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Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 4

Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on Feb 13. Please help translate.

Highlights
Let's Talk continues

  • Birthday mode: This limited-time campaign feature celebrates 25 years of Wikipedia with a birthday mascot, Baby Globe. When turned on, Baby Globe is shown on ~2,500 articles, waiting to be discovered by readers. The feature is available for all Wikipedias to customise through Community Configuration until 6 April 2026. So far 17 Wikipedias have joined in the fun.
  • Wikipedia's 25th birthday party celebrated on Commons: Content from the January 15th global birthday party selected as Media of the day.

Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org

  • Etherpad cleanup: For security and performance reasons, all current pads on Wikimedia’s Etherpad instance, the web-based "ephemeral" editor for real-time collaborative document editing, will be permanently deleted after 30 April. We will continue running this Etherpad instance to support events and other short-term collaboration, but will be periodically deleting data going forward. If you have content in Etherpad you want to keep, please create local backups, as data will be permanently deleted and will not be able to be recovered.
  • Activity tab: Wikipedia iOS app has rolled out the improved Activity tab to all users in version 7.9.0. A/B test results showed increased account creation among users with access to the feature. Updates include enhanced editing impact insights, module customization, and relocation of History into the Search tab.
  • Reference Check: The feature Reference Check has been deployed to all Wikipedias. In A/B testing, the impact was substantial: newcomers shown Reference Check were approximately 2.2 times more likely to include a reference on desktop (or acknowledge/explain why they did not) and about 17.5 times more likely on mobile web.
  • Semantic search: The Foundation has launched a limited Android mobile app experiment that tests hybrid search capabilities which can handle both semantic and keyword queries. The Phase 1 beta is now live on Greek Wikipedia. The goal is to understand whether combining meaning-based retrieval with keyword search helps readers find information more effectively. Testing will expand to English, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias in March.
  • Navigation experience: The Foundation will run an experiment for mobile web users, that adds a table of contents and automatically expands all article sections, to learn more about navigation issues they face. The test will be available on Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
Screenshot of the current prototype of Abstract Wikipedia, showing a two sentence article about Kolkata.
  • Site notices: Site notices (MediaWiki:Sitenotice and MediaWiki:Anonnotice) now will render on all platforms, not just on the desktop site. Users on mobile web will now see these notices and be informed.
  • Tech News: Latest updates from Tech News week 08 and 09 include the new “Edit full page” button for people who are editing a page-section using the mobile visual editor. They also link to the 40 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
  • Wikifunctions: Abstract Wikipedia is going to have its public preview within the next few weeks, here is the preview.

Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · The Wikipedia Library · list of movement events

Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness
See also: Progress on the annual plan

Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters

Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate

For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletin(_AT_)wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!

MediaWiki message delivery 12:36, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary 722

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2026-03-09. Missed the previous one? See issue #721.

Discussions

  • New requests for permissions/Bot: DifoolBot 8 - Task: Remove Wikipedia import references from statements where the referenced article has since been deleted.

Events

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

Tool of the week

  • Data2Go : An iOS app for browsing and editing Wikidata with a mobile-first UI. It combines fast search, rich item detail views, statement editing, map previews, media galleries, and account-based write access to Wikidata.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

Newest properties and property proposals to review

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

Development

  • GraphQL: We have released the first version of this new API. You can read more about it and try it out.
  • Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We have worked with editors to improve some highly-used modules that access Wikidata in a suboptimal way. They have been adjusted to lead to less unneeded change notification in people's watchlists and recent changes on Wikipedia and co.
  • Mobile statement editing: We fixed an issue where certain Properties were not accessible in the new mobile UI. We are also working on fixing a bug with saving musical notation statements. We are continuing the work on supporting editing of geocoordinates.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

Tech News: 2026-11

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

Weekly highlight

  • All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday, 25 March 2026 at 15:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests, which happen twice a year. During the switchover, all Wikimedia website traffic is shifted from one primary data center to the backup data center to test availability and prevent service disruption even in emergencies.
  • Last week, all wikis had 2 hours of read-only time, and extended unavailability for user-scripts and gadgets. This was due to a security incident which has since been resolved. Work is ongoing to prevent re-occurrences. For current information please see the post on the Stewards' noticeboard (translations).

Updates for editors

  • Users facing multiple blocks on mobile will now see the reasons for each block separately, instead of a generic message. This helps them understand why they are blocked and what steps they can take to resolve the issue. For example, users affected for using common VPNs (such as iCloud Private Relay) will receive clearer guidance on what they need to do to start editing again.
  • Later this week, Suggestion Mode will become available as a beta feature within the visual editor at all Wikipedias. This feature proactively suggests various types of actions that people can consider taking to improve Wikipedia articles, and learn about related guidelines. The feature is locally configurable, and can also be locally expanded with custom Suggestions. Current settings can be seen at Special:EditChecks and there are instructions for how administrators can customize the links to point to local guidelines. The feature is connected to Edit check which suggests improvements while someone is writing new content. In the future, the Editing team plans to evaluate the feature's impact with newcomers through a controlled experiment.
  • Recurrent item View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where the cursor became misaligned during the use of CodeMirror’s syntax highlighting, which makes wikitext and code easier to read, has now been fixed. This problem specifically affected users who defined a font rule in a custom stylesheet while creating a new topic with DiscussionTools.

Updates for technical contributors

  • API rate limiting update: To help ensure fair use of infrastructure, global API rate limits will be applied this week to requests without a compliant User-Agent that originate from outside Toolforge/WMCS and to unauthenticated requests made from web browsers. Higher limits will be applied to identified traffic in April. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits.
  • The new GraphQL API has been released. The API was developed as a flexible alternative to select features of the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS), to improve developer experience and foster adaptability, and efficient data access. Try it out and give feedback. You can also sign up for usability tests.
  • The PTAC Unsupported Tools Working Group continued improvements to Video2Commons in February, with fixes addressing authentication errors, large-file handling, task queue visibility, and clearer upload behavior. Work is still ongoing in some areas, including changes related to deprecated server-side uploads. Read this update to learn more.
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

  • The Article Guidance team invites experienced Wikipedia editors from selected pilot wikis and interested contributors from other Wikipedias to fill out this questionnaire which is available in English, Arabic, Bengali, Japanese, Portuguese, Persian, and Turkish. Your answers will help the team customize guidance for less experienced editors and help them learn community policies and practices while creating an article. Learn more on the project page.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 18:51, 9 March 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 10 March 2026

  • Special report: What actually happened during the Wikimedia security incident?
    A horrifying exploit took place, which could have had catastrophic and far-reaching consequences if used maliciously; instead, it seems to have happened by accident and was used for childish vandalism. How did this happen, and what did the script actually do?
* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:12, 10 March 2026 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 73

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team – 12:05, 11 March 2026 (UTC)


This Month in GLAM: February 2026



Headlines
Read this edition in full • Single-page

To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

Your submission at Articles for creation: Railway 200 has been accepted

Railway 200, which you submitted to Articles for creation, has been accepted!

Congratulations, and thank you for helping expand the scope of Wikipedia! We hope you will continue making quality contributions.

The article has been assessed as C-Class, which is recorded on its talk page. This is a great rating for a new article, and places it among the top 23% of accepted submissions, well done! You may like to take a look at the grading scheme to see how you can improve the article.

Future articles

Next steps

Thanks again, and happy editing!

Cheerio, Mattdaviesfsic. Talk to me. 18:32, 14 March 2026 (UTC)

Thank you

The Helping Hand Barnstar
Awarded for enhancing international cooperation by helping to link a Wikipedia article in Japanese Wikipedia to a new article in English Wikipedia. Thank you for your technical assistance. Example of your work was to link the article Avantgardey to show that it is in 2 other languages already. Vanguard10 (talk) 21:46, 15 March 2026 (UTC)

Disclaimer: I have no financial or familial ties to Avantgardey. I am not even Japanese. Vanguard10 (talk) 21:47, 15 March 2026 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #723

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2026-03-16. Missed the previous one? See issue #722.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

Tool of the week

Other Noteworthy Stuff

Newest properties and property proposals to review

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

Development

  • Mobile statement editing:
    • If you have not tried it yet, now is an excellent time to turn it on in the beta features section of your preferences, test it and give feedback.
    • We have added support for editing globe coordinate statements
  • Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are continuing to work on the issue of too many Wikidata in recent changes and watchlists on Wikipedia and co. We are currently prototyping a way to only consider changes that actually have an impact on the article (phab:T419823). We also finished the work on an emergency switch to turn off sending changes for qualifiers and references to Wikipedia and co in case of major database disruptions (phab:T412956).
  • Ontology federation: We are working towards getting the code for ontology federation (in its first version of using Wikidata Items as values on other Wikibase instances) ready for wider testing.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

· Previous issue · JosefAnthony talk ·MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:35, 16 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 ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽ beta feature, also known as CodeMirror 6, has been used for wikitext syntax highlighting since November 2024. It will be promoted out of beta by May 2026 in order to bring improvements and new features to all editors who use the standard syntax highlighter. If you have any questions or concerns about promoting the feature out of beta, please share.
  • Some changes to local user groups are performed by stewards on Meta-Wiki and logged there only. Now, interwiki rights changes will be logged both on Meta-Wiki and the wiki of the target user to make it easier to access a full record of user's rights changes on a local wiki. Past log entries for such changes will be backfilled in the coming weeks.
  • On wikis using Flagged Revisions, the number of pending changes shown on Special:PendingChanges previously counted pages which were no longer pending review, because they have been removed from the system without being reviewed, e.g. due to being deleted, moved to a different namespace, or due to wiki configuration changes. The count will be correct now. On some wikis the number shown will be much smaller than before. There should be no change to the list of pages itself.
  • Wikifunctions composition language has been rewritten, resulting in a new version of the language. This change aims to increase service stability by reducing the orchestrator's memory consumption. This rewrite also enables substantial latency reduction, code simplification, and better abstractions, which will open the door to later feature additions. Read more about the changes.
  • Users can now sort search results alphabetically by page title. The update gives an additional option to finding pages more easily and quickly. Previously, results could be sorted by Edit date, Creation date, or Relevance. To use the new option, open 'Advanced Search' on the search results page and select 'Alphabetically' under 'Sorting Order'.
  • Recurrent item 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 ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽ beta feature have been using CodeMirror instead of CodeEditor for syntax highlighting when editing JavaScript, CSS, JSON, Vue and Lua content pages, for some time now. Along with promoting CodeMirror 6 out of beta, the plan is to replace CodeEditor as the standard editor for these content models by May 2026. Feedback or concerns are welcome.
  • The CodeMirror JavaScript modules will soon be upgraded to CodeMirror 6. Leading up to the upgrade, loading the ext.CodeMirror or ext.CodeMirror.lib modules from gadgets and user scripts was deprecated in July 2025. The use of the ext.CodeMirror.switch hook was also deprecated in March 2025. Contributors can now make their scripts or gadgets compatible with CodeMirror 6. See the migration guide for more information.
  • The MediaWiki Interfaces team is expanding coverage of REST API module definitions to include extension APIs. REST API modules are groups of related endpoints that can be independently managed and versioned. Modules now exist for GrowthExperiments and Wikifunctions APIs. As we migrate extension APIs to this structure, documentation will move out of the main MediaWiki OpenAPI spec and REST Sandbox view, and will instead be accessible via module-specific options in the dropdown on the REST Sandbox (i.e., Special:RestSandbox, available on all wiki projects).
  • The Scribunto extension provides different pieces of information about the wiki where the module is being used via the mw.site library. Starting last week, the library also provides a way of accessing the wiki ID that can be used to facilitate cross-wiki module maintenance.
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

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)

Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 5

Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on February 27. Please help translate.

Highlights

Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org

  • Experiments: The Foundation is frequently conducting experiments to help learn what features will be most effective and valuable to the projects. The list of experiments in Product and Technology, tracks upcoming, live, in-analysis, and completed experiments as well as their rationale. For example, the tracker shares that one upcoming experiment, Reader to Contributor Baseline, will measure how many readers create contributor accounts and whether the rate differs depending on how people arrived to the site.
  • Article guidance: Help less experienced editors by filling out a questionnaire on this page (available in 7 languages). The Foundation are looking particularly for experienced Wikipedia editors from these pilot wikis. Your answers will help customize guidance for less experienced editors while creating an article.
  • Wikifunctions: You can now create Functions that will show a citation in their output.
  • Editing feature: Suggestion Mode is available as a beta feature within the visual editor at all Wikipedias. This feature proactively suggests various types of actions that people can consider taking to improve Wikipedia articles, and learn about related guidelines.
  • Paste Check: Paste Check is now available at all Wikipedias. 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.
  • Mobile experience: The user menu in the top corner for all mobile users is standardized so that it is closer to the desktop experience to improve the user interface for readers.
  • Two-factor authentication: 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.
  • Tech News: Latest updates from Tech News week 10 and 11 include the new GraphQL API has been released as a flexible alternative to select features of the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS). They also link to the 50 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
WikiCelebrates Mervat.

Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · The Wikipedia Library · list of movement events

Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters

Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate

For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletin(_AT_)wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!

MediaWiki message delivery 22:17, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue 239, March 2026

Full front page of The Bugle
Your Military History Newsletter

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 12:07, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

March music

Quick facts
story · music · places
Close

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) 17:57, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

on Bach's birthday, a story about my joy --Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:30, 21 March 2026 (UTC)

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