watch and other preferences on Special:GlobalWatchlistSettings on Meta. You can watch up to five wikis.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 February. It will be on all wikis from 11 February (calendar).
Future changes
When admins protect pages the form will use the OOUI look. Special:Import will also get the new look. This will make them easier to use on mobile phones.
Some services will not work for a short period of time from 07:00 UTC on 17 February. There might be problems with new short links, new translations, new notifications, adding new items to your reading lists or recording email bounces. This is because of database maintenance.
Last week Tech News reported that the IP address Cloud VPS and Toolforge use to contact the wikis will change on 8 February. This is delayed. It will happen later instead.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
There were problems with recent versions of MediaWiki. Because the updates caused problems the developers rolled back to an earlier version. Some updates and new functions will come later than planned.
Some services will not work for a short period of time from 07:00 UTC on 17 February. There might be problems with new short links, new translations, new notifications, adding new items to your reading lists or recording email bounces. This is because of database maintenance.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 February. It will be on all wikis from 18 February (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The visual editor will now use MediaSearch to find images. You can search for images on Commons in the visual editor when you are looking for illustrations. This is to help editors find better images.
Editing a timeline might have removed all text from it. This was because of a bug and has been fixed. You might need to edit the timeline again for it to show properly.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 February. It will be on all wikis from 25 February (calendar).
Future changes
There is a user group for developers and users interested in working on Wikimedia wikis with the Rust programming language. You can join or tell others who want to make your wiki better in the future.
Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Kurds and Kurdistan closed
An arbitration case regarding Kurds and Kurdistan has now closed and the final decision is viewable at the link above. The following remedies have been enacted:
GPinkerton(talk·contribs) is indefinitely banned from the English Wikipedia. This ban may be appealed twelve months after the enactment of this remedy, and every twelve months thereafter.
GPinkerton(talk·contribs) is topic-banned from articles related to Kurds and Kurdistan, broadly construed. This ban may be appealed twelve months after the enactment of this remedy, and every twelve months thereafter.
Thepharoah17(talk·contribs) is topic-banned from articles related to Kurds and Kurdistan, broadly construed. This ban may be appealed twelve months after the enactment of this remedy, and every twelve months thereafter.
عمروبنكلثوم(talk·contribs) is topic-banned from articles related to Kurds and Kurdistan, broadly construed. This ban may be appealed twelve months after the enactment of this remedy, and every twelve months thereafter.
SupremeDeliciousness(talk·contribs) is topic-banned from articles related to Kurds and Kurdistan, broadly construed. This ban may be appealed twelve months after the enactment of this remedy, and every twelve months thereafter.
Paradise Chronicle is warned to avoid casting aspersions and repeating similar uncollegial conduct in the future.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Wikis using the Growth team tools can now show the name of a newcomer's mentor anywhere through a magic word. This can be used for welcome messages or userboxes.
A new version of the VideoCutTool is now available. It enables cropping, trimming, audio disabling, and rotating video content. It is being created as part of the developer outreach programs.
Problems
There was a problem with the job queue. This meant some functions did not save changes and mass messages were delayed. This did not affect wiki edits.
Some editors may not be logged in to their accounts automatically in the latest versions of Firefox and Safari.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 March. It will be on all wikis from 4 March (calendar).
A request for comment is open that proposes a process for the community to revoke administrative permissions. This follows a 2019 RfC in favor of creating one such a policy.
A request for comment is in progress to remove F7 (invalid fair-use claim) subcriterion a, which covers immediate deletion of non-free media with invalid fair-use tags.
A request for comment asks if sysops may place the General sanctions/Coronavirus disease 2019 editnotice template on pages in scope that do not have page-specific sanctions?
When blocking an IPv6 address with Twinkle, there is now a checkbox with the option to just block the /64 range. When doing so, you can still leave a block template on the initial, single IP address' talkpage.
When protecting a page with Twinkle, you can now add a note if doing so was in response to a request at WP:RfPP, and even link to the specific revision.
By motion, the discretionary sanctions originally authorized under the GamerGate case are now authorized under a new Gender and sexuality case, with sanctions authorized for all edits about, and all pages related to, any gender-related dispute or controversy and associated people. Sanctions issued under GamerGate are now considered Gender and sexuality sanctions.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Section translation now works on Bengali Wikipedia. It helps mobile editors translate sections of articles. It will come to more wikis later. The first focus is active wikis with a smaller number of articles. You can test it and leave feedback.
When someone links to a Wikipedia article on Twitter this will now show a preview of the article.
Problems
Many graphs have JavaScript errors. Graph editors can check their graphs in their browser's developer console after editing.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 March. It will be on all wikis from 11 March (calendar).
The New Discussion tool will soon be a new discussion tools beta feature for on most Wikipedias. The goal is to make it easier to start new discussions.
Future changes
There will be a number of changes to make it easier to work with templates. Some will come to the first wikis in March. Other changes will come to the first wikis in June. This is both for those who use templates and those who create or maintain them. You can read more.
Reference Previews will become a default feature on some wikis on 17 March. They will share a setting with Page Previews. If you prefer the Reference Tooltips or Navigation-Popups gadget you can keep using them. If so Reference Previews won't be shown.
New JavaScript-based functions will not work in Internet Explorer 11. This is because Internet Explorer is an old browser that doesn't work with how JavaScript is written today. Everything that works in Internet Explorer 11 today will continue working in Internet Explorer for now. You can read more.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Wikis that are part of the desktop improvements project can now use a new search function. The desktop improvements and the new search will come to more wikis later. You can also test it early.
Editors who put up banners or change site-wide JavaScript code should use the client error graph to see that their changes has not caused problems. You can read more.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 March. It will be on all wikis from 18 March (calendar).
Future changes
You can add a newline or carriage return character to a custom signature if you use a template. There is a proposal to not allow them in the future. This is because they can cause formatting problems.
You will be able to read but not edit 12 wikis for a short period of time on 23 March at 06:00 (UTC). This could take 30 minutes but will probably be much faster.
You can use Quarry for SQL queries to the Wiki Replicas. Cross-database JOINS will no longer work from 23 March. There will be a new field to specify the database to connect to. If you think this affects you and you need help you can post on Phabricator or on Wikitech. PAWS and other ways to do SQL queries to the Wiki Replicas will be affected later.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a Wikipedia app for KaiOS phones. They don't have a touch screen so readers navigate with the phone keys. There is now a simulator so you can see what it looks like.
You will be able to read but not edit twelve wikis for a short period of time on 23 March at 06:00 (UTC). This can also affect password changes, logging in to new wikis, global renames and changing or confirming emails. This could take 30 minutes but will probably be much faster.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 March. It will be on all wikis from 25 March (calendar).
Flagged revisions will no longer have multiple tags like "tone" or "depth". It will also only have one tier. This was changed because very few wikis used these features and they make the tool difficult to maintain.
Gadgets and user scripts can access variables about the current page in JavaScript. In 2015 this was moved from wg* to mw.config. wg* will soon no longer work.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Some very old web browsersdon’t work well with the Wikimedia wikis. Some old code for browsers that used to be supported is being removed. This could cause issues in those browsers.
IRC recent changes feeds have been moved to a new server. Make sure all tools automatically reconnect to irc.wikimedia.org and not to the name of any specific server. Users should also consider switching to the more modern EventStreams.
Problems
When you move a page that many editors have on their watchlist the history can be split. It might also not be possible to move it again for a while. This is because of a job queue problem.
Some translatable pages on Meta could not be edited. This was because of a bug in the translation tool. The new MediaWiki version was delayed because of problems like this.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 March. It will be on all wikis from 1 April (calendar).
Following a request for comment, F7 (invalid fair-use claim) subcriterion a has been deprecated; it covered immediate deletion of non-free media with invalid fair-use tags.
Following a request for comment, page movers were granted the delete-redirect userright, which allows moving a page over a single-revision redirect, regardless of that redirect's target.
Technical news
When you move a page that many editors have on their watchlist the history can be split and it might also not be possible to move it again for a while. This is because of a job queue problem. (T278350)
Code to support some very old web browsers is being removed. This could cause issues in those browsers. (T277803)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Editors can collapse part of an article so you have to click on it to see it. When you click a link to a section inside collapsed content it will now expand to show the section. The browser will scroll down to the section. Previously such links didn't work unless you manually expanded the content first.
Changes later this week
The citoidAPI will use for example 2010-12-XX instead of 2010-12 for dates with a month but no days. This is because 2010-12 could be confused with 2010-2012 instead of December 2010. This is called level 1 instead of level 0 in the Extended Date/Time Format.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 April. It will be on all wikis from 8 April (calendar).
Future changes
PAWS can now connect to the new Wiki Replicas. Cross-database JOINS will no longer work from 28 April. There is a new way to connect to the databases. Until 28 April both ways to connect to the databases will work. If you think this affects you and you need help you can post on Phabricator or on Wikitech.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Email to the Wikimedia wikis are handled by groups of Wikimedia editors. These volunteer response teams now use Znuny instead of OTRS. The functions and interface remain the same. The volunteer administrators will give more details about the next steps soon.
If you use syntax highlighting, you can see line numbers in the 2010 and 2017 wikitext editors when editing templates. This is to make it easier to see line breaks or talk about specific lines. Line numbers will soon come to all namespaces.
Because of a technical change there could be problems with gadgets and scripts that have an edit summary area that looks similar to this one. If they look strange they should use mw.loader.using('mediawiki.action.edit.styles') to go back to how they looked before.
The latest version of MediaWiki came to the Wikimedia wikis last week. There was no Tech News issue last week.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
The user group oversight will be renamed suppress. This is for technical reasons. This is the technical name. It doesn't affect what you call the editors with this user right on your wiki. This is planned to happen in two weeks. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Templates have parameters that can have specific values. It is possible to suggest values for editors with TemplateData. You can soon see them as a drop-down list in the visual editor. This is to help template users find the right values faster.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 April. It will be on all wikis from 29 April (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Twinkle is a gadget on English Wikipedia. It can help with maintenance and patrolling. It can now be used on other wikis. You can get Twinkle on your wiki using the twinkle-starter GitHub repository.
Problems
The content translation tool did not work for many articles for a little while. This was because of a bug.
Some things will not work for about a minute on 5 May. This will happen around 06:00 UTC. This will affect the content translation tool and notifications among other things. This is because of an upgrade to avoid crashes.
Changes later this week
Reference Previews will become a default feature on a number of wikis on 5 May. This is later than planned because of some changes. You can use it without using Page Previews if you want to. The earlier plan was to have the preference to use both or none.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 May. It will be on all wikis from 6 May (calendar).
Future changes
The CSS classes .error, .warning and .success do not work for mobile readers if they have not been specifically defined on your wiki. From June they will not work for desktop readers. This can affect gadgets and templates. The classes can be defined in MediaWiki:Common.css or template styles instead.
The user group oversight will be renamed to suppress. This is for technical reasons. You can comment at T112147 if you have objections.
Arbitration
The community consultation on the Arbitration Committee discretionary sanctions procedure was closed, and an initial draft based on feedback from the now closed consultation is expected to be released in early June to early July for community review.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 May. It will be on all wikis from 13 May (calendar).
Future changes
You can see what participants plan to work on at the online Wikimedia hackathon 22–23 May.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
An earlier issue of Tech News said that the citoidAPI would handle dates with a month but no days in a new way. This has been reverted for now. There needs to be more discussion of how it affects different wikis first.
Changes later this week
MediaWiki:Pageimages-blacklist will be renamed MediaWiki:Pageimages-denylist. The list can be copied to the new name. It will happen on 19 May for some wikis and 20 May for some wikis. Most wikis don't use it. It lists images that should never be used as thumbnails for articles.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 May. It will be on all wikis from 20 May (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Wikimedia movement has been using IRC on a network called Freenode. There have been changes around who is in control of the network. The Wikimedia IRC Group Contacts have decided to move to the new Libera Chat network instead. This is not a formal decision for the movement to move all channels but most Wikimedia IRC channels will probably leave Freenode. There is a migration guide and ongoing Wikimedia discussions about this.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 May. It will be on all wikis from 27 May (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
There was an issue on the Vector skin with the text size of categories and notices under the page title. It was fixed last Monday.
FoldArchives collapses archived talk page threads in order to reduce screen space
GoToTitle converts the page title into an input field for navigating to other pages
UserHighlighter adds highlighting to links to the userpages, talk pages, and contributions of administrators and other user groups as well as tooltips to indicate which groups a user is in
filterDiff: Adds a "Show changes" button to the filter editor.
filterNotes: Parses filter notes as wikitext (so links are clickable), and signs and dates new comments for you.
filterTest: Adds a "Test changes" button. Opens Special:AbuseFilter/test with what's currently in the edit form, not with what's saved in the database, so you don't have to copy-paste your changes.
Twinkle has a number of improvements, including that most watchlist defaults now make use of the new temporary watchlist feature. Other changes include rollbacks treating consecutive IPv6 editors in the same /64 range as the same user, adding a preview for shared IP tagging, a preference for watching users after CSD notification, and for sysops, the ability to block the /64 and link to a WP:RfPP request, and new copyright blocks default to indefinite.
Wikipedia:Shortdesc helper now v3.4.17, changes include minor fixes and preventing edits that don't change the description.
Joeytje50's JWB now version 4.1.0, includes the ability to generate page lists from the search tool, major updates to the handling of regular expressions, the storing of user settings, the addition of upload protection, and an option to skip pages that belong to a specific category, among other changes. See User:Joeytje50/JWB/Changelog for a full list of recent changes.
Wikipedia:User scripts/List has been revamped to make it easier to find scripts suited for your needs. If you know of a cool script that is missing on the list, or a script on the list that is no longer working, please edit the list or let us know on the talk page.
My apologies for this long-overdue issue, and if I missed any scripts. Hopefully going forward we can go back to monthly releases - any help would be appreciated. Thanks, --DannyS712 (talk) 13:04, 2 June 2021 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 June. It will be on all wikis from 10 June (calendar).
Future changes
The Wikimedia movement uses Phabricator for technical tasks. This is where we collect technical suggestions, bugs and what developers are working on. The company behind Phabricator will stop working on it. This will not change anything for the Wikimedia movement now. It could lead to changes in the future.
Searching on Wikipedia will find more results in some languages. This is mainly true for when those who search do not use the correct diacritics because they are not seen as necessary in that language. For example searching for Bedusz doesn't find Będusz on German Wikipedia. The character ę isn't used in German so many would write e instead. This will work better in the future in some languages.
The CSRF token parameters in the action API were changed in 2014. The old parameters from before 2014 will stop working soon. This can affect bots, gadgets and user scripts that still use the old parameters.
Wikimedia previously used the IRC network Freenode. However, due to changes over who controlled the network with reports of a forceful takeover by several ex-staff members, the Wikimedia IRC Group Contacts decided to move to the new Libera Chat network. It has been reported that Wikimedia related channels on Freenode have been forcibly taken over if they pointed members to Libera. There is a migration guide and Wikimedia discussions about this.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Logged-in users on the mobile web can choose to use the advanced mobile mode. They now see categories in a similar way as users on desktop do. This means that some gadgets that have just been for desktop users could work for users of the mobile site too. If your wiki has such gadgets you could decide to turn them on for the mobile site too. Some gadgets probably need to be fixed to look good on mobile.
German Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage and 29 smaller wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on 22 June. This is planned between 5:00 and 5:30 UTC.
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes in the week of 28 June. More information will be published in Tech News later. It will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The otrs-member group name is now vrt-permissions. This could affect abuse filters.
Problems
You will be able to read but not edit German Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage and 29 smaller wikis for a few minutes on 22 June. This is planned between 5:00 and 5:30 UTC.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 June. It will be on all wikis from 24 June (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Wikisources have a new OCR tool. If you don't want to see the "extract text" button on Wikisource you can add .ext-wikisource-ExtractTextWidget { display: none; } to your common.css page.
Problems
You will be able to read but not edit the Wikimedia wikis for a few minutes on 29 June. This is planned at 14:00 UTC.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 June. It will be on all wikis from 1 July (calendar).
Future changes
Threshold for stub link formatting, thumbnail size and auto-number headings can be set in preferences. They are expensive to maintain and few editors use them. The developers are planning to remove them. Removing them will make pages load faster. You can read more and give feedback.
A toolbar will be added to the Reply tool's wikitext source mode. This will make it easier to link to pages and to ping other users.
Consensus has been reached to delete all books in the book namespace. There was rough consensus that the deleted books should still be available on request at WP:REFUND even after the namespace is removed.
An RfC is open to discuss the next steps following a trial which automatically applied pending changes to TFAs.
Technical news
IP addresses of unregistered users are to be hidden from everyone. There is a rough draft of how IP addresses may be shown to users who need to see them. This currently details allowing administrators, checkusers, stewards and those with a new usergroup to view the full IP address of unregistered users. Editors with at least 500 edits and an account over a year old will be able to see all but the end of the IP address in the proposal. The ability to see the IP addresses hidden behind the mask would be dependent on agreeing to not share the parts of the IP address they can see with those who do not have access to the same information. Accessing part of or the full IP address of a masked editor would also be logged. Comments on the draft are being welcomed at the talk page.
Arbitration
The community authorised COVID-19 general sanctions have been superseded by the COVID-19 discretionary sanctions following a motion at a case request. Alerts given and sanctions placed under the community authorised general sanctions are now considered alerts for and sanctions under the new discretionary sanctions.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Tech News
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 19 July.
Recent changes
AutoWikiBrowser is a tool to make repetitive tasks easier. It now uses JSON. Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage has moved to Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPageJSON and Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Config. Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage/Version has moved to Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage/VersionJSON. The tool will eventually be configured on the wiki so that you don't have to wait until the new version to add templates or regular expression fixes.
Problems
InternetArchiveBot helps saving online sources on some wikis. It adds them to Wayback Machine and links to them there. This is so they don't disappear if the page that was linked to is removed. It currently has a problem with linking to the wrong date when it moves pages from archive.is to web.archive.org.
Changes later this week
The tool to find, add and remove templates will be updated. This is to make it easier to find and use the right templates. It will come to the first wikis on 7 July. It will come to more wikis later this year.
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
Some Wikimedia wikis use Flagged Revisions or pending changes. It hides edits from new and unregistered accounts for readers until they have been patrolled. The auto review action in Flagged Revisions will no longer be logged. All old logs of auto-review will be removed. This is because it creates a lot of logs that are not very useful.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The tool to find, add and remove templates was updated. This is to make it easier to find and use the right templates. It was supposed to come to the first wikis on 7 July. It was delayed to 12 July instead. It will come to more wikis later this year.
Special:UnconnectedPages lists pages that are not connected to Wikidata. This helps you find pages that can be connected to Wikidata items. Some pages should not be connected to Wikidata. You can use the magic word __EXPECTED_UNCONNECTED_PAGE__ on pages that should not be listed on the special page.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 July. It will be on all wikis from 22 July (calendar).
Future changes
How media is structured in the parser's HTML output will soon change. This can affect bots, gadgets, user scripts and extensions. You can read more. You can test it on Testwiki or Testwiki 2.
The parameters for how you obtain tokens in the MediaWiki API were changed in 2014. The old way will no longer work from 1 September. Scripts, bots and tools that use the parameters from before the 2014 change need to be updated. You can read more.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
A new version of MediaWiki came to the Wikimedia wikis the week before last week. This was not in Tech News because there was no newsletter that week.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 July. It will be on all wikis from 29 July (calendar).
Future changes
If you use the Monobook skin you can choose to switch off responsive design on mobile. This will now work for more skins. If ⧼monobook-responsive-label⧽ is unticked you need to also untick the new preferenceEnable responsive mode. Otherwise it will stop working. Interface admins can automate this process on your wiki. You can read more.
An RfC is open to add a delay of one week from nomination to deletion for G13 speedy deletions.
Technical news
Last week all wikis were very slow or not accessible for 30 minutes. This was due to server lag caused by regenerating dynamic lists on the Russian Wikinews after a large bulk import. (T287380)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
If your wiki uses markup like <div class="mw-content-ltr"> or <div class="mw-content-rtl"> without the required dir attribute, then these will no longer work in 2 weeks. There is a short-term fix that can be added to your local wiki's Common.css page, which is explained at T287701. From now on, all usages should include the full attributes, for example: <div class="mw-content-ltr" dir="ltr" lang="en"> or <div class="mw-content-rtl" dir="rtl" lang="he">. This also applies to some other HTML tags, such as span or code. You can find existing examples on your wiki that need to be updated, using the instructions at T287701.
Last week, all wikis had slow access or no access for 30 minutes. There was a problem with generating dynamic lists of articles on the Russian Wikinews, due to the bulk import of 200,000+ new articles over 3 days, which led to database problems. The problematic feature has been disabled on that wiki and developers are discussing if it can be fixed properly.
Changes later this week
When adding links to a page using VisualEditor or the 2017 wikitext editor, disambiguation pages will now only appear at the bottom of search results. This is because users do not often want to link to disambiguation pages.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 August. It will be on all wikis from 5 August (calendar).
Future changes
The team of the Wikipedia app for Android is working on communication in the app. The developers are working on how to talk to other editors and get notifications. You can read more. They are looking for users who want to test the plans. Any editor who has an Android phone and is willing to download the app can do this.
The Beta Feature for Discussion tools will be updated in the coming weeks. You will be able to subscribe to individual sections on a talk page at more wikis. You can test this now by adding ?dtenable=1 to the end of the talk page's URL (example).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
You can read but not edit 17 wikis for a few minutes on 10 August. This is planned at 05:00 UTC. This is because of work on the database.
Changes later this week
The Wikimania Hackathon will take place remotely on 13 August, starting at 5:00 UTC, for 24 hours. You can participate in many ways. You can still propose projects and sessions.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 August. It will be on all wikis from 12 August (calendar).
The old CSS <div class="visualClear"></div> will not be supported after 12 August. Instead, templates and pages should use <div style="clear:both;"></div>. Please help to replace any existing uses on your wiki. There are global-search links available at T287962.
Future changes
The Wikipedia Library is a place for Wikipedia editors to get access to sources. There is an extension which has a new function to tell users when they can take part in it. It will use notifications. It will start pinging the first users in September. It will ping more users later.
Vue.js will be the JavaScript framework for MediaWiki in the future.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can add language links in the sidebar in the new Vector skin again. You do this by connecting the page to a Wikidata item. The new Vector skin has moved the language links but the new language selector cannot add language links yet.
Problems
There was a problem on wikis which use the Translate extension. Translations were not updated or were replaced with the English text. The problems have been fixed.
Changes later this week
A revision tag will soon be added to edits that add links to disambiguation pages. This is because these links are usually added by accident. The tag will allow editors to easily find the broken links and fix them. If your wiki does not like this feature, it can be hidden.
Would you like to help improve the information about tools? Would you like to attend or help organize a small virtual meetup for your community to discuss the list of tools? Please get in touch on the Toolhub Quality Signal Sessions talk page. We are also looking for feedback from tool maintainers on some specific questions.
In the past, edits to any page in your user talk space ignored your mute list, e.g. sub-pages. Starting this week, this is only true for edits to your talk page.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 August. It will be on all wikis from 19 August (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Score extension (<score> notation) has been re-enabled on public wikis and upgraded to a newer version. Some musical score functionality may no longer work because the extension is only enabled in "safe mode". The security issue has been fixed and an advisory published.
Problems
You will be able to read but not edit some wikis for a few minutes on 25 August. This will happen around 06:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. During this time, operations on the CentralAuth will also not be possible.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 August. It will be on all wikis from 26 August (calendar).
Also during this time, operations on the CentralAuth will not be possible (GlobalRenames, changing/confirming e-mail addresses, logging into new wikis, password changes).
For more details about the operation and on all impacted services, please check on Phabricator.
A banner will be displayed 30 minutes before the operation.
Please help your community to be aware of this maintenance operation. Thank you!
20:33, 24 August 2021 (UTC)
Tech News: 2021-35
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Some musical score syntax no longer works and may needed to be updated, you can check Category:Pages with score rendering errors on your wiki for a list of pages with errors.
Problems
Musical scores were unable to render lyrics in some languages because of missing fonts. This has been fixed now. If your language would prefer a different font, please file a request in Phabricator.
Changes later this week
The parameters for how you obtain tokens in the MediaWiki API were changed in 2014. The old way will no longer work from 1 September. Scripts, bots and tools that use the parameters from before the 2014 change need to be updated. You can read more about this.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 September. It will be on all wikis from 2 September (calendar).
Future changes
You will be able to read but not edit Commons for a few minutes on 6 September. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance.
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes in the week of 13 September. More information will be published in Tech News later. It will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
A discussion is open to decide when, if ever, should discord logs be eligible for removal when posted onwiki (including whether to oversight them)
A RfC on the next steps after the trial of pending changes on TFAs has resulted in a 30 day trial of automatic semi protection for TFAs.
Technical news
The Score extension has been re-enabled on public wikis. It has been updated, but has been placed in safe mode to address unresolved security issues. Further information on the security issues can be found on the mediawiki page.
Arbitration
A request for comment is in progress to provide an opportunity to amend the structure, rules, and procedures of the Arbitration Committee election and resolve any issues not covered by existing rules. Comments and new proposals are welcome.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The wikis that have Growth features deployed have been part of A/B testing since deployment, in which some newcomers did not receive the new features. Now, all of the newcomers on 21 of the smallest of those wikis will be receiving the features.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
In 2017, the provided jQuery library was upgraded from version 1 to 3, with a compatibility layer. The migration will soon finish, to make the site load faster for everyone. If you maintain a gadget or user script, check if you have any JQMIGRATE errors and fix them, or they will break.
Last year, the Portuguese Wikipedia community embarked on an experiment to make log-in compulsory for editing. The impact report of this trial is ready. Moving forward, the Anti-Harassment Tools team is looking for projects that are willing to experiment with restricting IP editing on their wiki for a short-term experiment. Learn more.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
A majority of Wikipedias now have access to the Growth features. The Growth team has published an FAQ page about the features. This translatable FAQ covers the description of the features, how to use them, how to change the configuration, and more.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 September. It will be on all wikis from 16 September (calendar).
Starting this week, Wikipedia in Italian will receive weekly software updates on Wednesdays. It used to receive the updates on Thursdays. Due to this change, bugs will be noticed and fixed sooner.
You can add language links in the sidebar in the new Vector skin again. You do this by connecting the page to a Wikidata item. The new Vector skin has moved the language links but the new language selector cannot add language links yet.
The syntax highlight tool marks up code with different colours. It now can highlight 23 new code languages. Additionally, golang can now be used as an alias for the Go programming language, and a special output mode has been added to show a program's output.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
MediaWiki had a feature that would highlight local links to short articles in a different style. Each user could pick the size at which "stubs" would be highlighted. This feature was very bad for performance, and following a consultation, has been removed.
A technical change was made to the MonoBook skin to allow for easier maintenance and upkeep. This has resulted in some minor changes to HTML that make MonoBook's HTML consistent with other skins. Efforts have been made to minimize the impact on editors, but please ping Jon (WMF) on wiki or in phabricator if any problems are reported.
Problems
There was a problem with search last week. Many search requests did not work for 2 hours because of an accidental restart of the search servers.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 September. It will be on all wikis from 23 September (calendar).
The meta=proofreadpage API has changed. The piprop parameter has been renamed to prpiprop. API users should update their code to avoid unrecognized parameter warnings. Pywikibot users should upgrade to 6.6.0.
Future changes
The Reply tool will be deployed to the remaining wikis in the coming weeks. It is currently part of "Discussion tools" in Beta features at most wikis. You will be able to turn it off in Editing Preferences.
The previously announced change to how you obtain tokens from the API has been delayed to September 21 because of an incompatibility with Pywikibot. Bot operators using Pywikibot can follow T291202 for progress on a fix, and should plan to upgrade to 6.6.1 when it is released.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
iOS 15 has a new function called Private Relay (Apple website). This can hide the user's IP when they use Safari browser. This is like using a VPN in that we see another IP address instead. It is opt-in and only for those who pay extra for iCloud. It will come to Safari users on OSX later. There is a technical discussion about what this means for the Wikimedia wikis.
Problems
Some gadgets and user-scripts add items to the portlets (article tools) part of the skin. A recent change to the HTML may have made those links a different font-size. This can be fixed by adding the CSS class .vector-menu-dropdown-noicon.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 September. It will be on all wikis from 30 September (calendar).
The GettingStarted extension was built in 2013, and provides an onboarding process for new account holders in a few versions of Wikipedia. However, the recently developed Growth features provide a better onboarding experience. Since the vast majority of Wikipedias now have access to the Growth features, GettingStarted will be deactivated starting on 4 October.
A small number of users will not be able to connect to the Wikimedia wikis after 30 September. This is because an old root certificate will no longer work. They will also have problems with many other websites. Users who have updated their software in the last five years are unlikely to have problems. Users in Europe, Africa and Asia are less likely to have immediate problems even if their software is too old. You can read more.
You can receive notifications when someone leaves a comment on user talk page or mentions you in a talk page comment. Clicking the notification link will now bring you to the comment and highlight it. Previously, doing so brought you to the top of the section that contained the comment. You can find more information in T282029.
Following an RfC, extended confirmed protection may be used preemptively on certain high-risk templates.
Following a discussion at the Village Pump, there is consensus to treat discord logs the same as IRC logs. This means that discord logs will be oversighted if posted onwiki.
A motion has standardised the 500/30 (extended confirmed) restrictions placed by the Arbitration Committee. The standardised restriction is now listed in the Arbitration Committee's procedures.
Following the closure of the Iranian politics case, standard discretionary sanctions are authorized for all edits about, and all pages related to, post-1978 Iranian politics, broadly construed.
The Arbitration Committee encourages uninvolved administrators to use the discretionary sanctions procedure in topic areas where it is authorised to facilitate consensus in RfCs. This includes, but is not limited to, enforcing sectioned comments, word/diff limits and moratoriums on a particular topic from being brought in an RfC for up to a year.
Miscellaneous
Editors have approved expanding the trial of Growth Features from 2% of new accounts to 25%, and the share of newcomers getting mentorship from 2% to 5%. Experienced editors are invited to add themselves to the mentor list.
The community consultation phase of the 2021 CheckUser and Oversight appointments process is open for editors to provide comments and ask questions to candidates.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
A more efficient way of sending changes from Wikidata to Wikimedia wikis that show them has been enabled for the following 10 wikis: mediawiki.org, the Italian, Catalan, Hebrew and Vietnamese Wikipedias, French Wikisource, and English Wikivoygage, Wikibooks, Wiktionary and Wikinews. If you notice anything strange about how changes from Wikidata appear in recent changes or your watchlist on those wikis you can let the developers know.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 October. It will be on all wikis from 7 October (calendar).
Some gadgets and bots that use the API to read the AbuseFilter log might break. The hidden property will no longer say an entry is implicit for unsuppressed log entries about suppressed edits. If your bot needs to know this, do a separate revision query. Additionally, the property will have the value false for visible entries; previously, it wasn't included in the response.
A more efficient way of sending changes from Wikidata to Wikimedia wikis that show them will be enabled for all production wikis. If you notice anything strange about how changes from Wikidata appear in recent changes or your watchlist you can let the developers know.
Future changes
You can soon get cross-wiki notifications in the iOS Wikipedia app. You can also get notifications as push notifications. More notification updates will follow in later versions.
The JavaScript variables wgExtraSignatureNamespaces, wgLegalTitleChars, and wgIllegalFileChars will soon be removed from mw.config. These are not part of the "stable" variables available for use in wiki JavaScript.
The JavaScript variables wgCookiePrefix, wgCookieDomain, wgCookiePath, and wgCookieExpiration will soon be removed from mw.config. Scripts should instead use mw.cookie from the "mediawiki.cookie" module.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 October. It will be on all wikis from 14 October (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Toolhub is a catalogue to make it easier to find software tools that can be used for working on the Wikimedia projects. You can read more.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 October. It will be on all wikis from 21 October (calendar).
3–5% of editors may be blocked in the next few months. This is because of a new service in Safari, which is similar to a proxy or a VPN. It is called iCloud Private Relay. There is a discussion about this on Meta. The goal is to learn what iCloud Private Relay could mean for the communities.
Wikimedia Enterprise is a new API for those who use a lot of information from the Wikimedia projects on other sites. It is a way to get big commercial users to pay for the data. There will soon be a copy of the Wikimedia Enterprise dataset. You can read more. You can also ask the team questions on Zoom on 22 October 15:00 UTC.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Coolest Tool Award 2021 is looking for nominations. You can recommend tools until 27 October.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 October. It will be on all wikis from 28 October (calendar).
Future changes
Diff pages will have an improved copy and pasting experience. The changes will allow the text in the diff for before and after to be treated as separate columns and will remove any unwanted syntax.
The version of the Liberation fonts used in SVG files will be upgraded. Only new thumbnails will be affected. Liberation Sans Narrow will not change.
Phase 2 of the 2021 RfA review has commenced which will discuss potential solutions to address the 8 issues found in Phase 1. Proposed solutions that achieve consensus will be implemented and you may propose solutions till 07 November 2021.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a limit on the amount of emails a user can send each day. This limit is now global instead of per-wiki. This change is to prevent abuse.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 November. It will be on all wikis from 4 November (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Mobile IP editors are now able to receive warning notices indicating they have a talk page message on the mobile website (similar to the orange banners available on desktop). These notices will be displayed on every page outside of the main namespace and every time the user attempts to edit. The notice on desktop now has a slightly different colour.
In the future, unregistered editors will be given an identity that is not their IP address. This is for legal reasons. A new user right will let editors who need to know the IPs of unregistered accounts to fight vandalism, spam, and harassment, see the IP. You can read the suggestions for how that identity could work and discuss on the talk page.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Most large file uploads errors that had messages like "stashfailed" or "DBQueryError" have now been fixed. An incident report is available.
Problems
Sometimes, edits made on iOS using the visual editor save groups of numbers as telephone number links, because of a feature in the operating system. This problem is under investigation.
There was a problem with search last week. Many search requests did not work for 2 hours because of a configuration error.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 November. It will be on all wikis from 18 November (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 December. It will be on all wikis from 2 December (calendar).
Unregistered editors using the mobile website are now able to receive notices to indicate they have talk page messages. The notice looks similar to what is already present on desktop, and will be displayed on when viewing any page except mainspace and when editing any page. (T284642)
The limit on the number of emails a user can send per day has been made global instead of per-wiki to help prevent abuse. (T293866)
The already authorized standard discretionary sanctions for all pages relating to the Horn of Africa (defined as including Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and adjoining areas if involved in related disputes), broadly construed, have been made permanent.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
MediaWiki 1.38-wmf.11 was scheduled to be deployed on some wikis last week. The deployment was delayed because of unexpected problems.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 December. It will be on all wikis from 9 December (calendar).
At all Wikipedias, a Mentor Dashboard is now available at Special:MentorDashboard. It allows registered mentors, who take care of newcomers' first steps, to monitor their assigned newcomers' activity. It is part of the Growth features. You can learn more about activating the mentor list on your wiki and about the mentor dashboard project.
The predecessor to the current MediaWiki Action API (which was created in 2008), action=ajax, will be removed this week. Any scripts or bots using it will need to switch to the corresponding API module.
An old ResourceLoader module, jquery.jStorage, which was deprecated in 2016, will be removed this week. Any scripts or bots using it will need to switch to mediawiki.storage instead.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There are now default short aliases for the "Project:" namespace on most wikis. E.g. On Wikibooks wikis, [[WB:]] will go to the local language default for the [[Project:]] namespace. This change is intended to help the smaller communities have easy access to this feature. Additional local aliases can still be requested via the usual process.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 December. It will be on all wikis from 16 December (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Tech News
Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 10 January 2022.
Recent changes
Queries made by the DynamicPageList extension (<DynamicPageList>) are now only allowed to run for 10 seconds and error if they take longer. This is in response to multiple outages where long-running queries caused an outage on all wikis.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.
The Wikimedia Cloud VPS hosts technical projects for the Wikimedia movement. Developers need to claim projects they use. This is because old and unused projects are removed once a year. Unclaimed projects can be shut down from February.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 22nd issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter. This issue will be covering new and updated user scripts from the past seven months (June through December 2021).
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
LuckyRename, by Alexis Jazz, is this month's featured script. LuckyRename makes requesting file moves easier, and automates the many steps in file moving (including automatic replacement of existing usage). Give it a shot!
Updated scripts
SD0001: hide-reverted-edits has been updated to take into account changes in reversion tools like Twinkle and RedWarn.
ClaudineChionh: SkinSwitcher (a fork and update of Eizen's script) provides an options menu/toolbox/toolbar allowing users to view a given page in MediaWiki's default skins.
Wikipedia:User scripts/Ranking is a sortable table of Wikipedia's thousand-or-so most commonly used scripts; it includes their author, last modification date, installation count, and sometimes a short description.
Toolhub is a community managed catalog of software tools used in the Wikimedia movement. Technical volunteers can use Toolhub to document the tools that they create or maintain. All Wikimedians can use Toolhub to search for tools to help with their workflows and to create lists of useful tools to share with others.
draft-sorter sorts AfC drafts by adding WikiProject banners to their talk pages. It supersedes User:Enterprisey/draft-sorter, adding a few features and fixing some bugs.
BooksToSfn adds a portlet link in Visual Editor's source mode editing, in main namespace articles or in the user's Sandbox. When clicked, it converts one {{cite book}} inside a <ref>...</ref> tag block into an {{Sfn}}.
diffedit enables editing directly from viewing a diff "when, for instance, you notice a tiny mistake deep into an article, and don't want to edit the entire article and re-find that one line to fix that tiny mistake".
warnOnLargeFile warns you if you're about to open a very large file (width/height >10,000px or file size >100 MB) from a file page.
QuickDiff (by OneTwoThreeFall at Fandom) lets you quickly view any diff link on a wiki, whether on Recent Changes, contribs pages, history pages, the diff view itself, or elsewhere. For more information, view its page on Fandom.
talkback creates links after user talk page links like this: |C|TB (with the first linking to the user's contributions, and the latter giving the option of sending a {{talkback}} notice). It also adds a [copy] link next to section headers.
diff-link shows "copy" links on history and contributions pages that copy an internal link to the diff (e.g., Special:Diff/1026402230) to your clipboard when clicked.
auto-watchlist-expiry automatically watchlists every page you edit for a user-definable duration (you can still pick a different time using the dropdown, though).
generate pings generates the wikitext needed to ping all members of a category, up to 50 editors (the limit defined by MediaWiki).
share ExpandTemplates url allows for easy sharing of your inputs to Special:ExpandTemplates. It adds a button that, when clicked, copies a shareable URL to your exact invocation of the page, like this. Other editors do not need to have this script installed in order to access the URL generated.
show tag names shows the real names of tags next to their display names in places such as page revision histories or the watchlist.
ColourContrib color-codes the user contributions page so that pages you've edited last are sharply distinguished from pages where another editor was the last to edit the page.
All in all, some very neat scripts were written in these last few months. Hoping to see many more in the next issue -- drop us a line on the talk page if you've been writing (or seeing) anything cool and good. Filling in for DannyS712, this has been jp×g. Take care, and merry Christmas! jp×g 07:30, 24 December 2021 (UTC)
Following consensus at the 2021 RfA review, the autopatrolled user right has been removed from the administrators user group; admins can grant themselves the autopatrolled permission if they wish to remain autopatrolled.
The functionaries email list (functionaries-enlists.wikimedia.org) will no longer accept incoming emails apart from those sent by list members and WMF staff. Private concerns, apart from those requiring oversight, should be directly sent to the Arbitration Committee.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
A oauth_consumer variable has been added to the AbuseFilter to enable identifying changes made by specific tools.
Gadgets are now able to directly include JSON pages. This means some gadgets can now be configured by administrators without needing the interface administrator permission, such as with the Geonotice gadget.
Gadgets can now specify page actions on which they are available. For example, |actions=edit,history will load a gadget only while editing and on history pages.
Gadgets can now be loaded on demand with the withgadget URL parameter. This can be used to replace an earlier snippet that typically looks like withJS or withCSS.
The heading on the main page can now be configured using MediaWiki:Mainpage-title-loggedin for logged-in users and MediaWiki:Mainpage-title for logged-out users. Any CSS that was previously used to hide the heading should be removed.
Four special pages (and their API counterparts) now have a maximum database query execution time of 30 seconds. These special pages are: RecentChanges, Watchlist, Contributions, and Log. This change will help with site performance and stability. You can read more details about this change including some possible solutions if this affects your workflows.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 January. It will be on all wikis from 13 January (calendar).
Events
Community Wishlist Survey 2022 begins. All contributors to the Wikimedia projects can propose for tools and platform improvements. The proposal phase takes place from 10 January 18:00 UTC to 23 January 18:00 UTC. Learn more.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
When using WikiEditor (also known as the 2010 wikitext editor), people will now see a warning if they link to disambiguation pages. If you click "Review link" in the warning, it will ask you to correct the link to a more specific term. You can read more information about this completed 2021 Community Wishlist item.
When asked to create a new page or talk page section, input fields can be "preloaded" with some text. This feature is now limited to wikitext pages. This is so users can't be tricked into making malicious edits. There is a discussion about if this feature should be re-enabled for some content types.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 January. It will be on all wikis from 20 January (calendar).
Events
Community Wishlist Survey 2022 continues. All contributors to the Wikimedia projects can propose for tools and platform improvements. The proposal phase takes place from 10 January 18:00 UTC to 23 January 18:00 UTC. Learn more.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 January. It will be on all wikis from 27 January (calendar).
The following languages can now be used with syntax highlighting: BDD, Elpi, LilyPond, Maxima, Rita, Savi, Sed, Sophia, Spice, .SRCINFO.
You can now access your watchlist from outside of the user menu in the new Vector skin. The watchlist link appears next to the notification icons if you are at the top of the page.
Events
You can see the results of the Coolest Tool Award 2021 and learn more about 14 tools which were selected this year.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
If a gadget should support the new ?withgadget URL parameter that was announced 3 weeks ago, then it must now also specify supportsUrlLoad in the gadget definition (documentation).
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 February. It will be on all wikis from 3 February (calendar).
Future changes
A change that was announced last year was delayed. It is now ready to move ahead:
The user group oversight will be renamed suppress. This is for technical reasons. This is the technical name. It doesn't affect what you call the editors with this user right on your wiki. This is planned to happen in three weeks. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections. As usual, these labels can be translated on translatewiki (direct links are available) or by administrators on your wiki.
The user group oversight will be renamed suppress in around 3 weeks. This will not affect the name shown to users and is simply a change in the technical name of the user group. The change is being made for technical reasons. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections.
The Reply Tool feature, which is a part of Discussion Tools, will be opt-out for everyone logged in or logged out starting 7 February 2022. Editors wishing to comment on this can do so in the relevant Village Pump discussion.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Category counts are sometimes wrong. They will now be completely recounted at the beginning of every month.
Problems
A code-change last week to fix a bug with Live Preview may have caused problems with some local gadgets and user-scripts. Any code with skin-specific behaviour for vector should be updated to also check for vector-2022. A code-snippet, global search, and example are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 February. It will be on all wikis from 10 February (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Purging a category page with fewer than 5,000 members will now recount it completely. This will allow editors to fix incorrect counts when it is wrong.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 February. It will be on all wikis from 17 February (calendar).
In the AbuseFilter extension, the rmspecials() function has been updated so that it does not remove the "space" character. Wikis are advised to wrap all the uses of rmspecials() with rmwhitespace() wherever necessary to keep filters' behavior unchanged. You can use the search function on Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
At Wikipedias, all new accounts now get the Growth features by default when creating an account. Communities are encouraged to update their help resources. Previously, only 80% of new accounts would get the Growth features. A few Wikipedias remain unaffected by this change.
You can now prevent specific images that are used in a page from appearing in other locations, such as within PagePreviews or Search results. This is done with the markup class=notpageimage. For example, [[File:Example.png|class=notpageimage]].
There has been a change to the HTML of Special:Contributions, Special:MergeHistory, and History pages, to support the grouping of changes by date in the mobile skin. While unlikely, this may affect gadgets and user scripts. A list of all the HTML changes is on Phabricator.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 February. It will be on all wikis from 24 February (calendar).
Future changes
The software to play videos and audio files on pages will change soon on all wikis. The old player will be removed. Some audio players will become wider after this change. The new player has been a beta feature for over four years.
Toolforge's underlying operating system is being updated. If you maintain any tools there, there are two options for migrating your tools into the new system. There are details, deadlines, and instructions on Wikitech.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Mentors using the Growth Mentor dashboard will now see newcomers assigned to them who have made at least one edit, up to 200 edits. Previously, all newcomers assigned to the mentor were visible on the dashboard, even ones without any edit or ones who made hundred of edits. Mentors can still change these values using the filters on their dashboard. Also, the last choice of filters will now be saved.
The user group oversight was renamed suppress. This is for technical reasons. You may need to update any local references to the old name, e.g. gadgets, links to Special:Listusers, or uses of NUMBERINGROUP.
Problems
The recent change to the HTML of tracking changes pages caused some problems for screenreaders. This is being fixed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 March. It will be on all wikis from 3 March (calendar).
Future changes
Working with templates will become easier. Several improvements are planned for March 9 on most wikis and on March 16 on English Wikipedia. The improvements include: Bracket matching, syntax highlighting colors, finding and inserting templates, and related visual editor features.
If you are a template developer or an interface administrator, and you are intentionally overriding or using the default CSS styles of user feedback boxes (the classes: successbox, messagebox, errorbox, warningbox), please note that these classes and associated CSS will soon be removed from MediaWiki core. This is to prevent problems when the same class-names are also used on a wiki. Please let us know by commenting at phab:T300314 if you think you might be affected.
A RfC is open to discuss prohibiting draftification of articles over 90 days old.
Technical news
The deployment of the reply tool as an opt-out feature, as announced in last month's newsletter, has been delayed to 7 March. Feedback and comments are being welcomed at Wikipedia talk:Talk pages project. (T296645)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
There was a problem with some interface labels last week. It will be fixed this week. This change was part of ongoing work to simplify the support for skins which do not have active maintainers.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 March. It will be on all wikis from 10 March (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
In the Wikipedia Android app it is now possible to change the toolbar at the bottom so the tools you use more often are easier to click on. The app now also has a focused reading mode.
Problems
There was a problem with the collection of some page-view data from June 2021 to January 2022 on all wikis. This means the statistics are incomplete. To help calculate which projects and regions were most affected, relevant datasets are being retained for 30 extra days. You can read more on Meta-wiki.
There was a problem with the databases on March 10. All wikis were unreachable for logged-in users for 12 minutes. Logged-out users could read pages but could not edit or access uncached content then.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 March. It will be on all wikis from 17 March (calendar).
Access to Special:RevisionDelete has been expanded to include users who have deletelogentry and deletedhistory rights through their group memberships. Before, only those with the deleterevision right could access this special page.
On the Special:Undelete pages for diffs and revisions, there will be a link back to the main Undelete page with the list of revisions.
Future changes
The Wikimedia Foundation has announced the IP Masking implementation strategy and next steps. The announcement can be read here.
The Wikimedia Hackathon 2022 will take place as a hybrid event on 20-22 May 2022. The Hackathon will be held online and there are grants available to support local in-person meetups around the world. Grants can be requested until 20 March.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
New code release schedule for this week
There will be four MediaWiki releases this week, instead of just one. This is an experiment which should lead to fewer problems and to faster feature updates. The releases will be on all wikis, at different times, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. You can read more about this project.
The Jupyter notebooks tool PAWS has been updated to a new interface.
Future changes
Interactive maps via Kartographer will soon work on wikis using the FlaggedRevisions extension. Please tell us which improvements you want to see in Kartographer. You can take this survey in simple English.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a simple new Wikimedia Commons upload tool available for macOS users, Sunflower.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 March. It will be on all wikis from 31 March (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of regular database maintenance. It will be performed on 29 March at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 31 March at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
For a few days last week, edits that were suggested to newcomers were not tagged in the Special:RecentChanges feed. This bug has been fixed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 April. It will be on all wikis from 7 April (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 7 April at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
Future changes
Starting next week, Tech News' title will be translatable. When the newsletter is distributed, its title may not be Tech News: 2022-14 anymore. It may affect some filters that have been set up by some communities.
Access to Special:RevisionDelete has been expanded to include users who have the deletelogentry and deletedhistory rights. This means that those in the Researcher user group and Checkusers who are not administrators can now access Special:RevisionDelete. The users able to view the special page after this change are the 3 users in the Researcher group, as there are currently no checkusers who are not already administrators. (T301928)
When viewing deleted revisions or diffs on Special:Undelete a back link to the undelete page for the associated page is now present. (T284114)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a new public status page at www.wikimediastatus.net. This site shows five automated high-level metrics where you can see the overall health and performance of our wikis' technical environment. It also contains manually-written updates for widespread incidents, which are written as quickly as the engineers are able to do so while also fixing the actual problem. The site is separated from our production infrastructure and hosted by an external service, so that it can be accessed even if the wikis are briefly unavailable. You can read more about this project.
On Wiktionary wikis, the software to play videos and audio files on pages has now changed. The old player has been removed. Some audio players will become wider after this change. The new player has been a beta feature for over four years.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 April. It will be on all wikis from 14 April (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 April. It will be on all wikis from 21 April (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 19 April at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 21 April at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
On selected wikis, 50% of logged-in users will see the new table of contents. When scrolling up and down the page, the table of contents will stay in the same place on the screen. This is part of the Desktop Improvements project.
Message boxes produced by MediaWiki code will no longer have these CSS classes: successbox, errorbox, warningbox. The styles for those classes and messagebox will be removed from MediaWiki core. This only affects wikis that use these classes in wikitext, or change their appearance within site-wide CSS. Please review any local usage and definitions for these classes you may have. This was previously announced in the 28 February issue of Tech News.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
On many wikis (group 1), the software to play videos and audio files on pages has now changed. The old player has been removed. Some audio players will become wider after this change. The new player has been a beta feature for over four years.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 April. It will be on all wikis from 28 April (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 26 April at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
Some very old browsers and operating systems are no longer supported. Some things on the wikis might look weird or not work in very old browsers like Internet Explorer 9 or 10, Android 4, or Firefox 38 or older.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
On all remaining wikis (group 2), the software to play videos and audio files on pages has now changed. The old player has been removed. Some audio players will become wider after this change. The new player has been a beta feature for over four years.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 May. It will be on all wikis from 5 May (calendar).
Future changes
The developers are working on talk pages in the Wikipedia app for iOS. You can give feedback. You can take the survey in English, German, Hebrew or Chinese.
Several CSS IDs related to MediaWiki interface messages will be removed. Technical editors should please review the list of IDs and links to their existing uses. These include #mw-anon-edit-warning, #mw-undelete-revision and 3 others.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Last week, there was a problem with Wikidata's search autocomplete. This has now been fixed.
Last week, all wikis had slow access or no access for 20 minutes, for logged-in users and non-cached pages. This was caused by a problem with a database change.
The Vector (2022) skin will be set as the default on several more wikis, including Arabic and Catalan Wikipedias. Logged-in users will be able to switch back to the old Vector (2010). See the latest update about Vector (2022).
Future meetings
The next open meeting with the Web team about Vector (2022) will take place on 17 May. The following meetings are currently planned for: 7 June, 21 June, 5 July, 19 July.
Following an RfC, a change has been made to the administrators inactivity policy. Under the new policy, if an administrator has not made at least 100 edits over a period of 5 years they may be desysopped for inactivity.
A public status system for WMF wikis has been created. It is located at https://www.wikimediastatus.net/ and is hosted separately to WMF wikis so in the case of an outage it will remain viewable.
Arbitration
Remedy 2 of the St Christopher case has been rescinded following a motion. The remedy previously authorised administrators to place a ban on single-purpose accounts who were disruptively editing on the article St Christopher Iba Mar Diop College of Medicine or related pages from those pages.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
Some wikis can soon use the add a link feature. This will start on Wednesday. The wikis are Catalan Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Swedish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia. This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally.
The Wikimedia Hackathon 2022 will take place online on May 20–22. It will be in English. There are also local hackathon meetups in Germany, Ghana, Greece, India, Nigeria and the United States. Technically interested Wikimedians can work on software projects and learn new skills. You can also host a session or post a project you want to work on.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 May. It will be on all wikis from 19 May (calendar).
Future changes
You can soon edit translatable pages in the visual editor. Translatable pages exist on for examples Meta and Commons.
At the time of the last newsletter (No.26, September 2021), the backlog was 'only' just over 6,000 articles. In the past six months, the backlog has reached nearly 16,000, a staggering level not seen in several years. A very small number of users had been doing the vast majority of the reviews. Due to "burn-out", we have recently lost most of this effort. Furthermore, several reviewers have been stripped of the user right for abuse of privilege and the articles they patrolled were put back in the queue.
Several discussions on the state of the process have taken place on the talk page, but there has been no action to make any changes. The project also lacks coordination since the "position" is vacant.
In the last 30 days, only 100 reviewers have made more than 8 patrols and only 50 have averaged one review a day. There are currently 888 New Page Reviewers, but about a third have not had any activity in the past month. All 809 administrators have this permission, but only about a dozen significantly contribute to NPP.
This means we have an active pool of about 450 to address the backlog. We cannot rely on a few to do most of the work as that inevitably leads to burnout. A fairly experienced reviewer can usually do a review in a few minutes. If every active reviewer would patrol just one article per day, the backlog would very quickly disappear.
If you have noticed a user with a good understanding of Wikipedia notability and deletion, do suggest they help the effort by placing {{subst:NPR invite}} on their talk page.
If you are no longer very active on Wikipedia or you no longer wish to be part of the New Page Reviewer user group, please consider asking any admin to remove you from the list. This will enable NPP to have a better overview of its performance and what improvements need to be made to the process and its software.
To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here. Sent 05:17, 23 May 2022 (UTC)
Tech News: 2022-21
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Administrators using the mobile web interface can now access Special:Block directly from user pages.
The www.wiktionary.org portal page now uses an automated update system. Other project portals will be updated over the next few months.
Problems
The Growth team maintains a mentorship program for newcomers. Previously, newcomers weren't able to opt out from the program. Starting May 19, 2022, newcomers are able to fully opt out from Growth mentorship, in case they do not wish to have any mentor at all.
Some editors cannot access the content translation tool if they load it by clicking from the contributions menu. This problem is being worked on. It should still work properly if accessed directly via Special:ContentTranslation.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 May. It will be on all wikis from 26 May (calendar).
Future changes
Gadget and user scripts developers are invited to give feedback on a proposed technical policy aiming to improve support from MediaWiki developers.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
In the AbuseFilter extension, an ip_in_ranges() function has been introduced to check if an IP is in any of the ranges. Wikis are advised to combine multiple ip_in_range() expressions joined by | into a single expression for better performance. You can use the search function on Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage.
The IP Info feature which helps abuse fighters access information about IPs, has been deployed to all wikis as a beta feature. This comes after weeks of beta testing on test.wikipedia.org.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 June. It will be on all wikis from 2 June (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 31 May at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
The New Topic Tool will be deployed for all editors at most wikis soon. You will be able to opt out from within the tool and in Preferences.
The list=usercontribs API will support fetching contributions from an IP range soon. API users can set the uciprange parameter to get contributions from any IP range within the limit.
A new parser function will be introduced: {{=}}. It will replace existing templates named "=". It will insert an equal sign. This can be used to escape the equal sign in the parameter values of templates.
Administrators using the mobile web interface can now access Special:Block directly from user pages. (T307341)
The IP Info feature has been deployed to all wikis as a Beta Feature. Any autoconfirmed user may enable the feature using the "IP info" checkbox under Preferences→ Beta features. Autoconfirmed users will be able to access basic information about an IP address that includes the country and connection method. Those with advanced privileges (admin, bureaucrat, checkuser) will have access to extra information that includes the Internet Service Provider and more specific location.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 June. It will be on all wikis from 9 June (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 June. It will be on all wikis from 16 June (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 14 June at 06:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Abkhazian Wikipedia, Achinese Wikipedia, Adyghe Wikipedia, Afrikaans Wikipedia, Akan Wikipedia, Alemannisch Wikipedia, Amharic Wikipedia, Aragonese Wikipedia, Old English Wikipedia, Syriac Wikipedia, Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia, Asturian Wikipedia, Atikamekw Wikipedia, Avaric Wikipedia, Aymara Wikipedia, Azerbaijani Wikipedia, South Azerbaijani Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally.
The New Topic Tool will be deployed for all editors at Commons, Wikidata, and some other wikis soon. You will be able to opt out from within the tool and in Preferences.
Future meetings
The next open meeting with the Web team about Vector (2022) will take place today (13 June). The following meetings will take place on: 28 June, 12 July, 26 July.
Future changes
By the end of July, the Vector 2022 skin should be ready to become the default across all wikis. Discussions on how to adjust it to the communities' needs will begin in the next weeks. It will always be possible to revert to the previous version on an individual basis. Learn more.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Wikipedia App for Android now has an option for editing the whole page at once, located in the overflow menu (three-dots menu ).
Some recent database changes may affect queries using the Quarry tool. Queries for site_stats at English Wikipedia, Commons, and Wikidata will need to be updated. Read more.
A new user_global_editcount variable can be used in abuse filters to avoid affecting globally active users.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 June. It will be on all wikis from 23 June (calendar).
Users of non-responsive skins (e.g. MonoBook or Vector) on mobile devices may notice a slight change in the default zoom level. This is intended to optimize zooming and ensure all interface elements are present on the page (for example the table of contents on Vector 2022). In the unlikely event this causes any problems with how you use the site, we'd love to understand better, please ping Jon (WMF) to any on-wiki conversations.
Parsoid's HTML output will soon stop annotating file links with different typeof attribute values, and instead use mw:File for all types. Tool authors should adjust any code that expects: mw:Image, mw:Audio, or mw:Video.
At the time of the last newsletter (No.27, May 2022), the backlog was approaching 16,000, having shot up rapidly from 6,000 over the prior two months. The attention the newsletter brought to the backlog sparked a flurry of activity. There was new discussion on process improvements, efforts to invite new editors to participate in NPP increased and more editors requested the NPP user right so they could help, and most importantly, the number of reviews picked up and the backlog decreased, dipping below 14,000[a] at the end of May.
Since then, the news has not been so good. The backlog is basically flat, hovering around 14,200. I wish I could report the number of reviews done and the number of new articles added to the queue. But the available statistics we have are woefully inadequate. The only real number we have is the net queue size.[b]
In the last 30 days, the top 100 reviewers have all made more than 16 patrols (up from 8 last month), and about 70 have averaged one review a day (up from 50 last month).
While there are more people doing more reviews, many of the ~730 with the NPP right are doing little. Most of the reviews are being done by the top 50 or 100 reviewers. They need your help. We appreciate every review done, but please aim to do one a day (on average, or 30 a month).
Backlog drive
A backlog reduction drive, coordinated by buidhe and Zippybonzo, will be held from July 1 to July 31. Sign up here. Barnstars will be awarded.
TIP – New school articles
Many new articles on schools are being created by new users in developing and/or non-English-speaking countries. The authors are probably not even aware of Wikipedia's projects and policy pages. WP:WPSCH/AG has some excellent advice and resources specifically written for these users. Reviewers could consider providing such first-time article creators with a link to it while also mentioning that not all schools pass the GNG and that elementary schools are almost certainly not notable.
Misc
There is a new template available, {{NPP backlog}}, to show the current backlog. You can place it on your user or talk page as a reminder:
Very high unreviewed pages backlog: 26957 articles, as of 02:00, 17 September 2026 (UTC), according to DatBot
There has been significant discussion at WP:VPP recently on NPP-related matters (Draftification, Deletion, Notability, Verifiability, Burden). Proposals that would somewhat ease the burden on NPP aren't gaining much traction, although there are suggestions that the role of NPP be fundamentally changed to focus only on major CSD-type issues.
If you have noticed a user with a good understanding of Wikipedia notability and deletion, suggest they help the effort by placing {{subst:NPR invite}} on their talk page.
If you are no longer very active on Wikipedia or you no longer wish to be part of the New Page Reviewer user group, please consider asking any admin to remove you from the list. This will enable NPP to have a better overview of its performance and what improvements need to be made to the process and its software.
To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 June. It will be on all wikis from 30 June (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 28 June at 06:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
Some global and cross-wiki services will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 30 June at 06:00 UTC. This will impact ContentTranslation, Echo, StructuredDiscussions, Growth experiments and a few more services.
Users will be able to sort columns within sortable tables in the mobile skin.
Future meetings
The next open meeting with the Web team about Vector (2022) will take place tomorrow (28 June). The following meetings will take place on 12 July and 26 July.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 July. It will be on all wikis from 7 July (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 5 July at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 7 July at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
This change only affects pages in the main namespace in Wikisource. The Javascript config variable proofreadpage_source_href will be removed from mw.config and be replaced with the variable prpSourceIndexPage.
The New Pages Patrol queue has around 10,000 articles to be reviewed. As all administrators have the patrol right, please consider helping out. The queue is here. For further information on the state of the project, see the latest NPP newsletter.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
In the Vector 2022 skin, the page title is now displayed above the tabs such as Discussion, Read, Edit, View history, or More. Learn more.
The Anti-Harassment Tools team recently deployed the IP Info Feature as a Beta Feature at all wikis. This feature allows abuse fighters to access information about IP addresses. Please check our update on how to find and use the tool. Please share your feedback using a link you will be given within the tool itself.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 12 July at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
The feature on mobile web for Nearby Pages was missing last week. It will be fixed this week.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 July. It will be on all wikis from 21 July (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Last week, some wikis were in read-only mode for a few minutes because of an emergency switch of their main database (targeted wikis).
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 July. It will be on all wikis from 28 July (calendar).
The external link icon will change slightly in the skins Vector legacy and Vector 2022. The new icon uses simpler shapes to be more recognizable on low-fidelity screens.
Administrators will now see buttons on user pages for "Change block" and "Unblock user" instead of just "Block user" if the user is already blocked.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 August. It will be on all wikis from 4 August (calendar).
This week, three meetings about Vector (2022) with live interpretation will take place. On Tuesday, interpretation in Russian will be provided. On Thursday, meetings for Arabic and Spanish speakers will take place. See how to join.
An RfC has been closed with consensus to add javascript that will show edit notices for editors editing via a mobile device. This only works for users using a mobile browser, so iOS app editors will still not be able to see edit notices.
An RfC has been closed with the consensus that train stations are not inherently notable.
Administrators will now see links on user pages for "Change block" and "Unblock user" instead of just "Block user" if the user is already blocked. (T308570)
Arbitration
The arbitration case request Geschichte has been automatically closed after a 3 month suspension of the case.
Miscellaneous
You can vote for candidates in the 2022 Board of Trustees elections from 16 August to 30 August. Two community elected seats are up for election.
Wikimania 2022 is taking place virtually from 11 August to 14 August. The schedule for wikimania is listed here. There are also a number of in-person events associated with Wikimania around the world.
Tech tip: When revision-deleting on desktop, hold ⇧ Shift between clicking two checkboxes to select every box in that range.
After the last newsletter (No.28, June 2022), the backlog declined another 1,000 to 13,000 in the last week of June. Then the July backlog drive began, during which 9,900 articles were reviewed and the backlog fell by 4,500 to just under 8,500 (these numbers illustrate how many new articles regularly flow into the queue). Thanks go to the coordinators Buidhe and Zippybonzo, as well as all the nearly 100 participants. Congratulations to Dr vulpes who led with 880 points. See this page for further details.
Unfortunately, most of the decline happened in the first half of the month, and the backlog has already risen to 9,600. Understandably, it seems many backlog drive participants are taking a break from reviewing and unfortunately, we are not even keeping up with the inflow let alone driving it lower. We need the other 600 reviewers to do more! Please try to do at least one a day.
Coordination
MB and Novem Linguae have taken on some of the coordination tasks. Please let them know if you are interested in helping out. MPGuy2824 will be handling recognition, and will be retroactively awarding the annual barnstars that have not been issued for a few years.
Open letter to the WMF
The Page Curation software needs urgent attention. There are dozens of bug fixes and enhancements that are stalled (listed at Suggested improvements). We have written a letter to be sent to the WMF and we encourage as many patrollers as possible to sign it here. We are also in negotiation with the Board of Trustees to press for assistance. Better software will make the active reviewers we have more productive.
TIP - Reviewing by subject
Reviewers who prefer to patrol new pages by their most familiar subjects can do so from the regularly updated sorted topic list.
New reviewers
The NPP School is being underused. The learning curve for NPP is quite steep, but a detailed and easy-to-read tutorial exists, and the Curation Tool's many features are fully described and illustrated on the updated page here.
If you have noticed a user with a good understanding of Wikipedia notability and deletion, suggest they help the effort by placing {{subst:NPR invite}} on their talk page.
If you are no longer very active on Wikipedia or you no longer wish to be part of the New Page Reviewer user group, please consider asking any admin to remove you from the list. This will enable NPP to have a better overview of its performance and what improvements need to be made to the process and its software.
To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 9 August at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 11 August at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Persian (Farsi) Wikipedia community decided to block IP editing from October 2021 to April 2022. The Wikimedia Foundation's Product Analytics team tracked the impact of this change. An impact report is now available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 August. It will be on all wikis from 18 August (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 16 August at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 18 August at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
For those who may have missed it in our last newsletter, here's a quick reminder to see the letter we have drafted, and if you support it, do please go ahead and sign it. If you already signed, thanks. Also, if you haven't noticed, the backlog has been trending up lately; all reviews are greatly appreciated.
To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Two problems with Kartographer maps have been fixed. Maps are no longer shown as empty when a geoline was created via VisualEditor. Geolines consisting of points with QIDs (e.g., subway lines) are no longer shown with pushpins.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 August. It will be on all wikis from 25 August (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 25 August at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
The colours of links and visited links will change. This is to make the difference between links and other text more clear.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
In recent months, there have been inaccurate numbers shown for various Special:Statistics at Commons, Wikidata, and English Wikipedia. This has now been fixed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 August. It will be on all wikis from 1 September (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 30 August at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 1 September at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
Future changes
The Wikimedia Foundation wants to improve how Wikimedia communities report harmful incidents by building the Private Incident Reporting System (PIRS) to make it easy and safe for users to make reports. You can leave comments on the talk page, by answering the questions provided. If you have ever faced a harmful situation that you wanted to report/reported, join a PIRS interview to share your experience. To sign up please emailMadalina Ana.
A discussion is open to define a process by which Vector 2022 can be made the default for all users.
An RfC is open to gain consensus on whether Fox News is reliable for science and politics.
Technical news
The impact report on the effects of disabling IP editing on the Persian (Farsi) Wikipedia has been released.
The WMF is looking into making a Private Incident Reporting System (PIRS) system to improve the reporting of harmful incidents through easier and safer reporting. You can leave comments on the talk page by answering the questions provided. Users who have faced harmful situations are also invited to join a PIRS interview to share the experience. To sign up please emailMadalina Ana.
Arbitration
An arbitration case regarding Conduct in deletion-related editing has been closed. The Arbitration Committee passed a remedy as part of the final decision to create a request for comment (RfC) on how to handle mass nominations at Articles for Deletion (AfD).
The arbitration case request Jonathunder has been automatically closed after a 6 month suspension of the case.
Miscellaneous
The new pages patrol (NPP) team has prepared an appeal to the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) for assistance with addressing Page Curation bugs and requested features. You are encouraged to read the open letter before it is sent, and if you support it, consider signing it. It is not a discussion, just a signature will suffice.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 September. It will be on all wikis from 8 September (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 6 September at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 8 September at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
On Special pages that only have one tab, the tab-bar's row will be hidden in the Vector-2022 skin to save space. The row will still show if Gadgets use it. Gadgets that currently append directly to the CSS id of #p-namespaces should be updated to use the mw.util.addPortletLink function instead. Gadgets that style this id should consider also targeting #p-associated-pages, the new id for this row. Examples are available.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The search servers have been upgraded to a new major version. If you notice any issues with searching, please report them on Phabricator.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 September. It will be on all wikis from 15 September (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Two database fields in the templatelinks table are now being dropped: tl_namespace and tl_title. Any queries that rely on these fields need to be changed to use the new normalization field called tl_target_id. See T299417 for more information. This is part of normalization of links tables.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 September. It will be on all wikis from 22 September (calendar).
In Kartographer maps, you can use icons on markers for common points of interest. On Tuesday, the previous icon set will be updated to version maki 7.2. That means, around 100 new icons will be available. Additionally, all existing icons were updated for clarity and to make them work better in international contexts.
Future changes
In a group discussion at Wikimania, more than 30 people talked about how to make content partnership software in the Wikimedia movement more sustainable. What kind of support is acceptable for volunteer developers? Read the summary and leave your feedback.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Parsoid clients should be updated to allow for space-separated multi-values in the rel attribute of links. Further details are in T315209.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 September. It will be on all wikis from 29 September (calendar).
Visual diffs will become available to all users, except at the Wiktionaries and Wikipedias.
Talk pages on the mobile site will change at the Arabic, Bangla, Chinese, French, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Korean, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. They should be easier to use and provide more information.
In the Module namespace, pages ending with .json will be treated as JSON, just like they already are in the User and MediaWiki namespaces.
Following an RfC, consensus has been found that, in the context of politics and science, the reliability of FoxNews.com is unclear and that additional considerations apply to its use.
The Articles for creation helper script now automatically recognises administrator accounts which means your name does not need to be listed at WP:AFCP to help out. If you wish to help out at AFC, enable AFCH by navigating to Preferences→ Gadgets and checking the "Yet Another AfC Helper Script" box.
Arbitration
Remedy 8.1 of the Muhammad images case will be rescinded 1 November following a motion.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Kartographer maps can now show geopoints from Wikidata, via QID or SPARQL query. Previously, this was only possible for geoshapes and geolines.
The Coolest Tool Award 2022 is looking for nominations. You can recommend tools until 12 October.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 October. It will be on all wikis from 6 October (calendar).
Talk pages on the mobile site will change at the Arabic, Bangla, Chinese, French, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Korean, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. They should be easier to use and provide more information. (Last week's release was delayed)
The scribunto-console API module will require a CSRF token. This module is documented as internal and use of it is not supported. [5]
The Vector 2022 skin will become the default across the smallest Wikimedia projects. Learn more.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 October. It will be on all wikis from 13 October (calendar).
On some wikis, Kartographer maps in full size view will be able to display nearby articles. After a feedback period, more wikis will follow.
Much has happened since the last newsletter over two months ago. The open letter finished with 444 signatures. The letter was sent to several dozen people at the WMF, and we have heard that it is being discussed but there has been no official reply. A related article appears in the current issue of The Signpost. If you haven't seen it, you should, including the readers' comment section.
Awards: Barnstars were given for the past several years (thanks to MPGuy2824), and we are now all caught up. The 2021 cup went to John B123 for leading with 26,525 article reviews during 2021. To encourage moderate activity, a new "Iron" level barnstar is awarded annually for reviewing 360 articles ("one-a-day"), and 100 reviews earns the "Standard" NPP barnstar. About 90 reviewers received barnstars for each of the years 2018 to 2021 (including the new awards that were given retroactively). All awards issued for every year are listed on the Awards page. Check out the new Hall of Fame also.
Software news: Novem Linguae and MPGuy2824 have connected with WMF developers who can review and approve patches, so they have been able to fix some bugs, and make other improvements to the Page Curation software. You can see everything that has been fixed recently here. The reviewer report has also been improved.
NPP backlog May – October 15, 2022
Suggestions:
There is much enthusiasm over the low backlog, but remember that the "quality and depth of patrolling are more important than speed".
Reminder: an article should not be tagged for any kind of deletion for a minimum of 15 minutes after creation and it is often appropriate to wait an hour or more. (from the NPP tutorial)
Reviewers should focus their effort where it can do the most good, reviewing articles. Other clean-up tasks that don't require advanced permissions can be left to other editors that routinely improve articles in these ways (creating Talk Pages, specifying projects and ratings, adding categories, etc.) Let's rely on others when it makes the most sense. On the other hand, if you enjoy doing these tasks while reviewing and it keeps you engaged with NPP (or are guiding a newcomer), then by all means continue.
This user script puts a link to the feed in your top toolbar.
Backlog:
Saving the best for last: From a July low of 8,500, the backlog climbed back to 11,000 in August and then reversed in September dropping to below 6,000 and continued falling with the October backlog drive to under 1,000, a level not seen in over four years. Keep in mind that there are 2,000 new articles every week, so the number of reviews is far higher than the backlog reduction. To keep the backlog under a thousand, we have to keep reviewing at about half the recent rate!
Reminders
Newsletter feedback - please take this short poll about the newsletter.
If you're interested in instant messaging and chat rooms, please join us on the New Page Patrol Discord, where you can ask for help and live chat with other patrollers.
If you are no longer very active on Wikipedia or you no longer wish to be a reviewer, please ask any admin to remove you from the group. If you want the tools back again, just ask at PERM.
To opt out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.
Tech News: 2022-42
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
A bug that caused problems in loading article thumbnails in Special:Search has been fixed. Further details are in T320406.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 October. It will be on all wikis from 20 October (calendar).
Lua module authors can use mw.loadJsonData() to load data from JSON pages.
Lua module authors can enable require( "strict" ) to add errors for some possible code problems. This replaces "Module:No globals" on most wikis.
Future changes
The Beta Feature for DiscussionTools will be updated at most wikis. The "reply" button will look different after this change.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There have been some minor visual fixes in Special:Search, regarding audio player alignment and image placeholder height. Further details are in T319230.
On Wikipedias, a new preference has been added to hide article thumbnails in Special:Search. Full details are in T320337.
Problems
Last week, three wikis (French Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Russian Wikipedia) had read-only access for 25 minutes. This was caused by a hardware problem.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 October. It will be on all wikis from 27 October (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 25 October at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 27 October at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Assamese Wikipedia, Bashkir Wikipedia, Balinese Wikipedia, Bavarian Wikipedia, Samogitian Wikipedia, Bikol Central Wikipedia, Belarusian Wikipedia, Belarusian (Taraškievica) Wikipedia, Bulgarian Wikipedia, Bhojpuri Wikipedia, Bislama Wikipedia, Banjar Wikipedia, Bambara Wikipedia, Bishnupriya Wikipedia, Breton Wikipedia, Bosnian Wikipedia, Buginese Wikipedia, Buryat Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally.
Pages with titles that start with a lower-case letter according to Unicode 11 will be renamed or deleted. There is a list of affected pages at m:Unicode 11 case map migration. More information can be found at T292552.
The Vector 2022 skin will become the default across the smallest Wikipedias. Learn more.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
When using keyboard navigation on a Kartographer map, the focus will become more visible.
In Special:RecentChanges, you can now hide the log entries for new user creations with the filter for "⧼rcfilters-filter-newuserlogactions-label⧽".
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 November. It will be on all wikis from 3 November (calendar).
The maps dialog in VisualEditor now has some help texts.
It is now possible to select the language of a Kartographer map in VisualEditor via a dropdown menu.
It is now possible to add a caption to a Kartographer map in VisualEditor.
It is now possible to hide the frame of a Kartographer map in VisualEditor.
An RfC is open to discuss having open requests for adminship automatically placed on hold after the seven-day period has elapsed, pending closure or other action by a bureaucrat.
Tech tip: Wikimarkup in a block summary is parsed in the notice that the blockee sees. You can use templates with custom options to specify situations like {{rangeblock|create=yes}} or {{uw-ublock|contains profanity}}.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
An updated version of the Event Registration tool is now available for testing at testwiki and test2wiki. The tool provides features for event organizers and participants. Your feedback is welcome at our project talkpage. More information about the project is available.
Problems
Twice last week, for about 45 minutes, some files and thumbnails failed to load and uploads failed, mostly for logged-in users. The cause is being investigated and an incident report will be available soon.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
At Wikidata, an interwiki link can now point to a redirect page if certain conditions are met. This new feature is called sitelinks to redirects. It is needed when one wiki uses one page to cover multiple concepts but another wiki uses more pages to cover the same concepts. Your feedback on the talkpage of the new proposed guideline is welcome.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 November. It will be on all wikis from 17 November (calendar).
There will be a new link to directly "Edit template data" on Template pages.
Future changes
Wikis where mobile DiscussionTools are enabled (these ones) will soon use full CSS styling to display any templates that are placed at the top of talk pages. To adapt these “talk page boxes” for narrow mobile devices you can use media queries, such as in this example.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The display of non-free media in the search bar and for article thumbnails in Special:Search has been deactivated. Further details are in T320661.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 22 November at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 24 November at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
A new preference, “Enable limited width mode”, has been added to the Vector 2022 skin. The preference is also available as a toggle on every page if your monitor is 1600 pixels or wider. It allows for increasing the width of the page for logged-out and logged-in users.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 November. It will be on all wikis from 1 December (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 29 November at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 1 December at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
Mathematical formulas shown in SVG image format will no longer have PNG fall-backs for browsers that don't support them. This is part of work to modernise the generation system. Showing only PNG versions was the default option until in February 2018.
An RfC on the banners for the December 2022 fundraising campaign has been closed.
Technical news
A new preference named "Enable limited width mode" has been added to the Vector 2022 skin. The preference is also shown as a toggle on every page if your monitor is 1600 pixels or wider. When disabled it removes the whitespace added by Vector 2022 on the left and right of the page content. Disabling this preference has the same effect as enabling the wide-vector-2022 gadget. (T319449)
Arbitration
Eligible users are invited to vote on candidates for the Arbitration Committee until 23:59 December 12, 2022 (UTC). Candidate statements can be seen here.
The arbitration case Stephen has been opened and the proposed decision is expected 1 December 2022.
A motion has modified the procedures for contacting an admin facing Level 2 desysop.
Miscellaneous
Tech tip: A single IPv6 connection usually has access to a "subnet" of 18 quintillion IPs. Add /64 to the end of an IP in Special:Contributions to see all of a subnet's edits, and consider blocking the whole subnet rather than an IP that may change within a minute.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Wikisources use a tool called ProofreadPage. ProofreadPage uses OpenSeadragon which is an open source tool. The OpenSeadragon JavaScript API has been significantly re-written to support dynamically loading images. The functionality provided by the older version of the API should still work but it is no longer supported. User scripts and gadgets should migrate over to the newer version of the API. The functionality provided by the newer version of the API is documented on MediaWiki.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 December. It will be on all wikis from 8 December (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The character = cannot be used in new usernames, to make usernames work better with templates. Existing usernames are not affected.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 December. It will be on all wikis from 15 December (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Tech News
Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 9 January 2023.
Recent changes
On a user's contributions page, you can filter it for edits with a tag like 'reverted'. Now, you can also filter for all edits that are not tagged like that. This was part of a Community Wishlist 2022 request.
A new function has been used for gadget developers to add content underneath the title on article pages. This is considered a stable API that should work across all skins. Documentation is available.
One of our test wikis is now being served from a new infrastructure powered by Kubernetes (read more). More Wikis will switch to this new infrastructure in early 2023. Please test and let us know of any issues.
Problems
Last week, all wikis had no edit access for 9 minutes. This was caused by a database problem.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.
The word "Reply" is very short in some languages, such as Arabic ("ردّ"). This makes the Discussion tools button on talk pages difficult to use. An arrow icon will be added to those languages. This will only be visible to editors who have the Beta Feature turned on.
Future changes
Edits can be automatically "tagged" by the system software or the Edit filter configuration system. Those tags link to a help page about the tags. Soon they will also link to Recent Changes to let you see other edits tagged this way. This was a Community Wishlist 2022 request.
The Trust & Safety tools team have shared new plans for building the Private Incident Reporting System. The system will make it easier for editors to ask for help if they are harassed or abused.
Realtime Preview for Wikitext is coming out of beta as an enabled feature for every user of the 2010 Wikitext editor in the week of January 9, 2023. It will be available to use via the toolbar in the 2010 Wikitext editor. The feature was the 4th most popular wish of the Community Wishlist Survey 2021.
The October drive reduced the backlog from 9,700 to an amazing 0! Congratulations to WaddlesJP13 who led with 2084 points. See this page for further details. The queue is steadily rising again and is approaching 2,000. It would be great if <2,000 were the “new normal”. Please continue to help out even if it's only for a few or even one patrol a day.
2022 Awards
Onel5969 won the 2022 cup for 28,302 article reviews last year - that's an average of nearly 80/day. There was one Gold Award (5000+ reviews), 11 Silver (2000+), 28 Iron (360+) and 39 more for the 100+ barnstar. Rosguill led again for the 4th year by clearing 49,294 redirects. For the full details see the Awards page and the Hall of Fame. Congratulations everyone!
Minimum deletion time: The previous WP:NPP guideline was to wait 15 minutes before tagging for deletion (including draftification and WP:BLAR). Due to complaints, a consensus decided to raise the time to 1 hour. To illustrate this, very new pages in the feed are now highlighted in red. (As always, this is not applicable to attack pages, copyvios, vandalism, etc.)
New draftify script: In response to feedback from AFC, the The Move to Draft script now provides a choice of set messages that also link the creator to a new, friendly explanation page. The script also warns reviewers if the creator is probably still developing the article. The former script is no longer maintained. Please edit your edit your common.js or vector.js file from User:Evad37/MoveToDraft.js to User:MPGuy2824/MoveToDraft.js
Redirects: Some of our redirect reviewers have reduced their activity and the backlog is up to 9,000+ (two months deep). If you are interested in this distinctly different task and need any help, see this guide, this checklist, and spend some time at WP:RFD.
Discussions with the WMF The PageTriage open letter signed by 444 users is bearing fruit. The Growth Team has assigned some software engineers to work on PageTriage, the software that powers the NewPagesFeed and the Page Curation toolbar. WMF has submitted dozens of patches in the last few weeks to modernize PageTriage's code, which will make it easier to write patches in the future. This work is helpful but is not very visible to the end user. For patches visible to the end user, volunteers such as Novem Linguae and MPGuy2824 have been writing patches for bug reports and feature requests. The Growth Team also had a video conference with the NPP coordinators to discuss revamping the landing pages that new users see.
Reminders
Newsletter feedback - please take this short poll about the newsletter.
Voting for the Sound Logo has closed and the winner is expected to be announced February to April 2023.
Tech tip: You can view information about IP addresses in a centralised location using bullseye which won the Newcomer award in the recent Coolest Tool Awards.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can use tags to filter edits in the recent changes feed or on your watchlist. You can now use tags to filter out edits you don't want to see. Previously you could only use tags to focus on the edits with those tags.
You can now use the thanks function on your watchlist and the user contribution page.
A wiki page can be moved to give it a new name. You can now get a dropdown menu with common reasons when you move a page. This is so you don't have to write the explanation every time.
Matrix is a chat tool. You can now use matrix: to create Matrix links on wiki pages.
You can filter out translations when you look at the recent changes on multilingual wikis. This didn't hide translation pages. You can now also hide subpages which are translation pages.
Changes later this week
Realtime preview for wikitext is a tool which lets editors preview the page when they edit wikitext. It will be enabled for all users of the 2010 wikitext editor. You will find it in the editor toolbar.
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 10 January at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 12 January at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 January. It will be on all wikis from 12 January (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
The URLs in "prev" links on page history now contain diff=prev&oldid=[revision ID] in place of diff=[revision ID]&oldid=[revision ID]. This is to fix a problem with links pointing to incorrect diffs when history was filtered by a tag. Some user scripts may break as a result of this change.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 January. It will be on all wikis from 19 January (calendar).
Some changes to the appearance of talk pages have only been available on Talk: and User talk: namespaces. These will be extended to other talk namespaces, such as Wikipedia talk:. They will continue to be unavailable in non-talk namespaces, including Wikipedia: pages (e.g., at the Village Pump). You can change your preferences (beta feature).
On Wikisources, when an image is zoomed or panned in the Page: namespace, the same zoom and pan settings will be remembered for all Page: namespace pages that are linked to a particular Index: namespace page.
The Vector 2022 skin will become the default for the English Wikipedia desktop users. The change will take place on January 18 at 15:00 UTC. Learn more.
Future changes
The 2023 edition of the Community Wishlist Survey, which invites contributors to make technical proposals and vote for tools and improvements, starts next week on 23 January 2023 at 18:00 UTC. You can start drafting your proposals in the CWS sandbox.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Last week, for ~15 minutes, all wikis were unreachable for logged-in users and non-cached pages. This was caused by a timing issue.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 January. It will be on all wikis from 26 January (calendar).
If you have the Beta Feature for DiscussionTools enabled, the appearance of talk pages will add more information about discussion activity.
The 2023 edition of the Community Wishlist Survey (CWS), which invites contributors to make technical proposals and vote for tools and improvements, starts on Monday 23 January 2023 at 18:00 UTC.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Last week, for ~15 minutes, some users were unable to log in or edit pages. This was caused by a problem with session storage.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 February. It will be on all wikis from 2 February (calendar).
Future changes
Wikis that use localized numbering schemes for references need to add new CSS. This will help to show citation numbers the same way in all reading and editing modes. If your wiki would prefer to do it yourselves, please see the details and example CSS to copy from, and also add your wiki to the list. Otherwise, the developers will directly help out starting the week of February 5.
Voting in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey will begin on 10 February 2023 and end on 24 February 2023. You can submit, discuss and revise proposals until 6 February 2023.
Tech tip: Syntax highlighting is available in both the 2011 and 2017 Wikitext editors. It can help make editing paragraphs with many references or complicated templates easier.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
In the Vector 2022 skin, logged-out users using the full-width toggle will be able to see the setting of their choice even after refreshing pages or opening new ones. This only applies to wikis where Vector 2022 is the default.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 February. It will be on all wikis from 9 February (calendar).
Previously, we announced when some wikis would be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. These switches will not be announced any more, as the read-only time has become non-significant. Switches will continue to happen at 7AM UTC on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Across all the wikis, in the Vector 2022 skin, logged-in users will see the page-related links such as "What links here" in a new side menu. It will be displayed on the other side of the screen. This change had previously been made on Czech, English, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
Gadgets and user scripts will be changing to load on desktop and mobile sites. Previously they would only load on the desktop site. It is recommended that wiki administrators audit the gadget definitions prior to this change, and add skins=… for any gadgets which should not load on mobile. More details are available.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
On wikis where patrolled edits are enabled, changes made to the mentor list by autopatrolled mentors are not correctly marked as patrolled. It will be fixed later this week.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 February. It will be on all wikis from 16 February (calendar).
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Last week, during planned maintenance of Cloud Services, unforeseen complications forced the team to turn off all tools for 2–3 hours to prevent data corruption. Work is ongoing to prevent similar problems in the future.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 February. It will be on all wikis from 23 February (calendar).
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Last week, in some areas of the world, there were problems with loading pages for 20 minutes and saving edits for 55 minutes. These issues were caused by a problem with our caching servers due to unforseen events during a routine maintenance task.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 March. It will be on all wikis from 2 March (calendar).
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for 14:00 UTC.
Following a request for comment, the Portal CSD criteria (P1 (portal subject to CSD as an article) and P2 (underpopulated portal)) have been deprecated.
The Terms of Use update cycle has started, which includes a [p]roposal for better addressing undisclosed paid editing. Feedback is being accepted until 24 April 2023.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Community Wishlist Survey 2023 edition has been concluded. Community Tech has published the results of the survey and will provide an update on what is next in April 2023.
On wikis which use LanguageConverter to handle multiple writing systems, articles which used custom conversion rules in the wikitext (primarily on Chinese Wikipedia) would have these rules applied inconsistently in the table of contents, especially in the Vector 2022 skin. This has now been fixed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 March. It will be on all wikis from 9 March (calendar).
A search system has been added to the Preferences screen. This will let you find different options more easily. Making it work on mobile devices will happen soon.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 March. It will be on all wikis from 16 March (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Chavacano de Zamboanga Wikipedia, Min Dong Chinese Wikipedia, Chechen Wikipedia, Cebuano Wikipedia, Chamorro Wikipedia, Cherokee Wikipedia, Cheyenne Wikipedia, Central Kurdish Wikipedia, Corsican Wikipedia, Kashubian Wikipedia, Church Slavic Wikipedia, Chuvash Wikipedia, Welsh Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Last week, some users experienced issues loading image thumbnails. This was due to incorrectly cached images.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 March. It will be on all wikis from 23 March (calendar).
There will be a new option for Administrators when they are unblocking a user, to add the unblocked user’s user page to their watchlist. This will work both via Special:Unblock and via the API.
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Wikipedia mobile apps teams. During the meeting, we will discuss the current features and future roadmap. The meeting will be on 24 March at 17:00 (UTC). See details and how to join.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The AbuseFilter condition limit was increased from 1000 to 2000.
Desktop users are now able to subscribe to talk pages by clicking on the Subscribe link in the Tools menu. If you subscribe to a talk page, you receive notifications when new topics are started on that talk page. This is separate from putting the page on your watchlist or subscribing to a single discussion.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 March. It will be on all wikis from 30 March (calendar).
The legacy Mobile Content Service is going away in July 2023. Developers are encouraged to switch to Parsoid or another API before then to ensure service continuity.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The system for automatically creating categories for the Babel extension has had several important changes and fixes. One of them allows you to insert templates for automatic category descriptions on creation, allowing you to categorize the new categories.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 April. It will be on all wikis from 6 April (calendar).
Some older Web browsers will stop being able to use JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis from this week. This mainly affects users of Internet Explorer 11. If you have an old web browser on your computer you can try to upgrade to a newer version.
The deprecated jquery.hoverIntent module has been removed. This module could be used by gadgets and user scripts, to create an artificial delay in how JavaScript responds to a hover event. Gadgets and user scripts should now use jQuery hover() or on() instead. Examples can be found in the migration guide.
Some of the links in Special:SpecialPages will be re-arranged. There will be a clearer separation between links that relate to all users, and links related to your own user account.
You will be able to hide the Reply button in archived discussion pages with a new __ARCHIVEDTALK__ magic word. There will also be a new .mw-archivedtalk CSS class for hiding the Reply button in individual sections on a page.
Future changes
The Vega software that creates data visualizations in pages, such as graphs, will be upgraded to the newest version in the future. Graphs that still use the very old version 1.5 syntax may stop working properly. Most existing uses have been found and updated, but you can help to check, and to update any local documentation. Examples of how to find and fix these graphs are available.
The rollback of Vector 2022 RfC has found no consensus to rollback to Vector legacy, but has found rough consensus to disable "limited width" mode by default.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
In the visual editor, it is now possible to edit captions of images in galleries without opening the gallery dialog. This feature request was voted #61 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.
There was a problem with all types of CentralNotice banners still being shown to logged-in users even if they had turned off specific banner types. This has now been fixed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 April. It will be on all wikis from 13 April (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Moroccan Arabic Wikipedia, Danish Wikipedia, Dinka Wikipedia, Lower Sorbian Wikipedia, Ewe Wikipedia, Greek Wikipedia, Emiliano-Romagnolo Wikipedia, Esperanto Wikipedia, Estonian Wikipedia, Basque Wikipedia, Extremaduran Wikipedia, Tumbuka Wikipedia, Fulah Wikipedia, Finnish Wikipedia, Võro Wikipedia, Fijian Wikipedia, Faroese Wikipedia, Arpitan Wikipedia, Northern Frisian Wikipedia, Friulian Wikipedia, Irish Wikipedia, Guianan Creole Wikipedia, Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia, Galician Wikipedia, Gilaki Wikipedia, Guarani Wikipedia, Goan Konkani Wikipedia, Gothic Wikipedia, Gujarati Wikipedia, Manx Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can now see nearby articles on a Kartographer map with the button for the new feature "Show nearby articles". Six wikis have been testing this feature since October.
At Wikimedia Commons, some thumbnails have not been getting replaced correctly after a new version of the image is uploaded. This should be fixed later this week.
For the last few weeks, some external tools had inconsistent problems with logging-in with OAuth. This has now been fixed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 April. It will be on all wikis from 20 April (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Due to security issues with the Graph extension, graphs have been disabled in all Wikimedia projects. Wikimedia Foundation teams are working to respond to these vulnerabilities.
For a few days, it was not possible to save some kinds of edits on the mobile version of a wiki. This has been fixed.
Changes later this week
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on April 26. This is planned for 14:00 UTC.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 April. It will be on all wikis from 27 April (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The Video2commons tool has been updated. This fixed several bugs related to YouTube uploads.
The Special:Preferences page has been redesigned on mobile web. The new design makes it easier to browse the different categories and settings at low screen widths. You can also now access the page via a link in the Settings menu in the mobile web sidebar.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 May. It will be on all wikis from 4 May (calendar).
A request for comment about removing administrative privileges in specified situations is open for feedback.
Technical news
Progress has started on the Page Triage improvement project. This is to address the concerns raised by the community in their 2022 WMF letter that requested improvements be made to the tool.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Last week, Community Tech released the first update for providing better diffs, the #1 request in the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey. This update adds legends and tooltips to inline diffs so that users unfamiliar with the blue and yellow highlights can better understand the type of edits made.
When you close an image that is displayed via MediaViewer, it will now return to the wiki page instead of going back in your browser history. This feature request was voted #65 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.
The SyntaxHighlight extension now supports wikitext as a selected language. Old alternatives that were used to highlight wikitext, such as html5, moin, and html+handlebars, can now be replaced.
Graph Extension update: Foundation developers have completed upgrading the visualization software to Vega5. Existing community graphs based on Vega2 are no longer compatible. Communities need to update local graphs and templates, and shared lua modules like de:Modul:Graph. The Vega Porting guide provides the most comprehensive detail on migration from Vega2 and here is an example migration. Vega5 has currently just been enabled on mediawiki.org to provide a test environment for communities.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 May. It will be on all wikis from 11 May (calendar).
Until now, all new OAuth apps went through manual review. Starting this week, apps using identification-only or basic authorizations will not require review.
There will be an A/B test on 10 Wikipedias where the Vector 2022 skin is the default skin. Half of logged-in desktop users will see an interface where the different parts of the page are more clearly separated. You can read more.
jquery.tipsy will be removed from the MediaWiki core. This will affect some user scripts. Many lines with .tipsy( can be commented out. OO.ui.PopupWidget can be used to keep things working like they are now. You can read more and read about how to find broken scripts.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Citations that are automatically generated based on ISBN are currently broken. This affects citations made with the VisualEditor Automatic tab, and the use of the citoid API in gadgets and user scripts. Work is ongoing to restore this feature.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 May. It will be on all wikis from 18 May (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Gorontalo Wikipedia, Hausa Wikipedia, Hakka Chinese Wikipedia, Hawaiian Wikipedia, Fiji Hindi Wikipedia, Croatian Wikipedia, Upper Sorbian Wikipedia, Haitian Creole Wikipedia, Interlingua Wikipedia, Interlingue Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Iloko Wikipedia, Ingush Wikipedia, Ido Wikipedia, Icelandic Wikipedia, Inuktitut Wikipedia, Jamaican Patois Wikipedia, Javanese Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally.
Gadget and userscript developers should replace jquery.cookie with mediawiki.cookie. The jquery.cookie library will be removed in ~1 month, and staff developers will run a script to replace any remaining uses at that time.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
An improved impact module will be available at Wikipedias. The impact module is a feature available to newcomers at their personal homepage. It will show their number of edits, how many readers their edited pages have, how many thanks they have received and similar things. It is also accessible by accessing Special:Impact.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 May. It will be on all wikis from 25 May (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Citations can once again be added automatically from ISBNs, thanks to Zotero's ISBN searches. The current data sources are the Library of Congress (United States), the Bibliothèque nationale de France (French National Library), and K10plus ISBN (German repository). Additional data source searches can be proposed to Zotero. The ISBN labels in the VisualEditor Automatic tab will reappear later this week.
For a few days earlier this month, the "Add interlanguage link" item in the Tools menu did not work properly. This has now been fixed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 May. It will be on all wikis from 1 June (calendar).
VisualEditor will be switched to a new backend on small and medium wikis this week. Large wikis will follow in the coming weeks. This is part of the effort to move Parsoid into MediaWiki core. The change should have no noticeable effect on users, but if you experience any slow loading or other strangeness when using VisualEditor, please report it on the phabricator ticket linked here.
Following an RfC, editors indefinitely site-banned by community consensus will now have all rights, including sysop, removed.
As a part of the Wikimedia Foundation's IP Masking project, a new policy has been created that governs the access to temporary account IP addresses. An associated FAQ has been created and individual communities can increase the requirements to view temporary account IP addresses.
Technical news
Bot operators and tool maintainers should schedule time in the coming months to test and update their tools for the effects of IP masking. IP masking will not be deployed to any content wiki until at least October 2023 and is unlikely to be deployed to the English Wikipedia until some time in 2024.
Arbitration
The arbitration case World War II and the history of Jews in Poland has been closed. The topic area of Polish history during World War II (1933-1945) and the history of Jews in Poland is subject to a "reliable source consensus-required" contentious topic restriction.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The RealMe extension allows you to mark URLs on your user page as verified for Mastodon and similar software.
Previously, clicking on someone else's link to Recent Changes with filters applied within the URL could unintentionally change your preference for "Group results by page". This has now been fixed.
Problems
For a few days last week, some tools and bots returned outdated information due to database replication problems, and may have been down entirely while it was being fixed. These issues have now been fixed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 June. It will be on all wikis from 8 June (calendar).
Bots will no longer be prevented from making edits because of URLs that match the spam blacklist.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The Search Preview panel has been deployed on four Wikipedias (Catalan, Dutch, Hungarian and Norwegian). The panel will show an image related to the article (if existing), the top sections of the article, related images (coming from MediaSearch on Commons), and eventually the sister projects associated with the article.
The RealMe extension now allows administrators to verify URLs for any page, for Mastodon and similar software.
The default project license has been officially upgraded to CC BY-SA 4.0. The software interface messages have been updated. Communities should feel free to start updating any mentions of the old CC BY-SA 3.0 licensing within policies and related documentation pages.
Problems
For three days last month, some Wikipedia pages edited with VisualEditor or DiscussionTools had an unintended __TOC__ (or its localized form) added during an edit. There is a listing of affected pages sorted by wiki, that may still need to be fixed.
Currently, the "Sort this page by default as" feature in VisualEditor is broken. Existing {{DEFAULTSORT:...}} keywords incorrectly appear as missing templates in VisualEditor. Developers are exploring how to fix this. In the meantime, those wishing to edit the default sortkey of a page are advised to switch to source editing.
Last week, an update to the delete form may have broken some gadgets or user scripts. If you need to manipulate (empty) the reason field, replace #wpReason with #wpReason > input. See an example fix.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 June. It will be on all wikis from 15 June (calendar).
VisualEditor will be switched to a new backend on English Wikipedia on Monday, and all other large wikis on Thursday. The change should have no noticeable effect on users, but if you experience any slow loading or other strangeness when using VisualEditor, please report it on the phabricator ticket linked here.
Future changes
From 5 June to 17 July, the Foundation's Security team is holding a consultation with contributors regarding a draft policy to govern the use of third-party resources in volunteer-developed gadgets and scripts. Feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome at Third-party resources policy on meta-wiki.
Redirect drive: In response to an unusually high redirect backlog, we held a redirect backlog drive in May. The drive completed with 23851 reviews done in total, bringing the redirect backlog to 0 (momentarily). Congratulations to Hey man im josh who led with a staggering 4316 points, followed by Meena and Greyzxq with 2868 and 2546 points respectively. See this page for more details. The redirect queue is steadily rising again and is steadily approaching 4,000. Please continue to help out, even if it's only for a few or even one review a day.
Redirect autopatrol: All administrators without autopatrol have now been added to the redirect autopatrol list. If you see any users who consistently create significant amounts of good quality redirects, consider requesting redirect autopatrol for them here.
WMF work on PageTriage: The WMF Moderator Tools team, consisting of Sam, Jason and Susana, and also some patches from Jon, has been hard at work updating PageTriage. They are focusing their efforts on modernising the extension's code rather than on bug fixes or new features, though some user-facing work will be prioritised. This will help make sure that this extension is not deprecated, and is easier to work on in the future. In the next month or so, we will have an opt-in beta test where new page patrollers can help test the rewrite of Special:NewPagesFeed, to help find bugs. We will post more details at WT:NPPR when we are ready for beta testers.
Articles for Creation (AFC): All new page reviewers are now automatically approved for Articles for Creation draft reviewing (you do not need to apply at WT:AFCP like was required previously). To install the AFC helper script, visit Special:Preferences, visit the Gadgets tab, tick "Yet Another AFC Helper Script", then click "Save". To find drafts to review, visit Special:NewPagesFeed, and at the top left, tick "Articles for Creation". To review a draft, visit a submitted draft, click on the "More" menu, then click "Review (AFCH)". You can also comment on and submit drafts that are unsubmitted using the script.
You can review the AFC workflow at WP:AFCR. It is up to you if you also want to mark your AFC accepts as NPP reviewed (this is allowed but optional, depends if you would like a second set of eyes on your accept). Don't forget that draftspace is optional, so moves of drafts to mainspace (even if they are not ready) should not be reverted, except possibly if there is conflict of interest.
Pro tip: Did you know that visual artists such as painters have their own SNG? The most common part of this "creative professionals" criteria that applies to artists is WP:ARTIST 4b (solo exhibition, not group exhibition, at a major museum) or 4d (being represented within the permanent collections of two museums).
Reminders
Newsletter feedback - please take this short poll about the newsletter.
To opt out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.
Tech News: 2023-25
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Flame graphs are now available in WikimediaDebug.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
There is now a toolbar search popup in the visual editor. You can trigger it by typing \ or pressing ctrl + shift + p. It can help you quickly access most tools in the editor.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Action API modules and Special:LinkSearch will now add a trailing / to all prop=extlinks responses for bare domains. This is part of the work to remove duplication in the externallinks database table.
Problems
Last week, search was broken on Commons and Wikidata for 23 hours.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 June. It will be on all wikis from 29 June (calendar).
The Minerva skin now applies more predefined styles to the .mbox-text CSS class. This enables support for mbox templates that use divs instead of tables. Please make sure that the new styles won't affect other templates in your wiki.
Gadgets will now load on both desktop and mobile by default. Previously, gadgets loaded only on desktop by default. Changing this default using the |targets= parameter is also deprecated and should not be used. You should make gadgets work on mobile or disable them based on the skin (with the |skins= parameter in MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition) rather than whether the user uses the mobile or the desktop website. Popular gadgets that create errors on mobile will be disabled by developers on the Minerva skin as a temporary solution.
All namespace tabs now have the same browser access key by default. Previously, custom and extension-defined namespaces would have to have their access keys set manually on-wiki, but that is no longer necessary.
The review form of the Flagged Revisions extension now uses the standardized user interface components.
The New Page Patrol team is sending you this impromptu message to inform you of a steeply rising backlog of articles needing review. If you have any extra time to spare, please consider reviewing one or two articles each day to help lower the backlog. You can start reviewing by visiting Special:NewPagesFeed. Thank you very much for your help.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
From this week all gadgets automatically load on mobile and desktop sites. If you see any problems with gadgets on your wikis, please adjust the gadget options in your gadget definitions file.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 July. It will be on all wikis from 6 July (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Section-level Image Suggestions feature has been deployed on seven Wikipedias (Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, Catalan, Hungarian, Finnish and Norwegian Bokmål). The feature recommends images for articles on contributors' watchlists that are a good match for individual sections of those articles.
Special:BlockedExternalDomains is a new tool for administrators to help fight spam. It provides a clearer interface for blocking plain domains (and their subdomains), is more easily searchable, and is faster for the software to process for each edit on the wiki. It does not support regex (for complex cases), nor URL path-matching, nor the MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist, but otherwise it replaces most of the functionalities of the existing MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. There is a Python script to help migrate all simple domains into this tool, and more feature details, within the tool's documentation. It is available at all wikis except for Meta-wiki, Commons, and Wikidata.
The WikiEditor extension was updated. It includes some of the most frequently used features of wikitext editing. In the past, many of its messages could only be translated by administrators, but now all regular translators on translatewiki can translate them. Please check the state of WikiEditor localization into your language, and if the "Completion" for your language shows anything less than 100%, please complete the translation. See a more detailed explanation.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 July. It will be on all wikis from 13 July (calendar).
The default protocol of Special:LinkSearch and API counterparts has changed from http to both http and https.
Special:LinkSearch and its API counterparts will now search for all of the URL provided in the query. It used to be only the first 60 characters. This feature was requested fifteen years ago.
Future changes
There is an experiment with a ChatGPT plugin. This is to show users where the information is coming from when they read information from Wikipedia. It has been tested by Wikimedia Foundation staff and other Wikimedians. Soon all ChatGPT plugin users can use the Wikipedia plugin. This is the same plugin which was mentioned in Tech News 2023/20.
There is an ongoing discussion on a proposed Third-party resources policy. The proposal will impact the use of third-party resources in gadgets and userscripts. Based on the ideas received so far, policy includes some of the risks related to user scripts and gadgets loading third-party resources, some best practices and exemption requirements such as code transparency and inspectability. Your feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome until July 17, 2023 on on the policy talk page.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 July. It will be on all wikis from 20 July (calendar).
MediaWiki system messages will now look for available local fallbacks, instead of always using the default fallback defined by software. This means wikis no longer need to override each language on the fallback chain separately. For example, English Wikipedia doesn't have to create en-ca and en-gb subpages with a transclusion of the base pages anymore. This makes it easier to maintain local overrides.
The action=growthsetmentorstatus API will be deprecated with the new MediaWiki version. Bots or scripts calling that API should use the action=growthmanagementorlist API now.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 July. It will be on all wikis from 27 July (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Synchronizer tool is now available to keep Lua modules synced across Wikimedia wikis, along with updated documentation to develop global Lua modules and templates.
The tag filter on Special:NewPages and revision history pages can now be inverted. For example, you can hide edits that were made using an automated tool.
The Wikipedia ChatGPT plugin experiment can now be used by ChatGPT users who can use plugins. You can participate in a video call if you want to talk about this experiment or similar work.
Problems
It was not possible to generate a PDF for pages with non-Latin characters in the title, for the last two weeks. This has now been fixed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 August. It will be on all wikis from 3 August (calendar).
Starting on Tuesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Georgian Wikipedia, Kara-Kalpak Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Kabardian Wikipedia, Kabiyè Wikipedia, Kikuyu Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Khmer Wikipedia, Kannada Wikipedia, Kashmiri Wikipedia, Colognian Wikipedia, Kurdish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Mobile Web editors can now edit a whole page at once. To use this feature, turn on "⧼Mobile-frontend-mobile-option-amc⧽" in your settings and use the "Edit full page" button in the "More" menu.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Content translation system is no longer using Youdao's machine translation service. The service was in place for several years, but due to no usage, and availability of alternatives, it was deprecated to reduce maintenance overheads. Other services which cover the same languages are still available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 August. It will be on all wikis from 17 August (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Latin Wikipedia, Ladino Wikipedia, Luxembourgish Wikipedia, Lak Wikipedia, Lezghian Wikipedia, Lingua Franca Nova Wikipedia, Ganda Wikipedia, Limburgish Wikipedia, Ligurian Wikipedia, Lombard Wikipedia, Lingala Wikipedia, Latgalian Wikipedia, Latvian Wikipedia, Maithili Wikipedia, Basa Banyumasan Wikipedia, Moksha Wikipedia, Malagasy Wikipedia, Armenian Wikipedia, Kyrgyz Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 August. It will be on all wikis from 24 August (calendar).
Future changes
There is an existing stable interface policy for MediaWiki backend code. There is a proposed stable interface policy for frontend code. This is relevant for anyone who works on gadgets or Wikimedia frontend code. You can read it, discuss it, and let the proposer know if there are any problems.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
As part of the changes for the better diff handling of paragraph splits, improved detection of splits is being rolled out. Over the last two weeks, we deployed this support to group0 and group1 wikis. This week it will be deployed to group2 wikis.
All Special:Contributions pages now show the user's local edit count and the account's creation date.
Wikisource users can now use the prpbengalicurrency label to denote Bengali currency characters as page numbers inside the <pagelist> tag.
Two preferences have been relocated. The preference "Enable the visual editor" is now shown on the "Editing" tab at all wikis. Previously it was shown on the "Beta features" tab at some wikis. The preference "Use the VisualEditor toolbar—which includes the automatic citation tool—in the Source editor too" is now also shown on the "Editing" tab at all wikis, instead of the "Beta features" tab.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 August. It will be on all wikis from 31 August (calendar).
All right-to-left language wikis, plus Korean, Armenian, Ukrainian, Russian, and Bulgarian Wikipedias, will have a link in the sidebar that provides a short URL of that page, using the Wikimedia URL Shortener. This feature will come to more wikis in future weeks.
Future changes
The removal of the DoubleWiki extension is being discussed. This extension currently allows Wikisource users to view articles from multiple language versions side by side when the <=> symbol next to a specific language edition is selected. Comments on this are welcomed at the phabricator task.
A proposal has been made to merge the second hidden-categories list (which appears below the wikitext editing form) with the main list of categories (which is further down the page). More information is available on Phabricator; feedback is welcome!
Following an RfC, TFAs will be automatically semi-protected the day before it is on the main page and through the day after.
A discussion at WP:VPP about revision deletion and oversight for dead names found that [s]ysops can choose to use revdel if, in their view, it's the right tool for this situation, and they need not default to oversight. But oversight could well be right where there's a particularly high risk to the person. Use your judgment.
The SmallCat dispute case has closed. As part of the final decision, editors participating in XfD have been reminded to be careful about forming local consensus which may or may not reflect the broader community consensus. Regular closers of XfD forums were also encouraged to note when broader community discussion, or changes to policies and guidelines, would be helpful.
Miscellaneous
Tech tip: The "Browse history interactively" banner shown at the top of Special:Diff can be used to easily look through a history, assemble composite diffs, or find out what archive something wound up in.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
EditInSequence, a feature that allows users to edit pages faster on Wikisource has been moved to a Beta Feature based on community feedback. To enable it, you can navigate to the beta features tab in Preferences.
There is a new option for Administrators when they are changing the usergroups for a user, to add the user’s user page to their watchlist. This works both via Special:UserRights and via the API.
The LoginNotify extension was not sending notifications since January. It has now been fixed, so going forward, you may see notifications for failed login attempts, and successful login attempts from a new device.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 September. It will be on all wikis from 7 September (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Eastern Mari Wikipedia, Maori Wikipedia, Minangkabau Wikipedia, Macedonian Wikipedia, Malayalam Wikipedia, Mongolian Wikipedia, Marathi Wikipedia, Western Mari Wikipedia, Malay Wikipedia, Maltese Wikipedia, Mirandese Wikipedia, Erzya Wikipedia, Mazanderani Wikipedia, Nāhuatl Wikipedia, Neapolitan Wikipedia, Low German Wikipedia, Low Saxon Wikipedia, Nepali Wikipedia, Newari Wikipedia, Norwegian Nynorsk Wikipedia, Novial Wikipedia, N'Ko Wikipedia, Nouormand Wikipedia, Northern Sotho Wikipedia, Navajo Wikipedia, Nyanja Wikipedia, Occitan Wikipedia, Livvi-Karelian Wikipedia, Oromo Wikipedia, Oriya Wikipedia, Ossetic Wikipedia, Punjabi Wikipedia, Pangasinan Wikipedia, Pampanga Wikipedia, Papiamento Wikipedia, Picard Wikipedia, Pennsylvania German Wikipedia, Palatine German Wikipedia, Norfuk / Pitkern Wikipedia, Piedmontese Wikipedia, Western Punjabi Wikipedia, Pontic Wikipedia, Pashto Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
ORES, the revision evaluation service, is now using a new open-source infrastructure on all wikis except for English Wikipedia and Wikidata. These two will follow this week. If you notice any unusual results from the Recent Changes filters that are related to ORES (for example, "Contribution quality predictions" and "User intent predictions"), please report them.
When you are logged in on one Wikimedia wiki and visit a different Wikimedia wiki, the system tries to log you in there automatically. This has been unreliable for a long time. You can now visit the login page to make the system try extra hard. If you feel that made logging in better or worse than it used to be, your feedback is appreciated.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 September. It will be on all wikis from 14 September (calendar).
As part of the changes for the Better diff handling of paragraph splits wishlist proposal, the inline switch widget in diff pages is being rolled out this week to all wikis. The inline switch will allow viewers to toggle between a unified inline or two-column diff wikitext format.
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on 20 September. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
The Enterprise API is launching a new feature called "breaking news". Currently in BETA, this attempts to identify likely "newsworthy" topics as they are currently being written about in any Wikipedia. Your help is requested to improve the accuracy of its detection model, especially on smaller language editions, by recommending templates or identifiable editing patterns. See more information at the documentation page on MediaWiki or the FAQ on Meta.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
MediaWiki now has a stable interface policy for frontend code that more clearly defines how we deprecate MediaWiki code and wiki-based code (e.g. gadgets and user scripts). Thank you to everyone who contributed to the content and discussions.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 September. It will be on all wikis from 21 September (calendar).
New Page Review article queue, March to September 2023
Backlog update:
At the time of this message, there are 11,300 articles and 15,600 redirects awaiting review. This is the highest backlog in a long time. Please help out by doing additional reviews!
October backlog elimination drive:
A one-month backlog drive for October will start in one week! Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles and redirects patrolled. Articles will earn 4x as many points compared to redirects. You can sign up here.
PageTriage code upgrades:
Upgrades to the PageTriage code, initiated by the NPP open letter in 2022 and actioned by the WMF Moderator Tools Team in 2023, are ongoing. More information can be found here. As part of this work, the Special:NewPagesFeed now has a new version in beta! The update leaves the NewPagesFeed appearance and function mostly identical to the old one, but updates the underlying code, making it easier to maintain and helping make sure the extension is not decommissioned due to maintenance issues in the future. You can try out the new Special:NewPagesFeed here - it will replace the current version soon.
Notability tip:
Professors can meet WP:PROF #1 by having their academic papers be widely cited by their peers. When reviewing professor articles, it is a good idea to find their Google Scholar or Scopus profile and take a look at their h-index and number of citations. As a very rough rule of thumb, for most fields, articles on people with a h-index of twenty or more, a first-authored paper with more than a thousand citations, or multiple papers each with more than a hundred citations are likely to be kept at AfD.
Reviewing tip:
If you would like like a second opinion on your reviews or simply want another new page reviewer by your side when patrolling, we recommend pair reviewing! This is where two reviewers use Discord voice chat and screen sharing to communicate with each other while reviewing the same article simultaneously. This is a great way to learn and transfer knowledge.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Vector 2022 skin will now remember the pinned/unpinned status for the Table of Contents for all logged-out users.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 September. It will be on all wikis from 28 September (calendar).
Gadget definitions will have a new "namespaces" option. The option takes a list of namespace IDs. Gadgets that use this option will only load on pages in the given namespaces.
Future changes
New variables will be added to AbuseFilter: global_account_groups and global_account_editcount. They are available only when an account is being created. You can use them to prevent blocking automatic creation of accounts when users with many edits elsewhere visit your wiki for the first time.
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Wikipedia mobile apps teams. During the meeting, we will discuss the current features and future roadmap. The meeting will be on 27 October at 17:00 (UTC). See details and how to join.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a new user preference for "Always enable safe mode". This setting will make pages load without including any on-wiki JavaScript or on-wiki stylesheet pages. It can be useful for debugging broken JavaScript gadgets.
Gadget definitions now have a new "contentModels" option. The option takes a list of page content models, like wikitext or css. Gadgets that use this option will only load on pages with the given content models.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 October. It will be on all wikis from 5 October (calendar).
Future changes
The Vector 2022 skin will no longer use the custom styles and scripts of Vector legacy (2010). The change will be made later this year or in early 2024. See how to adjust the CSS and JS pages on your wiki.
An RfC is open regarding amending the paid-contribution disclosure policy to add the following text: Any administrator soliciting clients for paid Wikipedia-related consulting or advising services not covered by other paid-contribution rules must disclose all clients on their userpage.
Technical news
Administrators can now choose to add the user's user page to their watchlist when changing the usergroups for a user. This works both via Special:UserRights and via the API. (T272294)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Fon (w:fon:)
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 October. It will be on all wikis from 12 October (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Swahili Wikipedia, Walloon Wikipedia, Waray Wikipedia, Wolof Wikipedia, Kalmyk Wikipedia, Xhosa Wikipedia, Mingrelian Wikipedia, Yiddish Wikipedia, Yoruba Wikipedia, Zhuang Wikipedia, Zeelandic Wikipedia, Min Nan Wikipedia, Zulu Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally.
At some wikis, newcomers are suggested images from Commons to add to articles without any images. Starting on Tuesday, newcomers at these wikis will be able to add images to unillustrated article sections. The specific wikis are listed under "Images recommendations" at the Growth team deployment table. You can learn more about this feature.
In the mobile web skin (Minerva) the CSS ID #page-actions will be replaced with #p-views. This change is to make it consistent with other skins and to improve support for gadgets and extensions in the mobile skin. A few gadgets may need to be updated; there are details and search-links in the task.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Unified login system's edge login should now be fixed for some browsers (Chrome, Edge, Opera). This means that if you visit a new sister project wiki, you should be logged in automatically without the need to click "Log in" or reload the page. Feedback on whether it's working for you is welcome.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 October. It will be on all wikis from 19 October (calendar).
Future changes
In 3 weeks, in the Vector 2022 skin, code related to addPortletLink and #p-namespaces that was deprecated one year ago will be removed. If you notice tools that should appear next to the "Discussion" tab are then missing, please tell the gadget's maintainers to see instructions in the Phabricator task.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a new Language and internationalization newsletter, written quarterly. It contains updates on new feature development, improvements in various language-related technical projects, and related support work.
Source map support has been enabled on all wikis. When you open the debugger in your browser's developer tools, you should be able to see the unminified JavaScript source code.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 October. It will be on all wikis from 26 October (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Structured Content team, as part of its project of improving UploadWizard on Commons, made some UX improvements to the upload step of choosing own vs not own work (T347590), as well as to the licensing step for own work (T347756).
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 November. It will be on all wikis from 2 November (calendar).
Listings on category pages are sorted on each wiki for that language using a library. For a brief period on 2 November, changes to categories will not be sorted correctly for many languages. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the library. They will then use a script to fix the existing categories. This will take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can read more.
Starting November 1, the impact module (Special:Impact) will be upgraded by the Growth team. The new impact module shows newcomers more data regarding their impact on the wiki. It was tested by a few wikis during the last few months.
WikiProject Articles for creation is holding a month long Backlog Drive!
The goal of this drive is to reduce the backlog of unreviewed drafts to less than 2 months outstanding reviews from the current 4+ months. Bonus points will be given for reviewing drafts that have been waiting more than 30 days. The drive is running from 1 November 2023 through 30 November 2023.
Barnstars will be given out as awards at the end of the drive.
There is a backlog of over 1800 pages, so start reviewing drafts. We're looking forward to your help! MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:24, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-45
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
In the Vector 2022 skin, the default font-size of a number of navigational elements (tagline, tools menu, navigational links, and more) has been increased slightly to match the font size used in page content.
Problems
Last week, there was a problem displaying some recent edits on a few wikis, for 1-6 hours. The edits were saved but not immediately shown. This was due to a database problem.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 November. It will be on all wikis from 9 November (calendar).
The Growth team will reassign newcomers from former mentors to the currently active mentors. They have also changed the notification language to be more user-friendly.
Following a motion, the contentious topic designation of Prem Rawat has been struck. Actions previously taken using this contentious topic designation are still in force.
Following several motions, multiple topic areas are no longer designated as a contentious topic. These contentious topic designations were from the Editor conduct in e-cigs articles, Liancourt Rocks, Longevity, Medicine, September 11 conspiracy theories, and Shakespeare authorship question cases.
Following a motion, remedies 3.1 (All related articles under 1RR whenever the dispute over naming is concerned), 6 (Stalemate resolution) and 30 (Administrative supervision) of the Macedonia 2 case have been rescinded.
Following a motion, remedy 6 (One-revert rule) of the The Troubles case has been amended.
An arbitration case named Industrial agriculture has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case close 8 November.
Miscellaneous
The Articles for Creation backlog drive is happening in November 2023, with 700+ drafts pending reviews for in the last 4 months or so. In addition to the AfC participants, all administrators and New Page Patrollers can conduct reviews using the helper script, Yet Another AFC Helper Script, which can be enabled in the Gadgets settings. Sign up here to participate!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Last week, users who previously visited Meta-Wiki or Wikimedia Commons and then became logged out on those wikis could not log in again. The problem is now resolved.
Last week, some pop-up dialogs and menus were shown with the wrong font size. The problem is now resolved.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 November. It will be on all wikis from 16 November (calendar).
Future changes
Reference Previews are coming to many wikis as a default feature. They are popups for references, similar to the PagePreviews feature. You can opt out of seeing them. If you are using the gadgets Reference Tooltips or Navigation Popups, you won’t see Reference Previews. Deployment is planned for November 22, 2023.
Canary (also known as heartbeat) events will be produced into Wikimedia event streams from December 11. Streams users are advised to filter out these events, by discarding all events where meta.domain == "canary". Updates to Pywikibot or wikimedia-streams will discard these events by default.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Quechua Wikipedia, Romansh Wikipedia, Romani Wikipedia, Rundi Wikipedia, Aromanian Wikipedia, Tarandíne Wikipedia, Rusyn Wikipedia, Kinyarwanda Wikipedia, Sanskrit Wikipedia, Sakha Wikipedia, Santali Wikipedia, Sardinian Wikipedia, Sicilian Wikipedia, Scots Wikipedia, Sindhi Wikipedia, Northern Sami Wikipedia, Sango Wikipedia, Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, Sinhala Wikipedia, Slovak Wikipedia, Slovenian Wikipedia, Samoan Wikipedia, Somali Wikipedia, Albanian Wikipedia, Serbian Wikipedia, Sranan Tongo Wikipedia, Swati Wikipedia, Southern Sotho Wikipedia, Saterland Frisian Wikipedia, Sundanese Wikipedia, Silesian Wikipedia, Tamil Wikipedia, Tulu Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Tetum Wikipedia, Tajik Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Turkmen Wikipedia, Tagalog Wikipedia, Tswana Wikipedia, Tongan Wikipedia, Tok Pisin Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Tsonga Wikipedia, Tatar Wikipedia, Twi Wikipedia, Tahitian Wikipedia, Tuvinian Wikipedia, Udmurt Wikipedia, Uyghur Wikipedia, Uzbek Wikipedia, Venda Wikipedia, Venetian Wikipedia, Veps Wikipedia, West Flemish Wikipedia, Volapük Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally.
The Vector 2022 skin will have some minor visual changes to drop-down menus, column widths, and more. These changes were added to four Wikipedias last week. If no issues are found, these changes will proceed to all wikis this week. These changes will make it possible to add new menus for readability and dark mode. Learn more.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 November. It will be on all wikis from 30 November (calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week.
MediaWiki's JavaScript system will now allow async/await syntax in gadgets and user scripts. Gadget authors should remember that users' browsers may not support it, so it should be used appropriately.
The deployment of "Add a link" announced last week was postponed. It will resume 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.
Recent changes
The spacing between paragraphs on Vector 2022 has been changed from 7px to 14px to match the size of the text. This will make it easier to distinguish paragraphs from sentences.
The "Sort this page by default as" feature in VisualEditor is working again. You no longer need to switch to source editing to edit {{DEFAULTSORT:...}} keywords.
Registration & Scholarship applications are now open for the Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 that will take place from 3–5 May in Tallinn, Estonia. Scholarship applications are open until 5 January 2024.
Following a talk page discussion, the Administrators' accountability policy has been updated to note that while it is considered best practice for administrators to have notifications (pings) enabled, this is not mandatory. Administrators who do not use notifications are now strongly encouraged to indicate this on their user page.
Arbitration
Following a motion, the Extended Confirmed Restriction has been amended, removing the allowance for non-extended-confirmed editors to post constructive comments on the "Talk:" namespace. Now, non-extended-confirmed editors may use the "Talk:" namespace solely to make edit requests related to articles within the topic area, provided that their actions are not disruptive.
The Arbitration Committee has announced a call for Checkusers and Oversighters, stating that it will currently be accepting applications for CheckUser and/or Oversight permissions at any point in the year.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
On Wikimedia Commons, there are some minor user-interface improvements for the "choosing own vs not own work" step in the UploadWizard. This is part of the Structured Content team's project of improving UploadWizard on Commons.
Problems
There was a problem showing the Newcomer homepage feature with the "impact module" and their page-view graphs, for a few days in early December. This has now been fixed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 December. It will be on all wikis from 14 December (calendar).
Future changes
The 2023 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 5 January 2024, and has an associated privacy statement.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Tech News
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 8 January 2024 because of the holidays.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 December. It will be on all wikis from 21 December (calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week.
Starting December 18, it won't be possible to activate Structured Discussions on a user's own talk page using the Beta feature. The Beta feature option remains available for users who want to deactivate Structured Discussions. This is part of Structured Discussions' deprecation work.
There will be full support for redirects in the Module namespace. The "Move Page" feature will leave an appropriate redirect behind, and such redirects will be appropriately recognized by the software (e.g. hidden from Special:UnconnectedPages). There will also be support for manual redirects.
Future changes
The MediaWiki JavaScript documentation is moving to a new format. During the move, you can read the old docs using version 1.41. Feedback about the new site is welcome on the project talk page.
The Wishathon is a new initiative that encourages collaboration across the Wikimedia community to develop solutions for wishes collected through the Community Wishlist Survey. The first community Wishathon will take place from 15–17 March. If you are interested in a project proposal as a user, developer, designer, or product lead, you can register for the event and read more.
New year, new scripts. Welcome to the 23rd issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering around 39% of our favorite new and updated user scripts since 24 December 2021. That’s right, we haven’t published in two years! Can you believe it? Did you miss us?
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
User:Alexander Davronov/HistoryHelper has now become stable with some bugfixes and features such as automatically highlighting potentially uncivil edit summaries and automatically pinging all the users selected.
To a lesser extent, the same goes for User:PrimeHunter/Search sort.js. I wish someone would integrate the sorts into the sort menu instead of adding 11 portlet links.
Aaron Liu: Watchlyst Greybar Unsin is a rewrite of Ais's Watchlist Notifier with modern APIs and several new features such as not displaying watchlist items marked as seen (hence the name), not bolding diffs of unseen watchlist elements which doesn’t work properly anyways, displaying the rendered edit summary, proper display of log and creation actions and more links.
Alexis Jazz: Factotum is a spiritual successor to reply-link with a host of extra features like section adding, link rewriting, regular expressions and more.
User:Aveaoz/AutoMobileRedirect: This script will automatically redirect MobileFrontend (en.m.wikipedia) to normal Wikipedia. Unlike existing scripts, this one will actually check if your browser is mobile or not through its secret agent string, so you can stay logged in on mobile! Hooray screen estate!
Deputy is a first-of-its-kind copyright cleanup toolkit. It overrides the interface for Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations for easy case processing. It also includes the functionality of the following (also new) scripts:
User:Elominius/gadget/diff arrow keys allows navigation between diffs with the arrow keys. It also has a version that requires holding Ctrl with the arrow key.
Frequently link to Wikipedia on your websites yet find generating CC-BY credits to be such a hassle? Say no more! User:Luke10.27/attribute will automatically do it for ya and copy the credit to yer clipboard.
User:MPGuy2824/MoveToDraft, a spiritual successor (i.e. fork) to Evad37's script, with a few bugs solved, and a host of extra features like check-boxes for choosing draftification reasons, multi-contributor notification, and appropriate warnings based on last edit time.
/CopyCodeBlock: one of the most important operations for any scripter and script-user is to copy and paste. This script adds a copy button in the top right of every code block (not to be confused with <code>) that will, well, copy it to your clipboard!
m:User:NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh/AceForLuaDebugConsole.js adds the Ace editor (a.k.a. the editor you see when editing JS, CSS and Lua on Wikimedia wikis) to the Lua debug console. "In my opinion, whoever designed it to be a plain <textarea> needs to seriously reconsider their decision."
GANReviewTool quickly and easily closes good article nominations.
ReviewStatus displays whether or not a mainspace page is marked as reviewed.
SpeciesHelper tries to add the correct speciesbox, category, taxonbar, and stub template to species articles.
User:Opencooper/svgReplace and Tol's fork replaces all rasterized SVGs with their original SVG codes for your loading pleasures. Tell us which one is better!
ArticleInfo displays page information at the top of the page, directly below the title.
/HeaderIcons takes away the Vector 2022 user dropdown and replaces it with all of the icons within, top level, right next to the Watchlist. One less click away! There's also an alternate version that uses text links instead of icons.
Following a motion, the Arbitration Committee rescinded the restrictions on the page name move discussions for the two Ireland pages that were enacted in June 2009.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
mediawiki2latex is a tool that converts wiki content into the formats of LaTeX, PDF, ODT, and EPUB. The code now runs many times faster due to recent improvements. There is also an optional Docker container you can install on your local machine.
The way that Random pages are selected has been updated. This will slowly reduce the problem of some pages having a lower chance of appearing.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 January. It will be on all wikis from 11 January (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Pages that use the JSON contentmodel will now use tabs instead of spaces for auto-indentation. This will significantly reduce the page size.
Gadgets and personal user scripts may now use JavaScript syntax introduced in ES6 (also known as "ES2015") and ES7 ("ES2016"). MediaWiki validates the source code to protect other site functionality from syntax errors, and to ensure scripts are valid in all supported browsers. Previously, Gadgets could use the requiresES6 option. This option is no longer needed and will be removed in the future.
An update on the status of the Community Wishlist Survey for 2024 has been published. Please read and give your feedback.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 January. It will be on all wikis from 18 January (calendar).
Starting on January 17, it will not be possible to login to Wikimedia wikis from some specific old versions of the Chrome browser (versions 51–66, released between 2016 and 2018). Additionally, users of iOS 12, or Safari on Mac OS 10.14, may need to login to each wiki separately.
The jquery.cookie module was deprecated and replaced with the mediawiki.cookie module last year. A script has now been run to replace any remaining uses, and this week the temporary alias will be removed.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
A bug in UploadWizard prevented linking to the userpage of the uploader when uploading. It has now been fixed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 January. It will be on all wikis from 25 January (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Starting Monday January 29, all talk pages messages' timestamps will become a link. This link is a permanent link to the comment. It allows users to find the comment they are looking for, even if this comment was moved elsewhere. This will affect all wikis except for the English Wikipedia. You can read more about this change on Diff or on Mediawiki.org.
There are some improvements to the CAPTCHA to make it harder for spam bots and scripts to bypass it. If you have feedback on this change, please comment on the task. Staff are monitoring metrics related to the CAPTCHA, as well as secondary metrics such as account creations and edit counts.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 January. It will be on all wikis from 1 February (calendar).
On February 1, a link will be added to the "Tools" menu to download a QR code that links to the page you are viewing. There will also be a new Special:QrCode page to create QR codes for any Wikimedia URL. This addresses the #19 most-voted wish from the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.
Gadgets which only work in some skins have sometimes used the targets option to limit where you can use them. This will stop working this week. You should use the skins option instead.
An RfC about increasing the inactivity requirement for Interface administrators is open for feedback.
Technical news
Pages that use the JSON contentmodel will now use tabs instead of spaces for auto-indentation. This will significantly reduce the page size. (T326065)
Arbitration
Following a motion, the Arbitration Committee adopted a new enforcement restriction on January 4, 2024, wherein the Committee may apply the 'Reliable source consensus-required restriction' to specified topic areas.
Community feedback is requested for a draft to replace the "Information for administrators processing requests" section at WP:AE.
A vote to ratify the charter for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is open till 2 February 2024, 23:59:59 (UTC) via Secure Poll. All eligible voters within the Wikimedia community have the opportunity to either support or oppose the adoption of the U4C Charter and share their reasons. The details of the voting process and voter eligibility can be found here.
Community Tech has made some preliminary decisions about the future of the Community Wishlist Survey. In summary, they aim to develop a new, continuous intake system for community technical requests that improves prioritization, resource allocation, and communication regarding wishes. Read more
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The mobile site history pages now use the same HTML as the desktop history pages. If you hear of any problems relating to mobile history usage please point them to the phabricator task.
On most wikis, admins can now block users from making specific actions. These actions are: uploading files, creating new pages, moving (renaming) pages, and sending thanks. The goal of this feature is to allow admins to apply blocks that are adequate to the blocked users' activity. Learn more about "action blocks".
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 February. It will be on all wikis from 8 February (calendar).
Talk pages permalinks that included diacritics and non-Latin script were malfunctioning. This issue is fixed.
Future changes
24 Wikipedias with Reference Tooltips as a default gadget are encouraged to remove that default flag. This would make Reference Previews the new default for reference popups, leading to a more consistent experience across wikis. For 46 Wikipedias with less than 4 interface admins, the change is already scheduled for mid-February, unless there are concerns. The older Reference Tooltips gadget will still remain usable and will override this feature, if it is available on your wiki and you have enabled it in your settings.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The WDQS Graph Split experiment is working and loaded onto 3 test servers. The team in charge is testing the split's impact and requires feedback from WDQS users through the UI or programmatically in different channels. Users' feedback will validate the impact of various use cases and workflows around the Wikidata Query service.
Problems
There was a bug that affected the appearance of visited links when using mobile device to access wiki sites. It made the links appear black; this issue is fixed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 February. It will be on all wikis from 15 February (calendar).
As work continues on the grid engine deprecation, tools on the grid engine will be stopped starting on February 14th, 2024. If you have tools actively migrating you can ask for an extension so they are not stopped.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
If you have the "Email me when a page or a file on my watchlist is changed" option enabled, edits by bot accounts no longer trigger notification emails. Previously, only minor edits would not trigger the notification emails.
There are changes to how user and site scripts load for Vector 2022 on specific wikis. The changes impacted the following Wikis: all projects with Vector legacy as the default skin, Wikivoyage, and Wikibooks. Other wikis will be affected over the course of the next three months. Gadgets are not impacted. If you have been affected or want to minimize the impact on your project, see this ticket. Please coordinate and take action proactively.
Newly auto-created accounts (the accounts you get when you visit a new wiki) now have the same local notification preferences as users who freshly register on that wiki. It is effected in four notification types listed in the task's description.
The maximum file size when using Upload Wizard is now 5 GiB.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 February. It will be on all wikis from 22 February (calendar).
Selected tools on the grid engine have been stopped as we prepare to shut down the grid on March 14th, 2024. The tool's code and data have not been deleted. If you are a maintainer and you want your tool re-enabled reach out to the team. Only tools that have asked for extension are still running on the grid.
The CSS filter property can now be used in HTML style attributes in wikitext.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The mobile visual editor is now the default editor for users who never edited before, at a small group of wikis. Research shows that users using this editor are slightly more successful publishing the edits they started, and slightly less successful publishing non-reverted edits. Users who defined the wikitext editor as their default on desktop will get the wikitext editor on mobile for their first edit on mobile as well.
The mw.config value wgGlobalGroups now only contains groups that are active in the wiki. Scripts no longer have to check whether the group is active on the wiki via an API request. A code example of the above is: if (/globalgroupname/.test(mw.config.get("wgGlobalGroups"))).
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 February. It will be on all wikis from 29 February (calendar).
Future changes
The right to change edit tags (changetags) will be removed from users in Wikimedia sites, keeping it by default for admins and bots only. Your community can ask to retain the old configuration on your wiki before this change happens. Please indicate in this ticket to keep it for your community before the end of March 2024.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 24th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 24 December 2021. Uh-huh, we're finally covering the good ones among the rest! Aren't you excited? Remember to include a link in double brackets to the script's .js page when you install the script, so that we can see who uses the script in WhatLinksHere! The ScriptInstaller gadget automatically does this. Aaron Liu (talk) 01:00, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
Featured script
Making user scripts load faster by SD0001 is this month's featured script, which caches userscripts every day to eliminate the overhead caused by force-downloading the newest version of scripts every time you open a Wikipedia page. Despite being released in April 2021, our best script scouters have failed to locate it due to its omission from the US of L. For security reasons, the script only supports loading JavaScript pages.
Newly maintained scripts
After earthly attempts at improving the original have failed...
Ahecht has created a fork of SiBr4/TemplateSearch, which adds the "TP:" shortcut for "Template:" in the search box, and updated it to be compatible with Vector 2022.
AquilaFasciata/goToTopFast is a much faster fork of the classic goToTop script that also adds compatibility for Minerva and Vector 2022.
Without caching. Each script takes 400–500ms. A particularly large script takes 1.11 s! Internet download speed is 50 Mbps.With caching enabled. Each script takes just 1-2 ms to load.
Improve a script
Unfortunately, this section has remained nearly identical. Help us out here!
To a lesser extent, the same goes for PrimeHunter/Search sort. I wish someone would integrate the sorts into the sort menu instead of adding 11 portlet links.
Dragoniez/SuppressEnterInForm stops you from accidentally submitting anything due to pressing enter while in the smaller box, and works on almost anything... except the InputBox element itself, used in subscription lists and the Signpost Crossword! Oh, the humanity!
Doǵu/Adiutor(pictured) provides a nice, integrated interface to do some twinkley tasks such as copyvio detection, CSD tagging, and viewing the most recent diff.
Eejit43 has quite the aesthetically pleasing scripts, all made in TypeScript.
/afcrc-helper is a replacement for the unmaintained Enterprisey/AFCRHS and processes Redirects for Creation and Categories for Creation requests.
/ajax-undo stops the "undo" button from taking you to another page while providing a text box to provide a reason for the revert.
/redirect-helper(pictured) adds a much better interface for editing and redirects, including categorization, for which valid categories are dictated by /redirect-helper.json.
/rmtr-helper helps process technical requested moves without being able to actually move them.
Guycn2/UserInfoPopup(pictured) adds a flyout after the watchlist star on userspace pages that displays the common information you might use about a user.
Jeeputer/editCounter, under userspace, adds a portlet link to count your edits by namespace, put them in a table, and put that table in a hardcoded subpage, all in the background.
Hilst/Scripts/sectionLinks converts all section links to use the § sign, which are known to be preferred over the ugly # by 99% of the devils I've met.
PrimeHunter/Category source.js adds portlet links to tell you where a category for an article comes from and supports those from template transclusions.
Sophivorus's MiniEdit adds some nice, li'l buttons next to paragraphs to edit their wikitext with a minimal interface.
Edit-listings
Dragoniez/ToollinkTweaks adds more and customizable links next to users in page history, logs, watchlist, recent changes, etc.
Firefly/more-block-info optimizes the display of rangeblocks in contribution pages. Doesn't work outside the English locale of any wiki, unfortunately.
NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh/AjaxLoader makes paging links (e.g. older 50, 500, newest) load without refreshing and makes you realize how slow your internet actually is.
Appearance-ricing
Ahecht/RedirectID adds the redirect target to all redirects. For all the WP:NAVPOPS haters. (Do these exist?)
Dragoniez/MarkBLockedGlobal: Remember the "strike blocked usernames" gadget? Now you can use a red, dotted line to highlight rangeblocks and global locks!
Jonesey/common(pictured) has some styles to overhaul your Vector 2022 experience. It reduces padding everywhere, and makes the top bar animation faster.
Aaron Liu/V22 is a fork that narrows the sidebars instead of upheaving them, reverts the January 2024 dropdown changes, and restores the old page-link color for links that don't go outside the current wiki.
Nardog: SmartDiff is a spiritual successor to Enterprisey/fancy-diffs. It makes the page title part of links in diffs clickable, along with template and parser function calls. Unnamed parameters can be configured per template to also be linked. All links are styled based on the normal CSS classes of rendered links.
For the paranoid: Rublov/anonymize replaces your username at the top of the screen with the generic "User page" text. Remember, it is your duty to persuade everyone that editing is an honor.
/AjaxBlock provides a dialog box for easy input of reasons while blocking users.
/Selective Rollback(pictured) provides a dialog box to customize rollback edit summaries and does them without reloading the page. Seriously, why doesn't MediaWiki already do this?
/flickrsearch adds a portlet link to search for uploadable flickr images about the subject.
/randomincategory adds a portlet link when on Category pages to go to a random page in the current category.
Vghfr/EasyTemplates adds a portlet link to automatically insert some of the most common inline {{fix}} templates.
Yes, we're just doing 'em as we go now. Thanks for reading through this looong issue, if you did! I'm sure this'll send a record for the longest issue ev-ah. You may need to wait even longer for the last issue, as our reserve of old-y and goodie scripts have ran out... We encourage you to try and do some of the requests or improvement tasks. See you in Summer, hopefully!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Special:Book page (as well as the associated "Create a book" functionality) provided by the old Collection extension has been removed from all Wikisource wikis, as it was broken. This does not affect the ability to download normal books, which is provided by the Wikisource extension.
Maintenance on etherpad is completed. If you encounter any issues, please indicate in this ticket.
Gadgets allow interface admins to create custom features with CSS and JavaScript. The Gadget and Gadget_definition namespaces and gadgets-definition-edit user right were reserved for an experiment in 2015, but were never used. These were visible on Special:Search and Special:ListGroupRights. The unused namespaces and user rights are now removed. No pages are moved, and no changes need to be made.
A usability improvement to the "Add a citation" in Wikipedia workflow has been made, the insert button was moved to the popup header.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 March. It will be on all wikis from 7 March (calendar).
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
The HTML markup of headings and section edit links will be changed later this year to improve accessibility. See Heading HTML changes for details. The new markup will be the same as in the new Parsoid wikitext parser. You can test your gadget or stylesheet with the new markup if you add ?useparsoid=1 to your URL (more info) or turn on Parsoid read views in your user options (more info).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 March. It will be on all wikis from 14 March (calendar).
After consulting with various communities, the line height of the text on the Minerva skin will be increased to its previous value of 1.65. Different options for typography can also be set using the options in the menu, as needed.
The active link color in Minerva will be changed to provide more consistency with our other platforms and best practices.
Structured data on Commons will no longer ask whether you want to leave the page without saving. This will prevent the “information you’ve entered may not be saved” popups from appearing when no information have been entered. It will also make file pages on Commons load faster in certain cases. However, the popups will be hidden even if information has indeed been entered. If you accidentally close the page before saving the structured data you entered, that data will be lost.
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The notice "Language links are at the top of the page" that appears in the Vector 2022 skin main menu has been removed now that users have learned the new location of the Language switcher.
IP info feature displays data from Spur, an IP addresses database. Previously, the only data source for this feature was MaxMind. Now, IP info is more useful for patrollers.
The Toolforge Grid Engine services have been shut down after the final migration process from Grid Engine to Kubernetes.
RevisionSlider is an interface to interactively browse a page's history. Users in right-to-left languages reported RevisionSlider reacting wrong to mouse clicks. This should be fixed now.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 March. It will be on all wikis from 21 March (calendar).
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
An update was made on March 18th 2024 to how various projects load site, user JavaScript and CSS in Vector 2022 skin. A checklist is provided for site admins to follow.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 March. It will be on all wikis from 28 March (calendar).
The Toolforge Grid Engine services have been shut down after the final migration process from Grid Engine to Kubernetes. (T313405)
Arbitration
An arbitration case has been opened to look into "the intersection of managing conflict of interest editing with the harassment (outing) policy".
Miscellaneous
Editors are invited to sign up for The Core Contest, an initiative running from April 15 to May 31, which aims to improve vital and other core articles on Wikipedia.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Users of the reading accessibility beta feature will notice that the default line height for the standard and large text options has changed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 April. It will be on all wikis from 4 April (calendar).
Future changes
The Wikimedia Foundation has an annual plan. The annual plan decides what the Wikimedia Foundation will work on. You can now read the draft key results for the Product and Technology department. They are suggestions for what results the Foundation wants from big technical changes from July 2024 to June 2025. You can comment on the talk page.
Backlog update: The October drive reduced the article backlog from 11,626 to 7,609 and the redirect backlog from 16,985 to 6,431! Congratulations to Schminnte, who led with over 2,300 points.
Following that, New Page Patrol organized another backlog drive for articles in January 2024. The January drive started with 13,650 articles and reduced the backlog to 7,430 articles. Congratulations to JTtheOG, who achieved first place with 1,340 points in this drive.
Looking at the graph, it seems like backlog drives are one of the only things keeping the backlog under control. Another backlog drive is being planned for May. Feel free to participate in the May backlog drive planning discussion.
It's worth noting that both queues are gradually increasing again and are nearing 14,034 articles and 22,540 redirects. We encourage you to keep contributing, even if it's just a single patrol per day. Your support is greatly appreciated!
2023 Awards
Onel5969 won the 2023 cup with 17,761 article reviews last year - that's an average of nearly 50/day. There was one Platinum Award (10,000+ reviews), 2 Gold Awards (5000+ reviews), 6 Silver (2000+), 8 Bronze (1000+), 30 Iron (360+) and 70 more for the 100+ barnstar. Hey man im josh led on redirect reviews by clearing 36,175 of them. For the full details, see the Awards page and the Hall of Fame. Congratulations everyone for their efforts in reviewing!
Recruitment: A couple of the coordinators have been inviting editors to become reviewers, via mass-messages to their talk pages. If you know someone who you'd think would make a good reviewer, then a personal invitation to them would be great. Additionally, if there are Wikiprojects that you are active on, then you can add a post there asking participants to join NPP. Please be careful not to double invite folks that have already been invited.
Reviewing tip: Reviewers who prefer to patrol new pages within their most familiar subjects can use the regularly updated NPP Browser tool.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Web browsers can use tools called extensions. There is now a Chrome extension called Citation Needed which you can use to see if an online statement is supported by a Wikipedia article. This is a small experiment to see if Wikipedia can be used this way. Because it is a small experiment, it can only be used in Chrome in English.
A new Edit Recovery feature has been added to all wikis, available as a user preference. Once you enable it, your in-progress edits will be stored in your web browser, and if you accidentally close an editing window or your browser or computer crashes, you will be prompted to recover the unpublished text. Please leave any feedback on the project talk page. This was the #8 wish in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.
Readers using the Minerva skin on mobile will notice there has been an improvement in the line height across all typography settings.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 April. It will be on all wikis from 11 April (calendar).
New accounts and logged-out users will get the visual editor as their default editor on mobile. This deployment is made at all wikis except for the English Wikipedia.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Between 2 April and 8 April, on wikis using Flagged Revisions, the "Reverted" tag was not applied to undone edits. In addition, page moves, protections and imports were not autoreviewed. This problem is now fixed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 April. It will be on all wikis from 18 April (calendar).
Default category sort keys will now affect categories added by templates placed in footnotes. Previously footnotes used the page title as the default sort key even if a different default sort key was specified (category-specific sort keys already worked).
A new variable page_last_edit_age will be added to abuse filters. It tells how many seconds ago the last edit to a page was made.
Future changes
Volunteer developers are kindly asked to update the code of their tools and features to handle temporary accounts. Learn more.
Four database fields will be removed from database replicas (including Quarry). This affects only the abuse_filter and abuse_filter_history tables. Some queries might need to be updated.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
You can nominate your favorite tools for the fifth edition of the Coolest Tool Award. Nominations will be open until May 10.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 April. It will be on all wikis from 25 April (calendar).
Future changes
This is the last warning that by the end of May 2024 the Vector 2022 skin will no longer share site and user scripts/styles with old Vector. For user-scripts that you want to keep using on Vector 2022, copy the contents of Special:MyPage/vector.js to Special:MyPage/vector-2022.js. There are more technical details available. Interface administrators who foresee this leading to lots of technical support questions may wish to send a mass message to your community, as was done on French Wikipedia.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.
The appearance of talk pages changed for the following wikis: Azerbaijani Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, Persian Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Romanian Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Vietnamese Wikipedia. These wikis participated to a test, where 50% of users got the new design, for one year. As this test gave positive results, the new design is deployed on these wikis as the default design. It is possible to opt-out these changes in user preferences ("Show discussion activity"). The deployment will happen at all wikis in the coming weeks.
Kartographer maps can use an alternative visual style without labels, by using mapstyle="osm". This wasn't working in previews, creating the wrong impression that it wasn't supported. This has now been fixed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 May. It will be on all wikis from 2 May (calendar).
Partial action blocks are now in effect on the English Wikipedia. This means that administrators have the ability to restrict users from certain actions, including uploading files, moving pages and files, creating new pages, and sending thanks. T280531
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.
The appearance of talk pages changed for all wikis, except for Commons, Wikidata and most Wikipedias (a few have already received this design change). You can read the detail of the changes on Diff. It is possible to opt-out these changes in user preferences ("Show discussion activity"). The deployment will happen at remaining wikis in the coming weeks.
Interface admins now have greater control over the styling of article components on mobile with the introduction of the SiteAdminHelper. More information on how styles can be disabled can be found at the extension's page.
Wikimedia Enterprise has added article body sections in JSON format and a curated short description field to the existing parsed Infobox. This expansion to the API is also available via Wikimedia Cloud Services.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 May. It will be on all wikis from 9 May (calendar).
When you look at the Special:Log page, the first view is labelled "All public logs", but it only shows some logs. This label will now say "Main public logs".
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
On Wikisource there is a special page listing pages of works without corresponding scan images. Now you can use the new magic word __EXPECTWITHOUTSCANS__ to exclude certain pages (list of editions or translations of works) from that list.
If you use the user-preference "Show preview without reloading the page", then the template-page feature "Preview page with this template (what's this?)" will now also work without reloading the page.
Kartographer maps can now specify an alternative text via the alt= attribute. This is identical in usage to the alt= attribute in the image and gallery syntax. An exception for this feature is wikis like Wikivoyage where the miniature maps are interactive.
The old Guided Tour for the "New Filters for Edit Review" feature has been removed. It was created in 2017 to show people with older accounts how the interface had changed, and has now been seen by most of the intended people.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 May. It will be on all wikis from 16 May (calendar).
The Special:Search results page will now use CSS flex attributes, for better accessibility, instead of a table. If you have a gadget or script that adjusts search results, you should update your script to the new HTML structure.
Future changes
In the Vector 2022 skin, main pages will be displayed at full width (like special pages). The goal is to keep the number of characters per line large enough. This is related to the coming changes to typography in Vector 2022. Learn more.
Two columns of the pagelinks database table (pl_namespace and pl_title) are being dropped soon. Users must use two columns of the new linktarget table instead (lt_namespace and lt_title). In your existing SQL queries:
Replace JOIN pagelinks with JOIN linktarget and pl_ with lt_ in the ON statement
Below that add JOIN pagelinks ON lt_id = pl_target_id
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, will now correctly delete pages which were moved to another title.
New changes have been made to the UploadWizard in Wikimedia Commons: the overall layout has been improved, by following new styling and spacing for the form and its fields; the headers and helper text for each of the fields was changed; the Caption field is now a required field, and there is an option for users to copy their caption into the media description.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 May. It will be on all wikis from 23 May (calendar).
The HTML used to render all headings is being changed to improve accessibility. It will change on 22 May in some skins (Timeless, Modern, CologneBlue, Nostalgia, and Monobook). Please test gadgets on your wiki on these skins and report any related problems so that they can be resolved before this change is made in all other skins. The developers are also considering the introduction of a Gadget API for adding buttons to section titles if that would be helpful to tool creators, and would appreciate any input you have on that.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Several bugs related to the latest updates to the UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons have been fixed. For more information, see T365107 and T365119.
In March 2024 a new addPortlet API was added to allow gadgets to create new portlets (menus) in the skin. In certain skins this can be used to create dropdowns. Gadget developers are invited to try it and give feedback.
Some CSS in the Minerva skin has been removed to enable easier community configuration. Interface editors should check the rendering on mobile devices for aspects related to the classes: .collapsible, .multicol, .reflist, .coordinates, .topicon. Further details are available on replacement CSS if it is needed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 May. It will be on all wikis from 30 May (calendar).
When you visit a wiki where you don't yet have a local account, local rules such as edit filters can sometimes prevent your account from being created. Starting this week, MediaWiki takes your global rights into account when evaluating whether you can override such local rules.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
It is now possible for local administrators to add new links to the bottom of the site Tools menu without JavaScript. Documentation is available.
The message name for the definition of the tracking category of WikiHiero has changed from "MediaWiki:Wikhiero-usage-tracking-category" to "MediaWiki:Wikihiero-usage-tracking-category".
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 June. It will be on all wikis from 6 June (calendar).
Future changes
Next week, on wikis with the Vector 2022 skin as the default, logged-out desktop users will be able to choose between different font sizes. The default font size will also be increased for them. This is to make Wikimedia projects easier to read. Learn more.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The software used to render SVG files has been updated to a new version, fixing many longstanding bugs in SVG rendering.
The HTML used to render all headings is being changed to improve accessibility. It was changed last week in some skins (Vector legacy and Minerva). Please test gadgets on your wiki on these skins and report any related problems so that they can be resolved before this change is made in Vector-2022. The developers are still considering the introduction of a Gadget API for adding buttons to section titles if that would be helpful to tool creators, and would appreciate any input you have on that.
The HTML markup used for citations by Parsoid changed last week. In places where Parsoid previously added the mw-reference-text class, Parsoid now also adds the reference-text class for better compatibility with the legacy parser. More details are available.
Problems
There was a bug with the Content Translation interface that caused the tools menus to appear in the wrong location. This has now been fixed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 June. It will be on all wikis from 13 June (calendar).
The new version of MediaWiki includes another change to the HTML markup used for citations: Parsoid will now generate a <span class="mw-cite-backlink"> wrapper for both named and unnamed references for better compatibility with the legacy parser. Interface administrators should verify that gadgets that interact with citations are compatible with the new markup. More details are available.
On multilingual wikis that use the <translate> system, there is a feature that shows potentially-outdated translations with a pink background until they are updated or confirmed. From this week, confirming translations will be logged, and there is a new user-right that can be required for confirming translations if the community requests it.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
People who attempt to add an external link in the visual editor will now receive immediate feedback if they attempt to link to a domain that a project has decided to block. Please see Edit check for more details.
The dark mode beta feature is now available on category and help pages, as well as more special pages. There may be contrast issues. Please report bugs on the project talk page.
Problems
Cloud Services tools were not available for 25 minutes last week. This was caused by a faulty hardware cable in the data center.
Last week, styling updates were made to the Vector 2022 skin. This caused unforeseen issues with templates, hatnotes, and images. Changes to templates and hatnotes were reverted. Most issues with images were fixed. If you still see any, report them here.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 June. It will be on all wikis from 20 June (calendar).
Starting June 18, the Reference Edit Check will be deployed to a new set of Wikipedias. This feature is intended to help newcomers and to assist edit-patrollers by inviting people who are adding new content to a Wikipedia article to add a citation when they do not do so themselves. During a test at 11 wikis, the number of citations added more than doubled when Reference Check was shown to people. Reference Check is community configurable.
Mailing lists will be unavailable for roughly two hours on Tuesday 10:00–12:00 UTC. This is to enable migration to a new server and upgrade its software.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Editors will notice that there have been some changes to the background color of text in the diff view, and the color of the byte-change numbers, last week. These changes are intended to make text more readable in both light mode and dark mode, and are part of a larger effort to increase accessibility. You can share your comments or questions on the project talkpage.
The text colors that are used for visited-links, hovered-links, and active-links, were also slightly changed last week to improve their accessibility in both light mode and dark mode.
Problems
You can copy permanent links to talk page comments by clicking on a comment's timestamp. This feature did not always work when the topic title was very long and the link was used as a wikitext link. This has been fixed. Thanks to Lofhi for submitting the bug.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 June. It will be on all wikis from 27 June (calendar).
Starting 26 June, all talk pages messages' timestamps will become a link at English Wikipedia, making this feature available for you to use at all wikis. This link is a permanent link to the comment. It allows users to find the comment they were linked to, even if this comment has since been moved elsewhere. You can read more about this feature on Diff or on Mediawiki.org.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Over the next three weeks, dark mode will become available for all users, both logged-in and logged-out, starting with the mobile web version. This fulfils one of the top-requested community wishes, and improves low-contrast reading and usage in low-light settings. As part of these changes, dark mode will also work on User-pages and Portals. There is more information in the latest Web team update.
Logged-in users can now set global preferences for the text-size and dark-mode, thanks to a combined effort across Foundation teams. This allows Wikimedians using multiple wikis to set up a consistent reading experience easily, for example by switching between light and dark mode only once for all wikis.
If you use a very old web browser some features might not work on the Wikimedia wikis. This affects Internet Explorer 11 and versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari older than 2016. This change makes it possible to use new CSS features and to send less code to all readers.
Wikipedia Admins can customize local wiki configuration options easily using Community Configuration. Community Configuration was created to allow communities to customize how some features work, because each language wiki has unique needs. At the moment, admins can configure Growth features on their home wikis, in order to better recruit and retain new editors. More options will be provided in the coming months.
Editors interested in language issues that are related to Unicode standards, can now discuss those topics at a new conversation space in MediaWiki.org. The Wikimedia Foundation is now a member of the Unicode Consortium, and the coordination group can collaboratively review the issues discussed and, where appropriate, bring them to the attention of the Unicode Consortium.
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Mandailing (w:btm:)
Problems
Editors can once again click on links within the visual editor's citation-preview, thanks to a bug fix by the Editing Team.
Local administrators can now add new links to the bottom of the site Tools menu without using JavaScript. Documentation is available on MediaWiki. (T6086)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The CampaignEvents extension is now available on Meta-wiki, Igbo Wikipedia, and Swahili Wikipedia, and can be requested on your wiki. This extension helps in managing and making events more visible, giving Event organizers the ability to use tools like the Event registration tool. To learn more about the deployment status and how to request this extension for your wiki, visit the CampaignEvents page on Meta-wiki.
Editors using the iOS Wikipedia app who have more than 50 edits can now use the Add an Image feature. This feature presents opportunities for small but useful contributions to Wikipedia.
A problem with the color of the talkpage tabs always showing as blue, even for non-existent pages which should have been red, affecting the Vector 2022 skin, has been fixed.
Future changes
The Trust and Safety Product team wants to introduce temporary accounts with as little disruption to tools and workflows as possible. Volunteer developers, including gadget and user-script maintainers, are kindly asked to update the code of their tools and features to handle temporary accounts. The team has created documentation explaining how to do the update. Learn more.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Wikimedia developers can now officially continue to use both Gerrit and GitLab, due to a June 24 decision by the Wikimedia Foundation to support software development on both platforms. Gerrit and GitLab are both code repositories used by developers to write, review, and deploy the software code that supports the MediaWiki software that the wiki projects are built on, as well as the tools used by editors to create and improve content. This decision will safeguard the productivity of our developers and prevent problems in code review from affecting our users. More details are available in the Migration status page.
The Wikimedia Foundation seeks applicants for the Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC). This group will bring technical contributors and Wikimedia Foundation together to co-define a more resilient, future-proof technological platform. Council members will evaluate and consult on the movement's product and technical activities, so that we develop multi-generational projects. We are looking for a range of technical contributors across the globe, from a variety of Wikimedia projects. Please apply here by August 10.
Editors with rollback user-rights who use the Wikipedia App for Android can use the new Edit Patrol features. These features include a new feed of Recent Changes, related links such as Undo and Rollback, and the ability to create and save a personal library of user talk messages to use while patrolling. If your wiki wants to make these features available to users who do not have rollback rights but have reached a certain edit threshold, you can contact the team. You can read more about this project on Diff blog.
Next week, functionaries, volunteers maintaining tools, and software development teams are invited to test the temporary accounts feature on testwiki. Temporary accounts is a feature that will help improve privacy on the wikis. No further temporary account deployments are scheduled yet. Please share your opinions and questions on the project talk page.
Editors who upload files cross-wiki, or teach other people how to do so, may wish to join a Wikimedia Commons discussion. The Commons community is discussing limiting who can upload files through the cross-wiki upload/Upload dialog feature to users auto-confirmed on Wikimedia Commons. This is due to the large amount of copyright violations uploaded this way. There is a short summary at Commons:Cross-wiki upload and discussion at Commons:Village Pump.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Feature News
Stewards can now globally block accounts. Before the change only IP addresses and IP ranges could be blocked globally. Global account blocks are useful when the blocked user should not be logged out. Global locks (a similar tool logging the user out of their account) are unaffected by this change. The new global account block feature is related to the Temporary Accounts project, which is a new type of user account that replaces IP addresses of unregistered editors that are no longer made public.
Later this week, Wikimedia site users will notice that the Interface of FlaggedRevs (also known as "Pending Changes") is improved and consistent with the rest of the MediaWiki interface and Wikimedia's design system. The FlaggedRevs interface experience on mobile and Minerva skin was inconsistent before it was fixed and ported to Codex by the WMF Growth team and some volunteers.
Wikimedia site users can now submit account vanishing requests via GlobalVanishRequest. This feature is used when a contributor wishes to stop editing forever. It helps you hide your past association and edit to protect your privacy. Once processed, the account will be locked and renamed.
Have you tried monitoring and addressing vandalism in Wikipedia using your phone? A Diff blog post on Patrolling features in the Mobile App highlights some of the new capabilities of the feature, including swiping through a feed of recent changes and a personal library of user talk messages for use when patrolling from your phone.
Wikimedia contributors and GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) organisations can now learn and measure the impact Wikimedia Commons is having towards creating quality encyclopedic content using the Commons Impact Metrics analytics dashboard. The dashboard offers organizations analytics on things like monthly edits in a category, the most viewed files, and which Wikimedia articles are using Commons images. As a result of these new data dumps, GLAM organisation can more reliably measure their return on investment for programs bringing content into the digital Commons.
Project Updates
Come share your ideas for improving the wikis on the newly reopened Community Wishlist. The Community Wishlist is Wikimedia’s forum for volunteers to share ideas (called wishes) to improve how the wikis work. The new version of the wishlist is always open, works with both wikitext and Visual Editor, and allows wishes in any language.
Learn more
Have you ever wondered how Wikimedia software works across over 300 languages? This is 253 languages more than the Google Chrome interface, and it's no accident. The Language and Product Localization Team at the Wikimedia Foundation supports your work by adapting all the tools and interfaces in the MediaWiki software so that contributors in our movement who translate pages and strings can translate them and have the sites in all languages. Read more about the team and their upcoming work on Diff.
How can Wikimedia build innovative and experimental products while maintaining such heavily used websites? A recent blog post by WMF staff Johan Jönsson highlights the work of the WMF Future Audience initiative, where the goal is not to build polished products but test out new ideas, such as a ChatGPT plugin and Add a Fact, to help take Wikimedia into the future.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Feature news
Editors using the Visual Editor in languages that use non-Latin characters for numbers, such as Hindi, Manipuri and Eastern Arabic, may notice some changes in the formatting of reference numbers. This is a side effect of preparing a new sub-referencing feature, and will also allow fixing some general numbering issues in Visual Editor. If you notice any related problems on your wiki, please share details at the project talkpage.
Bugs status
Some logged-in editors were briefly unable to edit or load pages last week. These errors were mainly due to the addition of new linter rules which led to caching problems. Fixes have been applied and investigations are continuing.
Editors can use the IP Information tool to get information about IP addresses. This tool is available as a Beta Feature in your preferences. The tool was not available for a few days last week, but is now working again. Thank you to Shizhao for filing the bug report. You can read about that, and 28 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Project updates
There are new features and improvements to Phabricator from the Release Engineering and Collaboration Services teams, and some volunteers, including: the search systems, the new task creation system, the login systems, the translation setup which has resulted in support for more languages (thanks to Pppery), and fixes for many edge-case errors. You can read details about these and other improvements in this summary.
There is an update on the Charts project. The team has decided which visualization library to use, which chart types to start focusing on, and where to store chart definitions.
One new wiki has been created: a Wikivoyage in Czech (voy:cs:)
Hey there, welcome to the 25th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 1 March 2024. We've got a ton of wonderful editors taking back their pitchforks today. Don't worry, for they come in peace, to forcibly fix and extend existing scripts you use with sheer passion. There's so many, them forks have got what's basically their own column now! gift us with some rows before it's too late Aaron Liu (talk) 04:01, 1 August 2024 (UTC)
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
To a lesser extent, the same goes for PrimeHunter/Search sort. I wish someone would integrate the sorts into the sort menu instead of adding 11 portlet links.
An easily configurable script to add a link to the #p-vector-user-menu-overflow portlet with a name, target, and icon. This one should be a relatively easier one. I would do it myself, but I'm too busy rotting away on Celeste (video game).
After the ＲＩＩＪ update, Aaron Liu: Watchlyst Greybar Unsin has a dismiss button that allows you to mark an item as read in one click and cycle to the next Watchlist item.
Lordseriouspig/StatusChangerImproved is just like Enterprisey's script, except you select your status from a dropdown instead of cycling through them with a button. The WMF operates out of car-centric infrastructure anyway. Shame!
Newly maintained scripts
Aaron Liu has created Duplinks from Evad37/duplinks-alt; his fork adds a config variable to automatically highlight duplicate links on the loading of any page where the portlet link would've appeared.
Tired of staring at a bunch of filtering text and waiting for darn filter logs to load? Msz2001/AbuseFilter analyzer can parse abuse filters into a visual syntax tree and evaluate locally on-demand!
Polygnotus/DuplicateReferences finds references with the same link and displays the number of them along with a button to add the {{duplicated citations}} tag under the references section. Being lazy has never been easier!
fastest gun on the net Ponor/really-quick-block really quick add to contribution lists three buttons awesome
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Feature news
Two new parser functions will be available this week: {{#dir}} and {{#bcp47}}. These will reduce the need for Template:Dir and Template:BCP47 on Commons and allow us to drop 100 million rows from the "what links here" database. Editors at any wiki that use these templates, can help by replacing the templates with these new functions. The templates at Commons will be updated during the Hackathon at Wikimania.
Communities can request the activation of the visual editor on entire namespaces where discussions sometimes happen (for instance Wikipedia: or Wikisource: namespaces) if they understand the known limitations. For discussions, users can already use DiscussionTools in these namespaces.
The tracking category "Pages using Timeline" has been renamed to "Pages using the EasyTimeline extension" in TranslateWiki. Wikis that have created the category locally should rename their local creation to match.
Project updates
Editors who help to organize WikiProjects and similar on-wiki collaborations, are invited to share ideas and examples of successful collaborations with the Campaigns and Programs teams. You can fill out a brief survey or share your thoughts on the talkpage. The teams are particularly looking for details about successful collaborations on non-English wikis.
The new parser is being rolled out on Wikivoyage wikis over the next few months. The English Wikivoyage and Hebrew Wikivoyage were switched to Parsoid last week. For more information, see Parsoid/Parser Unification.
The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New design previews for Translatable pages; Updates about MinT for Wiki Readers; the release of Translation dumps; and more.
Users wishing to permanently leave may now request "vanishing" via Special:GlobalVanishRequest. Processed requests will result in the user being renamed, their recovery email being removed, and their account being globally locked.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Stewards can now specify if global blocks should prevent account creation. Before this change by the Trust and Safety Product Team, all global blocks would prevent account creation. This will allow stewards to reduce the unintended side-effects of global blocks on IP addresses.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Feature news
Editors who want to re-use references but with different details such as page numbers, will be able to do so by the end of 2024, using a new sub-referencing feature. You can read more about the project and how to test the prototype.
Editors using tracking categories to identify which pages use specific extensions may notice that six of the categories have been renamed to make them more easily understood and consistent. These categories are automatically added to pages that use specialized MediaWiki extensions. The affected names are for: DynamicPageList, Kartographer, Phonos, RSS, Score, WikiHiero. Wikis that have created the category locally should rename their local creation to match. Thanks to Pppery for these improvements.
Technical volunteers who edit modules and want to get a list of the categories used on a page, can now do so using the categories property of mw.title objects. This enables wikis to configure workflows such as category-specific edit notices. Thanks to SD001 for these improvements.
Bugs status
Your help is needed to check if any pages need to be moved or deleted. A maintenance script was run to clean up unreachable pages (due to Unicode issues or introduction of new namespaces/namespace aliases). The script tried to find appropriate names for the pages (e.g. by following the Unicode changes or by moving pages whose titles on Wikipedia start with Talk:WP: so that their titles start with Wikipedia talk:), but it may have failed for some pages, and moved them to Special:PrefixIndex/T195546/ instead. Your community should check if any pages are listed there, and move them to the correct titles, or delete them if they are no longer needed. A full log (including pages for which appropriate names could be found) is available in phab:P67388.
Editors who volunteer as mentors to newcomers on their wiki are once again able to access lists of potential mentees who they can connect with to offer help and guidance. This functionality was restored thanks to a bug fix. Thank you to Mbch331 for filing the bug report. You can read about that, and 18 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Project updates
The application deadline for the Product & Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) has been extended to September 16. Members will help by providing advice to Foundation Product and Technology leadership on short and long term plans, on complex strategic problems, and help to get feedback from more contributors and technical communities. Selected members should expect to spend roughly 5 hours per month for the Council, during the one year pilot. Please consider applying, and spread the word to volunteers you think would make a positive contribution to the committee.
Learn more
The 2024 Coolest Tool Awards were awarded at Wikimania, in seven categories. For example, one award went to the ISA Tool, used for adding structured data to files on Commons, which was recently improved during the Wiki Mentor Africa Hackathon. You can see video demonstrations of each tool at the awards page. Congratulations to this year's recipients, and thank you to all tool creators and maintainers.
The latest Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin is available, and includes some highlights from Wikimania, an upcoming Language community meeting, and other news from the movement.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Feature news
Administrators can now test the temporary accounts feature on test2wiki. This was done to allow cross-wiki testing of temporary accounts, for when temporary accounts switch between projects. The feature was enabled on testwiki a few weeks ago. No further temporary account deployments are scheduled yet. Temporary Accounts is a project to create a new type of user account that replaces IP addresses of unregistered editors which are no longer made public. Please share your opinions and questions on the project talk page.
Later this week, editors at wikis that use FlaggedRevs (also known as "Pending Changes") may notice that the indicators at the top of articles have changed. This change makes the system more consistent with the rest of the MediaWiki interface.
Bugs status
Editors who use the 2010 wikitext editor, and use the Character Insert buttons, will no longer experience problems with the buttons adding content into the edit-summary instead of the edit-window. You can read more about that, and 26 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Project updates
Please review and vote on Focus Areas, which are groups of wishes that share a problem. Focus Areas were created for the newly reopened Community Wishlist, which is now open year-round for submissions. The first batch of focus areas are specific to moderator workflows, around welcoming newcomers, minimizing repetitive tasks, and prioritizing tasks. Once volunteers have reviewed and voted on focus areas, the Foundation will then review and select focus areas for prioritization.
Do you have a project and are willing to provide a three (3) month mentorship for an intern? Outreachy is a twice a year program for people to participate in a paid internship that will start in December 2024 and end in early March 2025, and they need mentors and projects to work on. Projects can be focused on coding or non-coding (design, documentation, translation, research). See the Outreachy page for more details, and a list of past projects since 2013.
Learn more
If you're curious about the product and technology improvements made by the Wikimedia Foundation last year, read this recent highlights summary on Diff.
To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
Following an RfC, there is a new criterion for speedy deletion: C4, which applies to unused maintenance categories, such as empty dated maintenance categories for dates in the past.
The arbitration case Historical Elections is currently open. Proposed decision is expected by 3 September 2024 for this case.
Miscellaneous
Editors can now enter into good article review circles, an alternative for informal quid pro quo arrangements, to have a GAN reviewed in return for reviewing a different editor's nomination.
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
Editors and volunteer developers interested in data visualisation can now test the new software for charts. Its early version is available on beta Commons and beta Wikipedia. This is an important milestone before making charts available on regular wikis. You can read more about this project update and help to test the charts.
Feature news
Editors who use the Special:UnusedTemplates page can now filter out pages which are expected to be there permanently, such as sandboxes, test-cases, and templates that are always substituted. Editors can add the new magic word __EXPECTUNUSEDTEMPLATE__ to a template page to hide it from the listing. Thanks to Sophivorus and DannyS712 for these improvements.
Editors who use the New Topic tool on discussion pages, will now be reminded to add a section header, which should help reduce the quantity of newcomers who add sections without a header. You can read more about that, and 28 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Last week, some Toolforge tools had occasional connection problems. The cause is still being investigated, but the problems have been resolved for now.
Translation administrators at multilingual wikis, when editing multiple translation units, can now easily mark which changes require updates to the translation. This is possible with the new dropdown menu.
Project updates
A new draft text of a policy discussing the use of Wikimedia's APIs has been published on Meta-Wiki. The draft text does not reflect a change in policy around the APIs; instead, it is an attempt to codify existing API rules. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome on the proposed update’s talk page until September 13 or until those discussions have concluded.
Learn more
To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Feature news
Starting this week, the standard syntax highlighter will receive new colors that make them compatible in dark mode. This is the first of many changes to come as part of a major upgrade to syntax highlighting. You can learn more about what's to come on the help page.
Editors of wikis using Wikidata will now be notified of only relevant Wikidata changes in their watchlist. This is because the Lua functions entity:getSitelink() and mw.wikibase.getSitelink(qid) will have their logic unified for tracking different aspects of sitelinks to reduce junk notifications from inconsistent sitelinks tracking.
Project updates
Users of all Wikis will have access to Wikimedia sites as read-only for a few minutes on September 25, starting at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
Contributors of 11 Wikipedias, including English will have a new MOS namespace added to their Wikipedias. This improvement ensures that links beginning with MOS: (usually shortcuts to the Manual of Style) are not broken by Mooré Wikipedia (language code mos).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Improvements and Maintenance
Editors interested in templates can help by reading the latest Wishlist focus area, Template recall and discovery, and share your feedback on the talkpage. This input helps the Community Tech team to decide the right technical approach to build. Everyone is also encouraged to continue adding new wishes.
The new automated Special:NamespaceInfo page helps editors understand which namespaces exist on each wiki, and some details about how they are configured. Thanks to DannyS712 for these improvements.
References Check is a feature that encourages editors to add a citation when they add a new paragraph to a Wikipedia article. For a short time, the corresponding tag "Edit Check (references) activated" was erroneously being applied to some edits outside of the main namespace. This has been fixed.
It is now possible for a wiki community to change the order in which a page’s categories are displayed on their wiki. By default, categories are displayed in the order they appear in the wikitext. Now, wikis with a consensus to do so can request a configuration change to display them in alphabetical order.
Tool authors can now access ToolsDB's public databases from both Quarry and Superset. Those databases have always been accessible to every Toolforge user, but they are now more broadly accessible, as Quarry can be accessed by anyone with a Wikimedia account. In addition, Quarry's internal database can now be queried from Quarry itself. This database contains information about all queries that are being run and starred by users in Quarry. This information was already public through the web interface, but you can now query it using SQL. You can read more about that, and 20 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Any pages or tools that still use the very old CSS classes mw-message-box need to be updated. These old classes will be removed next week or soon afterwards. Editors can use a global-search to determine what needs to be changed. It is possible to use the newer cdx-message group of classes as a replacement (see the relevant Codex documentation, and an example update), but using locally defined onwiki classes would be best.
Technical project updates
Next week, all Wikimedia wikis will be read-only for a few minutes. This will start on September 25 at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. This maintenance process also targets other services. The previous switchover took 3 minutes, and the Site Reliability Engineering teams use many tools to make sure that this essential maintenance work happens as quickly as possible.
Tech in depth
The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes details about: research about hook handlers to help simplify development, research about performance improvements, work to improve the REST API for end-users, and more.
To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
Hackathon Showcase (45 mins) - 19 short presentations by some of the Hackathon participants, describing some of the projects they worked on, such as automated testing of maintenance scripts, a video-cutting command line tool, and interface improvements for various tools. There are more details and links available in the Phabricator task.
Co-Creating a Sustainable Future for the Toolforge Ecosystem (40 mins) - a roundtable discussion for tool-maintainers, users, and supporters of Toolforge about how to make the platform sustainable and how to evaluate the tools available there.
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 September 25 at 15:00 UTC. Reading the wikis will not be interrupted, but editing will be paused. These twice-yearly processes allow WMF's site reliability engineering teams to remain prepared to keep the wikis functioning even in the event of a major interruption to one of our data centers.
Updates for editors
A screenshot of the interface for the Alt Text suggested-edit feature
Editors who use the iOS Wikipedia app in Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Chinese, may see the Alt Text suggested-edit experiment after editing an article, or completing a suggested edit using "Add an image". Alt-text helps people with visual impairments to read Wikipedia articles. The team aims to learn if adding alt-text to images is a task that editors can be successful with. Please share any feedback on the discussion page.
The Codex color palette has been updated with new and revised colors for the MediaWiki user interfaces. The most noticeable changes for editors include updates for: dark mode colors for Links and for quiet Buttons (progressive and destructive), visited Link colors for both light and dark modes, and background colors for system-messages in both light and dark modes.
It is now possible to include clickable wikilinks and external links inside code blocks. This includes links that are used within <syntaxhighlight> tags and on code pages (JavaScript, CSS, Scribunto and Sanitized CSS). Uses of template syntax {{…}} are also linked to the template page. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements.
Two bugs were fixed in the GlobalVanishRequest system by improving the logging and by removing an incorrect placeholder message.
The API now enables 5,000 on-demand API requests per month and twice-monthly HTML snapshots freely (gratis and libre). More information on the updates and also improvements to the software development kits (SDK) are explained on the project's blog post. While Wikimedia Enterprise APIs are designed for high-volume commercial reusers, this change enables many more community use-cases to be built on the service too.
The Snapshot API (html dumps) have added beta Structured Contents endpoints (blog post on that) as well as released two beta datasets (English and French Wikipedia) from that endpoint to Hugging Face for public use and feedback (blog post on that). These pre-parsed data sets enable new options for researchers, developers, and data scientists to use and study the content.
In depth
The Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) is used to get answers to questions using the Wikidata data set. As Wikidata grows, we had to make a major architectural change so that WDQS could remain performant. As part of the WDQS Graph Split project, we have new SPARQL endpoints available for serving the "scholarly" and "main" subgraphs of Wikidata. The query.wikidata.org endpoint will continue to serve the full Wikidata graph until March 2025. After this date, it will only serve the main graph. For more information, please see the announcement on Wikidata.
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
Readers of 42 more wikis can now use Dark Mode. If the option is not yet available for logged-out users of your wiki, this is likely because many templates do not yet display well in Dark Mode. Please use the night-mode-checker tool if you are interested in helping to reduce the number of issues. The recommendations page provides guidance on this. Dark Mode is enabled on additional wikis once per month.
Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor as their default can access features from the 2017 wikitext editor by adding ?veaction=editsource to the URL. If you would like to enable the 2017 wikitext editor as your default, it can be set in your preferences.
For logged-out readers using the Vector 2022 skin, the "donate" link has been moved from a collapsible menu next to the content area into a more prominent top menu, next to "Create an account". This restores the link to the level of prominence it had in the Vector 2010 skin. Learn more about the changes related to donor experiences.
The CampaignEvents extension provides tools for organizers to more easily manage events, communicate with participants, and promote their events on the wikis. The extension has been enabled on Arabic Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Swahili Wikipedia, and Meta-Wiki. Chinese Wikipedia has decided to enable the extension, and discussions on the extension are in progress on Spanish Wikipedia and on Wikidata. To learn how to enable the extension on your wiki, you can visit the CampaignEvents page on Meta-Wiki.
Developers with an account on Wikitech-wiki should check if any action is required for their accounts. The wiki is being changed to use the single-user-login (SUL) system, and other configuration changes. This change will help reduce the overall complexity for the weekly software updates across all our wikis.
In depth
The server switch was completed successfully last week with a read-only time of only 2 minutes 46 seconds. This periodic process makes sure that engineers can switch data centers and keep all of the wikis available for readers, even if there are major technical issues. It also gives engineers a chance to do maintenance and upgrades on systems that normally run 24 hours a day, and often helps to reveal weaknesses in the infrastructure. The process involves dozens of software services and hundreds of hardware servers, and requires multiple teams working together. Work over the past few years has reduced the time from 17 minutes down to 2–3 minutes.
Following a discussion, the speedy deletion reason "File pages without a corresponding file" has been moved from criterion G8 to F2. This does not change what can be speedily deleted.
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
Communities can now request installation of Automoderator on their wiki. Automoderator is an automated anti-vandalism tool that reverts bad edits based on scores from the new "Revert Risk" machine learning model. You can read details about the necessary steps for installation and configuration.
Updates for editors
Translators in wikis where the mobile experience of Content Translation is available, can now customize their articles suggestion list from 41 filtering options when using the tool. This topic-based article suggestion feature makes it easy for translators to self-discover relevant articles based on their area of interest and translate them. You can try it with your mobile device.
It is now possible for <syntaxhighlight> code blocks to offer readers a "Copy" button if the copy=1 attribute is set on the tag. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements.
Customized copyright footer messages on all wikis will be updated. The new versions will use wikitext markup instead of requiring editing raw HTML.
Later this month, temporary accounts will be rolled out on several pilot wikis. The final list of the wikis will be published in the second half of the month. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 11 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts. Guidance on how to update the code is available.
Rate limiting has been enabled for the code review tools Gerrit and GitLab to address ongoing issues caused by malicious traffic and scraping. Clients that open too many concurrent connections will be restricted for a few minutes. This rate limiting is managed through nftables firewall rules. For more details, see Wikitech's pages on Firewall, GitLab limits and Gerrit operations.
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 Structured Discussion extension (also known as Flow) is starting to be removed. This extension is unmaintained and causes issues. It will be replaced by DiscussionTools, which is used on any regular talk page. A first set of wikis are being contacted. These wikis are invited to stop using Flow, and to move all Flow boards to sub-pages, as archives. At these wikis, a script will move all Flow pages that aren't a sub-page to a sub-page automatically, starting on 22 October 2024. On 28 October 2024, all Flow boards at these wikis will be set in read-only mode.
WMF's Search Platform team is working on making it easier for readers to perform text searches in their language. A change last week on over 30 languages makes it easier to find words with accents and other diacritics. This applies to both full-text search and to types of advanced search such as the hastemplate and incategory keywords. More technical details (including a few other minor search upgrades) are available.
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, EditCheck was installed at Russian Wikipedia, and fixes were made for some missing user interface styles.
Updates for technical contributors
Editors who use the Toolforge tool Earwig's Copyright Violation Detector will now be required to log in with their Wikimedia account before running checks using the "search engine" option. This change is needed to help prevent external bots from misusing the system. Thanks to Chlod for these improvements.
Some HTML elements in the interface are now wrapped with a <bdi> element, to make our HTML output more aligned with Web standards. More changes like this will be coming in future weeks. This change might break some tools that rely on the previous HTML structure of the interface. Note that relying on the HTML structure of the interface is not recommended and might break at any time.
In depth
The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes: updates on Wikimedia's authentication system, research to simplify feature development in the MediaWiki platform, updates on Parser Unification and MathML rollout, and more.
The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition include: research about improving topic suggestions related to countries, improvements to PHPUnit tests, and more.
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 Mobile Apps team has released an update to the iOS app's navigation, and it is now available in the latest App store version. The team added a new Profile menu that allows for easy access to editor features like Notifications and Watchlist from the Article view, and brings the "Donate" button into a more accessible place for users who are reading an article. This is the first phase of a larger planned navigation refresh to help the iOS app transition from a primarily reader-focused app, to an app that fully supports reading and editing. The Wikimedia Foundation has added more editing features and support for on-wiki communication based on volunteer requests in recent years.
iOS Wikipedia App's profile menu and contents
Updates for editors
Wikipedia readers can now download a browser extension to experiment with some early ideas on potential features that recommend articles for further reading, automatically summarize articles, and improve search functionality. For more details and to stay updated, check out the Web team's Content Discovery Experiments page and subscribe to their newsletter.
Later this month, logged-out editors of these 12 wikis will start to have temporary accounts created. The list may slightly change - some wikis may be removed but none will be added. Temporary account is a new type of user account. It enhances the logged-out editors' privacy and makes it easier for community members to communicate with them. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 12 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts. Guidance on how to update the code is available. Read more about the deployment plan across all wikis.
It is now possible to create functions on Wikifunctions using Wikidata lexemes, through the new Wikidata lexeme type launched last week. When you go to one of these functions, the user interface provides a lexeme selector that helps you pick a lexeme from Wikidata that matches the word you type. After hitting run, your selected lexeme is retrieved from Wikidata, transformed into a Wikidata lexeme type, and passed into the selected function. Read more about this in the latest Wikifunctions newsletter.
Updates for technical contributors
Users of the Wikimedia sites can now format dates more easily in different languages with the new {{#timef:…}} parser function. For example, {{#timef:now|date|en}} will show as "17 September 2026". Previously, {{#time:…}} could be used to format dates, but this required knowledge of the order of the time and date components and their intervening punctuation. #timef (or #timefl for local time) provides access to the standard date formats that MediaWiki uses in its user interface. This may help to simplify some templates on multi-lingual wikis like Commons and Meta.
Commons and Meta users can now efficiently retrieve the user's language using {{USERLANGUAGE}} instead of using {{int:lang}}.
The Product and Tech Advisory Council (PTAC) now has its pilot members with representation across Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America. They will work to address the Movement Strategy's Technology Council initiative of having a co-defined and more resilient technological platform.
In depth
The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: an upcoming Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module, new Community Configuration options, and details on new projects.
The Wikimedia Foundation is now an official partner of the CVE program, which is an international effort to catalog publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities. This partnership will allow the Security Team to instantly publish common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) records that are affecting MediaWiki core, extensions, and skins, along with any other code the Foundation is a steward of.
The Community Wishlist is now testing machine translations for Wishlist content. Volunteers can now read machine-translated versions of wishes and dive into discussions even before translators arrive to translate content.
20–22 December 2024 - Indic Wikimedia Hackathon Bhubaneswar 2024 in Odisha, India. A hackathon for community members, including developers, designers and content editors, to build technical solutions that improve contributors' experiences.
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
Later in November, the Charts extension will be deployed to the test wikis in order to help identify and fix any issue. A security review is underway to then enable deployment to pilot wikis for broader testing. You can read the October project update and see the latest documentation and examples on Beta Wikipedia.
View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, Pediapress.com, an external service that creates books from Wikipedia, can now use Wikimedia Maps to include existing pre-rendered infobox map images in their printed books on Wikipedia.
Updates for technical contributors
Wikis can use the Guided Tour extension to help newcomers understand how to edit. The Guided Tours extension now works with dark mode. Guided Tour maintainers can check their tours to see that nothing looks odd. They can also set emitTransitionOnStep to true to fix an old bug. They can use the new flag allowAutomaticBack to avoid back-buttons they don't want.
Administrators in the Wikimedia projects who use the Nuke Extension will notice that mass deletions done with this tool have the "Nuke" tag. This change will make reviewing and analyzing deletions performed with the tool easier.
Mass deletions done with the Nuke tool now have the 'Nuke' tag. This change will make reviewing and analyzing deletions performed with the tool easier. T366068
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
Stewards can now make global account blocks cause global autoblocks. This will assist stewards in preventing abuse from users who have been globally blocked. This includes preventing globally blocked temporary accounts from exiting their session or switching browsers to make subsequent edits for 24 hours. Previously, temporary accounts could exit their current session or switch browsers to continue editing. This is an anti-abuse tool improvement for the Temporary Accounts project. You can read more about the progress on key features for temporary accounts.
Wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled can now use the Collaboration List feature. This list provides a new, easy way for contributors to learn about WikiProjects on their wikis. Thanks to the Campaign team for this work that is part of the 2024/25 annual plan. If you are interested in bringing the CampaignEvents extension to your wiki, you can follow these steps or you can reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for help.
The text color for red links will be slightly changed later this week to improve their contrast in light mode.
View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, on multilingual wikis, users can now hide translations from the WhatLinksHere special page.
Updates for technical contributors
XML data dumps have been temporarily paused whilst a bug is investigated.
In depth
Temporary Accounts have been deployed to six wikis; thanks to the Trust and Safety Product team for this work, you can read about the deployment plans. Beginning next week, Temporary Accounts will also be enabled on seven other projects. If you are active on these wikis and need help migrating your tools, please reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for assistance.
The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New languages supported in translatewiki or in MediaWiki; New keyboard input methods for some languages; details about recent and upcoming meetings, and more.
Meetings and events
MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2024 is happening in Vienna, Austria and online from 4 to 6 November 2024. The conference will feature discussions around the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies in different industries and will inspire and onboard new users.
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
On wikis with the Translate extension enabled, users will notice that the FuzzyBot will now automatically create translated versions of categories used on translated pages.
In 1.44.0-wmf-2, the logic of Wikibase function getAllStatements changed to behave like getBestStatements. Invoking the function now returns a copy of values which are immutable.
Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. The API will be rerouting some page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newer MediaWiki REST API endpoints. The impacted endpoints include getting page/revision metadata and rendered HTML content. These changes will be available on testwiki later this week, with other projects to follow. This change should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints should verify behavior on testwiki, and raise any concerns on the related Phabricator ticket.
In depth
Admins and users of the Wikimedia projects where Automoderator is enabled can now monitor and evaluate important metrics related to Automoderator's actions. This Superset dashboard calculates and aggregates metrics about Automoderator's behaviour on the projects in which it is deployed. Thanks to the Moderator Tools team for this Dashboard; you can visit the documentation page for more information about this work.
Meetings and events
21 November 2024 (8:00 UTC & 16:00 UTC) - Community call with Wikimedia Commons volunteers and stakeholders to help prioritize support efforts for 2025-2026 Fiscal Year. The theme of this call is how content should be organised on Wikimedia Commons.
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 Wikimedia sites will now be warned when they create a redirect to a page that doesn't exist. This will reduce the number of broken redirects to red links in our projects.
View all 42 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, Pywikibot, which automates work on MediaWiki sites, was upgraded to 9.5.0 on Toolforge.
Updates for technical contributors
On wikis that use the FlaggedRevs extension, pages created or moved by users with the appropriate permissions are marked as flagged automatically. This feature has not been working recently, and changes fixing it should be deployed this week. Thanks to Daniel and Wargo for working on this.
In depth
There is a new Diff post about Temporary Accounts, available in more than 15 languages. Read it to learn about what Temporary Accounts are, their impact on different groups of users, and the plan to introduce the change on all wikis.
Meetings and events
Technical volunteers can now register for the 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which will take place in Istanbul, Turkey. Application for travel and accommodation scholarships is open from November 12 to December 10 2024. The registration for the event will close in mid-April 2025. The Wikimedia Hackathon is an annual gathering that unites the global technical community to collaborate on existing projects and explore new ideas.
Join the Wikimedia Commons community calls this week to help prioritize support for Commons which will be planned for 2025–2026. The theme will be how content should be organised on Wikimedia Commons. This is an opportunity for volunteers who work on different things to come together and talk about what matters for the future of the project. The calls will take place November 21, 2024, 8:00 UTC and 16:00 UTC.
A Language community meeting will take place November 29, 16:00 UTC to discuss updates and technical problem-solving.
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
A new version of the standard wikitext editor-mode syntax highlighter will be available as a beta feature later this week. This brings many new features and bug fixes, including right-to-left support, template folding, autocompletion, and an improved search panel. You can learn more on the help page.
The 2010 wikitext editor now supports common keyboard shortcuts such Ctrl+B for bold and Ctrl+I for italics. A full list of all six shortcuts is available. Thanks to SD0001 for this improvement.
Starting November 28, Flow/Structured Discussions pages will be automatically archived and set to read-only at the following wikis: bswiki, elwiki, euwiki, fawiki, fiwiki, frwikiquote, frwikisource, frwikiversity, frwikivoyage, idwiki, lvwiki, plwiki, ptwiki, urwiki, viwikisource, zhwikisource. This is done as part of StructuredDiscussions deprecation work. If you need any assistance to archive your page in advance, please contact Trizek (WMF).
The CodeEditor, which can be used in JavaScript, CSS, JSON, and Lua pages, now offers live autocompletion. Thanks to SD0001 for this improvement. The feature can be temporarily disabled on a page by pressing Ctrl+, and un-selecting "Live Autocompletion".
Tool-maintainers who use the Graphite system for tracking metrics, need to migrate to the newer Prometheus system. They can check this dashboard and the list in the Description of the task T350592 to see if their tools are listed, and they should claim metrics and dashboards connected to their tools. They can then disable or migrate all existing metrics by following the instructions in the task. The Graphite service will become read-only in April.
The New PreProcessor parser performance report has been fixed to give an accurate count for the number of Wikibase entities accessed. It had previously been resetting after 400 entities.
Meetings and events
A Language community meeting will take place November 29 at 16:00 UTC. There will be presentations on topics like developing language keyboards, the creation of the Mooré Wikipedia, the language support track at Wiki Indaba, and a report from the Wayuunaiki community on their experiences with the Incubator and as a new community over the last 3 years. This meeting will be in English and will also have Spanish interpretation.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Starting this week, Wikimedia wikis no longer support connections using old RSA-based HTTPS certificates, specifically rsa-2048. This change is to improve security for all users. Some older, unsupported browser or smartphone devices will be unable to connect; Instead, they will display a connectivity error. See the HTTPS Browser Recommendations page for more-detailed information. All modern operating systems and browsers are always able to reach Wikimedia projects.
Starting December 16, Flow/Structured Discussions pages will be automatically archived and set to read-only at the following wikis: arwiki, cawiki, frwiki, mediawikiwiki, orwiki, wawiki, wawiktionary, wikidatawiki, zhwiki. This is done as part of StructuredDiscussions deprecation work. If you need any assistance to archive your page in advance, please contact Trizek (WMF).
This month the Chart extension was deployed to production and is now available on Commons and Testwiki. With the security review complete, pilot wiki deployment is expected to start in the first week of December. You can see a working version on Testwiki and read the November project update for more details.
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug with the "Download as PDF" system was fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
In late February, temporary accounts will be rolled out on at least 10 large wikis. This deployment will have a significant effect on the community-maintained code. This is about Toolforge tools, bots, gadgets, and user scripts that use IP address data or that are available for logged-out users. The Trust and Safety Product team wants to identify this code, monitor it, and assist in updating it ahead of the deployment to minimize disruption to workflows. The team asks technical editors and volunteer developers to help identify such tools by adding them to this list. In addition, review the updated documentation to learn how to adjust the tools. Join the discussions on the project talk page or in the dedicated thread on the Wikimedia Community Discord server (in English) for support and to share feedback.
Following an RFC, the policy on restoration of adminship has been updated. All former administrators may now only regain the tools following a request at the Wikipedia:Bureaucrats' noticeboard within 5 years of their most recent admin action. Previously this applied only to administrators deysopped for inactivity.
Following a request for comment, a new speedy deletion criterion, T5, has been enacted. This applies to template subpages that are no longer used.
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
Technical documentation contributors can find updated resources, and new ways to connect with each other and the Wikimedia Technical Documentation Team, at the Documentation hub on MediaWiki.org. This page links to: resources for writing and improving documentation, a new #wikimedia-techdocs IRC channel on libera.chat, a listing of past and upcoming documentation events, and ways to request a documentation consultation or review. If you have any feedback or ideas for improvements to the documentation ecosystem, please contact the Technical Documentation Team.
Updates for editors
Layout change for the Edit Check feature
Later this week, Edit Check will be relocated to a sidebar on desktop. Edit check is the feature for new editors to help them follow policies and guidelines. This layout change creates space to present people with new Checks that appear while they are typing. The initial results show newcomers encountering Edit Check are 2.2 times more likely to publish a new content edit that includes a reference and is not reverted.
The Chart extension, which enables editors to create data visualizations, was successfully made available on MediaWiki.org and three pilot wikis (Italian, Swedish, and Hebrew Wikipedias). You can see a working examples on Testwiki and read the November project update for more details.
Translators in wikis where the mobile experience of Content Translation is available, can now discover articles in Wikiproject campaigns of their interest from the "All collection" category in the articles suggestion feature. Wikiproject Campaign organizers can use this feature, to help translators to discover articles of interest, by adding the <page-collection> </page-collection> tag to their campaign article list page on Meta-wiki. This will make those articles discoverable in the Content Translation tool. For more detailed information on how to use the tool and tag, please refer to the step-by-step guide.
The Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, now has a multiselect filter for namespace selection. This enables users to select multiple specific namespaces, instead of only one or all, when fetching pages for deletion.
The Nuke feature also now provides links to the userpage of the user whose pages were deleted, and to the pages which were not selected for deletion, after page deletions are queued. This enables easier follow-up admin-actions. Thanks to Chlod and the Moderator Tools team for both of these improvements.
The Editing Team is working on making it easier to populate citations from archive.org using the Citoid tool, the auto-filled citation generator. They are asking communities to add two parameters preemptively, archiveUrl and archiveDate, within the TemplateData for each citation template using Citoid. You can see an example of a change in a template, and a list of all relevant templates.
Last week, all wikis had problems serving pages to logged-in users and some logged-out users for 30–45 minutes. This was caused by a database problem, and investigation is ongoing.
View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug in the Add Link feature has been fixed. Previously, the list of sections which are excluded from Add Link was partially ignored in certain cases.
Updates for technical contributors
Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, now has an early-stage implementation in PHP. It is available for general use in MediaWiki extensions and Toolforge apps through Composer, with use in MediaWiki core coming soon. More information is available in the documentation. Thanks to Doğu for the inspiration and many contributions to the library.
Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. On December 4, the MediaWiki Interfaces team began rerouting page/revision metadata and rendered HTML content endpoints on testwiki from RESTbase to comparable MediaWiki REST API endpoints. The team encourages active users of these endpoints to verify their tool's behavior on testwiki and raise any concerns on the related Phabricator ticket before the end of the year, as they intend to roll out the same change across all Wikimedia projects in early January. These changes are part of the work to replace the outdated RESTBase system.
The 2024 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 3 January 2025, and has an associated privacy statement.
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
Interested in improving event management on your home wiki? The CampaignEvents extension offers organizers features like event registration management, event/wikiproject promotion, finding potential participants, and more - all directly on-wiki. If you are an organizer or think your community would benefit from this extension, start a discussion to enable it on your wiki today. To learn more about how to enable this extension on your wiki, visit the deployment status page.
Updates for editors
Users of the iOS Wikipedia App in Italy and Mexico on the Italian, Spanish, and English Wikipedias, can see a personalized Year in Review with insights based on their reading and editing history.
Users of the Android Wikipedia App in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia can see the new Rabbit Holes feature. This feature shows a suggested search term in the Search bar based on the current article being viewed, and a suggested reading list generated from the user’s last two visited articles.
The global reminder bot is now active and running on nearly 800 wikis. This service reminds most users holding temporary rights when they are about to expire, so that they can renew should they want to. See the technical details page for more information.
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 13 January 2025 because of the end of year holidays. Thank you to all of the translators, and people who submitted content or feedback, this year.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed in the Android Wikipedia App which had caused translatable SVG images to show the wrong language when they were tapped.
Updates for technical contributors
There is no new MediaWiki version next week. The next deployments will start on 14 January.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 26th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 1 August 2024. At press time, over 94% of the world has legally fallen prey to the merry celebrations of "Christmas", and so shall you soon. It's been a quiet 4 months, and we hope to see you with way more new scripts next year. Happy holidays! Aaron Liu (talk) 05:06, 25 December 2024 (UTC)
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
Featured script
Very useful for changelist patrollers, DiffUndo, by Nardog, is this edition's featured script. Taking inspiration from WP:AutoWikiBrowser's double-click-to-undo feature, it adds an undo button to every line of every diff from "show changes", optimizing partial reverts with your favorite magic spell and nearly fulfilling m:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Partial revert undo.
Miscellaneous
Doğu/Adiutor, a recent WP:Twinkle/WP:RedWarn-like userscript that follows modern WMF UI design, is now an extension. However, its sole maintainer has left the project, which still awaits WMF mw:code stewardship (among some audits) to be installed on your favorite WMF wikis.
DannyS712, our former chief editor, has ascended to MediaWiki and the greener purpley pastures of PHP with commits creating Special:NamespaceInfo and the __EXPECTUNUSEDTEMPLATE__ magic word to exclude a template from Special:UnusedTemplates! I wonder if Wikipedia has a templaters' newsletter...
BilledMammal/Move+ needs updating to order list of pages handle lists of pages to move correctly regardless of the discussion's page, so that we may avoid repeating fiasco history.
Andrybak/Unsigned helper forks Anomie/unsignedhelper to add support for binary search, automatic edit summaries after generating the {{unsigned}} template, support for {{undated}}, and support for generating while syntax highlighting is on.
Polygnotus/Move+ updates BilledMammal's classic Move+ to add automattic watchlisting of all pages—except the target page(s)—changed while processing a move.
A request for comment is open to discuss whether admins should be advised to warn users rather than issue no-warning blocks to those who have posted promotional content outside of article space.
Technical news
The Nuke feature also now provides links to the userpage of the user whose pages were deleted, and to the pages which were not selected for deletion, after page deletions are queued. This enables easier follow-up admin-actions.
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 Single User Login system is being updated over the next few months. This is the system which allows users to fill out the login form on one Wikimedia site and get logged in on all others at the same time. It needs to be updated because of the ways that browsers are increasingly restricting cross-domain cookies. To accommodate these restrictions, login and account creation pages will move to a central domain, but it will still appear to the user as if they are on the originating wiki. The updated code will be enabled this week for users on test wikis. This change is planned to roll out to all users during February and March. See the SUL3 project page for more details and a timeline.
Updates for editors
On wikis with PageAssessments installed, you can now filter search results to pages in a given WikiProject by using the inproject: keyword. (These wikis: Arabic Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage, French Wikipedia, Hungarian Wikipedia, Nepali Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia)
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Tigre (w:tig:)
View all 35 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a bug with updating a user's edit-count after making a rollback edit, which is now fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. Starting the week of January 13, we will begin rerouting some page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newer MediaWiki REST API endpoints for all wiki projects. This change was previously available on testwiki and should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints may raise issues directly to the MediaWiki Interfaces Team in Phabricator if they arise.
Toolforge tool maintainers can now share their feedback on Toolforge UI, an initiative to provide a web platform that allows creating and managing Toolforge tools through a graphic interface, in addition to existing command-line workflows. This project aims to streamline active maintainers’ tasks, as well as make registration and deployment processes more accessible for new tool creators. The initiative is still at a very early stage, and the Cloud Services team is in the process of collecting feedback from the Toolforge community to help shape the solution to their needs. Read more and share your thoughts about Toolforge UI.
For tool and library developers who use the OAuth system: The identity endpoint used for OAuth 1 and OAuth 2 returned a JSON object with an integer in its sub field, which was incorrect (the field must always be a string). This has been fixed; the fix will be deployed to Wikimedia wikis on the week of January 13.
Many wikis currently use Cite CSS to render custom footnote markers in Parsoid output. Starting January 20 these rules will be disabled, but the developers ask you to not clean up your MediaWiki:Common.css until February 20 to avoid issues during the migration. Your wikis might experience some small changes to footnote markers in Visual Editor and when using experimental Parsoid read mode, but if there are changes these are expected to bring the rendering in line with the legacy parser output.
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
Administrators can mass-delete multiple pages created by a user or IP address using Extension:Nuke. It previously only allowed deletion of pages created in the last 30 days. It can now delete pages from the last 90 days, provided it is targeting a specific user or IP address.
On wikis that use the Patrolled edits feature, when the rollback feature is used to revert an unpatrolled page revision, that revision will now be marked as "manually patrolled" instead of "autopatrolled", which is more accurate. Some editors that use filters on Recent Changes may need to update their filter settings.
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the Visual Editor's "Insert link" feature did not always suggest existing pages properly when an editor started typing, which has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
The Structured Discussion extension (also known as Flow) is being progressively removed from the wikis. This extension is unmaintained and causes issues. It will be replaced by DiscussionTools, which is used on any regular talk page. The last group of wikis (Catalan Wikiquote, Wikimedia Finland, Goan Konkani Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikibooks, Wikimedia Sweden) will soon be contacted. If you have questions about this process, please ping Trizek (WMF) at your wiki.
The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: updates about services from the Data Platform Engineering teams, information about Codex from the Design System team, and more.
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
Patrollers and admins - what information or context about edits or users could help you to make patroller or admin decisions more quickly or easily? The Wikimedia Foundation wants to hear from you to help guide its upcoming annual plan. Please consider sharing your thoughts on this and 13 other questions to shape the technical direction for next year.
Updates for editors
iOS Wikipedia App users worldwide can now access a personalized Year in Review feature, which provides insights based on their reading and editing history on Wikipedia. This project is part of a broader effort to help welcome new readers as they discover and interact with encyclopedic content.
Edit patrollers now have a new feature available that can highlight potentially problematic new pages. When a page is created with the same title as a page which was previously deleted, a tag ('Recreated') will now be added, which users can filter for in Special:RecentChanges and Special:NewPages.
Later this week, there will be a new warning for editors if they attempt to create a redirect that links to another redirect (a double redirect). The feature will recommend that they link directly to the second redirect's target page. Thanks to the user SomeRandomDeveloper for this improvement.
Wikimedia wikis allow WebAuthn-based second factor checks (such as hardware tokens) during login, but the feature is fragile and has very few users. The MediaWiki Platform team is temporarily disabling adding new WebAuthn keys, to avoid interfering with the rollout of SUL3 (single user login version 3). Existing keys are unaffected.
For developers that use the MediaWiki History dumps: The Data Platform Engineering team has added a couple of new fields to these dumps, to support the Temporary Accounts initiative. If you maintain software that reads those dumps, please review your code and the updated documentation, since the order of the fields in the row will change. There will also be one field rename: in the mediawiki_user_history dump, the anonymous field will be renamed to is_anonymous. The changes will take effect with the next release of the dumps in February.
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
Editors who use the "Special characters" editing-toolbar menu can now see the 32 special characters you have used most recently, across editing sessions on that wiki. This change should help make it easier to find the characters you use most often. The feature is in both the 2010 wikitext editor and VisualEditor.
Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor can now create sublists with correct indentation by selecting the line(s) you want to indent and then clicking the toolbar buttons. You can now also insert <code> tags using a new toolbar button. Thanks to user stjn for these improvements.
Help is needed to ensure the citation generator works properly on each wiki.
(1) Administrators should update the local versions of the page MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json to include entries for preprint, standard, and dataset; Here are example diffs to replicate for 'preprint' and for 'standard' and 'dataset'.
(2.1) If the citoid map in the citation template used for these types of references is missing, one will need to be added. (2.2) If the citoid map does exist, the TemplateData will need to be updated to include new field names. Here are example updates for 'preprint' and for 'standard' and 'dataset'. The new fields that may need to be supported are archiveID, identifier, repository, organization, repositoryLocation, committee, and versionNumber.
Administrators can now nuke pages created by a user or IP address from the last 90 days, up from the initial 30 days. T380846
A 'Recreated' tag will now be added to pages that were created with the same title as a page which was previously deleted and it can be used as a filter in Special:RecentChanges and Special:NewPages. T56145
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 Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) has published a draft of their recommendations for the Wikimedia Foundation's Product and Technology department. They have recommended focusing on mobile experiences, particularly contributions. They request community feedback at the talk page by 21 February.
Updates for editors
The "Special pages" portlet link will be moved from the "Toolbox" into the "Navigation" section of the main menu's sidebar by default. This change is because the Toolbox is intended for tools relating to the current page, not tools relating to the site, so the link will be more logically and consistently located. To modify this behavior and update CSS styling, administrators can follow the instructions at T385346.
As part of this year's work around improving the ways readers discover content on the wikis, the Web team will be running an experiment with a small number of readers that displays some suggestions for related or interesting articles within the search bar. Please check out the project page for more information.
View all 22 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the global blocks log will now be shown directly on the Special:CentralAuth page, similarly to global locks, to simplify the workflows for stewards.
Updates for technical contributors
Wikidata now supports a special language as a "default for all languages" for labels and aliases. This is to avoid excessive duplication of the same information across many languages. If your Wikidata queries use labels, you may need to update them as some existing labels are getting removed.
The function getDescription was invoked on every Wiki page read and accounts for ~2.5% of a page's total load time. The calculated value will now be cached, reducing load on Wikimedia servers.
As part of the RESTBase deprecation effort, the /page/related endpoint has been blocked as of February 6, 2025, and will be removed soon. This timeline was chosen to align with the deprecation schedules for older Android and iOS versions. The stable alternative is the "morelike" action API in MediaWiki, and a migration example is available. The MediaWiki Interfaces team can be contacted for any questions.
In depth
The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: Updates about the "Contribute" menu; details on some of the newest language editions of Wikipedia; details on new languages supported by the MediaWiki interface; updates on the Community-defined lists feature; and more.
The latest Chart Project newsletter is available. It includes updates on the progress towards bringing better visibility into global charts usage and support for categorizing pages in the Data namespace on Commons.
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
Communities using growth tools can now showcase one event on the Special:Homepage for newcomers. This feature will help newcomers to be informed about editing activities they can participate in. Administrators can create a new event to showcase at Special:CommunityConfiguration. To learn more about this feature, please read the Diff post, have a look at the documentation, or contact the Growth team.
Updates for editors
Highlighted talk pages improvements
Starting next week, talk pages at these wikis – Spanish Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia – will get a new design. This change was extensively tested as a Beta feature and is the last step of talk pages improvements.
You can now navigate to view a redirect page directly from its action pages, such as the history page. Previously, you were forced to first go to the redirect target. This change should help editors who work with redirects a lot. Thanks to user stjn for this improvement.
When a Cite reference is reused many times, wikis currently show either numbers like "1.23" or localized alphabetic markers like "a b c" in the reference list. Previously, if there were so many reuses that the alphabetic markers were all used, an error message was displayed. As part of the work to modernize Cite customization, these errors will no longer be shown and instead the backlinks will fall back to showing numeric markers like "1.23" once the alphabetic markers are all used.
The log entries for each change to an editor's user-groups are now clearer by specifying exactly what has changed, instead of the plain before and after listings. Translators can help to update the localized versions. Thanks to user Msz2001 for these improvements.
A new filter has been added to the Special:Nuke tool, which allows administrators to mass delete pages, to enable users to filter for pages in a range of page sizes (in bytes). This allows, for example, deleting pages only of a certain size or below.
Non-administrators can now check which pages are able to be deleted using the Special:Nuke tool. Thanks to user MolecularPilot for this and the previous improvements.
View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed in the configuration for the AV1 video file format, which enables these files to play again.
Updates for technical contributors
Parsoid Read Views is going to be rolling out to most Wiktionaries over the next few weeks, following the successful transition of Wikivoyage to Parsoid Read Views last year. For more information, see the Parsoid/Parser Unification project page.
Developers of tools that run on-wiki should note that mw.Uri is deprecated. Tools requiring mw.Uri must explicitly declare mediawiki.Uri as a ResourceLoader dependency, and should migrate to the browser native URL API soon.
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
Administrators can now customize how the Babel feature creates categories using Special:CommunityConfiguration/Babel. They can rename language categories, choose whether they should be auto-created, and adjust other settings.
The wikimedia.org portal has been updated – and is receiving some ongoing improvements – to modernize and improve the accessibility of our portal pages. It now has better support for mobile layouts, updated wording and links, and better language support. Additionally, all of the Wikimedia project portals, such as wikibooks.org, now support dark mode when a reader is using that system setting.
One new wiki has been created: a Wiktionary in Santali (wikt:sat:)
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that prevented clicking on search results in the web-interface for some Firefox for Android phone configurations.
Meetings and events
The next Language Community Meeting is happening soon, February 28th at 14:00 UTC. This week's meeting will cover: highlights and technical updates on keyboard and tools for the Sámi languages, Translatewiki.net contributions from the Bahasa Lampung community in Indonesia, and technical Q&A. If you'd like to join, simply sign up on the wiki page.
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
All logged-in editors using the mobile view can now edit a full page. The "Edit full page" link is accessible from the "More" menu in the toolbar. This was previously only available to editors using the Advanced mobile contributions setting.
Interface administrators can now help to remove the deprecated Cite CSS code matching "mw-ref" from their local MediaWiki:Common.css. The list of wikis in need of cleanup, and the code to remove, can be found with this global search and in this example, and you can learn more about how to help on the CSS migration project page. The Cite footnote markers ("[1]") are now rendered by Parsoid, and the deprecated CSS is no longer needed. The CSS for backlinks ("mw:referencedBy") should remain in place for now. This cleanup is expected to cause no visible changes for readers. Please help to remove this code before March 20, after which the development team will do it for you.
When editors embed a file (e.g. [[File:MediaWiki.png]]) on a page that is protected with cascading protection, the software will no longer restrict edits to the file description page, only to new file uploads. In contrast, transcluding a file description page (e.g. {{:File:MediaWiki.png}}) will now restrict edits to the page.
When editors revert a file to an earlier version it will now require the same permissions as ordinarily uploading a new version of the file. The software now checks for 'reupload' or 'reupload-own' rights, and respects cascading protection.
When administrators are listing pages for deletion with the Nuke tool, they can now also list associated talk pages and redirects for deletion, alongside pages created by the target, rather than needing to manually delete these pages afterwards.
The previously noted update to Single User Login, which will accommodate browser restrictions on cross-domain cookies by moving login and account creation to a central domain, will now roll out to all users during March and April. The team plans to enable it for all new account creation on Group0 wikis this week. See the SUL3 project page for more details and an updated timeline.
Since last week there has been a bug that shows some interface icons as black squares until the page has fully loaded. It will be fixed this week.
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Sylheti (w:syl:)
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed with loading images in very old versions of the Firefox browser on mobile.
A request for comment is open to discuss whether AI-generated images (meaning those wholly created by generative AI, not human-created images modified with AI tools) should be banned from use in articles.
A new filter has been added to the Special:Nuke tool, which allows administrators to filter for pages in a range of page sizes (in bytes). This allows, for example, deleting pages only of a certain size or below. T378488
Non-administrators can now check which pages are able to be deleted using the Special:Nuke tool. T376378
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
Editors who use password managers at multiple wikis may notice changes in the future. The way that our wikis provide information to password managers about reusing passwords across domains has recently been updated, so some password managers might now offer you login credentials that you saved for a different Wikimedia site. Some password managers already did this, and are now doing it for more Wikimedia domains. This is part of the SUL3 project which aims to improve how our unified login works, and to keep it compatible with ongoing changes to the web-browsers we use.
The Wikipedia Apps Team is inviting interested users to help improve Wikipedia’s offline and limited internet use. After discussions in Afrika Baraza and the last ESEAP call, key challenges like search, editing, and offline access are being explored, with upcoming focus groups to dive deeper into these topics. All languages are welcome, and interpretation will be available. Want to share your thoughts? Join the discussion or email aramadan@wikimedia.org!
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 19. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: the launch of the Community Updates module, the most recent changes in Community Configuration, and the upcoming test of in-article suggestions for first-time editors.
An old API that was previously used in the Android Wikipedia app is being removed at the end of March. There are no current software uses, but users of the app with a version that is older than 6 months by the time of removal (2025-03-31), will no longer have access to the Suggested Edits feature, until they update their app. You can read more details about this change.
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
Twice a year, around the equinoxes, the Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team performs a datacenter server switchover, redirecting all traffic from one primary server to its backup. This provides reliability in case of a crisis, as we can always fall back on the other datacenter. Thanks to the Listen to Wikipedia tool, you can hear the switchover take place: Before it begins, you'll hear the steady stream of edits; Then, as the system enters a brief read-only phase, the sound stops for a couple of minutes, before resuming after the switchover. You can read more about the background and details of this process on the Diff blog. If you want to keep an ear out for the next server switchover, listen to the wikis on March 19 at 14:00 UTC.
On Wikimedia Commons, a new system to select the appropriate file categories has been introduced: if a category has one or more subcategories, users will be able to click on an arrow that will open the subcategories directly within the form, and choose the correct one. The parent category name will always be shown on top, and it will always be possible to come back to it. This should decrease the amount of work for volunteers in fixing/creating new categories. The change is also available on mobile. These changes are part of planned improvements to the UploadWizard.
The Community Tech team is seeking wikis to join a pilot for the Multiblocks feature and a refreshed Special:Block page in late March. Multiblocks enables administrators to impose multiple different types of blocks on the same user at the same time. If you are an admin or steward and would like us to discuss joining the pilot with your community, please leave a message on the project talk page.
Starting March 25, the Editing team will test a new feature for Edit Check at 12 Wikipedias: Multi-Check. Half of the newcomers on these wikis will see all Reference Checks during their edit session, while the other half will continue seeing only one. The goal of this test is to see if users are confused or discouraged when shown multiple Reference Checks (when relevant) within a single editing session. At these wikis, the tags used on edits that show References Check will be simplified, as multiple tags could be shown within a single edit. Changes to the tags are documented on Phabricator.
The Global reminder bot, which is a service for notifying users that their temporary user-rights are about to expire, now supports using the localized name of the user-rights group in the message heading. Translators can see the listing of existing translations and documentation to check if their language needs updating or creation.
The GlobalPreferences gender setting, which is used for how the software should refer to you in interface messages, now works as expected by overriding the local defaults.
View all 26 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the Wikipedia App for Android had a bug fixed for when a user is browsing and searching in multiple languages.
Updates for technical contributors
Later this week, the way that Codex styles are loaded will be changing. There is a small risk that this may result in unstyled interface message boxes on certain pages. User generated content (e.g. templates) is not impacted. Gadgets may be impacted. If you see any issues please report them. See the linked task for details, screenshots, and documentation on how to fix any affected gadgets.
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 Wikimedia Foundation is seeking your feedback on the drafts of the objectives and key results that will shape the Foundation's Product and Technology priorities for the next fiscal year (starting in July). The objectives are broad high-level areas, and the key-results are measurable ways to track the success of their objectives. Please share your feedback on the talkpage, in any language, ideally before the end of April.
Updates for editors
The CampaignEvents extension will be released to multiple wikis (see deployment plan for details) in April 2025, and the team has begun the process of engaging communities on the identified wikis. The extension provides tools to organize, manage, and promote collaborative activities (like events, edit-a-thons, and WikiProjects) on the wikis. The extension has three tools: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation Lists. It is currently on 13 Wikipedias, including English Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia, as well as Wikidata. Questions or requests can be directed to the extension talk page or in Phabricator (with #campaigns-product-team tag).
Starting the week of March 31st, wikis will be able to set which user groups can view private registrants in Event Registration, as part of the CampaignEvents extension. By default, event organizers and the local wiki admins will be able to see private registrants. This is a change from the current behavior, in which only event organizers can see private registrants. Wikis can change the default setup by requesting a configuration change in Phabricator (and adding the #campaigns-product-team tag). Participants of past events can cancel their registration at any time.
Administrators at wikis that have a customized MediaWiki:Sidebar should check that it contains an entry for the Special pages listing. If it does not, they should add it using * specialpages-url|specialpages. Wikis with a default sidebar will see the link moved from the page toolbox into the sidebar menu in April.
The Minerva skin (mobile web) combines both Notice and Alert notifications within the bell icon (). There was a long-standing bug where an indication for new notifications was only shown if you had unseen Alerts. This bug is now fixed. In the future, Minerva users will notice a counter atop the bell icon when you have 1 or more unseen Notices and/or Alerts.
VisualEditor has introduced a new client-side hook for developers to use when integrating with the VisualEditor target lifecycle. This hook should replace the existing lifecycle-related hooks, and be more consistent between different platforms. In addition, the new hook will apply to uses of VisualEditor outside of just full article editing, allowing gadgets to interact with the editor in DiscussionTools as well. The Editing Team intends to deprecate and eventually remove the old lifecycle hooks, so any use cases that this new hook does not cover would be of interest to them and can be shared in the task.
Developers who use the mw.Api JavaScript library, can now identify the tool using it with the userAgent parameter: var api = new mw.Api( { userAgent: 'GadgetNameHere/1.0.1' } );. If you maintain a gadget or user script, please set a user agent, because it helps with library and server maintenance and with differentiating between legitimate and illegitimate traffic.
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 Editing team is working on a new Edit check: Peacock check. This check's goal is to identify non-neutral terms while a user is editing a wikipage, so that they can be informed that their edit should perhaps be changed before they publish it. This project is at the early stages, and the team is looking for communities' input: in this Phabricator task, they are gathering on-wiki policies, templates used to tag non-neutral articles, and the terms (jargon and keywords) used in edit summaries for the languages they are currently researching. You can participate by editing the table on Phabricator, commenting on the task, or directly messaging Trizek (WMF).
Single User Login has now been updated on all wikis to move login and account creation to a central domain. This makes user login compatible with browser restrictions on cross-domain cookies, which have prevented users of some browsers from staying logged in.
Starting on March 31st, the MediaWiki Interfaces team will begin a limited release of generated OpenAPI specs and a SwaggerUI-based sandbox experience for MediaWiki REST APIs. They invite developers from a limited group of non-English Wikipedia communities (Arabic, German, French, Hebrew, Interlingua, Dutch, Chinese) to review the documentation and experiment with the sandbox in their preferred language. In addition to these specific Wikipedia projects, the sandbox and OpenAPI spec will be available on the on the test wiki REST Sandbox special page for developers with English as their preferred language. During the preview period, the MediaWiki Interfaces Team also invites developers to share feedback about your experience. The preview will last for approximately 2 weeks, after which the sandbox and OpenAPI specs will be made available across all wiki projects.
Sometimes a small, one line code change can have great significance: in this case, it means that for the first time in years we're able to run all of the stack serving maps.wikimedia.org - a host dedicated to serving our wikis and their multi-lingual maps needs - from a single core datacenter, something we test every time we perform a datacenter switchover. This is important because it means that in case one of our datacenters is affected by a catastrophe, we'll still be able to serve the site. This change is the result of extensive work by two developers on porting the last component of the maps stack over to kubernetes, where we can allocate resources more efficiently than before, thus we're able to withstand more traffic in a single datacenter. This work involved a lot of complicated steps because this software, and the software libraries it uses, required many long overdue upgrades. This type of work makes the Wikimedia infrastructure more sustainable.
Meetings and events
MediaWiki Users and Developers Workshop Spring 2025 is happening in Sandusky, USA, and online, from 14–16 May 2025. The workshop will feature discussions around the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies in different industries and will inspire and onboard new users. Registration and presentation signup is now available at the workshop's website.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The Design System Team is preparing to release the next major version of Codex (v2.0.0) on April 29. Editors and developers who use CSS from Codex should see the 2.0 overview documentation, which includes guidance related to a few of the breaking changes such as font-size, line-height, and size-icon.
The results of the Developer Satisfaction Survey (2025) are now available. Thank you to all participants. These results help the Foundation decide what to work on next and to review what they recently worked on.
The 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon will take place in Istanbul, Turkey, between 2–4 May. Registration for attending the in-person event will close on 13 April. Before registering, please note the potential need for a visa or e-visa to enter the country.
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
Later this week, the default thumbnail size will be increased from 220px to 250px. This changes how pages are shown in all wikis and has been requested by some communities for many years, but wasn't previously possible due to technical limitations.
File thumbnails are now stored in discrete sizes. If a page specifies a thumbnail size that's not among the standard sizes (20, 40, 60, 120, 250, 330, 500, 960), then MediaWiki will pick the closest larger thumbnail size but will tell the browser to downscale it to the requested size. In these cases, nothing will change visually but users might load slightly larger images. If it doesn't matter which thumbnail size is used in a page, please pick one of the standard sizes to avoid the extra in-browser down-scaling step.
Updates for editors
The Wikimedia Foundation are working on a system called Edge Uniques which will enable A/B testing, help protect against Distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks), and make it easier to understand how many visitors the Wikimedia sites have. This is so that they can more efficiently build tools which help readers, and make it easier for readers to find what they are looking for.
To improve security for users, a small percentage of logins will now require that the account owner input a one-time password emailed to their account. It is recommended that you check that the email address on your account is set correctly, and that it has been confirmed, and that you have an email set for this purpose.
"Are you interested in taking a short survey to improve tools used for reviewing or reverting edits on your Wiki?" This question will be asked at 7 wikis starting next week, on Recent Changes and Watchlist pages. The Moderator Tools team wants to know more about activities that involve looking at new edits made to your Wikimedia project, and determining whether they adhere to your project's policies.
The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: an invitation for tool maintainers to attend the Toolforge UI Community Feedback Session on April 15th; recent community metrics; and recent technical blog posts.
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
Wikifunctions is now integrated with Dagbani Wikipedia since April 15. It is the first project that will be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in articles. A function is something that takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, such as adding up two numbers, converting miles into metres, calculating how much time has passed since an event, or declining a word into a case. Wikifunctions will allow users to do that through a simple call of a stable and global function, rather than via a local template.
A new type of lint error has been created: Empty headings (documentation). The Linter extension's purpose is to identify wikitext patterns that must or can be fixed in pages and provide some guidance about what the problems are with those patterns and how to fix them.
Following its publication on HuggingFace, the "Structured Contents" dataset, developed by Wikimedia Enterprise, is now also available on Kaggle. This Beta initiative is focused on making Wikimedia data more machine-readable for high-volume reusers. They are releasing this beta version in a location that open dataset communities already use, in order to seek feedback, to help improve the product for a future wider release. You can read more about the overall Structured Contents project, and about the first release that's freely usable.
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings and events
The Editing and Machine Learning Teams invite interested volunteers to a video meeting to discuss Peacock check, which is the latest Edit check that will detect "peacock" or "overly-promotional" or "non-neutral" language whilst an editor is typing. Editors who work with newcomers, or help to fix this kind of writing, or are interested in how we use artificial intelligence in our projects are encouraged to attend. The meeting will be on April 28, 2025 at 18:00–19:00 UTC and hosted on Zoom.
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
Event organizers who host collaborative activities on multiple wikis, including Bengali, Japanese, and Korean Wikipedias, will have access to the CampaignEvents extension this week. Also, admins in the Wikipedia where the extension is enabled will automatically be granted the event organizer right soon. They won't have to manually grant themselves the right before they can manage events as requested by a community.
The release of the next major version of Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, is scheduled for 29 April 2025. Technical editors will have access to the release by the week of 5 May 2025. This update will include a number of breaking changes and minor visual changes. Instructions on handling the breaking and visual changes are documented on this page. Pre-release testing is reported in T386298, with post-release issues tracked in T392379 and T392390.
Users of Wiki Replicas will notice that the database views of ipblocks, ipblocks_ipindex, and ipblocks_compat are now deprecated. Users can query the block and block_target new views that mirror the new tables in the production database instead. The deprecated views will be removed entirely from Wiki Replicas in June, 2025.
The 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which brings the global technical community together to connect, brainstorm, and hack existing projects, will take place from May 2 to 4th, 2025, at Istanbul, Turkey.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Admins can now choose which namespaces are permitted for Event Registration via Community Configuration (documentation). The default setup is for event registration to be permitted in the Event namespace, but other namespaces (such as the project namespace or WikiProject namespace) can now be added. With this change, communities like WikiProjects can now more easily use Event Registration for their collaborative activities.
Editors can now transclude the Collaboration List on a wiki page (documentation). The Collaboration List is an automated list of events and WikiProjects on the wikis, accessed via Special:AllEvents (example). Now, the Collaboration List can be added to all sorts of wiki pages, such as: a wiki mainpage, a WikiProject page, an affiliate page, an event page, or even a user page.
Developers who use the moment library in gadgets and user scripts should revise their code to use alternatives like the Intl library or the new mediawiki.DateFormatter library. The moment library has been deprecated and will begin to log messages in the developer console. You can see a global search for current uses, and ask related questions in this Phabricator task.
Developers who maintain a tool that queries the Wikidata term store tables (wbt_*) need to update their code to connect to a separate database cluster. These tables are being split into a separate database cluster. Tools that query those tables via the wiki replicas must be adapted to connect to the new cluster instead. Documentation and related links are available.
The latest Chart Project newsletter is available. It includes updates on preparing to expand the deployment to additional wikis as soon as this week (starting May 6) and scaling up over the following weeks, plus exploring filtering and transforming source data.
An RfC was closed with consensus to allow editors to opt-out of seeing "sticky decorative elements". Such elements should now be wrapped in {{sticky decoration wrapper}}. Editors who wish to opt out can follow the instructions at WP:STICKYDECO.
An RfC has resulted in a broad prohibition on the use of AI-generated images in articles. A few common-sense exceptions are recognized.
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 "Get shortened URL" link on the sidebar now includes a QR code. Wikimedia site users can now use it by scanning or downloading it to quickly share and access shared content from Wikimedia sites, conveniently.
Updates for editors
The Wikimedia Foundation is working on a system called Edge Uniques, which will enable A/B testing, help protect against distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks), and make it easier to understand how many visitors the Wikimedia sites have. This is to help more efficiently build tools which help readers, and make it easier for readers to find what they are looking for. Tech News has previously written about this. The deployment will be gradual. Some might see the Edge Uniques cookie the week of 19 May. You can discuss this on the talk page.
Starting May 19, 2025, Event organisers in wikis with the CampaignEvents extension enabled can use Event Registration in the project namespace (e.g., Wikipedia namespace, Wikidata namespace). With this change, communities don't need admins to use the feature. However, wikis that don't want this change can remove and add the permitted namespaces at Special:CommunityConfiguration/CampaignEvents.
The Wikipedia project now has a Wikipedia in Nupe (w:nup:). This is a language primarily spoken in the North Central region of Nigeria. Speakers of this language are invited to contribute to new Wikipedia.
Developers can now access pre-parsed Dutch Wikipedia, amongst others (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese) through the Structured Contents snapshots (beta). The content includes parsed Wikipedia abstracts, descriptions, main images, infoboxes, article sections, and references.
The /page/data-parsoid REST API endpoint is no longer in use and will be deprecated. It is scheduled to be turned off on June 7, 2025.
The IPv6 support is a newly introduced Cloud virtual network that significantly boosts Wikimedia platforms' scalability, security, and readiness for the future. If you are a technical contributor eager to learn more, check out this blog post for an in-depth look at the journey to IPv6.
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 Editing Team and the Machine Learning Team are working on a new check for newcomers: Peacock check. Using a prediction model, this check will encourage editors to improve the tone of their edits, using artificial intelligence. We invite volunteers to review the first version of the Peacock language model for the following languages: Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Japanese. Users from these wikis interested in reviewing this model are invited to sign up at MediaWiki.org. The deadline to sign up is on May 23, which will be the start date of the test.
Updates for editors
From May 20, 2025, oversighters and checkusers will need to have their accounts secured with two-factor authentication (2FA) to be able to use their advanced rights. All users who belong to these two groups and do not have 2FA enabled have been informed. In the future, this requirement may be extended to other users with advanced rights. Learn more.
Multiblocks will begin mass deployment by the end of the month: all non-Wikipedia projects plus Catalan Wikipedia will adopt Multiblocks in the week of May 26, while all other Wikipedias will adopt it in the week of June 2. Please contact the team if you have concerns. Administrators can test the new user interface now on your own wiki by browsing to Special:Block?usecodex=1, and can test the full multiblocks functionality on testwiki. Multiblocks is the feature that makes it possible for administrators to impose different types of blocks on the same user at the same time. See the help page for more information.
Later this week, the Special:SpecialPages listing of almost all special pages will be updated with a new design. This page has been redesigned to improve the user experience in a few ways, including: The ability to search for names and aliases of the special pages, sorting, more visible marking of restricted special pages, and a more mobile-friendly look. The new version can be previewed at Beta Cluster now, and feedback shared in the task.
The Chart extension is being enabled on more wikis. For a detailed list of when the extension will be enabled on your wiki, please read the deployment timeline.
Wikifunctions will be deployed on May 27 on five Wiktionaries: Hausa, Igbo, Bengali, Malayalam, and Dhivehi/Maldivian. This is the second batch of deployment planned for the project. After deployment, the projects will be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in their pages. A function is something that takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, such as adding up two numbers, converting miles into metres, calculating how much time has passed since an event, or declining a word into a case. Wikifunctions will allow users to do that through a simple call of a stable and global function, rather than via a local template.
Later this week, the Wikimedia Foundation will publish a hub for experiments. This is to showcase and get user feedback on product experiments. The experiments help the Wikimedia movement understand new users, how they interact with the internet and how it could affect the Wikimedia movement. Some examples are generated video, the Wikipedia Roblox speedrun game and the Discord bot.
View all 29 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a bug with creating an account using the API, which has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
Gadgets and user scripts that interact with Special:Block may need to be updated to work with the new manage blocks interface. Please review the developer guide for more information. If you need help or are unable to adapt your script to the new interface, please let the team know on the talk page.
The mw.title object allows you to get information about a specific wiki page in the Lua programming language. Starting this week, a new property will be added to the object, named isDisambiguationPage. This property allows you to check if a page is a disambiguation page, without the need to write a custom function.
User script developers can use a new reverse proxy tool to load javascript and css from gitlab.wikimedia.org with mw.loader.load. The tool's author hopes this will enable collaborative development workflows for user scripts including linting, unit tests, code generation, and code review on gitlab.wikimedia.org without a separate copy-and-paste step to publish scripts to a Wikimedia wiki for integration and acceptance testing. See Tool:Gitlab-content on Wikitech for more information.
The 12th edition of Wiki Workshop 2025, a forum that brings together researchers that explore all aspects of Wikimedia projects, will be held virtually on 21-22 May. Researchers can register now.
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
A community-wide discussion about a very delicate issue for the development of Abstract Wikipedia is now open on Meta: where to store the abstract content that will be developed through functions from Wikifunctions and data from Wikidata. The discussion is open until June 12 at Abstract Wikipedia/Location of Abstract Content, and every opinion is welcomed. The decision will be made and communicated after the consultation period by the Foundation.
Updates for editors
Since last week, on all wikis except the largest 20, people using the mobile visual editor will have additional tools in the menu bar, accessed using the new + toolbar button. To start, the new menu will include options to add: citations, hieroglyphs, and code blocks. Deployment to the remaining wikis is scheduled to happen in June.
The #ifexist parser function will no longer register a link to its target page. This will improve the usefulness of Special:WantedPages, which will eventually only list pages that are the target of an actual red link. This change will happen gradually as the source pages are updated.
This week, the Moderator Tools team will launch a new filter to Recent Changes, starting at Indonesian Wikipedia. This new filter highlights edits that are likely to be reverted. The goal is to help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic edits. Other wikis will benefit from this filter in the future.
Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users will see suggestions of articles for further reading. The feature will be available on both desktop and mobile. Readers of Catalan, Hebrew, and Italian Wikipedias and some sister projects will receive the change between May 21 and mid-June. Readers of other wikis will receive the change later. The goal is to encourage users to read the wikis more. Learn more.
Some users of the Wikipedia Android app can use a new feature for readers, WikiGames, a daily trivia game based on real historical events. The release has started as an A/B test, available to 50% of users in the following languages: English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Turkish.
The Newsletter extension that is available on MediaWiki.org allows the creation of various newsletters for global users. The extension can now publish new issues as section links on an existing page, instead of requiring a new page for each issue.
The previously deprecated ipblocks views in Wiki Replicas will be removed in the beginning of June. Users are encouraged to query the new block and block_target views instead.
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 Chart extension is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. Editors can use this new extension to create interactive data visualizations like bar, line, area, and pie charts. Charts are designed to replace many of the uses of the legacy Graph extension.
Updates for editors
It is now easier to configure automatic citations for your wiki within the visual editor's citation generator. Administrators can now set a default template by using the _default key in the local MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json page (example diff). Setting this default will also help to future-proof your existing configurations when new item types are added in the future. You can still set templates for individual item types as they will be preferred to the default template.
Starting the week of June 2, bots logging in using action=login or action=clientlogin will fail more often. This is because of stronger protections against suspicious logins. Bots using bot passwords or using a loginless authentication method such as OAuth are not affected. If your bot is not using one of those, you should update it; using action=login without a bot password was deprecated in 2016. For most bots, this only requires changing what password the bot uses.
From this week, Wikimedia wikis will allow ES2017 features in JavaScript code for official code, gadgets, and user scripts. The most visible feature of ES2017 is async/await syntax, allowing for easier-to-read code. Until this week, the platform only allowed up to ES2016, and a few months before that, up to ES2015.
Scholarship applications to participate in the GLAM Wiki Conference 2025 are now open. The conference will take place from 30 October to 1 November, in Lisbon, Portugal. GLAM contributors who lack the means to support their participation can apply here. Scholarship applications close on June 7th.
An Articles for Creation backlog drive is happening in June 2025, with over 1,600 drafts awaiting review from the past two months. In addition to AfC participants, all administrators and new page patrollers can help review using the Yet Another AFC Helper Script, which can be enabled in the Gadgets settings. Sign up here to participate!
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 Trust and Safety Product team is finalizing work needed to roll out temporary accounts on large Wikipedias later this month. The team has worked with stewards and other users with extended rights to predict and address many use cases that may arise on larger wikis, so that community members can continue to effectively moderate and patrol temporary accounts. This will be the second of three phases of deployment – the last one will take place in September at the earliest. For more information about the recent developments on the project, see this update. If you have any comments or questions, write on the talk page, and join a CEE Catch Up this Tuesday.
Updates for editors
The watchlist expiry feature allows editors to watch pages for a limited period of time. After that period, the page is automatically removed from your watchlist. Starting this week, you can set a preference for the default period of time to watch pages. The preferences also allow you to set different default watch periods for editing existing pages, pages you create, and when using rollback.
Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.
The appearance of talk pages will change at almost all Wikipedias (some have already received this design change, a few will get these changes later). You can read details about the changes on Diff. It is possible to opt out of these changes in user preferences ("Show discussion activity").
Users with specific extended rights (including administrators, bureaucrats, checkusers, oversighters, and stewards) can now have IP addresses of all temporary accounts revealed automatically during time-limited periods where they need to combat high-speed account-hopping vandalism. This feature was requested by stewards.
This week, the Moderator Tools and Machine Learning teams will continue the rollout of a new filter to Recent Changes, releasing it to several more Wikipedias. This filter utilizes the Revert Risk model, which was created by the Research team, to highlight edits that are likely to be reverted and help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic contributions. The feature will be rolled out to the following Wikipedias: Afrikaans Wikipedia, Belarusian Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Welsh Wikipedia, Hawaiian Wikipedia, Icelandic Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia. The rollout will continue in the coming weeks to include the rest of the Wikipedias in this project.
AbuseFilter editors active on Meta-Wiki and large Wikipedias are kindly asked to update AbuseFilter to make it compatible with temporary accounts. A link to the instructions and the private lists of filters needing verification are available on Phabricator.
Lua modules now have access to the name of a page's associated thumbnail image, and on some wikis to the WikiProject assessment information. This is possible using two new properties on mw.title objects, named pageImage and pageAssessments.
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
You can nominate your favorite tools for the sixth edition of the Coolest Tool Award. Nominations are anonymous and will be open until June 25. You can re-use the survey to nominate multiple tools.
Foundation staff and technical volunteers use Wikimedia APIs to build the tools, applications, features, and integrations that enhance user experiences. Over the coming years, the MediaWiki Interfaces team will be investing in Wikimedia web (HTTP) APIs to better serve technical volunteer needs and protect Wikimedia infrastructure from potential abuse. You can read more about their plans to evolve the APIs in this Techblog post.
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
This week, the Moderator Tools and Machine Learning teams will continue the rollout of a new filter to Recent Changes, releasing it to the third and last batch of Wikipedias. This filter utilizes the Revert Risk model, which was created by the Research team, to highlight edits that are likely to be reverted and help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic contributions. The feature will be rolled out to the following Wikipedias: Azerbaijani Wikipedia, Latin Wikipedia, Macedonian Wikipedia, Malayalam Wikipedia, Marathi Wikipedia, Norwegian Nynorsk Wikipedia, Punjabi Wikipedia, Swahili Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Tagalog Wikipedia. The rollout will continue in the coming weeks to include the rest of the Wikipedias in this project.
Updates for editors
Last week, temporary accounts were rolled out on Czech, Korean, and Turkish Wikipedias. This and next week, deployments on larger Wikipedias will follow. Share your thoughts about the project.
Later this week, the Editing team will release Multi Check to all Wikipedias (except English Wikipedia). This feature shows multiple Reference checks within the editing experience. This encourages users to add citations when they add multiple new paragraphs to a Wikipedia article. This feature was previously available as an A/B test. The test shows that users who are shown multiple checks are 1.3 times more likely to add a reference to their edit, and their edit is less likely to be reverted (-34.7%).
A few pages need to be renamed due to software updates and to match more recent Unicode standards. All of these changes are related to title-casing changes. Approximately 71 pages and 3 files will be renamed, across 15 wikis; the complete list is in the task. The developers will rename these pages next week, and they will fix redirects and embedded file links a few minutes later via a system settings update.
View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that had caused pages to scroll upwards when text near the top was selected.
Updates for technical contributors
Editors can now use Lua modules to filter and transform tabular data for use with Extension:Chart. This can be used for things like selecting a subset of rows or columns from the source data, converting between units, statistical processing, and many other useful transformations. Information on how to use transforms is available.
The all_links variable in AbuseFilter is now renamed to new_links for consistency with other variables. Old usages will still continue to work.
The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: the recent updates for the "Add a Link" Task, two new Newcomer Engagement Features, and updates to Community Configuration.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
AbuseFilter maintainers can now match against IP reputation data in AbuseFilters. IP reputation data is information about the proxies and VPNs associated with the user's IP address. This data is not shown publicly and is not generated for actions performed by registered accounts.
Hidden content that is within collapsible parts of wikipages will now be revealed when someone searches the page using the web browser's "Find in page" function (Ctrl+F or ⌘F) in supporting browsers.
A new feature, called Favourite Templates, will be deployed later this week on all projects (except English Wikipedia, which will receive the feature next week), following a piloting phase on Polish and Arabic Wikipedia, and Italian and English Wikisource. The feature will provide a better way for new and experienced contributors to recall and discover templates via the template dialog, by allowing users to put templates on a special "favourite list". The feature works with both the visual editor and the wikitext editor. The feature is a community wishlist focus area.
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that had caused some Notifications to be sent multiple times.
Administrator elections will take place this month. Administrator elections are an alternative to RFA that is a gentler process for candidates due to secret voting and multiple people running together. The call for candidates is July 9–15, the discussion phase is July 18–22, and the voting phase is July 23–29. Get ready to submit your candidacy, or (with their consent) to nominate a talented candidate!
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
Temporary accounts have been rolled out on 18 large and medium-sized Wikipedias, including German, Japanese, French, and Chinese. Now, about 1/3 of all logged-out activity across wikis is coming from temporary accounts. Users involved in patrolling may be interested in two new documentation pages: Access to IP, explaining everything related to access to temporary account IP addresses, and Repository with a list of new gadgets and user scripts.
Updates for editors
Anyone can play an experimental new game, WikiRun, that lets you race through Wikipedia by clicking from one article to another, aiming to reach a target page in as few steps and in as little time as possible. The project's goal is to explore new ways of engaging readers. Try playing the game and let the team know what you think on the talk page.
Users of the Wikipedia Android app in some languages can now play the new trivia game. Which came first? is a simple history game where you guess which of two events happened earlier on today's date. It was previously available as an A/B test. It is now available to all users in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, and Chinese. The goal of the feature is to help engage with new generations of readers.
Users of the iOS Wikipedia App in some languages may see a new tabbed browsing feature that enables you to open multiple tabs while reading. This feature makes it easier to explore related topics and switch between articles. The A/B test is currently running in Arabic, English, and Japanese in selected regions. More details are available on the Tabbed Browsing project page.
A new feature related to Template Recall and Discovery will be deployed later this week to all Wikimedia projects: a template category browser will be introduced to assist users in finding templates to put in their “favourite” list. The browser will allow users to browse a list of templates which have been organised into a given category tree. The feature has been requested by the community through the Community Wishlist.
It is now possible to access watchlist preferences from the watchlist page. Also the redundant button to edit the watchlist has been removed.
As part of MediaWiki 1.44 there is now a unified built-in Notifications system that makes it easier for developers to send, manage, and customize notifications. Check out the updated documentation at Manual:Notifications, information about migration in T388663 and details on deprecated hooks in T389624.
WikidataCon 2025, the conference dedicated to Wikidata is now open for session proposals and for registration. This year's event will be held online from October 31 – November 02 and will explore on the theme of "Connecting People through Linked Open Data".
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
Featured templates, a new feature related to Template Recall and Discovery will be deployed this week to all Wikimedia projects: With this feature, editors will be able to quickly access a list of templates that are likely to be useful. These templates will be displayed in a list, under the "featured" tab of the template discovery interface. Administrators can define the list via the Community Configuration interface. The feature fulfills a request by the community through the Community Wishlist.
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the request to add Malayalam fonts in the Wikisource Book Export Tool was resolved and now, the rendering of Malayalam letters in exported Wikisource books are accurate.
WikiIndaba 2025 scholarship application and program submission is open until 23:59 GMT on July 20. WikiIndaba is a regional conference for African Wikimedians both on the continent and in the diaspora to unite and grow together. Submit your scholarship application and program proposal now!
WikiCon Brasil 2025 will take place on July 19-20 in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. The Brazilian community members are encouraged to register and attend!
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 Translation Suggestions feature in the Content Translation tool now has another level of article filters added to the "... More" category. Translators who use the Suggestions feature can now select and receive article suggestions that are customized to geographical locations of their interest using the new "Regions" filter.
Administrators can now limit "Add a Link" to newcomers. The "Add a Link" Structured Task helps new account holders start editing, but some communities have requested the ability to restrict it to its intended audience: newcomers. Administrators can configure this setting within the Community Configuration feature.
For AbuseFilter editors on some wikis, it is now possible to filter edits based on the RevertRisk score of the edit being attempted. It is only populated if the action being evaluated is an edit. For more information, please see the ORES/AbuseFilter variables documentation.
The Beta Cluster wikis have been moved from beta.wmflabs.org to beta.wmcloud.org. Users may need to update URLs in any tools, or in their password managers. Any related issues can be reported in the task.
WikiCite 2025 will take place from 29–31 August, both online and in-person in Bern, Switzerland. The event's goals are to reconnect communities, institutions, and individuals working with open citations, bibliographic data, and the Wikidata/Wikibase ecosystem. Registration is open and the call for proposals will be announced soon.
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 Community Tech team will be focusing on wishes related to Watchlists and Recent Changes pages, over the next few months. They are looking for feedback. Please read the latest update, and if you have ideas, please submit a wish on the topic.
Updates for editors
The Wikimedia Commons community has decided to block cross-wiki uploads to Wikimedia Commons, for all users without autoconfirmed rights on that wiki, starting on August 16. This is because of widespread problems related to files that are uploaded by newcomers. Users who are affected by this will get an error message with a link to the less restrictive UploadWizard on Commons. Please help translating the message or give feedback on the message text. Please also update your local help pages to explain this restriction.
On wikis with temporary accounts enabled and Meta-Wiki, administrators may now set up a footer for the Special:Contributions pages of temporary accounts, similar to those which can be shown on IP and user-account pages. They may do it by creating the page named MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer-temp.
Wikimania 2025 will run from August 6–9. The program is available for you to plan which sessions you want to attend. Most sessions will be live-streamed, with exceptions for those that show the "no camera" icon. If you are joining online to watch live-streams and use the interactive features, please register for a free virtual ticket. For example, you may be interested in technical sessions such as:
The MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference, Fall 2025 will be held 28–30 October 2025 in Hanover, Germany. This event is organized by and for the third-party MediaWiki community. You can propose sessions and register to attend.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 27th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 2025! Boy, does it feel good to kick off the year with an issue. Yep, it's been a year since we cleared out the 2022-2024 backlog with issues 23 and 24! Good times. Though in this case "a year" just means... 6 months? 😯 The salience of whatever joke I was planning to make here has vanished speedily. Aaron Liu (talk) 21:00, 31 July 2025 (UTC)
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
Featured script
WikiTextExpander by Polygnotus, is this edition's featured script. At the click of a configurable hotkey, this script will find and replace or link a configurable list of phrases within the selected text in all source editors (even in the comment/reply field!). Besides allowing the quick insertion of templated messages, this script greatly mitigates the WP:WTF? problem by providing both the legibility of familiar words and the convenience of shortcuts. And to those asking, the capitalization of "Wikitext" as "WikiText" was a necessary sacrifice for far-more-memorable acronymy.
Updated scripts
CanonNi: AlertAssistant has been fixed and rewritten using OOUI instead of Twinkle's Morebits. Such modern, very tool. (Do note that the maintainer has since become inactive.)
NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh/AjaxLoader has been updated to use modern JS APIs that replace the browser's URL bar with the link you clicked on to load in place. The "back" (and "forward") buttons also work now. Cool, innit?
andrybak: Unsigned helper no longer shows an error when the message to sign was added in the earliest 50 revisions of a page's history. This is especially relevant to pages with short histories.
BilledMammal/Move+ needs updating to order list of pages handle lists of pages to move correctly regardless of the discussion's page, so that we may avoid repeating fiasco history.
Requested scripts
We need scripts that...
allow sorting lists of citations such as by URI or other identifier
automatically convert the capitalization of citations' titles
collect a list of discussion participants and generate a ping list
In breaking m:Tech/News, Gadgets can now include .vue files. This makes it easier to develop modern user interfaces using Vue.js, in particular using Codex, the official design system of Wikimedia. Codex icons are now also available. The documentation has examples.
New scripts
Appo/Globstory integrates OpenHistoryMap, updating the map whenever hovering/clicking on a location or year, the latter of which changes the map to be (hopefully) accurate to the year selected. It's pretty interesting.
linkinfo Somewhat similar to WP:NavPops, Awesome Aasim/linkinfo(pictured) provides a collection of links to replace the right-click context menu, presented beautifully.
PreviousDiscussions provides a link to search for your username on subpages of another user's userpage and talkpage conveniently.
Twineeea/noRedLinks brings you to the "read" instead of the "create" tab when you visit a red link. Contemplate life's mysteries as you stare into the blank! Deeply.
No, this is not going to be the enduring tradition of S++ for the future. This was meant to be a joke for the special occasion on the first day of the fourth month but was delayed by four months because I'm lazy.
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
Editors can now enable the User Info card. This feature adds an icon next to usernames on history pages and similar user-contribution log pages. When you tap or click on the icon, it displays data related to that user account such as the number of edits, reverted edits, blocks, and more. It's part of a broader project to make it easier for moderators to evaluate account trustworthiness. The feature can be enabled in your global preferences, and later this week it will be available in local preferences.
Everybody is invited to share comments on Collaborative Contributions, a project recently launched by the Connection team. The project aims to create a new way to display the impact of collaborative editing activities (such as edit-a-thons, backlog drives, and WikiProjects) on the wikis. Post your comments on the project talk page.
Administrators can now define the default block duration for temporary accounts. To do that, they need to create a page named MediaWiki:Ipb-default-expiry-temporary-account and use a value defined in MediaWiki:Ipboptions. This allows administrators to easily block temporary accounts for 90 days, which is functionally equivalent to an indefinite block. The advantage of this solution is that it does not clutter Special:BlockList. More documentation is available.
Gadgets can now include .vue files. This makes it easier to develop modern user interfaces using Vue.js, in particular using Codex, the official design system of Wikimedia. Codex icons can be loaded through the gadget definition. The documentation has examples. For user scripts that use Vue.js, an API module now exists to load Codex icons.
Module developers can now use a Lua interface to simplify the preparation of Lua modules for translation on Meta-Wiki. This improvement makes it easier for translators to find and edit module strings without dealing with raw Lua code. It helps prevent mistakes that could break the module during translation. Module developers and translators are invited to watch the demo video, read more about translatable modules to understand how it works, refer to Meta-Wiki's Module:User Wikimedia project for example usage, and share their feedback on how well it addresses the challenges in their workflow. The interface still has some performance issues, so it should not be used in widely used modules yet.
Developers of external tools that connect to Wikimedia pages must set a user-agent that complies with the user-agent policy. This policy will start to be more strongly enforced in August because of external crawlers that are overusing Wikimedia's resources. Tools that are hosted on Wikimedia's Toolforge or Cloud VPS will not be affected by this for now, but should still set a user-agent. More technical details are available, and related questions are welcome in that task.
Parsoid Read Views is going to be rolling out to some smaller Wikipedias over the next few weeks, following the successful transition of Wikivoyages and Wiktionaries to Parsoid Read Views. For more information, see the Parsoid/Parser Unification project page.
Wikimania 2025 will run from August 6–9. The program is available for you to plan which sessions you want to attend. Most sessions will be live-streamed, with exceptions for those that show the "no camera" icon. If you are joining online to watch live-streams and use the interactive features, please register for a free virtual ticket. For example, you may be interested in technical sessions such as:
Following a request for comment, there is a new policy outlining the granting of permissions to view the IP addresses of temporary accounts. Temporary account deployment on the English Wikipedia is currently scheduled for September 2025, and editors can request access to the permission ahead of time. Admins are encouraged to keep an eye on the request page; there will likely be a flood of editors requesting the permission when they realize they can no longer see IP addresses.
South Asia (WP:CT/SA) is designated a contentious topic. The topic area is specifically defined as All pages related to the region of South Asia (India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal), broadly construed, including but not limited to history, politics, ethnicity, and social groups.
Wikimania 2025 is happening in Nairobi, Kenya, and online from August 6 to August 9. This year marks 20 years of Wikimania. Interested users can join the online event. Registration for the virtual event is free and will remain open throughout Wikimania. You can register here now.
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 WikiEditor toolbar now includes its keyboard shortcuts in the tooltips for its buttons. This will help to improve the discoverability of this feature.
The search bar on the Minerva skin (mobile) has been updated to use the same type-ahead search component that is used on the Vector 2022 skin. There are no changes in search functionality but there are minor visual changes. Specifically, the close-search button has been changed from an "X" to a back arrow. This helps to distinguish it from the other "X" button that is used to clear any text.
Editors on some wikis will see a new toggle for "Group results by page" on watchlist, related changes, and recent changes pages. This is an A/B experiment that is planned to start on August 11, and will run for 3–6 weeks on the Bengali, Chinese, Czech, French, Greek, Portuguese, and Urdu Wikipedias. The experiment will examine how making this feature more discoverable might affect editors' ability to find the edits they are looking for.
The multiwiki datasets of Unicode data have been moved to Category:Unicode Module Datasets on Wikimedia Commons, to follow the idea of "One common data source, multiple local wikis". Most wikis have been updated to use the Commons version. You can ask questions at the talkpage.
Lua code can add warnings when something is wrong, by using the mw.addWarning() function. It is now possible to add more than one warning, instead of new warnings replacing old ones. If you maintain a Lua module that used warnings, you should check it still works as expected.
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
Later this week, people who are logged-in and have the "Discussion tools" Beta Feature enabled will gain the ability to "Thank" individual comments directly from talk pages, rather than needing to navigate to page history. Learn more about this feature.
An A/B test comparing two versions of the desktop donate link launched on testwiki on 12 August and on English Wikipedia 14 August for 0.1% of logged out users on the desktop site. The experiment will run for three weeks, ending on 12 September.
An A/A test to measure the baseline for reader retention was launched 12 August using Experimentation Lab. This measures the percentage of users who revisit a wiki after their initial visit over a 14-day period. No visual changes are expected. The experiment will run through 31 August.
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
Template authors can now use additional CSS properties, since the CSS sanitizer used by TemplateStyles was updated. For example: width: fit-content; ruby-align; relative units such as lh; and custom strings in list-style-type. These improvements are a Community Wishlist wish.
On large wikis, the default time period to display edits from, within the Special:RecentChanges page, has been changed from 7 days to 1 day. This is part of a performance improvement project. This should have no user-facing impact due to the quantity of edits on these wikis.
Wikimedia Commons videos were not shown in the Videos tab in Google Search. The problem was investigated and reported to Google who have now fixed the issue.
One new wiki has been created: a Wiktionary in Betawi (wikt:bew:)
Two fields of the recentchanges database table are being removed. rc_new and rc_type are being removed in favor of rc_source. Queries to these older fields will start to fail starting this week and developers should use rc_source instead. These older fields were deprecated over 10 years ago and should not be in use. This is part of work to improve the performance and stability of queries to the recentchanges table.
The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: support for new languages in MediaWiki and translatewiki; the start of the Language Onboarding and Development project to help support the growth of new and small wikis; updates on research projects; and more.
Meetings and events
The next Language Community Meeting is happening soon, August 29th at 15:00 UTC. This week's meeting will cover: the Avro keyboard developers from Wikimedia Bangladesh, who were recently awarded a national award for their contributions to this keyboard; and other topics.
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 Editing team wants to compile a list of templates, jargon terms, and policies used in edit summaries when a copyright violation is removed. This will help them identify the number of edits reverted due to copyright issues. We invite community members from the following Wikis to list these terms in T402601, or to share their list with Trizek_(WMF): Arabic Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, Persian Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Vietnamese Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia. This project is open until September 9th 2025.
Updates for editors
The CampaignEvents extension has been enabled for all Wikisources. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. The extension has three features: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List. To request the extension for your wiki, visit the Deployment information page.
The lists in the footer of the editing interface, such as "Templates used on this page," will now be organized into columns when there is enough space. This enhancement minimizes scrolling when editing lengthy articles on Wikipedia.
On September 3rd, 2025 we will increase the sampling percentages of our group by toggle experiment of the Special:RecentChanges, Special:Watchlist, and Special:RelatedChanges pages on the Chinese, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias to 100 percent, allowing more editors to be part of this experiment. This adjustment is intended to ensure we have sufficient data to make informed decisions when evaluating the experiment results.
Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users will see suggestions of articles for further reading on English Wikipedia beginning the week of September 22. The feature will be available on both desktop and mobile. All non-English wikis received this change in June and July. The goal is to make it easier for users to find articles. Learn more.
Wikifunctions now has a new capability called "lightweight enumeration types", an enumeration type is simply a fixed set of values that's in the type's definition. This capability makes it quick and easy to define such a type, and allows for the reuse of values that are already present in Wikidata. Here is a newsletter to learn more.
The latest Readers Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: the formation of two new teams — Reader Growth and Reader Experience; insights into declining pageviews and account creations; highlights from the Wikimania Nairobi panel on improving the reading experience; upcoming experiments to engage new and existing readers; and more.
An RfC is open on whether use of emojis with no encyclopedic value in mainspace and draftspace (e.g., at the start of paragraphs or in place of bullet points) should be added as a criterion under G15.
An RfC is in progress to amend the structure, rules, and procedures of the Arbitration Committee election and resolve any issues not covered by existing rules.
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 Editing team is working on a new check: Paste check. This check informs newcomers who paste text into Wikipedia that the content might not be accepted. This check is an effort to increase the likelihood that the new content people are adding to Wikipedia is aligned with the Movement's commitment to offering information under a free content license. This check will soon be tested at a few wikis. If your community is interested in this test, please tell us in this task, or contact the team.
Updates for editors
Later this week, users of the "⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽" beta feature will be able to use a linting tool to see errors or other potential problems in wikitext in real time. See the help page for more information.
When browsing a wiki (like en.wikipedia.org), the software responds in one of two ways: a desktop page, or a redirect to a mobile version on an "m" domain (like en.m.wikipedia.org). Over the next three weeks, MediaWiki will start displaying the mobile version to mobile devices directly on the standard domain, without this redirect. This change does not affect existing m-dot URLs, or the "Desktop view" opt-out. Learn more.
When an edit changes the categories of a page, the changes to the category membership counts are now happening asynchronously. This improves the speed of saving edits, especially when moving many pages to or from the same category, and reduces the risk of site outages, but it means that the counts can show outdated information for a few minutes.
Edits on Wikidata to qualifiers (properties and values) and references (properties and values) in a Wikidata item statement will now not add entries to the RecentChanges or Watchlist pages on all other Wikis. This is a temporary change to improve performance while other solutions are created. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. Learn more.
Japanese-language wikis have had a major upgrade to the way that search works. The new search should generally give more accurate and more relevant search results.
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
References lists that are made using the <references/>tag will now automatically display with columns in Vector 2022 when readers are using its 'standard' settings for text-size and page-width.
Starting in the week of October 6, on small wikis and medium wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled, all autoconfirmed users will be able to use Event Registration as an organizer. No changes will be made for large wikis unless requested in Phabricator. This change is being made to make it easier for more people to use Event Registration, especially on wikis that are less likely to have policies related to the Event Organizer right. Learn more.
Users that search using regular expressions (regex) can now use additional features including:
for the intitle: keyword: metacharacters for start-of-line (^) and end-of-line ($) anchors
for both intitle: and insource: keywords: shorthand character classes for digits (\d), whitespace (\s), and word characters (\w); and escape codes for line feed (\r), newline (\n), tab (\t), and unicode (e.g. \uHHHH).
When you search for text that looks like an IP, the system will now show search results. It used to take you to the contributions for that IP instead of showing search results.
View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that affected users who used the page-tabs to switch from wikitext editing of a section into the visualeditor.
Updates for technical contributors
The MediaWiki Interfaces team is redesigning the Wikimedia REST API Sandbox with Codex. If you have feedback on improvements for the API documentation or what makes developer experiences smooth (or frustrating), you’re invited to join an upcoming discovery interview, or leave feedback onwiki. Learn more.
Edits to Wikidata aliases (an alternative name for an item or a property) will now be shown in RecentChanges and Watchlist entries on other wikis less often, reducing unnecessary notifications. This will reduce the overall quantity of 'noisy' entries. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. Learn more.
The new Unicode 17.0 version has been released. The datasets on Commons for the Module:Unicode data have been updated. Wikipedias that do not use the Commons datasets should either update their own data or switch to the Commons datasets.
Users of the Wikimedia Enterprise Structured Contents endpoints can now access Parsed Tables. The new Parsed Tables feature extracts and represents Wikipedia tables in structured JSON. This improves machine accessibility as part of the Structured Contents initiative. Structured Contents output is freely available through the On-demand API, or through Wikimedia Cloud Services.
A dataset of English Wikipedia biographical information from Wikimedia Enterprise has been published on Kaggle, for evaluation and research. This provides structured data from more than 1.5 million biographies, including birth and death dates, education, affiliations, careers, awards, and more (from a June 2024 snapshot).
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
On September 24th at 15:00 UTC, all Wikimedia sites users will experience a brief read-only period due to a scheduled datacenter server switchover. The Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team will redirect all traffic from one primary server to its backup. You can listen to the switchover using the "Listen to Wikipedia" tool, where you will hear edits stop for a few minutes during the read-only phase, then resume. This twice-yearly datacenter server switchover ensures reliability by testing the backup datacenter, so that our sites can stay online even if the primary datacenter fails. You can read more about the process on the Diff blog.
Updates for editors
Editors of 60 more Wiktionaries will soon be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them into their pages. A function takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, like adding numbers, converting miles to meters, calculating elapsed time, or declining a word into a case. They will join the other 65 Wiktionary language editions, which already have access to embedded Wikifunctions calls. Later this year, plans are in place to expand to more Wiktionaries and the Incubator.
A new parser function has been added: {{#contentmodel}}. Template editors and admins can use it to get the localized or canonical name of the content model of a specific page. The function makes it easier to create and edit system messages, such as MediaWiki:editinginterface, even when you switch types of pages, like wiki, JavaScript, CSS or JSON page.
Adding or editing a DISPLAYTITLE for an article using VisualEditor will no longer be broken. Editors who use VisualEditor mode to modify the {{DISPLAYTITLE}} would no longer have the literal text "DISPLAYTITLE" or its localized variant added to their articles. A list of pages that may have been affected and might need cleanup is documented in this ticket.
Beta users of the Wikipedia Android app can now try the redesigned Activity tab, which replaces the Edits tab. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging.
Wikifunctions users can now import many essential facts involving geo-coordinates, quantities and time values from Wikidata. This is made possible by the creation of Wikifunctions types for these values, which makes them available for use by functions in Wikifunctions. Learn more about how this works in this video and Wikifunctions' August 1 newsletter (for quantities) and August 22 newsletter (for geo-coordinates).
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
A major software upgrade has been made to Phabricator. The update introduces performance improvements, a refreshed search interface, enhancements to Maniphest task search, updates to user profile pages and project workboards, new Herald automation features, as well as general text input, mobile experience improvements and more.
Updates for editors
The Community Tech team will release the new Community Wishlist extension on October 1, that will improve the way wishes will be submitted. The new extension will allow users to add tags to their wishes to better categorise them, and (in a future iteration) to filter them by status, tags and focus areas. It will also be possible to support individual wishes again, as requested by the community in many instances. The old system will be retired. There will be a brief period of downtime while the extension is deployed and wishes are migrated to the new system. You can read more about this in the latest update or you can consult the current documentation on MediaWiki.
As announced on Diff blog, the production trial of the hCaptcha service for bot detection has begun. The trial is currently using hCaptcha to protect account creation on Chinese, Persian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, and Turkish Wikipedias, where it will replace our existing CAPTCHA (FancyCaptcha). The goal with the trial is to better block bots while also improving usability and accessibility for users who encounter CAPTCHA challenges.
The CampaignEvents extension has been deployed to Wikimedia Commons. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. On Commons, anyone who is a registered user can use it as an event participant. To use it as an organizer, someone needs to have the event organizer right.
On wikis using the Mentorship system, communities can now opt experienced editors out of Mentorship through Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship. Within this setting, communities may define thresholds, based on edit count and account age, to decide when an editor is considered experienced enough to no longer receive Mentorship.
The Editing Team and the Machine Learning Team are working on a new check for newcomers: Tone check. Using a prediction model, this check will encourage editors to improve the tone of their edits, using artificial intelligence. We invite volunteers to review the first version of the Tone language model for the following languages: Arabic, Czech, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Farsi, Italian, Norwegian, Romanian and Latvian. Users from these wikis interested in reviewing this model are invited to sign up at MediaWiki.org. The deadline to sign up is on October 3, which will be the start date of the test.
The rollout of multiblocks had the side effect that non-active block logs may have been shown on Special:Contributions and on blocked users' user and user_talk pages. This issue will be fully resolved in a few days. As part of the fix, messages prefixed with sp-contributions-blocked-notice will be removed and replaced with those prefixed with blocked-notice-logextract in a few weeks. Please help translate the new messages and update any local overrides if needed.
There was a bug with links added using visual editor if they included characters such as [ ] | after the fragment identifier (#). They were not encoded properly creating an incorrect link. This has been fixed.
One new wiki has been created: a Wikiquote in Malay (q:ms:)
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the User Info Card now displays currently active global lock/blocks.
Updates for technical contributors
Later this week, editors using Lua modules will be able to use the mw.title.newBatch function to look up the existence of up to 25 pages at once, in a way that only increases the expensive function count once.
A new Unsupported Tools Working Group has been formed as part of ongoing efforts to collectively determine technical work priorities, similar to the Product & Technology Advisory Council (PTAC). The working group will help prioritize and review requests for support of unmaintained extensions, gadgets, bots, and tools. For the first cycle, the group will be prioritizing an unsupported Wikimedia Commons tool.
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
Paste Check is a new Edit Check feature to help avoid and fight copyright violations. When editors paste text into an article, Paste Check prompts them to confirm the origin and licensing of the content. Starting Wednesday, 8 October, 22 wikis will test Paste Check. Paste Check will help new volunteers understand and follow the policies and guidelines necessary to make constructive contributions to Wikipedia projects.
Updates for editors
Mobile devices will receive mobile articles directly on the standard domain (like en.wikipedia.org), instead of via a redirect to an "m" domain (like en.m.wikipedia.org). This change improves performance. This week it will be enabled on Wikipedias. The existing mobile URLs and the "Desktop view" opt-out remain available. Learn more.
New date filters, creationdate: and lasteditdate:, are now available in the wiki search engine. This allows users to filter search results by a page's first or last revision date. The filters support comparison operators (e.g. >2024) and relative dates (e.g. today-1d), making it easier to find recently updated content or pages within specific age ranges.
Wikifunctions now supports rich text in embedded calls across the 150 wikis where it's enabled. To showcase this, the team created a Latin declination table that Wiktionary editors can use to automatically generate noun forms, producing clear, formatted results — see an example output. If you need any help or have any feedback, please contact the Wikifunctions Team.
An edit link will now appear inside the categories box on article pages for logged in users, which will directly launch the VisualEditor category dialog.
View all 34 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a problem downloading pdf files last week and that has been resolved.
Updates for technical contributors
The field rev_sha1 in the revision database table is being removed in favor of content_sha1 in the content database table. See the announcement for more information.
The Reader Experience team will roll out Dark Mode user interface on all Wikimedia sites on October 29, 2025. All anonymous users of Wikimedia sites will have the option to activate a color scheme that features light-colored text on a dark background. This is designed to provide a more comfortable reading experience, especially in low-light situations. Template authors and technical contributors are encouraged to learn how to make pages ready for Dark mode and address any compatibility issues found in templates in their wiki before the enablement. Please contact the Web team for questions or any support on this talk page before the enablement.
Starting on Monday, October 6, API endpoints under the rest.php path will be rerouted through a new internal API Gateway. Individual wikis will be updated based on the standard release groups, with total traffic increased over time. This change is expected to be non-breaking and non-disruptive. If any issues are observed, please file a Phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board.
After a motion, arbitration enforcement page protections no longer need to be logged in the AELOG. A bot now automatically posts protections at WP:AELOG/P. To facilitate this bot, protection summaries must include a link to the relevant CT page (e.g. [[WP:CT/BLP]]), and you will receive talk page reminders if you forget to specify the contentious topic but otherwise indicate it is an AE action.
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
Last week, improvements to account security and two-factor authentication (2FA) features were enabled across all wikis. These changes include user interface improvements for Special:AccountSecurity, the support of multiple 2FA methods via authenticator apps and portable security keys (previously users could only enable one method), and a new Recovery Codes module which facilitates fewer account lockouts due to lost two-factor apps and devices. As part of the Account Security project, work is continuing through the rest of 2025 on further user experience improvements, and support for passkeys as an alternate second factor.
Updates for editors
Another part of the Account security project is making 2FA generally available to all users. Along with editors with advanced privileges, such as administrators and bureaucrats, 40% of editors now have access to 2FA. You can check if you have access at Special:AccountSecurity. Instructions for activation are on the linked page. The plan is to continue increasing availability if it is determined that the user support capabilities are able to support global usage.
This week, users at wikis where talk page Usability Improvements are already available by default (everywhere except the 12 wikis listed in T379264) will gain the ability to Thank a comment directly from the talk page it appears on. Before this change, Thanking could only be done by visiting the revision history of the talk page. You can learn more about this change.
Users who have not verified their email address will soon be receiving monthly Notification reminders to do so. This is because users who have verified their email can more easily recover their account. These reminders will not be sent if the user is inactive or removes the unverified email from their account.
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a fix was made for an occasional error with saving translated paragraphs in the Content Translation tool, and the related error messages are now easier to see.
Updates for technical contributors
The Unsupported Tools Working Group has chosen Video2Commons as the first tool for its pilot cycle. The group will explore ways to improve and sustain the tool over the coming months. Learn more on Meta.
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
To optimize how user data is stored in our databases, the saved preferences of users who haven't logged in for over five years and have fewer than 100 edits will be cleared. When those users return, default settings will apply.
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a broken link from the GlobalContributions interface message to the XTools GlobalContributions page which has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
The work to reroute all traffic to API endpoints under the rest.php route through a common API gateway is now complete. If any issues are observed, please file a phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board.
Edits to Wikidata references or qualifiers will now be shown in RecentChanges and Watchlist entries on other wikis less often, reducing unnecessary notifications. This will reduce the overall quantity of 'noisy' entries. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged.
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 Wikipedia iOS app has launched an A/B/C test of improvements made to the tabbed browsing feature for select regions and languages. The test, named “More dynamic tabs”, explores new tab experiences and includes “Did you know” and “Because you read” article recommendations. You can read more on the project page.
Autoconfirmed users on small and medium wikis with the CampaignEvents extension can now use Event Registration without the Event Organizer right. This feature lets organizers enable registration, manage participants, and lets users register with one click instead of signing event pages.
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue of flashing colors when holding or pressing the arrow keys under the dark mode settings in Vector 2022 has been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
The CampaignEvents extension will be deployed to all remaining wikis during the week of 17 November 2025. The extension currently includes three features: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List. For this rollout, Invitation List will not be enabled on Wikifunctions and MediaWiki unless requested by those communities. Visit the deployment page to learn more.
The SwaggerUI-based REST sandbox experience is now live on all wiki projects. The sandbox can be accessed through the Special:RestSandbox page. Please report any issues to the MediaWiki Interfaces team board, or join the discussion on the project launch page.
Transform endpoints with a trailing slash path in the MediaWiki REST API are now marked as deprecated. They will remain functional during this time, but removal is expected by the end of January 2026. All API users currently calling them are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. Both endpoint variations can be found and tested using the REST Sandbox. See the MediaWiki REST API Deprecation page for more detailed information about the API deprecation policies and procedures.
A dedicated changelog now exists for the MediaWiki REST API. The changelog provides an overview of these changes, making it easier for developers to keep track of improvements and iterations. Announcements will also continue to flow through the standard communication channels, including Tech News and email distribution lists, but can now be more easily referenced from a central location. If you have feedback about the style, structure, or content of this changelog, please join the discussion.
Administrators can delete the tracking category which was previously added by the JsonConfig extension, as it is no longer used. See the categories linked from Q130635582. It is OK if there are still pages listed in the category as that is just a caching issue, and they will be automatically cleared out the next time each page is edited.
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
Administrators will now find that Special:MergeHistory is now significantly more flexible about what it can merge. It can now merge sections taken from the middle of the history of the source (rather than only the start) and insert revisions anywhere in the history of the destination page (rather than only the start).
For users with "Automatically subscribe to topics" enabled in their preferences, starting a new topic or adding a reply to an existing topic will now subscribe them to replies to that topic. Previously, this would only happen if the DiscussionTools "Add topic" or "Reply" widgets were used. When DiscussionTools was originally launched existing accounts were not opted in to automatic topic subscriptions, so this change should primarily affect newer accounts and users who have deliberately changed their preferences since that time.
Scribunto modules can now be used to generate SVG images. This can be used to build charts, graphics and other visualizations dynamically through Lua, reducing the need to compose them externally and upload them as files.
Wikimedia sites now provide all anonymous users with the option to enable a dark mode color scheme, featuring light-colored text on a dark background. This enhancement aims to deliver a more enjoyable reading experience, especially in dimly lit environments.
Users with large watchlists have long faced timeouts when editing Special:EditWatchlist. The page now loads entries in smaller sections instead of all at once due to a paging update, allowing everyone to edit their watchlists smoothly. As part of the database update, sorting by expiry has been removed because it was over 100× slower than sorting by title. A community wish has been created to explore alternative ways to restore sort-by-expiry. If this feature is important to you, please support the wish!
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the fixing of the persisting highlighting when using VisualEditor find and replace during a query.
Updates for technical contributors
Since 2019 the Wikimedia URL Shortener at https://w.wiki is available for all Wikimedia wikis to create short links to articles, permalinks, diffs, etc. It is available in the sidebar as "Get shortened URL". There are 30 wikis that also install an older "ShortUrl" extension. The old extension will soon be removed. This means /s/ URLs will not be advertised under article titles via HTML class="title-shortlink". The /s/ URLs will keep working.
On Thursday, October 30, the MediaWiki Interfaces and SRE Service Operations teams began rerouting Action API traffic through a common API gateway. Individual wikis will be updated based on the standard release groups, with total traffic increased over time. This change is expected to be non-breaking and non-disruptive. If any issues are observed, please file a Phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board.
MediaWiki Train deployments will pause for the final two weeks of 2025: 22 December and 29 December. Backport windows will also pause between Monday, 22 December 2025 and Thursday, 2 January 2026. A backport window is a scheduled time to add things like bug fixes and configuration changes. There are seven deployment trains remaining for 2025.
In 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation reported that AI systems and search engines increasingly use Wikipedia content without driving users to the site, contributing to an 8% drop in human pageviews compared to 2024. After detecting bots disguised as humans, Wikimedia updated its traffic data to reflect this shift. Read more about current user trends on Wikipedia in a Diff blog post.
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
Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.
MediaWiki can now display a page indicator automatically while a page is protected. This feature is disabled by default. It can be enabled by community request.
Using the "Show preview" or "Show changes" buttons in the wikitext editor will now carry over certain URL parameters like 'useskin', 'uselang' and 'section'. This update also fixes an issue where, if the browser crashed while previewing an edit to a single section, saving this edit could overwrite the entire page with just that section’s content.
Wikivoyage wikis can use colored map markers in the article text. The text of these markers will now be shown in contrasting black or white color, instead of always being white. Local workarounds for the problem can be removed.
The Activity tab in the Wikipedia Android app is now available for all users. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging.
The Reader Growth team is launching an experiment called "Image browsing" to test how to make it easier for readers to browse and discover images on Wikipedia articles. This experiment, a mobile-only A/B test, will go live on English Wikipedia in the week of November 17 and will run for four weeks, affecting 0.05% of users on English wiki. The test launched on November 3 on Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese wikis, affecting up to 10% of users on those wikis.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example the inability to lock accounts on mobile sites has been fixed.
The JWT subject field in OAuth 2 access tokens will soon change from <user id> to mw:<identity type>:<user id>, where <identity type> is typically CentralAuth: (for SUL wikis) or local:<wiki id> (for other wikis). This is to avoid conflicts between different user ID types, and to make OAuth 2 access tokens and the sessionJwt cookie more similar. Old access tokens will still work.
A REL1_45 branch for MediaWiki core and each of the extensions and skins in Wikimedia git has been created. This is the first step in the release process for MediaWiki 1.45.0, scheduled for late November 2025. If you are working on a critical bug fix or working on a new feature, you may need to take note of this change.
The process for generating CirrusSearch dumps has been updated due to slowing performance. If you encounter any issues migrating to the replacement dumps, please contact the Search Platform Team for support.
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 Reader Experience team is experimenting with reading lists on mobile web, allowing logged-in readers with no edits to save private lists of articles for later. The experiment is running on Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias since the week of 10 November, and will begin on English Wikipedia the week of 17 November.
Users who can’t receive their email verification code during login can now get help by submitting a form on a new special page. This update is part of the Account Security initiative. If your account has an email address, please make sure you still have access to it. When logging in from a new device or location without 2FA, you may be asked to enter a 6-digit code sent by email to finish logging in. Learn more.
As part of the Parser Unification project, the Content Transform Team rolled out Parsoid as the default parser to many low-traffic Wikipedias and is preparing the next step to high traffic ones. This message is an invitation for you to opt-in to Parsoid, as described in the Extension:ParserMigration documentation, and identify any issues you might encounter with your own workflow using bots, gadgets, or user scripts. Please, let us know through the "Report Visual Bug" link in the Tools sidebar or create a phab ticket and tag the Content Transform Team in Phabricator.
Unsupported Tools: Several issues with Video2Commons have been fixed, including filename-related upload failures, black-video imports, and retry handling. AV1 support has also been added. Ongoing work focuses on backend stability, ffmpeg errors, subtitle imports, metadata handling, and playlist uploads. To track specific tasks, check the Phabricator board.
Save the date for the next Wikimedia Hackathon happening in Milan, Italy from May 1–3, 2026. Registration will open in January 2026. Scholarship applications are currently open, and will close on November 28, 2025. If you have any questions, please email hackathon@wikimedia.org.
WikiProject Articles for creation is holding a month long Backlog Drive in December!
The goal of this drive is to reduce the backlog of unreviewed drafts to less than half a month of outstanding reviews from the current 2+ months. Bonus points will be given for reviewing drafts that have been waiting more than 30 days. The drive is running from 1 December 2025 through 31 December 2025.
Barnstars will be given out as awards at the end of the drive.
There is a backlog of over 3000 pages, so start reviewing drafts. We're looking forward to your help! MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:07, 23 November 2025 (UTC)
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
Last week, the Wikimedia Search Team recreated the "DWIM" (Do What I Mean) gadget functionality server-side, for Russian and Hebrew Wikipedias. This feature adds cross-keyboard suggestions to the standard search-box suggestions. For example, searching for cxfcnmt on Russian Wikipedia will now add suggestions for счастье ("happiness") that the user probably intended. They plan to enable this feature for other Russian and Hebrew wikis this week.
Later this week, users of the "⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽" beta feature will have syntax highlighting available in DiscussionTools. This requires that the "Enable editing tools in source mode" preference be set.
Campaign events extension – the set of tools for coordinating events and other on-wiki collaborations has now been deployed to all Wikimedia wikis. A new feature known as Collaborative contribution to help organizers and participants see the impact of activities has also been added. Join the upcoming learning session to see the new feature in action and share your feedback.
View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the bug which stopped CodeReviewBot from working, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
Users of Wikimedia API can join a usability study to help validate the new design of Wikimedia REST API sandboxes. Interested participants should fill the recruitment survey.
The MediaWiki Interfaces team is deprecating XSLT stylesheets within the Action API. Support for format=xml&xlst={stylesheet} will be removed from Wikimedia projects by the end of November, 2025. In addition, it will soon be disabled by default in MediaWiki release versions: v1.43 (LTS), v1.44, and v1.45. Support for XSLT stylesheets will be fully removed from MediaWiki v1.46 (expected to release between April and May 2026).
The WDQS legacy endpoint (query-legacy-full.wikidata.org) will be decommissioned at the end of December 2025, and finally closed down on 7th January 2026. After this date, users should expect requests to query.wikidata.org that require the full graph to fail or return invalid results if they are not rewritten to use SPARQL federation. The team encourages users to ensure that tools and workflows use the supported WDQS endpoints (https://query.wikidata.org/ - Main graph or https://query-scholarly.wikidata.org/ - Scholarly graph). For support with migrating use cases, please review the Data Access and Request a Query pages for details and assistance on alternative access methods.
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 Wikipedia Year in Review 2025 will be available on December 2 for users of iOS and Android Wikipedia apps, featuring new personalized insights, updated reading highlights, and refreshed designs. Learn more on the review's project page.
The Growth team is working on improving the text and presentation of the Verification Email sent to new users to make them more welcoming, useful and informative. Some new text have been drafted for A/B testing and you can help by translating them. See Phabricator.
Add a link will now be deployed at Japanese, Urdu and Chinese Wikipedias on December 2. Add a link is based on a prediction model that suggests links to be added to articles. While this feature has already been available on most Wikipedias, the prediction model could not support certain languages. A new model has now been developed to handle these languages, and it will be gradually rolled out to other Wikipedias over time. If you would like to know more, please contact Trizek (WMF).
View all 34 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where search boxes on some Commons pages showed no results due to switch from SpecialSearch to MediaSearch, has now been fixed.
The Wikimedia Foundation is in the early stages of exploring approaches to Article guidance. The initiative aims to identify interventions that could help new editors easily understand and apply existing Wikipedia practices and policies when creating an article. The project is in the exploration and early experimental design phase. All community members are encouraged to learn more about the project, and share their thoughts on the talk page.
Starting on November 4, the IP addresses of logged-out editors are no longer being publicly displayed. Instead, they will have a temporary account associated with their edits.
Administrators will now find that Special:MergeHistory is now significantly more flexible about what it can merge. It can now merge sections taken from the middle of the history of the source (rather than only the start) and insert revisions anywhere in the history of the destination page (rather than only the start). T382958
An Articles for Creation backlog drive is happening in December 2025, with over 1,000 drafts awaiting review from the past two months. In addition to AfC participants, all administrators and new page patrollers can help review using the Yet Another AFC Helper Script, which can be enabled in the Gadgets settings. Sign up here to participate!
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
Anybody who wishes to secure their user account can now use two-factor authentication (2FA). This is available to all registered users of all Wikimedia projects. This is part of the Account Security initiative. Later, 2FA will be required for all users who can take security- or privacy-sensitive actions.
Updates for editors
Following last week's deployments, the Add a link feature, which allows editors to add suggested links during editing, will be available to an additional 33 Wikipedias starting on 9 December. This expansion is possible thanks to the new prediction model that now supports all languages, including those that were previously not covered. While the feature has been available on most Wikipedias for some time, this rollout brings us closer to using the improved model everywhere. If you have any questions or would like more details please contact Trizek (WMF).
Last week, the Search Platform team added transliterated as-you-type search suggestions to Georgian wikis. If there are only a few regular search suggestions, then queries in Latin or Cyrillic script are now rewritten into Georgian script to look for more matches. For example, searching for either bedniereba or бедниереба will now suggest the existing article about ბედნიერება ("happiness"). You can recommend other languages where transliterated suggestions would be useful on Phabricator for future development.
Later this week, a controlled experiment will begin for editors on the 100 largest Wikipedias who are editing a section in the mobile web visual editor. 50% of these editors will notice a new "Edit full page" button that will enable them to expand their editing session to the whole page. This feature is intended to make it easier for people on mobile web to edit any article section, regardless of which section-edit icon they tapped to begin. The experiment will last ~4 weeks. You can find more details about the project.
Later this week, the Reader Growth team will launch a mobile web experiment to expand all article sections by default (currently they are collapsed by default) and pin the section header the user is currently reading to the top of the page. The experiment will affect 10% of users on Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
The Wikipedia Year in Review 2025, a feature in the Wikipedia mobile apps (iOS and Android) that provides users with a personalised summary of their engagement with Wikipedia over the year, is now available on the iOS and Android apps. This edition includes expanded personalised insights, improved reading highlights, new donor messaging, and updated designs. Open the app to view your Year in Review and explore your reading journey from 2025.
A recent software bug caused edits made with VisualEditor to make unintended changes to wikitext, including removing whitespace and replacing spaces with underscores in wikilinks inside citations. This was partially fixed last week, and further fixes are in progress. Editors who used VisualEditor between November 28 and December 2 should review their edits for unexpected modifications.
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the incorrect handling of URLs copied from the address bar of Microsoft Edge users, has been resolved.
Updates for technical contributors
Starting this week, users of the "⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽" beta feature will have CodeMirror as the editor for Lua, JavaScript, CSS, JSON and Vue content models, instead of CodeEditor. With this, the linters will be upgraded. This is part of a larger effort to eventually replace CodeEditor and provide a consistent code editing experience.
Developers are encouraged to take the 2025 Developer Satisfaction Survey, which remains open until 5 January 2026. If you build software for the Wikimedia ecosystem and would like to share your experiences or feedback, your participation is greatly appreciated.
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
View all 18 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, one of the fixes addressed an issue for temporary accounts adding an external URL, which triggered an hCaptcha request in more cases than intended, and did not display the required popup on the first attempt to publish the edit.
Updates for technical contributors
To improve database and site performance, external links to Wikimedia projects will no longer be stored in the database. This means they will not be searchable in Special:LinkSearch, will not be checked by the Spam Blacklist or AbuseFilter as new links, and will not be in the externallinks table on database replicas. In the future this may be extended to other highly-linked trusted websites on a per-wiki basis, such as Creative Commons links on Wikimedia Commons.
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
From January, edit filters can be set to automatically suppress their details such as rules and list of attempted edits and actions. This will help oversighters use edit filters to prevent doxxing or other suppressible material.
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 12 January 2026 because of the end of year holidays. Thank you to all of the translators, and people who submitted content or feedback, this year.
View all 16 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the crash that occurred when tapping "First Steps" in the Wikipedia Android Year in Review has now been fixed, and the feature opens as expected.
Updates for technical contributors
Interface elements such as diffs and categories generated by MediaWiki used to have the attribute data-mw="interface" to distinguish from wiki content. The attribute has been replaced with data-mw-interface="", to avoid potential conflicts with other data-mw attributes, which are generated by Parsoid.
There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.
Meetings and events
The Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026 will take place on 13-14 March 2026 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Applications just opened mid-December and will close in mid-January or earlier if capacity is reached. With space for approximately 100 participants, early application is encouraged.
New Pages Patrol is hosting a one-time, two-month experimental backlog drive aimed at reducing the backlog. This will be a combo drive: both articles and redirects will earn points.
The drive will run from 1 January to 28 February 2026.
The drive is divided into two phases. Participants may take part in either phase or across both phases, depending on availability.
Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles and redirects patrolled during the drive.
Two-month drive-exclusive barnstars will be awarded to eligible participants.
Each article review earns 1 point, while each redirect review earns 0.2 points.
Streak awards will be granted based on consistently meeting weekly point thresholds.
Barnstars will also be awarded for re-reviewing articles previously reviewed by other patrollers during the drive.
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.
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 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.
Updates for editors
As part of the current work of Community Tech team on the Multiple watchlists project, the display of EditWatchlist will be updated as a first step towards multiple watchlists. Additionally, the pagination on Search will be updated too, as a part of the work on the Revamp pagination / page navigation wish.
The Global Watchlist is a MediaWiki extension that lets you see your watchlists from different wikis on the same page. It was recently updated to look more like the regular Watchlist, such as preparing it for temporary accounts in IP masking (including rerouting user links to contributions pages), making page titles bold, and opening links in edit summaries and tags in new browser tabs.
View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where global blocks did not have the option to disable sending emails, has now been fixed, and will be available for use in the week of January 13.
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 tray shown on Special:Diff in mobile view has been redesigned. It is now collapsed by default, and incorporates a link to undo the edit being viewed, making it easier for mobile editors and reviewers to take action while keeping the interface uncluttered.
The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension continues to improve — it now automatically determines the text direction (ensuring correct display of sites with unusual domain names) and shows detailed descriptions for log actions. Later this week, a new permanent link for page creations and CSS classes for each entry element will be added.
View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the previously observed issue in Vector 2022, where anchor link targets were obscured by the sticky header, has now been addressed.
Updates for technical contributors
As mentioned in the October 2025 deprecation announcement, MediaWiki Interfaces team will begin sunsetting all transform endpoints containing a trailing slash from the MediaWiki REST API the week of January 26. Changes are expected to roll out to all wikis on or before January 30th. All API users currently calling them are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. Both endpoint variations can be found, compared, and tested using the REST Sandbox. If you have questions or encounter any problems, please file a ticket in Phabricator to the #MW-Interfaces-Team board.
The WMF Wikidata Platform team (WDP) has published its January 2026 newsletter. It includes updates on the legacy full-graph endpoint decommissioning, the User-Agent policy change, the monthly Blazegraph migration office hours, and efforts to reduce regressions caused by the legacy endpoint shutdown. As a reminder, you can subscribe to the WDP newsletter!
The Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026 will take place on 13-14 March 2026 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Applications opened mid-December and will close soon or when capacity is reached. It's a two-day, technically oriented hackathon bringing together Wikimedians from the region. Hope to see you there!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
All users with registered accounts can now use passkeys for two-factor authentication (2FA). Passkeys are a simple way to log in without using a second device. They verify the user's identity using a fingerprint, face scan, or a PIN code. To set up a passkey, first set up a regular 2FA method. Currently, to log in with a passkey, users must also use a password. Later this quarter, passwordless login will allow users to log in with a single click and a passkey. Users with advanced rights will also be required to have 2FA enabled. This is part of the Account Security project.
Unregistered contributors on blocked IPs or blocked IP ranges can now interact on-wiki to appeal a block by creating a temporary account to appeal a block on the user talk page, unless the "prevent this user from editing their own talk page" is enabled. This solves the problem of logged-out users unable to use the default unblock process via user talk page.
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) methods description on the management page has been updated. It is now clearer and easier for users to understand and make use of.
Updates for technical contributors
A new AbuseFilter variable, account_type, has been added to provide a reliable way to determine the account type being created in the createaccount and autocreateaccount actions. As part of this change, the variable accountname has been renamed to account_name, and accountname is now deprecated. Edit filter managers should update any filters that use hardcoded account type checks or the deprecated variable.
Image thumbnails that are requested in non-standard sizes, and using non-standard methods such as direct requests to upload.wikimedia.org/… will stop working in the near future. This change is to prevent ongoing external abuse by web-scrapers and bots. Some users with custom CSS/JS, Interface Admins who can fix gadgets and local skins, and Tool-authors, will need to update their code to use standard thumbnail sizes. Details, search-links, and examples of how to fix them, are available in the task.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 25 March 2026 at 15:00 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.
Last week, all wikis had 2 hours of read-only time, and extended unavailability for user-scripts and gadgets. This was due to a security incident which has since been resolved. Work is ongoing to prevent re-occurrences. For current information please see the post on the Stewards' noticeboard (translations).
Updates for editors
Users facing multiple blocks on mobile will now see the reasons for each block separately, instead of a generic message. This helps them understand why they are blocked and what steps they can take to resolve the issue. For example, users affected for using common VPNs (such as iCloud Private Relay) will receive clearer guidance on what they need to do to start editing again.
Later this week, Suggestion Mode will become available as a beta feature within the visual editor at all Wikipedias. This feature proactively suggests various types of actions that people can consider taking to improve Wikipedia articles, and learn about related guidelines. The feature is locally configurable, and can also be locally expanded with custom Suggestions. Current settings can be seen at Special:EditChecks and there are instructions for how administrators can customize the links to point to local guidelines. The feature is connected to Edit check which suggests improvements while someone is writing new content. In the future, the Editing team plans to evaluate the feature's impact with newcomers through a controlled experiment.
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where the cursor became misaligned during the use of CodeMirror’s syntax highlighting, which makes wikitext and code easier to read, has now been fixed. This problem specifically affected users who defined a font rule in a custom stylesheet while creating a new topic with DiscussionTools.
Updates for technical contributors
API rate limiting update: To help ensure fair use of infrastructure, global API rate limits will be applied this week to requests without a compliant User-Agent that originate from outside Toolforge/WMCS and to unauthenticated requests made from web browsers. Higher limits will be applied to identified traffic in April. 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 new GraphQL API has been released. The API was developed as a flexible alternative to select features of the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS), to improve developer experience and foster adaptability, and efficient data access. Try it out and give feedback. You can also sign up for usability tests.
The PTAC Unsupported Tools Working Group continued improvements to Video2Commons in February, with fixes addressing authentication errors, large-file handling, task queue visibility, and clearer upload behavior. Work is still ongoing in some areas, including changes related to deprecated server-side uploads. Read this update to learn more.
The Article Guidance team invites experienced Wikipedia editors from selected pilot wikis and interested contributors from other Wikipedias to fill out this questionnaire which is available in English, Arabic, Bengali, Japanese, Portuguese, Persian, and Turkish. Your answers will help the team customize guidance for less experienced editors and help them learn community policies and practices while creating an article. Learn more on the project page.
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 ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽ beta feature, also known as CodeMirror 6, has been used for wikitext syntax highlighting since November 2024. It will be promoted out of beta by May 2026 in order to bring improvements and new features to all editors who use the standard syntax highlighter. If you have any questions or concerns about promoting the feature out of beta, please share.
Some changes to local user groups are performed by stewards on Meta-Wiki and logged there only. Now, interwiki rights changes will be logged both on Meta-Wiki and the wiki of the target user to make it easier to access a full record of user's rights changes on a local wiki. Past log entries for such changes will be backfilled in the coming weeks.
On wikis using Flagged Revisions, the number of pending changes shown on Special:PendingChanges previously counted pages which were no longer pending review, because they have been removed from the system without being reviewed, e.g. due to being deleted, moved to a different namespace, or due to wiki configuration changes. The count will be correct now. On some wikis the number shown will be much smaller than before. There should be no change to the list of pages itself.
Wikifunctions composition language has been rewritten, resulting in a new version of the language. This change aims to increase service stability by reducing the orchestrator's memory consumption. This rewrite also enables substantial latency reduction, code simplification, and better abstractions, which will open the door to later feature additions. Read more about the changes.
Users can now sort search results alphabetically by page title. The update gives an additional option to finding pages more easily and quickly. Previously, results could be sorted by Edit date, Creation date, or Relevance. To use the new option, open 'Advanced Search' on the search results page and select 'Alphabetically' under 'Sorting Order'.
View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the bug that prevented UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons from importing files from Flickr has now been fixed.
Users of the ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽ beta feature have been using CodeMirror instead of CodeEditor for syntax highlighting when editing JavaScript, CSS, JSON, Vue and Lua content pages, for some time now. Along with promoting CodeMirror 6 out of beta, the plan is to replace CodeEditor as the standard editor for these content models by May 2026. Feedback or concerns are welcome.
The CodeMirror JavaScript modules will soon be upgraded to CodeMirror 6. Leading up to the upgrade, loading the ext.CodeMirror or ext.CodeMirror.lib modules from gadgets and user scripts was deprecated in July 2025. The use of the ext.CodeMirror.switch hook was also deprecated in March 2025. Contributors can now make their scripts or gadgets compatible with CodeMirror 6. See the migration guide for more information.
The MediaWiki Interfaces team is expanding coverage of REST API module definitions to include extension APIs. REST API modules are groups of related endpoints that can be independently managed and versioned. Modules now exist for GrowthExperiments and Wikifunctions APIs. As we migrate extension APIs to this structure, documentation will move out of the main MediaWiki OpenAPI spec and REST Sandbox view, and will instead be accessible via module-specific options in the dropdown on the REST Sandbox (i.e., Special:RestSandbox, available on all wiki projects).
The Scribunto extension provides different pieces of information about the wiki where the module is being used via the mw.site library. Starting last week, the library also provides a way of accessing the wiki ID that can be used to facilitate cross-wiki module maintenance.
The 2026 Coolest Tool Award celebrating outstanding community tools, is now open for nominations! Nominate your favorite tool using the nomination survey form by 23 March 2026. For more information on privacy and data handling, please see the survey privacy statement.
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
Wikimedia site users can now log in without a password using passkeys. This is a secure method supported by fingerprint, facial recognition, or PIN. With this change, all users who opt for passwordless login will find it easier, faster, and more secure to log in to their accounts using any device. The new passkey login option currently appears as an autofill suggestion in the username field. An additional "Log in with passkey" button will soon be available for users who have already registered a passkey. This update will improve security and user experience. The screen recording demonstrates the passwordless login process step by step.
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday, 25 March 2026 at 15:00 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
Wikimedia site users can now export their notifications older than 5 years using a new Toolforge tool. This will ensure that users retain their important notifications and avoid them being lost based on the planned change to delete notifications older than 5 years, as previously announced.
Wikipedia editors in Indonesian, Thai, Turkish, and Simple English now have access to Special:PersonalDashboard. This is an early version of an experience that introduces newer editors to patrolling workflows, making it easier for them to move from making edits to participating in more advanced moderation work on their project.
The Special:Block now has two minor interface changes. Administrators can now easily perform indefinite blocks through a dedicated radio button in the expiry section. Also, choosing an indefinite expiry provides a different set of common reasons to select from, which can be changed at: MediaWiki:Ipbreason-indef-dropdown.
Mobile editors at several wikis can now see an improved logged-out edit warning, thanks to the recent updates from the Growth team. These changes released last week are part of ongoing efforts and tests to enhance account creation experience on mobile and then increase participation.
View all 36 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the bug that prevented mobile web users from seeing the block information when affected by multiple blocks has been fixed. They can now see messages of all the blocks currently affecting them when they access Wikipedia.
Updates for technical contributors
Images built using Toolforge will soon get the upgraded buildpacks version, bringing support for newer language versions and other upstream improvements and fixes. If you use Toolforge Build Service, review the recent cloud-announce email and update your build configuration as necessary to ensure your tools are compatible.
The API Portal documentation wiki will shut down in June 2026. API keys created on the API Portal will continue to work normally. api.wikimedia.org endpoints will be deprecated gradually starting in July 2026. Documentation on the API Portal is moving to mediawiki.org. Learn more on the project page.
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 Beta version of Abstract Wikipedia a new Wikimedia project which is language-independent, was launched last week. The project allows communities to build Wikipedia articles in their native language, which can be readily accessed by other users in their own languages. The wiki is powered by instructions from Wikifunctions and also based on structured content from Wikidata. Read more.
Updates for editors
The Growth team is running an A/B test to evaluate a clearer, more user-friendly message that promotes account creation on wikis. Currently when logged-out mobile users begin editing, they see a jarring warning message that can feel abrupt and discouraging. This also presents temporary account editing as the default rather than encouraging account creation. The test is running on ten Wikipedias, including Arabic, French, Spanish and German. Read more.
The Wikimedia Apps team is inviting feedback on how editing should work on the Wikipedia mobile apps. The discussion focuses on improving how users access editing tools when they tap "Edit". This is part of a broader effort to convert readers who develop an interest in editing, to access a more user-friendly pathway to start contributing.
View all 45 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where citation fetching from the large newspaper archive Newspapers.com was no longer working, due to a block in Citoid requests, has now been fixed.
Following a motion, the GSCASTE extended-confirmed restriction in the Indian military history case has been narrowed. It now applies to caste-related topics in South Asia, and the preemptive protection remedy has been amended accordingly.
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 CampaignEvents extension now includes a new group goal-setting feature, enabling organizers to set and track event goals such as the number of articles created and participating contributors in real time. Similarly, participants can work toward shared targets and see their collective impact as the event unfolds. The feature is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. Learn more in the documentation.
The new watchlist labels feature (announced in Tech News 2026-07) is now available via VisualEditor, the source editor, and the 'watchstar' (or watch link, for skins that don't have a star icon). Previously it was only possible to assign labels via EditWatchlist. In all three places it is a new field following the expiry field.
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where talk pages on mobile with Parsoid are unusable after empty section headers, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
The sub-referencing feature, which lets editors add details to an existing reference without duplicating it, will be gradually rolled out to more wikis later this year. Wikis using the Reference Tooltips gadget are encouraged to update their version (typically at MediaWiki:Gadget-ReferenceTooltips.js as shown here) to ensure compatibility. Other reference-related gadgets may also be affected.
All Wikinews editions will be closed and switched to read-only mode on 4 May 2026. Content will remain accessible, but no new edits or articles can be added. This closure was approved by the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation following extended discussions. Read more.
The Action API has had several formats for requested output. One of them, format=php, is being removed soon. Please ensure your scripts or bots use the JSON format. This removal should affect very few scripts and bots.
The Special:NamespaceInfo page now includes namespace aliases. For example "WP" for the "Project" ("Wikipedia") namespace on the German Wikipedia.
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
Experienced editors are invited to test the Article guidance feature, designed to help less-experienced editors create well-structured, policy-compliant Wikipedia articles. Testing instructions are available. Also, after reviewing the outlines, please provide feedback on the project talk page. Based on your input, the feature will be refined and transferred to the pilot Wikipedias to translate and adapt. Check out the video explaining the feature.
The Growth team has launched an account creation experiment to evaluate whether adding an account creation button to the mobile web header increases new account registrations and encourages more mobile users to contribute to the wikis. The experiment is currently live on Hindi, Indonesian, Bengali, Thai, and Hebrew Wikipedia, and targets 10% of logged-out mobile web users.
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where VisualEditor could get stuck loading on Windows devices with animations turned off, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
Starting later this week, Edit filter managers who have the ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽ beta feature enabled will have CodeMirror instead of CodeEditor as the editor at Special:AbuseFilter. This is part of the broader effort to make the user experience more consistent across all editors.
Tools and bots that access the Notifications API (action=query&meta=notifications) will need to update their OAuth or BotPassword grants to also include access to private notifications.
Due to a library upgrade, listings on category pages may be displayed out of order starting on Monday, 20th April. A migration script will be run to correct this, and will take hours to days depending on the size of the wiki (up to a week for English Wikipedia).
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
After two years of development, ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽, also known as CodeMirror 6, is to be promoted out of beta on Tuesday, April 21. It brings better code and wikitext readability, reduction in typing errors, and other benefits to all users of the standard syntax highlighter. A huge thank you to volunteer Bhsd who developed many of the new features, including code folding, autocompletion, and linting.
A major update to the Wikipedia app for iOS is now rolling out, redesigning the interface to align with Apple's latest "Liquid Glass" visual design. Download the latest version and explore the update.
Updates for editors
Reading lists is a feature which allows readers to save articles to a list for reading later. This feature is now in beta on Arabic, French, Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Chinese Wikipedias and by default for all new accounts on all Wikipedias.
An experiment which explores extending Page Previews to mobile web will be launched in the week of April 20 on Arabic, English, French, Italian, Polish, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. Page Previews are pop-ups that display a thumbnail, lead paragraph, and a link to open the full article of a blue link, thereby improving content discovery. The feature is already available on desktop and in the apps. Read more about this experiment and others.
On several wikis, logged-in editors who haven't confirmed their email addresses can now see a banner encouraging them to do so. Having the email address confirmed allows a user to restore access to the account if they lose it. Learn more.
View all 15 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where editing very large wiki pages in the 2017 wikitext editor caused slow loading, preview and scrolling lag, and performance issues when selecting, cutting, or pasting content, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
As part of the promotion of CodeMirror from a beta feature, all users will use CodeMirror instead of CodeEditor for syntax highlighting when editing JavaScript, CSS, JSON, Vue and Lua content pages.
The mirrors.wikimedia.org service for Debian and Ubuntu users will sunset and stop working on May 15. The resources for the service will be replaced with new and better options. Some users may need to switch to a different server which should take about a minute. You can read more.
The image and oldimage table will be removed from wikireplicas. If your tools or queries access image or oldimage directly, please update them to use the file and filerevision table before 28 May.
Following the recent implementation of global API rate limits on unidentified traffic, the Wikimedia Foundation will continue efforts to ensure fair use of infrastructure by applying global limits to identified API traffic beginning the last week of April. 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 and Frequently Asked Questions.
The Attribution API is now available as a beta. The API fetches information for crediting Wikimedia articles and media files wherever they are used. Reference documentation is available through the REST Sandbox special page available on all Wikimedia wikis (such as the REST sandbox on English Wikipedia). Share your feedback on the project talk page.
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
There is a change in how new users are autoconfirmed that will improve anti-vandalism protection. Currently, users who have had an account for a few days and made a few edits are automatically added to the Autoconfirmed users group. This configuration tends to be exploited by some vandals, who create accounts and start to use them only after some time. To mitigate this, the configuration will be updated next week so that – for the purpose of becoming autoconfirmed – the account age will be counted from their first edit, instead of registration date. The numeric value of the age threshold will remain the same. This change will be deployed only to wikis which require at least one edit as part of the autoconfirmation conditions.
All Wikipedia users with new accounts and those who activated the "automatically enable most beta features" option in their preference can now use the reading lists beta feature to save articles for later reading. This helps organize reading interests in one place for convenient access.
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where infobox images have huge padding in Firefox, has been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
As a reminder, the global API rate limits will be applied this week to identified API traffic. This is to help ensure fair use of infrastructure. 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, including the actual rate limits, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits and Frequently Asked Questions.
Changes to user permissions made from Meta are now included in the local user permissions log (T6055).
The autoconfirmed user group will soon be modified such that the four-day account age requirement begins when an account makes its first edit (T418484).
Arbitration
The arbitration case SchroCat has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case closed on 15 April.
Per a recent motion, appeals of blocks from the conflict-of-interest VRT queue are, by default, appealed on-wiki through the normal unblock process. However, they may be heard by the Committee if COIVRTers disagree on the interpretation of the evidence or believe ArbCom would be better suited to hear the appeal. Administrators are also advised that loosening or lifting such blocks without the consent of someone with access to the queue or ArbCom can be grounds for desysopping.
Per a recent motion, restrictions issued directly by the Committee may now be enforced with blocks which work exactly like contentious topic blocks.
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 Article guidance team invites experienced editors of pilot Wikipedias—Arabic, Bangla, Japanese, Portuguese, Persian, Turkish, Simple English, Spanish, and French—to help translate and adapt sample outlines. These outlines will guide editors in creating clear, well-structured, and policy-compliant articles when using the feature once it is launched in May 2026. Simple instructions on how to translate and adapt the outlines are available.
The number of available thumbnail size preferences in MediaWiki is being reduced to three standardized options—Small (180px), Regular (250px), and Large (400px), as part of ongoing efforts to improve performance and reduce strain on thumbnail services. As a result, existing preferences will be mapped to the nearest new size (for example, smaller selections like 120px or 150px will render at 180px, while larger ones like 300px or 360px will render at 400px). The preferences interface will soon be updated to reflect these changes, and users who wish to opt out or provide feedback can do so.
From now on, even when a permission expires automatically, users will receive an Echo notification similar to the standard notification for permission changes. There is a difference between this and Global reminder bot in that the latter reminds users a week before the rights are due to expire, so that they can renew the rights.
View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the problem where the ULS language selector in Special:Translate would scroll vertically when it shouldn't, has been resolved. Previously, when users opened the "Translate to English" dropdown and typed certain inputs, the dialog would scroll vertically by a few pixels even when there was enough space to display all results. The dropdown no longer shifts unnecessarily when filtering languages.
The Global Watchlist, which lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on a single page, continues to improve. For example, watchlists for Wikibase sites such as Wikidata now support EntitySchema elements for better tracking. The Live Updates mode now refreshes the special page every 60 seconds to comply with the updated global API rate limits for improved real-time responsiveness. Additionally, a directionality bug that displayed links as "changes 3" instead of "3 changes" in mixed-direction lists has been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
The second phase of global API rate limits has been rolled out to reduce the impact of AI crawlers and ensure fair, sustainable access to Wikimedia resources, prioritising human and mission-aligned traffic. Limits have been shifted from per-hour to per-minute, producing smoother traffic patterns and more predictable API load. Community users are not expected to be affected, and no action is required. Early indications show some User-Agent-based requestors are adjusting behaviour, and around 64% of automated API traffic has been identified. Monitoring continues, and Wikimedia Enterprise remains available for commercial support.
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
Community Tech has published new guidance explaining how wishes on Community Wishlist are triaged and prioritized. The documentation is intended to help contributors write stronger proposals by clarifying the factors that influence prioritization decisions. Beyond vote counts, the guidance highlights considerations such as potential impact on the community when determining which wishes move forward.
Updates for editors
The Reader Growth team is launching an experiment to test a new Share Card feature that allows readers to create visually engaging cards from Wikipedia articles or selected article sections and share them online, with each card linking back to the original article to help expand readership and article discovery. The mobile-only A/B test will be available to a portion of readers on Arabic, Chinese, French, Vietnamese, and English Wikipedia to better understand reading and sharing habits, and is scheduled to begin the week of May 18 and run for four weeks.
The Android and iOS Wikipedia apps recently released the 25-day reading challenge into Beta, as part of efforts to drive reader engagement by encouraging users to complete reading milestones. To track their reading streak during the challenge, App users can add a widget featuring Baby Globe to their home screen. The challenge officially begins May 11.
View all 17 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the global preference for enabling syntax highlighting in wikitext could unexpectedly disable itself after being turned on, has now been fixed.
At the time of this message, there are 15,282 articles and 32,951 redirects awaiting review.
After the January–February drive the article backlog was reduced to 15,179 articles and the redirect backlog to 19,053 respectively. Great job! However, both queues are growing rapidly and any additional reviews are highly appreciated.
2024 and 2025 NPP Awards
JTtheOG was selected as the NPP reviewer of the year for both 2024 and 2025, for reviewing the most articles amongst all reviewers.
Hey man im josh and MPGuy2824 won the Redirect Ninja Master Award for 2024 and 2025 respectively, for reviewing the most redirects.
Overall in 2024, one Platinum, two Gold, eight Silver, 12 Bronze and 45 Iron Barnstars were awarded. Additionally, 66 reviewers got the NPP barnstar for doing more than 100 reviews through the year. In 2025, one Platinum, ten Silver, 13 Bronze and 38 Iron Barnstars were awarded. Additionally, 38 reviewers got the NPP barnstar for doing more than 100 reviews through the year.
The experimental two-month long backlog drive concluded with 183 reviewers patrolling over 27,761 articles and 35,309 redirects, earning over 36,836 points. Congratulations to JTtheOG, who achieved first place with 6,484.6 points in this drive.
An attempt was made to get the New Pages Feed to sort by date marked as reviewed instead of date created. However we had to revert it due to bugs. We may try again in the future. You can subscribe to the Phabricator ticket if you're interested in following along.
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 Abstract Wikipedia team has identified five potential pilot wikis to assess their interest in adopting abstract articles on their wikis. The pilots are Malayalam, Bengali, Dagbani, Arabic, and Indonesian Wikipedia. The feedback period will be open until May 22. If your community is interested in becoming a pilot, let us know on Meta.
Updates for editors
An experiment to show Reading Lists to logged-out readers on mobile web will launch on May 18 across German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, and Urdu Wikipedias, and will run for one month. The effort supports broader goals of helping readers save and organize articles for later reading, while encouraging habits that could lead to future Wikipedia contributions.
To support a bookmark button in the Reading List beta feature, the "Tools > Action" menu has been updated to display icons, including the watch star indicator that helps editors identify temporarily watched articles. The icons now also match those used on mobile, improving consistency across platforms. The change is currently limited to the actions menu and mainly affects editors with privileged user rights.
Suggestion Mode was released as an A/B test for newcomer editors on the mobile website at ~15 Wikipedias. The experiment will measure the impact that Suggestion Mode has on the proportion of newcomer mobile web edit sessions that result in constructive (un-reverted) article edits. The experiment will also evaluate the feature's impact on editor retention, and monitor changes in revert and block rates.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue in the Wikipedia Android app where images could sometimes fail to load after opening a recommended reading list notification, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
The Wikidata Platform team has published its backend replacement recommendation and accompanying technical architecture for the migration of the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) away from Blazegraph. Feedback is invited until May 25th 2026, especially on potential gaps and impacts on advanced use cases. Wikidata community members and WDQS users are also encouraged to help identify high-impact tools and workflows that may need attention on this page. Feedback can be shared on the Migration talk page or during the next office hour. See the WDP team newsletter for more details.
On English, French, Japanese, and a few other Wikipedias, there was a trial of hCaptcha, a third-party bot detection service. The trial showed that hCaptcha effectively detects and deters some bad-faith automated activity, on its own and by giving checkusers and stewards signals to look into. Because the results were positive, hCaptcha will be rolled out across all wikis over the next few weeks. See the hCaptcha project page for technical information about the implementation and privacy protections. Learn more.
The latest Community Tech update is now available, with progress across several Community Wishlist initiatives, including Reading Lists expansion from the mobile app to the website, new language support for "Who Wrote That" and the Personal Dashboard, improvements to 3D rendering and Charts, and upcoming work on talk page sorting, audio playback, and editing workflows. The update also shares current priorities, wishlist status trends, and opportunities for community feedback on future focus areas and the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2026–2027 Annual Plan. Read the full newsletter for details.
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
Following a successful account creation experiment, an improved logged-out edit warning message will be deployed to all Wikimedia wikis in the first week of June. The change will only affect logged-out users on mobile web who open an editing session. The updated experience is designed to encourage account creation more clearly, while still allowing users to edit with temporary accounts. Results from the experiment showed a significant increase in account creation, with a 27% relative lift among users shown the updated message. As expected, as more people funnel into account creation, temporary accounts decreased by a relative 16%. The experiment did not show any significant changes in constructive edit rates or other monitored contributor metrics.
Updates for editors
For security reasons, members of certain user groups are required to have two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled. Members of these groups will be unable to disable the 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 next few weeks, users without 2FA will be removed from these groups. Notably, this applies to bureaucrats. See the linked tasks for deployment schedules.
After two successful experiments, the Reader Growth team is rolling out an Image Browsing beta feature for all Wikipedias on mobile on May 25. This means that anyone who has all beta features on by default will start to see this feature, and others can check the box to turn it on in their preferences. The beta feature will include a carousel of all an article's images at the top of the article, with controls for editors to exclude images from the article's carousel or to exclude an article from the feature entirely.
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, three dimensional STL files were being rendered incorrectly by the media viewer 3D extension which is now fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
The legacy CSS classes tleft and tright have been replaced with floatleft and floatright as the former do not work consistently across all MediaWiki platforms, notably mobile web and mobile apps. Projects relying on these classes are encouraged to review related usage and plan for migration. Please note that floatleft and floatright may also be deprecated in future, although there are currently no plans to do so. Read more.
Mandatory 2FA for bureaucrats: Bureaucrats without two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled have already lost access to their advanced rights on 26 May. Those who do not enable 2FA may be automatically removed from the groups in mid-June 2026, and from that point onward, new members must have 2FA enabled before they can be added. (T423119, T423120)
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 Reader Experience team is conducting an experiment to show the reading lists feature, which is still in development, to logged-out mobile readers to test whether it encourages account creation at a higher rate compared to the watchstar button. The experiment was launched on May 18th on German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, and Urdu wikis, and it will run for a month.
The Wikimedia Apps team released Phase 1 of the redesigned Home Feed to the Android Beta app. The new Home Feed includes a refreshed "Community" tab and a personalized "For You" tab featuring daily updated reading recommendations. The redesign is part of a broader effort to improve content discovery and create more engaging learning experiences in the Wikipedia apps.
View all 18 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where images could fail to load for some suggested edits on Special:Homepage, leaving the thumbnail stuck in a loading state, has now been fixed.
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
Wikimedia Enterprise has increased the free usage limits for its API offerings. The monthly request limit for the On-demand API has increased from 5,000 to 50,000 requests, while the Snapshot API limit has increased from 15 to 30 requests per month. In addition, Structured Contents snapshots are now available for free accounts. These changes expand access to Wikimedia Enterprise data for developers, researchers, and organizations using Wikimedia content.
Updates for editors
The refreshed Explore Feed, now called the Home Feed, is rolling out to 50% of users of the Wikipedia Android app. The Home Feed helps readers discover relevant content through two new tabs: Community and For You. The Community tab provides a scrollable feed of curated content and updates from the broader Wikimedia community and movement, while the For You tab offers a full-screen, swipeable experience that shows content tailored to a user's interests. The redesign is part of a broader effort to improve discovery and enhance the learning experience in the Wikipedia app.
The Which came first? daily trivia game is now available in the beta version of the Wikipedia iOS app in English, German, French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Turkish. The game uses historical events from Wikipedia's "On This Day" content and challenges readers to guess which of two events happened first. The game was previously released on Android. Communities interested in making the game available in their languages can read the instructions and requirements.
Sub-referencing, a new MediaWiki feature that allows editors to reuse references with different details, will begin rolling out to Wikimedia wikis following a successful pilot phase. Deployment will start on 8 June for most Group 1 wikis and French Wikipedia, with additional Wikipedia language editions receiving the feature over the coming months. Communities are encouraged to prepare by checking for untranslated Cite extension messages in their language and reviewing any use of Reference Tooltips, which may require updates to support the new functionality. Wikis using Reference Previews do not need to take any action. Communities may also wish to create the cite-tracking-category-ref-detailstracking category as a hidden category using __HIDDENCAT__ (or a dedicated template), and connect it to the corresponding Wikidata item d:Q129764848.
The Page Previews experiment on mobile web has concluded. The team decided not to roll out the feature after the results showed no statistically significant impact on reader retention, as the primary success metric was retention improvement. Page Previews, which are already available on desktop and in the apps, display a thumbnail, lead paragraph, and link to the full article when readers tap a blue link. The experiment tested this experience on mobile web across six Wikipedias.
The user interface icon library will be updated later this week or next week. Most of the ~300 icons have been slightly refined and ~30 new icons have been added. These changes improve the icons to make them more consistent and comprehensible, and provide more visual balance when they are used in groups.
The Universal Language Selector (ULS) interface in MediaWiki, which helps users select content in other languages, has been updated. The new version improves speed and accessibility, and users of Wikimedia projects can now pin languages for quicker language switching. The deployment to Wikimedia sites will happen gradually in the coming weeks. You can test it now as a beta feature by selecting beta features in your profile preferences and share your feedback on the project page.
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the Pageviews Analysis dashboard on pageviews.wmcloud.org stopped updating graph data in May 2026, affecting all users, has been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
The function signature for mw.util.addPortletLink() has been simplified. Developers can now pass a configuration object instead of a list of positional parameters when creating portlet links. The previous function signature remains supported for backwards compatibility. For example, instead of: mw.util.addPortletLink('p-cactions', '#', 'Stub', 'ca-stubtag', 'Add a stub tag to this page'); use mw.util.addPortletLink('p-cactions', { href: '#', text: 'Stub', id: 'ca-stubtag', tooltip: 'Add a stub tag to this page' });. Script maintainers are encouraged to review existing uses of addPortletLink() and update them where appropriate. This change will be available on all wikis from 11 June. Thanks to community volunteer Gerges for contributing this improvement.
Community Wishlist discussion: Product & Technology introduced changes meant to increase the number and complexity of wishes fulfilled, including the disbanding of the Community Tech team. They are engaging in discussions about a proposed direction for the wishlist from community members. Includes ways to structure annual voting, better tracking of wishes, removing focus areas, and staffing updates.
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 Reader Growth team has launched an Image Browsing beta feature on the mobile web version of all Wikipedias. The feature shows an image carousel at the top of articles with 3 or more images. Editors can configure this feature with the following controls: to hide a specific image from a page, either use class=notpageimage excluding it from thumbnail previews, or class=noviewer excluding it from MediaViewer. The carousel can also be disabled from a page entirely, with the magic word __NOMEDIAVIEWERCAROUSEL__. To submit feedback or flag bugs, please visit the project page.
Wikitables can now be sorted in descending order on the first click by adding data-sort-order="desc" to the header cell. Previously, by default, clicking a column header for the first time sorts it in ascending order. This addition to a Wikitable gives it more control and flexibility, while the default behavior for subsequent clicks remains unchanged.
Updates for editors
The Article guidance feature is currently being tested with some editors creating new articles on the Simple English, French, and Turkish Wikipedias. The experiment will soon begin on the Arabic and Bangla Wikipedias as well. This feature gives editors community-curated guidance to help them create articles that follow community standards. Experienced editors can continue creating or adapting outlines for specific article types that are commonly created by less experienced contributors. The outlines guide less experienced editors in creating high-quality articles. A quick guide to markups used in outlines can be found on this page. Example outlines that can be adapted and instructions for how to adapt them are on this section of the project page.
Wikis that wish to replace the "indefinitely" button in Special:Block for temporary accounts (for example, wikis that block temporary users only until account expiration) will be able to do so by creating MediaWiki:ipb-indefinite-expiry-temporary-account with the block duration they want.
By the end of June, a valid user-agent string will be required for automated dumps downloads from the dumps.wikimedia.org website. Automated requests that provide a generic or empty user-agent will be blocked. This extends enforcement of the long standing user-agent policy. Access to dumps through Wikimedia Cloud Services will not change.
The roll out of global API rate limits is now complete, with limits enforced across all APIs and at the documented levels for all groups. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki remain exempt. All bots should continue to follow the documented best practices to avoid being rate limited.
On June 17th at 6pm UTC the WMF will be holding Discord call focused on a code review. We've heard through the Developer Satisfaction Survey that volunteers are struggling with code review and we'd like to discuss these experiences with the goal of surfacing workable solutions. You can join the call via the Wikimedia Community Discord server.
The Latin American Wikimedia Conference will host a regional hackathon that will bring together the Wikimedia movement’s technical community including developers, system administrators, data scientists, and users with extended rights. Interested technical contributors can apply for a scholarship to participate until June 21 at midnight (Bolivia time, UTC-4).
Sign up for Wikimania Team Challenges to join this special event. The Team challenges will take place online and in person from July 21 to 22, before Wikimania conference. Everyone is welcome, regardless of skills or Wikimania registration. Teams will work on 10 important challenges supporting the Wikimedia community. For details, visit the Team Challenges page and register there. Registration closes on June 20th at 11pm UTC.
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
Growth features are now available at Wikidata. This update enables access to Mentorship (if configured), Impact module, the Help Panel, and a simplified Newcomer Homepage (without Suggested Edits). Wikidata administrators are still configuring the features through Community Configuration.
Updates for editors
The special page Special:RangeCalculator has been created. It allows users to find an IP range without needing to rely on external tools. Until now, this tool was only available to CheckUsers.
Sub-referencing is a new MediaWiki feature that allows editors to reuse references with different details. It will be deployed to most small and medium-sized Wikipedia language versions on June 23. The FAQ lists possible actions to take on your wiki to support the deployment. Check the rollout plan for the next deployment steps.
Starting next week, users will get a notification when they are blocked or unblocked from editing, or if this block changes.
Starting next week, abuse filters that are set to "require CAPTCHA verification" will begin to also affect users with the skipcaptcha right, which includes most autoconfirmed users. Bots are exempted. This change only affects edits that trigger an abuse filter. The skipcaptcha right will continue to exempt users from having to solve CAPTCHAs in the ordinary course of using the wikis.
Reference documentation for the Lift Wing API has moved from the API Portal to the interactive REST Sandbox.
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
As part of the Account Creation Experiments, the Growth team tested adding a user account icon in the mobile web header for logged-out users, providing direct access to "Create account" and "Log in" actions. The experiment increased account creation by about 20% without negatively affecting edit quality or constructive edit rates. The feature will now be rolled out to all Wikimedia Foundation wikis on mobile web in the first week of July.
After a successful experiment, logged-in users who did not confirm their email address when their account was created see a new banner asking them to complete that process. This helps reduce the risk that users get locked out of their account, and makes account email addresses overall more reliable. This is part of the Account Security project.
An update to Search is refining how the -prefix: behaves when used to exclude results. Previously, using -prefix: with negation could unintentionally broaden search results by adding the namespaces included in the search scope, leading to confusing behavior for users expecting a straightforward exclusion filter. With the update, -prefix: will now strictly exclude matching page titles as intended and may display a warning if the relevant namespace has not been explicitly selected. The behavior of prefix: without negation however remains unchanged.
View all 33 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where reviewers using the Page Curation toolbar were not automatically subscribed to talk page discussions they started has now been fixed. Reviewers will now receive notifications when someone replies to those discussions.
Updates for technical contributors
Starting June 29th, automated downloads from the dumps.wikimedia.org website will be subject to the user-agent policy. Automated requests that provide a generic or empty user-agent will be blocked. Access to dumps through Wikimedia Cloud Services remains unaffected. This is a follow up to the announcement made in the 2026/25 issue of Tech News.
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
View all 34 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the search bar results on Wikidata, showed English results instead of using the correct language fallback for users of language variants, has now been fixed. Search suggestions will now follow the expected language fallback chain.
Updates for technical contributors
In preparation for Celebrate Women campaign planned for March 2027, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Content Enablement team has launched a 22-question survey to better understand technical contributions by women+ (anyone who identifies as a woman) across Wikimedia projects. The survey takes approximately 15–20 minutes to complete and will remain open until 20 July 2026. The questions are also available on-wiki for review in advance.
The Score extension now supports rendering music scores as SVG images in addition to PNG, addressing a long-standing feature request and resolving historical image quality issues. Both formats are now provided to clients, with PNG in the src attribute and SVG in the srcset attribute.
The new Parsoid parser continues to be deployed to additional wikis, making it easier to introduce new reading and editing features. It was enabled on French Wikipedia, bringing total progress to covering 78.9% of Wikipedia page views. Rollout to English Wikipedia desktop will progress through this week.
The Wikimedia Hackathon 2026 recap blog post is now live. It highlights the projects, sessions, and social activities from this year’s event, and shares initial plans for the 2027 Wikimedia Hackathon.
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
Revise Tone helps newcomers identify passages in Wikipedia articles that may contain non-encyclopedic language and encourages them to consider revising the tone. The feature was A/B tested on the Arabic, English, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias, where newcomer task completion rates increased by 38.7% compared to the default Copyedit task, with no decrease in edit quality. The test ended on July 9, and the feature is now available for everyone on these wikis, configurable via Community Configuration. The plan is to release Revise Tone to more wikis.
View all 38 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where some users of the Wikipedia Android app were logged out immediately after signing in, preventing them from staying logged in and editing pages, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
Editing a page via user scripts or gadgets was causing watchlist labels that the user had assigned to that page to reset. This has now been fixed.
To work around a Safari bug (see phab:T425211), on Parsoid-enabled wikis, wikilink hrefs now use absolute urls instead of protocol-relative urls. REST API output remains unchanged and continue to use protocol-relative urls. Gadgets, user scripts, bots, and CSS might need to be adapted if they relied on the presence of protocol-relative urls in wikilink hrefs.
The Wikimedia Foundation’s Experiment Platform Team has published a blog post reflecting on its first year of structured experimentation. It highlights successful experiments such as Paste Check, Reference Check, and Tone Check, which improved editing outcomes and have been rolled out to more users, as well as experiments that did not lead to product changes. Read more.
WikiProject Articles for creation is holding a month long Backlog Drive in August!
The goal of this drive is to reduce the backlog of unreviewed drafts to less than a month of outstanding reviews from the current 3+ months. Bonus points will be given for reviewing drafts that have been waiting more than 30 days. The drive is running from 1 August 2026 through 31 August 2026.
Barnstars will be given out as awards at the end of the drive.
There is a backlog of over 5000 pages, so start reviewing drafts. We're looking forward to your help! MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:37, 19 July 2026 (UTC)
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 Reader Experience team has incorporated community feedback around the placement of watchstar and watchlist buttons for the Reading Lists beta feature, which would allow for saving articles for later reading – a wishlist item to bring the functionality to web. Editors are invited to enable the beta feature to test it out and share their thoughts.
Suggestion Mode offers edit suggestions within the VisualEditor for improving Wikipedia articles. All suggestions are community-configurable. The TextMatch feature is a way for volunteers to create custom local suggestions. The feature searches in articles for strings of text, and now includes support for regular expressions. This gives volunteers greater precision and flexibility over the kinds of local suggestions they can create. Note: Suggestions can be targeted based on the edit count of the person editing as well as other aspects of the page. You can find examples from other communities for inspiration, including TextMatches that detect: typos, grammar-errors, potential advertisements, clichés, incorrect dash or hyphen usage, non-specific time keywords, outdated names, and more. Any feedback is appreciated.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the SVG Translate tool could use an outdated version of a file, causing existing translations to be overwritten when new ones were uploaded, has now been fixed. Overall, in the last quarter from April – June 2026 about 337 community tasks were resolved by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Updates for technical contributors
On Parsoid-enabled wikis, Parsoid now renders a maximum of 1,250 images per page. A new tracking category, "media-limit-reached", will be soon made available to identify pages where this limit is reached, making it easier to find content whose media output may have been restricted during rendering. See phab:T430854 for more information and to provide feedback.
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
Content Translation now supports dark mode, fulfilling a Community Wishlist request. This brings the tool in line with the accessibility features available in the Vector 2022 and Minerva skins, helping reduce visual fatigue for users translating content.
DiscussionTools' source mode and the 2017 wikitext editor will now offer autocomplete for links ([[), templates ({{), HTML and parser tags (<), and magic words (__), making it quicker and easier to insert links, templates, and other wiki markup while editing.
The Readers Growth team has concluded its experiment with mobile page previews and will not roll out the feature. Page Previews are a pop-up bottom sheet that appears when readers tap a blue link, showing a thumbnail, lead paragraph, and an option to open the article. The experiment showed flat retention and negative indicator metrics, suggesting that mobile web readers preferred navigating directly to linked articles rather than using page previews.
The Reader Experience team has seen encouraging early results from the Reading Lists feature, with 93% of participating users reporting that it was useful. Reading Lists help active readers save articles for future reading and support their learning goals on Wikimedia projects. The team plans further improvements before expanding the feature to more users.
The Explore Feed Refresh initiative was tested with new and casual Wikipedia app readers. The refreshed feed helps readers discover new and relevant content. After a 10.5% increase in engagement with the feed, Wikimedia Apps team has decided to scale the Home Feed redesign to iOS with the learnings from the Android release applied.
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where subject names in the Article Guidance feature were displayed with incorrect capitalization on French Wikipedia, has now been fixed. Subject names will now follow the correct capitalization rules for the language.
Updates for technical contributors
After running several Account Creation Experiments to improve registration completion rates, a new version of the username field on Create Account has been rolled out. It includes a popover summarizing the username policy to provide clearer guidance during account creation. As part of this change, the messages createacct-helpusername and createacct-username-help that several communities have configured will no longer be used. If communities want to customize the guidance shown in the new popover, they can instead edit the following messages: createacct-username-policy-popover-bullet1, createacct-username-policy-popover-bullet2, and createacct-username-policy-popover-bullet3.
Later this week, the CodeMirror syntax highlighter will offer themes. The themes can be picked from a dropdown menu in the full CodeMirror preferences dialog. For wikitext, available themes are default, colorblind-friendly (previously the colorblind preference option on Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing) and no-highlighting. For code languages (i.e., CSS/JavaScript/JSON/Vue/Lua), there are several themes available. These same themes will eventually be available for wikitext, too.
From now on, wikis can restrict editing in the "User" namespace to only the page owner and certain user groups. Read the configuration documentation to learn more.
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 Reader Experience team has developed a patch demo that wraps the page toolbar onto two lines when there is not enough horizontal space for all the buttons. This aims to reduce crowding in the Vector 2022 toolbar, which can occur on some language Wikipedias at certain screen widths.
The Reader Experience team is planning to launch Reading Lists, a Community Wishlist item, which is currently available to try in beta, as a full feature in September. Before then, volunteer translator help is needed for string translations into a number of languages. The feature supports reading and learning goals on Wikipedia.
Next week, the table of contents on Wikimedia Commons file pages will be improved by consolidating the file page table of contents with the page table of contents. This will make it easier to understand a file page’s structure, navigate to specific sections, and share links to individual sections.
View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where some TIFF images failed to load after clicking their thumbnail, causing a broken image to be displayed instead of the full-size image, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
The variable and function selector in AbuseFilter has been updated to support search and autocomplete. It will allow filter maintainers to find the desired variable or function more quickly.
The MJPEG and VP8 formats are removed from the video player. The MP4 format (MPEG-4 Part 2) is added instead, which provides higher quality videos to older iPhone devices. It may take a few weeks to retroactively update all existing videos. The default format for modern devices stays the same (VP9/WebM).
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
A new ChartWizard is now available on Wikimedia Commons for users interested in creating charts from their own data. The wizard makes the Chart extension more beginner-friendly by allowing editors to create charts, such as bar and pie charts, without needing to use JSON. Users can still switch to the JSON editor if they prefer. Feedback on the new tool is welcome on the wish talk page.
View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the Wikipedia iOS app’s Picture of the Day widget displayed the same image every day instead of updating daily, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
Math formula SVG images will soon be generated in the browser instead of on the server. MathML continues to be generated on the server and renders in the browser without JavaScript. Wikibooks will see this change on 12 August, Wikisource on 19 August and Wikipedia from 20-27 August. You can try this by selecting "MathML with SVG image (client side MathJax rendering)" in your preferences. This change is part of deprecating RESTBase and deprecating Mathoid.
Category pages will soon support sorting entries by the time they are added to a category. This will make it easier to find recently or long-standing categorized pages. It will also improve workflows for maintenance categories such as deletion backlogs and other time-based review tasks. You can use cldsort=timestamp URL argument in category view to sort the entries.
Gadgets and user scripts on Wikimedia wikis may now use ES2018 features and ES2019 features in JavaScript code. Previously, the platform only allowed up to ES2017. MediaWiki validates the source code to protect functionality from syntax errors and to ensure scripts are valid in all supported browsers.
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 Worklist feature for the Event Registration tool is now live on all Wikimedia wikis. With Worklist, event organizers can add the articles their event will focus on directly to the event page. The Worklist also powers Event Pathways which notifies other editors of the upcoming or ongoing event when they edit an article featured in the event's Worklist. This is the minimum viable version (MVP), and feedback is welcome. Organizers are encouraged to try the feature. A hands-on Worklist Setup Workshop will take place on 18 August at 16:00 UTC and 19 August at 11:00 UTC.
Updates for editors
Special:ShortPages displays short pages by their size, but in many cases it gets filled with disambiguations and soft redirects, making it harder to find the short articles themselves. Starting this weekend, you will be able to choose not to include an article in the special page by adding the magic word __EXPECTSHORTPAGE__.
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Bole (w:bol:)
Starting the week of August 17, the page toolbar will wrap onto two lines when there is not enough horizontal space for all the buttons. This is a fully merged patch from the Reader Experience team which aims to reduce crowding in the Vector 2022 toolbar, that may occur on some language Wikipedias at certain screen widths.
View all 16 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, uploading large files to Wikimedia Commons has become more stable and less prone to failure following some fixes related to the “Could not acquire lock” upload error.
Updates for technical contributors
Debian Bullseye will reach the end of its Long Term Support on 31 August 2026. Some Cloud VPS projects still have instances running Debian Bullseye. Maintainers of those projects are encouraged to migrate to Debian Bookworm or Debian Trixie. A migration guide is available to help with the process, and users may also want to consider whether their workload is better suited to Toolforge. If you need help or cannot complete the migration by 31 August, please contact the Cloud VPS admins as soon as possible. Read more.
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 Special:CreateAccount page has been simplified as part of ongoing work to modernize the account creation experience. The panel showing project statistics no longer appears next to the form on desktop and mobile web. Multiple account creation experiments show that a simpler form helps newcomers complete registration.
In order to improve page performance, images now load when they are viewed. This means images lower down an article will not load if a reader never scrolls to that part of the page, which may affect some image-related metrics.
View all 42 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where image thumbnails in Abstract Wikipedia could fail to display after the corresponding file was moved on Wikimedia Commons, has now been fixed. Thumbnails will now update correctly when files are moved.
Updates for technical contributors
User Info card is a feature that helps patrollers see information about user accounts. So far, it has been available only in places such as page history, logs and recent changes. Now, it's possible to place it in the page content as well, using the {{#uic:}} parser function. It can be particularly useful in templates like {{Userlinks}} (or their specialized variants), as it will make it easier to see the context about a user on various noticeboard pages. The card will be displayed only to users who have it enabled in their preferences.
Due to user security and privacy risks, we have disabled access to Special:MyPage URLs when specifically using action=raw. If you are impacted by this, consider whether you can use an alternative approach. Special:MyPage URLs can still be accessed and used without action=raw. Specified user page URLs (e.g. User:Myusername) can still be used with action=raw.
Due to an update, the thumbnailing software has been improved. This includes upgrading librsvg to 2.60 and ImageMagick to 7, as well as resolving a number of long-standing thumbnailing bugs like rendering errors.
On 1 September 2026, a one-month backlog drive for new pages patrol will begin at a particularly important time for NPP.
The backlog has now passed 30,000 unreviewed articles, a level that has been described in current NPP discussions as exceptionally high and potentially difficult to overcome through normal reviewing alone. Backlog drives are one of the few measures that have historically produced a noticeable reduction in the backlog, so the participation of as many active patrollers as possible will matter this month.
If you can review during September, please make articles your priority. Every article that is reviewed is a meaningful reduction in the backlog. With the queue at its current size, even a relatively small increase in the number of articles each patroller reviews can add up to a substantial difference over the course of the month.
This is a hybrid drive, so redirect reviewing is still included. Redirects can be a useful way for newer patrollers to get comfortable with NPP and can help people build up to reviewing articles. However, the main goal of this drive is to tackle the article backlog, and experienced patrollers are particularly encouraged to spend as much of their available reviewing time on articles as they can.
Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles and redirects patrolled.
Each article review will earn 1 point, while each redirect review will earn 0.2 points.
Streak awards will be given out based on consistently hitting point thresholds for each week of the drive.
Barnstars will also be granted for re-reviewing articles previously reviewed by other patrollers during the drive.
If you have been thinking about doing more NPP, this is an especially good month to jump in. Whether you can review a few pages or hundreds, every review helps. And if you are already an active patroller, please consider whether you can put in some additional time during September to help bring the backlog back under control.
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
A new format for the Community Wishlist is open for feedback. You can read the proposed ideas on Meta. This new process plans to improve how wishes are triaged, voted on, and prioritized in a way that is transparent and balanced across project families and language editions. This consultation is open for two weeks.
Updates for editors
The latest release of the Wikipedia Android app includes updates to the Saved feature, bringing the app’s saving experience closer to iOS and Web. The update redesigns the Saved tab with an “All articles” view, removes the default “Saved” reading list, renames reading lists to “Collections,” and modernizes the article-saving experience.
The Reading Lists feature was enabled for all logged-in users on Bengali, Chinese, Czech and Vietnamese Wikipedias on August 25, after several months as a beta feature. Reading Lists will be available to all logged-in users on Arabic, French and Indonesian Wikipedias on September 1, followed by English Wikipedia on September 14, and all other Wikipedia wikis on September 28.
At the end of the month, some logged-out readers on Bengali, Czech, Persian, English, and Polish Wikipedias using the Minerva skin on mobile will see an updated navigation bar in an A/B test. The test will compare the current navigation bar with a new version designed to make it easier to find information more quickly. The goal is to determine whether these changes encourage readers to return more often. This experiment will not change the experience for logged-in readers and/or editors.
Editors who maintain redirects, templates, and categories used on redirect pages now have improved ways for finding and curating redirects. Previously, redirects pages could not be searched. Two new search keywords, onlyredirects: and withredirects:, now allow redirects to be searched directly and can be combined with existing keywords such as incategory:, intitle:, and insource:.
The ISBN lookup tools for generating citations were recently not working because of external service problems. Developers are working on solutions.
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where searching for pages by category using deepcat could return no results or unrelated results has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
The domain of URLs for thumbnails is changing from upload.wikimedia.org to thumb.wikimedia.org. The old URLs will continue to work for the foreseeable future but MediaWiki will advertise the new domain instead. URLs to other types of media such as original files, videos and transcodes will still be served from upload.wikimedia.org.
The Wikimedia Math API is now deprecated. These endpoints will be fully sunset by the end of September 2026. Developers who call these endpoints should transition to alternative math rendering solutions, such as the native MathML or MathJax. Third-party MediaWiki installations that utilize the Math extension for formula rendering are required to upgrade to v1.43+ to avoid disruption of service.
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
Add a Link has been upgraded for English Wikipedia users with improved detection of links that have different capitalization. This will help reduce ambiguous suggestions caused by differences in capitalization in article titles, including articles about cultural goods. A second phase of improvements is planned, which will also prepare the feature for release in other languages.
The Article guidance feature will be enabled by default for junior editors on Simple English and Turkish Wikipedia starting 10 September 2026 following an experiment. Junior editors with 0 to 99 edits will automatically see the feature when they click a red link or use the "Madde oluşturto" option on Turkish Wikipedia to create a new article. The change is intended to help junior editors create higher-quality articles that meet each Wikipedia’s standards. Additional improvements will continue based on the experiment results and community feedback.
The Pageviews Analysis tool which allows users to compare pageviews across multiple pages, turns 10 years old this year and several new features have been added. They include WikiNav which provides insights into how readers of Wikipedia explore the content, editing stats in Siteviews, the ability to lookup articles belonging to a WikiProject, and support for dark mode.
A visually simplified Minerva navigation bar is being tested for logged-out readers using mobile web on the Bengali, Czech, English, Farsi, and Polish Wikipedias. The experiment aims to determine whether simplifying the navigation improves reader retention. The test will run from August 31 to September 28, and no action is required from users.
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 23. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where Parsoid could mishandle nested nowiki tags, causing content to be lost and displaying unwanted text has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
Interface administrators can configure gadgets from MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition. The definition format has been updated and no longer requires the ResourceLoader option, as gadgets are always loaded through ResourceLoader. This simplifies gadget configuration by removing an option that is no longer necessary, making gadget definitions easier for administrators.
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 Future Audiences team has started a discussion on English Wikipedia about a proposed new experiment to show a temporary notice about the new Google Preferred Sources feature to Wikipedia readers coming from Google. The experiment is to test whether this notice makes visitors come back to Wikipedia more often. Preferred Sources feature lets users choose websites they trust so Google can highlight content from those sources more prominently in Search and AI experiences. We are interested in testing this on other languages that Google supports and would welcome assistance with starting conversations on other wikis. If interested, please reach out to Future Audiences on the talk page.
Updates for editors
The chat platform Discord is releasing a new self-service framework that websites can use to specify how their links should look when shared on Discord. The Future Audiences team is planning to start using this new framework to improve how Wikipedia links look when shared on Discord, giving better attribution and credit to contributors. The link appearance and behavior won't change in the first phase of this project as we want to first collect some baseline data to assess the impact of future changes. However, if community members who are active on Discord spot any issues, they can reach out on Phabricator or Metawiki.
The Reader Growth team will be running an experiment to test whether compacting article lead sections on mobiles with the addition of a "read more" button improves reader retention. The test will begin on September 17 on Arabic, Spanish, French, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Vietnamese, and Chinese Wikipedias and will run for four weeks.
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 23. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming week.
View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where Wikistats for Wikipedias was returning an HTTP 500 error and could not be reached, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
Developers who maintain a tool that queries the Wikimedia Commons links tables need to update their code to connect to the new x4 database cluster. The links tables have been moved from the s4 cluster to x4, and will no longer receive updates on s4. The page and redirect tables remain available on both clusters. A wiki replica for the x4 cluster will be set up afterwards. The change is being made because the s4 cluster has grown too large to operate efficiently. You can read more.
Speedy deletion criteria G15 has been renamed from "LLM-generated pages without human review" to "Unambiguously LLM-generated pages" and has an additional sign of detection added to it following a RfC.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 February. It will be on all wikis from 11 February (calendar).
Last week Tech News reported that the IP address Cloud VPS and Toolforge use to contact the wikis will change on 8 February. This is delayed. It will happen later instead. 
Administrator changes
Interface administrator changes
Guideline and policy news
Technical news
Arbitration
Miscellaneous
Alexandria • Happyme22 • RexxS
Ashleyyoursmile • Less Unless
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
New scripts
lists.wikimedia.org) will no longer accept incoming emails apart from those sent by list members and WMF staff. Private concerns, apart from those requiring oversight, should be directly sent to the Arbitration Committee.
). 
Barnstars will be awarded.
CheckUser changes
Oversighter changes
A link to the user's Special:CentralAuth page will appear on Special:Contributions — some user scripts which previously added this link may cause conflicts. This feature request was voted #17 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.
Bureaucrat changes
Featured script
Updated scripts
Improve a script
Requested scripts
Newly maintained scripts
.png)
.png)
Requested scripts
.jpg)
Miscellaneous
). There was a long-standing bug where an indication for new notifications was only shown if you had unseen Alerts. This bug is now fixed. In the future, Minerva users will notice a counter atop the bell icon when you have 1 or more unseen Notices and/or Alerts. 
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a broken link from the GlobalContributions interface message to the XTools GlobalContributions page which has now been fixed. 
Enable the user info card
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.
Oversight changes