User talk:Mandarax
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unless Trump appoints himself Dictator for Life

| This user is probably watching Babylon 5 on Tubi right now, and may not respond swiftly to queries. |
Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject,
so you know you are getting the best possible information.
- Michael Scott
| Index 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 |
Happy New Year, Mandarax!


Mandarax,
Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia.
— Moops ⋠T⋡ 20:22, 1 January 2023 (UTC)
Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year fireworks}} to user talk pages.
Pisote
Perhaps Pisote is more of an alternative spelling for Pizote than a misspelling, but we need to reconcile that these two redirects currently point to different articles. Both seem to refer specifically to White-nosed coati, as the lede says for Pizote at least. Either way, it doesn't seem like these two redirects should point to different articles. The ledes should be updated accordingly. Mdewman6 (talk) 02:59, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
- The Merriam-Webster page I linked to says that a pisote is a coati, which it defines as one of various species. I don't know if they were being imprecise, or if the pizote spelling is used in reference to only one species or for others too. I don't think it matters if the redirects point to different targets if they do indeed have different usages, especially since each of them averages fewer than one page view per day. I don't care either way, so feel free to make whatever changes you'd like (as long as they're not classified as misspellings). MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 05:29, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
- Based on google searching, it looks like both spellings are used in Central America to refer to the coati native there, which is the white-nosed coati specifically. So not unreasonable that an attempt at a dictionary definition would simply say "coati" since this is what locals in the native range of the white-nosed coati would call it in English, given that it's the only species present. Certainly this seems to be true for the 'pizote' spelling, and I can't imagine the same word spelled with an s would purposely be meant to refer to coatis more broadly, with the z spelling referring to a specific species. As to which spelling is "correct" or has etymological precedent, I am not sure. So, I am going to retarget pisote to white-nosed coati to match pizote and categorize as an alternative spelling. Cheers, Mdewman6 (talk) 01:07, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
A kitten for you!

I am gifting you this kitten for your taking care of lint errors on DYK nominations very frequently.
─ The Aafī (talk) 17:52, 22 January 2023 (UTC)
Thanks! MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 19:22, 22 January 2023 (UTC)
- @Mandarax, could you please help in finding what the problem is with journal citation in Sanaullah Bhat? ─ The Aafī (talk) 15:04, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
- Have you already fixed it? I don't see a problem. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 16:56, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
- If you try to see the article in preview, you'll get to see "One or more {{cite journal}} templates have maintenance messages". I don't know what that means. ─ The Aafī (talk) 17:23, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
- Ah, a maintenance message. This was not anything that a reader would notice. I fixed it by using the correct dash (en dash) in the date range. For future reference, hidden categories help decipher what the cryptic notice is about. If you don't see them, you can enable their display at your preferences, Appearance tab, under "Advanced options": select "Show hidden categories". In this case, the category was Category:CS1 maint: date format. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 18:48, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
- Hi @Mandarax: could you please take a look at this and see where this lint error is exactly? I'd be more than thankful to you. Thanks, ─ The Aafī (talk) 08:08, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
- I looked, but gave up after searching for a long time. I assume it's some
<tag>without a corresponding</tag>, but the page is too complicated for me to find the error. However, Jonesey95, I've seen you fixing litterally millions of similar errors; maybe you have a tool or are just keenly perceptive. Could you please take a look at meta:Deoband Community Wikimedia and fix the "Missing end tag" error? MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 20:10, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
- I looked, but gave up after searching for a long time. I assume it's some
- Hi @Mandarax: could you please take a look at this and see where this lint error is exactly? I'd be more than thankful to you. Thanks, ─ The Aafī (talk) 08:08, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
- Ah, a maintenance message. This was not anything that a reader would notice. I fixed it by using the correct dash (en dash) in the date range. For future reference, hidden categories help decipher what the cryptic notice is about. If you don't see them, you can enable their display at your preferences, Appearance tab, under "Advanced options": select "Show hidden categories". In this case, the category was Category:CS1 maint: date format. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 18:48, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
- If you try to see the article in preview, you'll get to see "One or more {{cite journal}} templates have maintenance messages". I don't know what that means. ─ The Aafī (talk) 17:23, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
- Have you already fixed it? I don't see a problem. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 16:56, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
Linked misspellings
Hello. I work through new entries in Wikipedia:Database reports/Linked misspellings and spotted that most of today's are linked from your sandbox, so I wondered if we might be duplicating each other's work. I usually check the entries which haven't appeared before. I look at all occurrences rather than just links but sometimes work a few days in arrears. I'm happy to carry on or to leave this to you if we'd be tripping over each other. Alternatively, one of us could divert to User:Certes/Misspellings which is a backlog of entries I missed when I was busy off-wiki for a few weeks. Certes (talk) 22:26, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
- I've been working on those for quite a few years. Actually, not most, but all of them should be in that sandbox (unless you're seeing a cached version from a previous day), because it's the same database report, automatically reformatted in a form that's more useful for me. I generally go through the list every day and fix all of the linked occurrences (except for a few that I skip for various reasons), and almost never check out any unlinked ones. So it looks like we're not tripping over each other. I'd seen you mention your page before, and I sometimes use it. It's very helpful in finding unlinked misspellings. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 01:40, 26 January 2023 (UTC)
January music
-- Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:56, 26 January 2023 (UTC)
February songs
Now I write my own stories, today a book, Alte Liebe, for Valentine --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:31, 14 February 2023 (UTC)
... and today the regional festival - DYK of 13 years ago ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:17, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
My story on 24 February is about Artemy Vedel (TFA by Amitchell235), and I made a suggestion for more peace, - what do you think? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:26, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
today: two women whose birthday we celebrate today, 99 and 90! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:51, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
DYK nomination: Gregg Rickman
Hi @Mandarax, thanks for looking at the DYK nomination for Gregg Rickman. I made the change you commented on here. Longhornsg (talk) 15:39, 14 February 2023 (UTC)
Exciting news!
Babylon 5 is now available on Tubi, which is a free streaming platform! It's been many, many years since I've seen this extraordinary show, which has been called "the greatest work of science fiction ever produced". If you've wondered what I've frequently raved about, and what Badger and Skinny Pete talked about for three hours straight, you'll have to check it out. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 20:36, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
Abby Day Slocomb
Galium hardhamiae
ITIS is wrong if it implies that the correct spelling is "hardhamae". I've now explained why this must be corrected to "hardhamiae" at Galium hardhamiae § Taxonomy, which I should have done when I moved the article. Note that Tropicos. which is usually reliable on taxonomy, also has the corrected spelling here. (Actually, if you follow through the major taxonomic databases in the taxonbar, you'll see that ITIS is the one out of line.) Peter coxhead (talk) 11:14, 22 March 2023 (UTC)
- This could not possibly matter to me less. I just don't think that the redirect, which uses the same spelling that one of the most authoritative taxonomic sources does, should be classified as a misspelling, but rather as an alternative spelling or former name. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 01:17, 23 March 2023 (UTC)
- thank you for a great reply! - sharing impressions from vacation on Madeira 20-30 March, pics now at 25 March with ups and downs and two cats --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:04, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
History of invention timeline
Is it necessary to split the agriculture and modern section since it has becoming more complicated Cuando de hyiopi (talk) 21:18, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
- I have no opinion on the matter. I've never read any of the article, and I've made only one edit to it in the last ten months, and only three ever, all of them very minor (like typo fixing). You've made more than sixty, so you're in a much better position to decide. If you think a major change in the structure of the article would improve it, I'd suggest discussing it on the article's talk page. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 22:20, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
April thanks
Thank you for consistent DYK fixes! -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:05, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
- Thanks for noticing. That's a great picture of the appropriately-named glory-of-the-snow. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 18:45, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
- thank you - you said that well! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:10, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
- Today is the 80th birthday of John Eliot Gardiner. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:17, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
- I had a good story on coronation day: the Te Deum we sang that day. And the following day we sang it for the composer ;)
- I heard pleasant music today - did you know a string quartet with two cellos (and no article yet in English? - I nominated Soňa Červená for GA just to give her a bit more exposure. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:52, 14 May 2023 (UTC)
- Wow, congrats on singing it for the composer! MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 01:57, 15 May 2023 (UTC)
- That was really great! - Now May scenery pictured when you click on songs. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 17:32, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
- Pentecost was full of music, and my story today is that 300 years ago today, Bach became Thomaskantor, with BWV 75, writing music history. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:12, 30 May 2023 (UTC)
- Wow, congrats on singing it for the composer! MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 01:57, 15 May 2023 (UTC)
Amazing DYK authorship skills
| Batman is half female. Roasted (talk) 02:38, 5 June 2023 (UTC) |
- Thanks! That was a dozen years ago. And two years later, I had another Batman hook: "... that Walter Baxter wrote about the gay Batman–Kent relationship?" MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 04:51, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
DYK thanks
You are speedy, my friend! Thanks for fixing those issues. You might have remembered me from my previous DYK participation, but it's been a while, so I've since forgotten the formatting rules. :-) Edge3 (talk) 01:36, 20 June 2023 (UTC)
- You're welcome for the tweaks. And thanks for the note. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 01:39, 20 June 2023 (UTC)
- Thanks for the fixes! - Today's story is about a singer whom I saw twice, not Wagner and Strauss, but Bach and Weill. - Vacation pics! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:33, 21 June 2023 (UTC)
Quick note
Please note in greyhound racing, a male is officially a dog and a female is officially a bitch, so I had to revert one of your edits. Many thanks. ApricotFoot (talk) 08:44, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
- Thanks, ApricotFoot, for letting me know. I had no idea. Is it standard in dog articles to link it as
[[Male|Dog]]? I think it would be much more useful to link as[[Dog#Terminology|Dog]], where this odd convention is explained. Although it's still a little fuzzy for me. Dog#Terminology says "dog" refers to "the species (or subspecies) as a whole, also any male member of the same". So a male dog would be called a "dog", but it looks like its sex would still be referred to as "male". Unfortunately, Template:Infobox greyhound has no documentation. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 19:06, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
Stranded in the rain
I assume you are not among them? Those poor people. Drmies (talk) 22:17, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
- Right, I'm not there. (It did rain one year that I went, and it was a super-muddy mess, but nothing like this.) I watched an extensive piece of drone footage, and the flooding looked horrible, but the truly remarkable thing was the near-complete absence of people, bicycles, and mutant vehicles. The playa had turned into a ghost town. I can sympathize with all of those burners trapped in their shelters. And it's even worse than many people realize – according to
TwitterX, they've got an Ebola outbreak!!! This morning, the Man was scheduled to burn tonight at 9:30 Pacific time, but the latest update no longer provides an estimate for when the Man and Temple burns may happen. Anyone interested should be able to watch whatever's happening live at https://burningman.org/live-webcast/ . Right now, there's a huge rainbow. Thanks for the note. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 23:13, 3 September 2023 (UTC)- Ebola?? Holy moly. Thx for the update. I guess it's been a while since you went? I'll try to check in in a couple of hours--though chances are all of Alabama, including me, will be asleep at that time, happily intoxicated after wins by Alabama and Auburn. But yeah, I feel bad for all the folks out there. It's so easy to laugh at people who do different things from what many others do, and so cheap. Drmies (talk) 01:33, 4 September 2023 (UTC)
- Someone had even taken a screenshot of a news story reporting that the Ebola thing was a hoax, and altered it to say that yes, there's an Ebola outbreak on the playa. Sorry if anybody took me seriously, but I thought the reference to "X" plus the three exclamation marks would be sufficient. I'm not sure if the pre-Elon Twitter would've done anything about such a hoax, but now anything goes. Yeah, it's been a while since I attended. I mentioned the little rain/mud I experienced, but the main environmental problems every year (until now) are the heat and especially the frequent, devastating, dust storms. I guess an optimist would say that there won't be any dust storms while it's all muddy. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 02:01, 4 September 2023 (UTC)
- Hmm were those exclamation marks extra fat? Gotcha. I saw a few dust references on the page you linked, yes. I'm taking a break from deleting weird pages created by someone who, I think, set up an imaginary Hangul course for themselves. So many lonely people on Wikipedia. Drmies (talk) 02:16, 4 September 2023 (UTC)
- Alright, I feel like I accomplished something. :) Later, Mandarax! Drmies (talk) 02:25, 4 September 2023 (UTC)
- Thanks for your adminwork, congrats on your team victories, and don't get too drunk. There's been an official update. 1) The Man burn is tomorrow at 9 pm. 2) The Temple burn is three hours later. That's 2 am in Alabama, but don't worry if you miss it. The Temple burn doesn't have fireworks like the Man burn. 3) "The online rumors of transmissible illnesses in Black Rock City are unfounded and untrue." MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 02:46, 4 September 2023 (UTC)
- Update: it is not the Temple (Temple of the Heart) that's scheduled to burn at midnight (Pacific time), but instead the Chapel of Babel. The Temple burn is scheduled for Tuesday at 8 pm, which follows the usual practice of happening the day after the Man burn. Sorry for misinforming. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 23:50, 4 September 2023 (UTC)
- Thanks for your adminwork, congrats on your team victories, and don't get too drunk. There's been an official update. 1) The Man burn is tomorrow at 9 pm. 2) The Temple burn is three hours later. That's 2 am in Alabama, but don't worry if you miss it. The Temple burn doesn't have fireworks like the Man burn. 3) "The online rumors of transmissible illnesses in Black Rock City are unfounded and untrue." MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 02:46, 4 September 2023 (UTC)
- Someone had even taken a screenshot of a news story reporting that the Ebola thing was a hoax, and altered it to say that yes, there's an Ebola outbreak on the playa. Sorry if anybody took me seriously, but I thought the reference to "X" plus the three exclamation marks would be sufficient. I'm not sure if the pre-Elon Twitter would've done anything about such a hoax, but now anything goes. Yeah, it's been a while since I attended. I mentioned the little rain/mud I experienced, but the main environmental problems every year (until now) are the heat and especially the frequent, devastating, dust storms. I guess an optimist would say that there won't be any dust storms while it's all muddy. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 02:01, 4 September 2023 (UTC)
- Ebola?? Holy moly. Thx for the update. I guess it's been a while since you went? I'll try to check in in a couple of hours--though chances are all of Alabama, including me, will be asleep at that time, happily intoxicated after wins by Alabama and Auburn. But yeah, I feel bad for all the folks out there. It's so easy to laugh at people who do different things from what many others do, and so cheap. Drmies (talk) 01:33, 4 September 2023 (UTC)
September music
Thank you for the little fixes repairing my sloppiness! -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:33, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
- You're welcome (but I wouldn't call it "sloppiness", since such redirects generally don't matter other than Main Page content).Another pretty picture. The flowers somewhat remind me of the naked ladies (Lycoris squamigera, I think) that I've got blooming now. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 07:08, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
- Lovely flowers also! - Herbst means autumn or fall, zeitlos means without time or any time, - a strange name, but when you see them (ad I did on 2 Sep) summer is past. I picked them for September as the prettiest pic I took in September 2022, and they - "weeping" if you look closer - were already used for a user who died and others who went on long break or are enjoying "vacation" for months. No idea how I knew. Next year will probably have a bright sunflower, - reminding me that I should upload more ... --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:59, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
- Today's story is about a great pianist with an unusual career, taking off when he was 50. It's the wedding anniversary of Clara and Robert Schumann, but I was too late with our gift. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:59, 12 September 2023 (UTC)
- Today I remember Raymond Arritt, who still helps me, five years after he died, per what he said in my darkest time on Wikipedia (placed in my edit-notice as a reminder), and by teh rulez. - Latest pics from a weekend in Berlin (one more day to come). --Gerda Arendt (talk) 18:51, 19 September 2023 (UTC)
DYK spelling
I see here you made a comment about the spelling meter vs metre. Must the DYK hooks use US spellings, or can they be use any spelling dialect? It is spelt "metre" in New Zealand. Panamitsu (talk) Please ping on reply 05:48, 10 September 2023 (UTC)
- Well, you had spelled it "meter" (twice). The hooks should use whichever spelling is appropriate (which is usually "metre"). I had added a {{Convert}}, figuring that its default spelling was correct here, then I noticed that you had also used the other spelling in the caption, so I added a conversion parameter to make it consistent with what appeared to be your preferred spelling. I've now changed it in both places. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 06:27, 10 September 2023 (UTC)
Some stroopwafels for you!
Help
Hello. Help improvements for acticle Akane Yamaguchi. Thanks you. 113.161.210.125 (talk) 02:23, 1 October 2023 (UTC)
- No.Drmies, from Talk:Akane Yamaguchi, I see that this is a sock you've encountered before. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 02:43, 1 October 2023 (UTC)
October music
User talk:Gerda Arendt#Music keeps track of "my" music and memories, and just today I have a juxtaposition of music performed by the two church choirs in town, one I sang in and one where I listened, to music about love, evening and night. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:16, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
Today, it's a place that inspired me, musings if you have time. Thank you for the much needed link to the right person for the artist! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:05, 20 October 2023 (UTC)
- It's always nice to see you branching out into the visual arts from your usual field of music. You're welcome – yes, my edit was necessary to distinguish between your sculptor and a concentration camp overseer! MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 19:09, 20 October 2023 (UTC)
November
Thank you! - Vacation pictures offered if you click on songs, and my story today is a DYK hook from 13 years ago OTD: about the great music at one of my churches. Mozart's Requiem to come on Sunday, coupled with Arvo Pärt's Da pacem Domine, - I guess you might come if it was a bit closer. Perhaps watch the video of our last production, our first on yt, ever. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:21, 21 November 2023 (UTC)
RIP, Andre
I would like to acknowledge Andre Braugher, who recently died. It has been said that his Brooklyn Nine-Nine character, Captain Holt, "may be the funniest sitcom character of all time". MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 00:22, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
- I came just to say thank you for again fixing a DYK nom after a page move, and before I could even ask. About the actor: the article looks well sourced, you could probably nominate him for WP:ITNN as it is, unless someone else did it already. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:05, 15 December 2023 (UTC)
- You're welcome for the DYK fix. Braugher already made it to RD. I'd seen him in a few other roles, but his performance as Raymond Holt was extraordinarily funny. Oh, I don't know if you've seen the show in your part of the world. but Captain Holt was also a big classical music/opera fan! MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 17:48, 15 December 2023 (UTC)
- Thank you for what you do and stand for! I wish you a good festive season and a peaceful New Year! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:04, 20 December 2023 (UTC)
- Thanks, Gerda. I hope you have a very happy holiday season! MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 07:57, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
- Thank you! - Today, I have a special story to tell, of the works of a musician born 300 years ago. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:40, 22 December 2023 (UTC)
- Thanks, Gerda. I hope you have a very happy holiday season! MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 07:57, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
- Thank you for what you do and stand for! I wish you a good festive season and a peaceful New Year! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:04, 20 December 2023 (UTC)
- You're welcome for the DYK fix. Braugher already made it to RD. I'd seen him in a few other roles, but his performance as Raymond Holt was extraordinarily funny. Oh, I don't know if you've seen the show in your part of the world. but Captain Holt was also a big classical music/opera fan! MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 17:48, 15 December 2023 (UTC)
The DYK Barnstar
Christmas greetings

May the bells of Christmas ring for freedom![1]

Problems playing this file? See media help.
May peace be upon us.
And have a happy and prosperous New Year. 7&6=thirteen (☎) 18:42, 24 December 2023 (UTC)
- Thank you! I wish a very happy holiday season for you too! MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 18:35, 25 December 2023 (UTC)
- Malpas, Anna (December 24, 2023). "How Ukraine independence song became a Christmas classic". AFP.
Seasons Greetings
2024
Same location pictured as 2019. -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:09, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
- Thanks, Gerda. Beautiful place for a concert. Happy new year to you too! MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 22:14, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
- Thank you! I was there, - DYK doesn't want that pic, but today's of destruction. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:50, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
- On the Main page: the person who made the pictured festival possible --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:30, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
- Today a friend's birthday, with related music and new vacation pics --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:33, 30 January 2024 (UTC)
Thanks
I was so focused on writing the hook that I forgot to bold the article. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 01:03, 8 January 2024 (UTC)
Valentine's Day
For Valentine's Day, I present one of the most romantic songs. Now, it might not seem that way at first, but if you think about it, it really is. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 17:27, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
- With thanks ("name their cars ..."), I present you flowers, - it might not seem that way at first, though. - The image, taken on a cemetery last year after the funeral of a distant but dear family member, commemorates today, with thanks for their achievements, four subjects mentioned on the Main page and Vami_IV, a friend here. Listen to very romantic music by Tchaikovsky (an article where one of the four is pictured), sung by today's subject (whose performance on stage I enjoyed two days ago). -- and then I forgot to sign --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:21, 24 February 2024 (UTC)
- more music and flowers on Rossini's rare birthday --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:11, 29 February 2024 (UTC)
April thanks
Thank you for improving article quality in April! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:15, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
- Thanks, Gerda. Another pretty flower picture. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 19:31, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
- if you click on places: images of a flock of sheep that I met by chance on the 300th birthday of cantata Du Hirte Israel, höre, BWV 104 --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:47, 21 April 2024 (UTC)
DYK and typos
Dear Mandarax,
Thanks for your suggestions. About the typos I think yacht was corrected and yachties is the correct word and I added the definition from the Oxford English Dictionary. As I am new doing this, I really appreciate your suggestions and comments.
All the best! Lautreca11 (talk) 08:49, 18 May 2024 (UTC)
Pearl DYK
Hi! On the Did you know nomination for Pearl (X), you left a comment in an edit summary: "This is for an article you reviewed (WP:QPQ), but you're exempt". I'm unsure what that means. Is the nomination invalid or something? (here) FishLoveHam (talk) 14:03, 20 May 2024 (UTC)
- Reviewed had been filled in with the name of the nomination template it was on. I removed it because this is supposed to be used to list a different nomination which the nominator reviewed to fulfill the QPQ if required to do so; but this is only required if you've previously nominated at least five articles. Since you haven't, you're exempt from having to do a QPQ, and your nomination is fine to proceed without one. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 17:34, 20 May 2024 (UTC)
- thanks for explaining :) FishLoveHam (talk) 18:18, 20 May 2024 (UTC)
May music
Today's story mentions a concert I loved to hear (DYK) and a piece I loved to sing in choir, 150 years old (OTD). -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:00, 22 May 2024 (UTC)
Schadenfreude?
Sometimes there's a fine line between Schadenfreude and just happiness that justice has been served. I think I'm feeling the latter much more, but in any case, I'm elated right now. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 21:17, 30 May 2024 (UTC)
- That sounds good! - Today we have a centenarian story (documentation about it by Percy Adlon) and an article that had two sentences yesterday and was up for deletion, and needs a few more citations. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:06, 20 June 2024 (UTC)
Trump is ineligible
There was plenty of talk about Trump being ineligible for the Presidency because of his insurrectionist activities, but I've never seen anyone mention that he's ineligible because of the Twenty-second Amendment, which states: "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice". Note that it doesn't mention anything about serving ... just getting elected. Trump has always insisted that he was elected for a second term; therefore, according to his own insistence, he is constitutionally ineligible to be elected again, unless he admits that he lost the last election, which he will never do. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 02:16, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
- This would only matter if Americans cared about hypocrisy anymore. We don’t. Floquenbeam (talk) 12:01, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
- I stand corrected, sort of.... I still wouldn't say he "admitted" that he lost, but he did accidentally let it slip that he knows he lost. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 01:43, 4 September 2024 (UTC)
July music
Today's story is about a photographer who took iconic pictures, especially View from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Manhattan, 9/11, yesterday's was a great mezzo, and on Thursday we watched a sublime ballerina. If that's not enough my talk offers chamber music from two amazing concerts. -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:47, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
DYK
I have some questions! Should the DYK hook be linked to the article I nominated or is that not necessary? The article I have nominated is A. Sreekar Prasad filmography whereas the BLP is A. Sreekar Prasad. There was a discussion here regarding lists. If you have the time, please let me know if I need to make any changes as this is my first nomination. Any inputs are appreciated. Jeraxmoira🐉 (talk) 07:10, 22 July 2024 (UTC)
- Welcome to DYK. Yes, as I mentioned in my edit summary, you must include a bold link to the nominated article (WP:DYKG#B1). It may be piped to whatever text fits in the hook. You may link to the person's article, but it's not necessary, and you could just include the name as part of the filmography link. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 08:44, 22 July 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-34
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 categoriesproperty ofmw.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 withWikipedia 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 00:50, 20 August 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-38
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-boxneed 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 newercdx-messagegroup 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 23:59, 16 September 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-41
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.
- View all 12 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- It is now possible for
<syntaxhighlight>code blocks to offer readers a "Copy" button if thecopy=1attribute 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.- Five new wikis have been created:
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MediaWiki message delivery 23:39, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
October thanks
Thank you for improving articles on October! - My story today is a cantata 300 years old, based on a hymn 200 years old when the cantata was composed, based on a psalm some thousand years old, - so said the 2015 DYK hook. I had forgotten the discussion on the talk. -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 17:04, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
Happy whatever you celebrate today, - more who died, more to come, and they made the world richer. Greetings from Madrid where I took the pic of assorted Cucurbita in 2016. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:53, 31 October 2024 (UTC)
- Thanks, Gerda. Happy whatever to you too! And, speaking of those who died.... MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 21:27, 31 October 2024 (UTC)
In memoriam
I'd like to mention that today is Adam Schlesinger's birthday. This brilliant songwriter tragically died from COVID in 2020. I will always be thankful to him for his amazing work on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 21:27, 31 October 2024 (UTC)
November music
Thank you for adding (pictured) to a DYK nom in memory. - For a surprise, a Bach cantata is on the Main page today, where it was last year for the 300th anniversary, and they were too lazy to find something new ;) - Look at my story, and listen to the 3 whole-tone steps and the dialogues of Fear and Hope. - An open letter open to be signed (more info on the talk), - I haven't checked if you did, please ignore then. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:08, 7 November 2024 (UTC)
I uploaded more pics, on a mountain in the sun above the fog. - Madeleine Riffaud - remember. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:25, 11 November 2024 (UTC)
- Nice pics, as usual. I signed the letter. Hopefully it will help to protect users when Führer Trump comes after those who have spoken out against him. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 05:06, 13 November 2024 (UTC)
- Yes. - I uploaded pics of a trip that was a 10-day celebration of a 16 November event, but the day was also when a dear friend died. We sang Hevenu shalom aleichem at his funeral yesterday, and it was good. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 18:56, 30 November 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-49
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
- Two new parser functions were added this week. The
{{#interwikilink}}function adds an interwiki link and the{{#interlanguagelink}}function adds an interlanguage link. These parser functions are useful on wikis where namespaces conflict with interwiki prefixes. For example, links beginning withMOS:on English Wikipedia conflict with themoslanguage code prefix of Mooré Wikipedia. - 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 22:20, 2 December 2024 (UTC)
Account creation request
I would like to ask you to create a local account for User:Sandbox for user warnings at the English Wikibooks for the sake of testing a new welcoming gadget. JJPMaster (she/they) 15:40, 8 December 2024 (UTC)
December music
Thank you for your watchful eye on redirects, while I - translating from German - didn't even notice there was one. - I have Michael Ruetz on the Main page (see story), and music to express happiness and sadness. Funeral of a friend on that cemetery, pictured in music, - it would illustrate the cemetery well but I'm sort of shy. -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 17:54, 10 December 2024 (UTC)
Listen today to the (new) Perplexities after Escher. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:00, 12 December 2024 (UTC)
Listen today to Beethoven's 3rd cello sonata, on his birthday - it was a hook in the 2020 DYK set when his 250th birthday was remembered. I picked a recording with Antônio Meneses, because he was on my sad list this year, and I was in Brazil (see places), and I love his playing. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:50, 16 December 2024 (UTC)
I come to fix the cellist's name, with a 10-years-old DYK and new pics - look for red birds --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:46, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
January music
Happy new year 2025, opened with trumpet fanfares that first sounded OTD in 1725 (as the Main page has). -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:03, 1 January 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks, Gerda. Happy new year to you too! MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 18:48, 1 January 2025 (UTC)
- Liebster Immanuel, Herzog der Frommen, BWV 123, my story today 300 years after the first performance, is up for GAN. Dada Masilo will be my story tomorrow. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:25, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
- My story today is about a composer who influenced music history also by writing. Did you watch Masilo talk and dance? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:07, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
- Today, pictured on the Main page, Tosca, in memory of her first appearance on stage OTD in 1900, and of principal author Brian Boulton. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 18:15, 14 January 2025 (UTC)
- Today, between many who just died, Tobias Kratzer on his 45th birthday who was good for an unusual DYK mentioning a Verdi opera in 2018, - you can see his work in the trailer of another one that I saw, and my talk page has a third (but by a different director). 2025 pics, finally. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 18:20, 17 January 2025 (UTC)
- Today I have a composer (trumpeter, conductor) on the main page who worked closely with another who became GA yesterday, - small world! To celebrate: mostly flowers pics from vacation ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:20, 20 January 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-04
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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 01:34, 21 January 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-05
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.
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- 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_historydump, theanonymousfield will be renamed tois_anonymous. The changes will take effect with the next release of the dumps in February.
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MediaWiki message delivery 22:12, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-06
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
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.jsonto include entries forpreprint,standard, anddataset; 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, andversionNumber.
- (1) Administrators should update the local versions of the page
- One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Central Kanuri (
w:knc:)
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the OCR (optical character recognition) tool used for Wikisource now supports a new language, Church Slavonic.
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MediaWiki message delivery 00:06, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-07
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.
Template editors who use TemplateStyles can now customize output for users with specific accessibility needs by using accessibility related media queries (prefers-reduced-motion,prefers-reduced-transparency,prefers-contrast, andforced-colors). Thanks to user Bawolff for these improvements.
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
getDescriptionwas 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/relatedendpoint 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 00:09, 11 February 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-08
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:Homepagefor newcomers. This feature will help newcomers to be informed about editing activities they can participate in. Administrators can create a new event to showcase atSpecial: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

- 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.Uriis deprecated. Tools requiringmw.Urimust explicitly declaremediawiki.Urias a ResourceLoader dependency, and should migrate to the browser nativeURLAPI soon.
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MediaWiki message delivery 21:14, 17 February 2025 (UTC)
February music
I pointed at a composer yesterday, as the main page had, and today it's about a soprano whose performance impressed me, - see video, on her birthday. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:35, 21 February 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-09
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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 00:38, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-10
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.
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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MediaWiki message delivery 02:28, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
March music
On Ravel's birthday, we also think of a conductor and five more composers ;) -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:13, 7 March 2025 (UTC)
Today I could have written five stories off the main page, and chose Sofia Gubaidulina. I find the TFA also interesting, and two DYK, and a birthday OTD. How about you? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:14, 16 March 2025 (UTC)
Today: an opera, 100 years old OTD, on Bach's birthday. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:15, 21 March 2025 (UTC)
Today, 300 years of Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 1! We sang works for (mostly) double choir by Pachelbel, Johann Christoph Bach, Kuhnau/Bach, Gounod and Rheinberger! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:55, 25 March 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-11
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.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 23:06, 10 March 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-12
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.
Updates for editors
- The improved Content Translation tool dashboard is now available in 10 Wikipedias and will be available for all Wikipedias soon. With the unified dashboard, desktop users can now: Translate new sections of an article; Discover and access topic-based article suggestion filters (initially available only for mobile device users); Discover and access the Community-defined lists filter, also known as "Collections", from wiki-projects and campaigns.
- 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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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MediaWiki message delivery 23:45, 17 March 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-13
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
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.
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- 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.ApiJavaScript library, can now identify the tool using it with theuserAgentparameter: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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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MediaWiki message delivery 22:39, 24 March 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-14
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.
View all 35 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- 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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 00:02, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-15
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 now on, interface admins and centralnotice admins are technically required to enable two-factor authentication before they can use their privileges. In the future this might be expanded to more groups with advanced user-rights.
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- 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, andsize-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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 18:50, 7 April 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-16
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.
- On April 15, the full Wikidata graph will no longer be supported on query.wikidata.org. After this date, scholarly articles will be available through query-scholarly.wikidata.org, while the rest of the data hosted on Wikidata will be available through the query.wikidata.org endpoint. This is part of the scheduled split of the Wikidata Graph, which was announced in September 2024. More information is available on Wikidata.
- The latest quarterly Wikimedia Apps Newsletter is now available. It covers updates, experiments, and improvements made to the Wikipedia mobile apps.
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- 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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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MediaWiki message delivery 00:21, 15 April 2025 (UTC)
April music
My story is about music that Bach and Picander gave the world 300 years (and 19 days) ago, - listen (on the conductor's birthday) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:49, 20 April 2025 (UTC)
I wrote my story today and then found it's the person's funeral day. - I hated to see DYK for Johannes-Passion (Gubaidulina) today instead of Good Friday, but it seems also right in the context. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 17:26, 24 April 2025 (UTC)
I finally managed to upload the pics I meant for Easter, see places. - Also finally, I managed a FAC, Easter Oratorio. I wanted that on the main page for Easter Sunday, but no, twice. You are invited to join a discussion about what "On this day" means, day or date. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:26, 25 April 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-17
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.
View all 37 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 20:57, 21 April 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-18
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.
View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- 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, andipblocks_compatare now deprecated. Users can query theblockandblock_targetnew views that mirror the new tables in the production database instead. The deprecated views will be removed entirely from Wiki Replicas in June, 2025.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization Newsletter is now available. This edition includes an overview of the improved Content Translation Dashboard Tool, support for new languages, highlights from the Wiki Loves Ramadan campaign, results from the Language Onboarding Experiment, an analysis of topic diversity in articles, and information on upcoming community meetings and events.
Meetings and events
- The Let's Connect Learning Clinic will take place on April 29 at 14:30 UTC. This edition will focus on "Understanding and Navigating Conflict in Wikimedia Projects". You can register now to attend.
- 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 19:29, 28 April 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-19
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 the latest draft update to their annual plan for next year (July 2025–June 2026). This includes an executive summary (also on Diff), details about the three main goals (Infrastructure, Volunteer Support, and Effectiveness), global trends, and the budget and financial model. Feedback and questions are welcome on the talk page until the end of May.
Updates for editors
- For wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled, two new feature improvements have been released:
- 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.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Developers who use the
momentlibrary in gadgets and user scripts should revise their code to use alternatives like theIntllibrary or the newmediawiki.DateFormatterlibrary. Themomentlibrary 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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 00:12, 6 May 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-20
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.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- 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-parsoidREST API endpoint is no longer in use and will be deprecated. It is scheduled to be turned off on June 7, 2025.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- 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.
Meetings and events
- The 2nd edition of 2025 of Afrika Baraza, a virtual platform for African Wikimedians to connect, will take place on May 15 at 17:00 UTC. This edition will focus on discussions regarding Wikimedia Annual planning and progress.
- The MENA Connect Community Call, a virtual meeting for MENA Wikimedians to connect, will take place on May 17 at 17:00 UTC. You can register now to attend.
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MediaWiki message delivery 22:35, 12 May 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-21
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
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.titleobject 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, namedisDisambiguationPage. 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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 23:10, 19 May 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-22
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 #ifexistparser 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.
View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- The previously deprecated
ipblocksviews in Wiki Replicas will be removed in the beginning of June. Users are encouraged to query the newblockandblock_targetviews instead.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- Wikidata and Sister Projects is a multi-day online event that will focus on how Wikidata is integrated to Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects. The event runs from May 29 – June 1. You can read the Program schedule and register.
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MediaWiki message delivery 20:02, 26 May 2025 (UTC)
May thanks
Tech News: 2025-23
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
_defaultkey 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.
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Starting the week of June 2, bots logging in using
action=loginoraction=clientloginwill 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; usingaction=loginwithout 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/awaitsyntax, 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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 23:52, 2 June 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-24
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.

- 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.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- 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
pageImageandpageAssessments.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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MediaWiki message delivery 01:14, 10 June 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-25
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
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.
View all 33 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 23:35, 16 June 2025 (UTC)
June music
I heard this music, yesterday, - streamed a day before at a different location. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:27, 23 June 2025 (UTC)
While you are of course invited to check out my recommendations any day, today offers unusually a great writer of novels, music with light and a place with exquisite food (too much detail to describe, - perhaps your mother can do that). --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:11, 28 June 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-26
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_linksvariable in AbuseFilter is now renamed tonew_linksfor consistency with other variables. Old usages will still continue to work.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 23:18, 23 June 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-27
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 CampaignEvents extension has been enabled on all Wikipedias. 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.
Updates for editors
- 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.
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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MediaWiki message delivery 23:38, 30 June 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-28
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.
- Bureaucrats on Wikimedia wikis can now use Special:VerifyOATHForUser to check if users have enabled two-factor authentication.
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.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- 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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- 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".
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MediaWiki message delivery 00:02, 8 July 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-29
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.
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- Developers, designers, and all Wikimedians are invited to submit a project idea for the Wikimania Hackathon 2025. Read this Diff blog post for more details.
Meetings and events
- 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!
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MediaWiki message delivery 20:06, 14 July 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-30
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.
View all 29 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- 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.orgtobeta.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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 23:39, 21 July 2025 (UTC)
July music
Tech News: 2025-31
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.
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 00:23, 29 July 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-32
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-accountand use a value defined inMediaWiki: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.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Gadgets can now include
.vuefiles. 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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- 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:
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 03:37, 5 August 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-33
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 Product and Technology Advisory Council published a set of proposed experiments the Wikimedia Foundation can try to improve communication with community. Feedback on the proposals are welcomed until August 22 on this talk page.
- 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.
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- 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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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MediaWiki message delivery 23:25, 11 August 2025 (UTC)
August music
Today's story - short version: ten years ago we had a DYK about a soprano who sang in concerts with me in the choir, - longer: I found today a youtube of an aria she sang with us then, recorded the same year, - if you still have time: our performances were the weekend before the Iraq war ultimatum, and we sang Dona nobis pacem (and the drummer drummed!) as if they could hear us in Washington. -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:46, 18 August 2025 (UTC)
Check out my talk for an Independence day, or: the pic of Oksana Lyniv was taken on 24 August. There's listening and reading in today's story, and I like both. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:40, 24 August 2025 (UTC)
On top of my talk: birthday of a great violinist and Requiem for a great friend. We sang Paradisi gloria from the Stabat Mater in the end. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 18:44, 31 August 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-34
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.
- Five new wikis have been created:
- a Wikisource in Tagalog (
s:tl:) - a Wikisource in Madurese (
s:mad:) - a Wikipedia in Rakhine (
w:rki:) - a Wikibooks in Minangkabau (
b:min:) - a Wiktionary in Standard Moroccan Amazigh (
wikt:zgh:)
- a Wikisource in Tagalog (
View all 46 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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MediaWiki message delivery 00:34, 19 August 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-35
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
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 aslh; and custom strings inlist-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.
- Administrators can now access the Special:BlockedExternalDomains page from the Special:CommunityConfiguration list page. This makes it easier to find.
- 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:)
View all 39 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Two fields of the recentchanges database table are being removed.
rc_newandrc_typeare being removed in favor ofrc_source. Queries to these older fields will start to fail starting this week and developers should userc_sourceinstead. 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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 00:08, 26 August 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-36
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, andSpecial:RelatedChangespages 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.
View all 37 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- 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.
Meetings and events
- Spotlight on some Wikimania 2025 Sessions:
- Identifying AI-generated text by searching for ISBNs whose checksums fail: Mathias Schindler of WMDE shared tools to help communities search for these.
- La durabilité du mouvement Wikimedia face aux défis actuels et futurs: This session explored how Wikimedia can stay a trusted source of knowledge in the age of generative AI, information overload, and disinformation.
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MediaWiki message delivery 20:46, 1 September 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-37
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 "Improved Syntax Highlighting" 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 (likeen.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.
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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MediaWiki message delivery 01:10, 9 September 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-38
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:andinsource: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).
- for the
- 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.
- All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 24. This is planned at 15:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests which happen twice a year. You can read more about the background and details of this process on the Diff blog.
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).
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- Scholarship applications for Wikimania 2026 in Paris, France, are open until October 31.
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MediaWiki message delivery 17:03, 15 September 2025 (UTC)
September music
Tech News: 2025-39
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
DISPLAYTITLEfor 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.
View all 12 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- 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).
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MediaWiki message delivery 22:52, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-41
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 (likeen.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:andlasteditdate:, 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_sha1in the revision database table is being removed in favor ofcontent_sha1in 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.phppath 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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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MediaWiki message delivery 17:19, 6 October 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-42
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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MediaWiki message delivery 18:56, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-43
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.phproute 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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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MediaWiki message delivery 19:32, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-44
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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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MediaWiki message delivery 19:28, 27 October 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-45
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
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 HTMLclass="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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 19:31, 3 November 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-46
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

- Starting November 12, users will see a change in the appearance of talk pages on some Wikipedias. Almost all wikis have received this design change; English Wikipedia will get these changes later. You can read more on Diff. Users can opt out of these changes in their user preferences in "Show discussion activity".
- 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.
Updates for technical contributors
- Nominations are open on Wikitech for new Toolforge standards committee members. The committee oversees the Toolforge Right to fork policy and Abandoned tool policy among other duties. Nominations will remain open through 2025-11-28.
- The JWT issuer field in OAuth 2 access tokens for SUL wikis has been changed to
https://meta.wikimedia.org. Old access tokens will still work. - The JWT subject field in OAuth 2 access tokens will soon change from
<user id>tomw:<identity type>:<user id>, where<identity type>is typicallyCentralAuth:(for SUL wikis) orlocal:<wiki id>(for other wikis). This is to avoid conflicts between different user ID types, and to make OAuth 2 access tokens and thesessionJwtcookie more similar. Old access tokens will still work. - MediaWiki's block messages (blockedtext, blockedtext-partial, autoblockedtext, systemblockedtext, blockedtext-tempuser, autoblockedtext-tempuser) now support additional parameters indicating whether the user is blocked from editing their own user talk page
$9or emailing other users$10. - A
REL1_45branch 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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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MediaWiki message delivery 20:36, 10 November 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-47
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.
- One new wiki has been created: a Wikisource in Minangkabau (
s:min:)
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- 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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 17:24, 17 November 2025 (UTC)
ArbCom 2025 Elections voter message
Hello! Voting in the 2025 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 1 December 2025. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
If you wish to participate in the 2025 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:20, 18 November 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-48
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 "Improved Syntax Highlighting" 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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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MediaWiki message delivery 15:54, 24 November 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-49
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. - Two new wikis have been created:
- a Wikipedia in Toki Pona (
w:tok:) - a Wikiquote in Nigerian Pidgin (
q:pcm:)
- a Wikipedia in Toki Pona (
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 18:56, 1 December 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-50
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 "Improved Syntax Highlighting" 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.
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
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MediaWiki message delivery 17:43, 8 December 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-51
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
externallinkstable 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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 19:00, 15 December 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-52
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 withdata-mw-interface="", to avoid potential conflicts with otherdata-mwattributes, 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 21:43, 22 December 2025 (UTC)
January music
happy new year! - inviting you to check out "my" story (fun listen today, full of surprises), music (and memory), and places (pictured by me: the latest uploads) any day! -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:53, 10 January 2026 (UTC)
20 January is the 100th birthday of David Tudor (see my story) and the 300th birthday of Bach's cantata Meine Seufzer, meine Tränen, BWV 13, if we go by date instead of occasion as he would have thought, so see my story for last Sunday, and celebrate ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:52, 20 January 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-03
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.
Updates for technical contributors
- The VisualEditor citation tool and Reference Previews now support "map" as a reference type.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki/MediaWiki
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MediaWiki message delivery 19:31, 12 January 2026 (UTC)
Adrian Feint
Congratulations on picking up the error of Académie Julien for Académie Julian. The curious fact is not that I got it wrong or that the correction took so long (nearly 20 years), but that it seems to have been (from Australian newspapers) the prevailing orthography. By false analogy from Australian/Australien, Parisian/Parisien perhaps? Doug butler (talk) 12:16, 17 January 2026 (UTC)
A cup of tea for you!
Tech News: 2026-07
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. - Two new wikis have been created:
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- 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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 23:28, 9 February 2026 (UTC)
February music
Today some 1510 carving from St. Valentin. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:33, 14 February 2026 (UTC)
Today something new: a 100th birthday of someone alive, György Kurtág! In 2004 I was there when he and his wife played for the Rheingau Musik Festival where he was the featured composer. They played as the 2019 DYK said, on an upright piano, - listen, the last piece was the same. - More pics uploaded, enjoy. And Rosiestep shows the latest cat! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:56, 19 February 2026 (UTC)
Today's main page features four biographies I helped to bring there, two women and two men, three opera singers (one pictured) and an actor, - a record for me, I believe ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:44, 24 February 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-10
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.
Updates for editors
- Sub-referencing, a new feature to re-use references with different details has been released to Swedish Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia and a couple of other wikis. You can try the feature on these projects or on testwiki and betawiki. Learnings from the first pilot wiki German Wikipedia have been published in a report. Reach out to the Wikimedia Deutschland team if you are interested in becoming a pilot 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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 17:50, 2 March 2026 (UTC)
March music
Of the four topics I helped to bring to the main page, I'm most proud of a woman's work, so made it my story. As it happens, last year's story OTD was about the woman. -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 17:38, 16 March 2026 (UTC)
on Bach's birthday, a story about my joy --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:45, 21 March 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-12
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 Improved Syntax Highlighting 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.
Updates for technical contributors
- A new special page, Special:LintTemplateErrors, has been created to list transcluded pages that are flagged as containing lint errors to help users discover them easily. The list is sorted by the number of transclusions with errors. For example: Special:LintTemplateErrors/night-mode-unaware-background-color.
- Users of the Improved Syntax Highlighting 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.CodeMirrororext.CodeMirror.libmodules from gadgets and user scripts was deprecated in July 2025. The use of theext.CodeMirror.switchhook 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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- 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.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 19:34, 16 March 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-13
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- WMDE Technical Wishes is considering improvements to automatically generated reference names in VisualEditor. Please check out the proposed solutions and participate in the request for comment.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 16:49, 23 March 2026 (UTC)
