User talk:Sohom Datta

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This is Sohom Datta's talk page, where you can send them messages and comments.

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Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11: 5 months

I'm pursuing my graduate classes. As a result, expect diminished activity onwiki for a while. I'll still be available on Discord and via email (and also on Phabricator and Gerrit).

Please keep discussions about AFC drafts on-wiki on this talk page. Off-wiki attempts to contact me about drafts will be rejected and you will be blocked.

This user is aware of the designation of the following as contentious topics:

the region of South Asia (India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal), broadly construed, including but not limited to history, politics, ethnicity, and social groups
living or recently deceased subjects of biographical content on Wikipedia articles

They should not be given alerts for those areas.

Proposed deletion of Hyprland

The article Hyprland has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Lack of notability

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the page to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion.

This is an automated notification. Please refer to the page's history for further information. DatBot (talk) 00:31, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

Replaceable non-free use File:Malvertisement on a mobile phone.jpg

Thanks for uploading File:Malvertisement on a mobile phone.jpg. I noticed that this file is being used under a claim of non-free use. However, I think that the way it is being used fails the first non-free content criterion. This criterion states that files used under claims of non-free use may have no free equivalent; in other words, if the file could be adequately covered by a freely-licensed file or by text alone, then it may not be used on Wikipedia. If you believe this file is not replaceable, please:

Go to the file description page and add the text {{Di-replaceable non-free use disputed|<your reason>}} below the original replaceable non-free use template, replacing <your reason> with a short explanation of why the file is not replaceable.
On the file's talk page, write a full explanation of why you believe the file is not replaceable.

Alternatively, you can also choose to replace this non-free media item by finding freely licensed media of the same subject, requesting that the copyright holder release this (or similar) media under a free license, or by creating new media yourself (for example, by taking your own photograph of the subject).

If you have uploaded other non-free media, consider checking that you have specified how these media fully satisfy our non-free content criteria. You can find a list of description pages you have edited by clicking on this link. Note that even if you follow steps 1 and 2 above, non-free media which could be replaced by freely licensed alternatives will be deleted 2 days after this notification, per the non-free content policy. If you have any questions, please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you. Stifle (talk) 07:50, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

DCWC closing update

Two weeks ago, the 2025 Developing Countries WikiContest came to a close! After three months of stiff competition at the top of the leaderboard, we have our winners. vigilantcosmicpenguin (submissions), continuing his work on covering abortion in Africa, comes in third with 692 points. simongraham (submissions) comes in second with 763 points, largely from a slew of good articles about jumping spiders. And returning to the podium for the second year in a row, BeanieFan11 (submissions) takes the Gold Belt Buckle with a mind-boggling 946 points from his series of articles on sportpersons. Congratulations to our winners!

Amazingly, the award for the most countries covered goes to both BeanieFan11 (submissions) and simongraham (submissions), who each submitted articles under 30 flags! BeanieFan11 (submissions) also wins for writing the most quality articles (16 good articles). For submitting 16 articles related to El Salvador, PizzaKing13 (submissions) wins the award for most submissions under one country. The award for most submissions related to women goes to both Spookyaki (submissions) (7 biographies about women) and vigilantcosmicpenguin (submissions) (21 related articles). And for the second year, simongraham (submissions) wins for the most reviews, having submitted 21!

Among the participants' contributions were 2 FAs, 5 FLs, 124 GAs, and an uncounted number of DYKs, ITNs, and reviews of every kind! Regardless of your level of participation, every contestant can be proud to have contributed towards a major step in countering the systemic bias on Wikipedia. Every year, millions of readers and editors around the globe use Wikipedia to educate themselves and communicate with others about parts of the world that often receive less attention than they deserve. Thank you for participating with us in the contest and contributing to this effort. The DCWC will return next year, and we look forward to seeing you contribute again! However, before that...

We need your feedback! Join the conversation on the talk page to discuss your reflections on the contest (even if you didn't participate!) and help us make it better.

If you have any questions, please leave a message on the contest talk page or ask one of the coordinators: Arconning (talk · contribs), sawyer777 (talk · contribs), or TechnoSquirrel69 (talk · contribs). (To unsubscribe from these updates, remove yourself from this list.) Sent via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 16:43, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

Notification of administrators without tools

	Greetings, Sohom Datta. You are receiving this notification because you've agreed to consider endorsing prospective admin candidates identified by the process outlined at Administrators without tools. Recently, the following editor(s) received this distinction and the associated endearing title: Bunnypranav
Thank you for supporting this effort. Your contributions are an integral part of overall success, and an example for others to follow. To stop receiving these notifications, remove your name from the list.

Tol Bot (talk) 21:00, 19 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.php route through a common API gateway is now complete. If any issues are observed, please file a phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board.
Edits to Wikidata references or qualifiers will now be shown in RecentChanges and Watchlist entries on other wikis less often, reducing unnecessary notifications. This will reduce the overall quantity of 'noisy' entries. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged.
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 19:32, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

October thanks

Quick facts

story · music · places

Thank you for improving article quality in October! My latest: Roberta Alexander, - listen. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:36, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

The Signpost: 20 October 2025

News and notes: Board shuffles, LLM blocks increase, IPs are going away
And the "Global Resource Distribution Committee" emerges.

Special report: The election that isn't
Two shortlisted WMF Board candidates removed from the ballot.

Interview: The BoT bump
Who was bumped and why?

In the media: An incident at WikiConference North America; WMF reports AI-related traffic drop and explains Wikipedia to US conservatives
...while Musk prepares to launch "Grokipedia".

Traffic report: One click after another
Serial-killer miniseries, deceased scientist, government shutdowns and Sandalwood hit "Kantara" crowd the tubes.

Humour: Wikipedia pay rates
Don't get too excited before you read this.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:43, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

Request

Hi Sohom, could you please remove all my advanced PERMs for now? Thanks! Ophyrius (he/him
T • C • G) 17:33, 23 October 2025 (UTC)

Done, feel free to ask for them back if/when you need! Sohom (talk) 17:56, 23 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

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:28, 27 October 2025 (UTC)

Agender flag colour

Stupid question but the color of the flag in the infobox changes on Agender if you switch light mode to dark mode. I am using Wikipedia:Dark mode (gadget). Do you happen to remember the magic incantation? Thanks, Polygnotus (talk) 13:50, 28 October 2025 (UTC)

@Polygnotus, That should not happen. That flavor of dark mode does not apply any transformation on the image (unless you specify skin-invert-image explicitly which doesn't show up in the text) Sohom (talk) 15:24, 28 October 2025 (UTC)

Yeah but User:Polygnotus/common.css and ==>

It is pretty mysterious. I checked with a colorpicker. Polygnotus (talk) 16:26, 28 October 2025 (UTC)

I do see a filter: "invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg)" and it is coming from MediaWiki:Gadget-dark-mode.css. Polygnotus (talk) 01:36, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

@Polygnotus I don't think the colors are inverting, the screenshots you show are the ones I see, the colors in the the flag are still the same, black, grey, white, green, white, grey, black in that order. In dark mode the black of the background bleeds into the black of the flag, but that should be expected. A hue inverted flag should be white, grey, black, dark green, black, grey, white like this image off to the side (I've explicitly added the skin-invert-image tag to it). Sohom (talk) 11:18, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

OK this is officially weird. I used my test account, turned on Wikipedia:Dark mode (gadget) in preferences, then went to Agender and switched from light to dark mode.

I confirmed with a colorpicker that the middle stripe was indeed a different color.

I disabled the invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg) line in the webdev tools and it showed the flag correctly.

But when I do <div style="filter: invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg);">[[File:Agender pride flag.svg]]</div> I get the same result you got.

Sometimes I worry that computers are intentionally messing with us. Polygnotus (talk) 11:46, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

Regarding your post at WP:BN

I think you are broadly correct, except I don't think Stewards would be excited to handle our routine +/-sysop activity. I don't really know what kind of fundamental changes to the crat role would achieve consensus, so my broad perspective is summed up at User:L235/RfB is no big deal: make being a bureaucrat a common thing that isn't a big deal. Best, KevinL (aka L235 · t · c) 13:01, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

Guide to temporary accounts

Hello, Sohom Datta. This message is being sent to remind you of significant upcoming changes regarding logged-out editing.

Starting 4 November, logged-out editors will no longer have their IP address publicly displayed. Instead, they will have a temporary account (TA) associated with their edits. Users with some extended rights like administrators and CheckUsers, as well as users with the temporary account IP viewer (TAIV) user right will still be able to reveal temporary users' IP addresses and all contributions made by temporary accounts from a specific IP address or range.

How do temporary accounts work?

Editing from a temporary account

When a logged-out user completes an edit or a logged action for the first time, a cookie will be set in this user's browser and a temporary account tied with this cookie will be automatically created for them. This account's name will follow the pattern: ~2025-12345-67 (a tilde, year of creation, a number split into units of 5).
All subsequent actions by the temporary account user will be attributed to this username. The cookie will expire 90 days after its creation. As long as it exists, all edits made from this device will be attributed to this temporary account. It will be the same account even if the IP address changes, unless the user clears their cookies or uses a different device or web browser.
A record of the IP address used at the time of each edit will be stored for 90 days after the edit. Users with the temporary account IP viewer (TAIV) user right will be able to see the underlying IP addresses.
As a measure against vandalism, there are two limitations on the creation of temporary accounts:
- There has to be a minimum of 10 minutes between subsequent temporary account creations from the same IP (or /64 range in case of IPv6).
- There can be a maximum of 6 temporary accounts created from an IP (or /64 range) within a period of 24 hours.

Temporary account IP viewer user right

How to enable IP Reveal

Administrators may grant the temporary account IP viewer (TAIV) user right to non-administrators who meet the criteria for granting. Importantly, an editor must make an explicit request for the permission (e.g. at WP:PERM/TAIV)—administrators are not permitted to assign the right without a request.
Administrators will automatically be able to see temporary account IP information once they have accepted the Access to Temporary Account IP Addresses Policy via Special:Preferences or via the onboarding dialog which comes up after temporary accounts are deployed.

Impact for administrators

It will be possible to block many abusers by just blocking their temporary accounts. A blocked person won't be able to create new temporary accounts quickly if the admin selects the autoblock option.
It will still be possible to block an IP address or IP range.
Temporary accounts will not be retroactively applied to contributions made before the deployment. On Special:Contributions, you will be able to see existing IP user contributions, but not new contributions made by temporary accounts on that IP address. Instead, you should use Special:IPContributions for this (see a video about IPContributions in a gallery below).

Rules about IP information disclosure

Publicizing an IP address gained through TAIV access is generally not allowed (e.g. ~2025-12345-67 previously edited as 192.0.2.1 or ~2025-12345-67's IP address is 192.0.2.1).
Publicly linking a TA to another TA is allowed if "reasonably believed to be necessary". (e.g. ~2025-12345-67 and ~2025-12345-68 are likely the same person, so I am counting their reverts together toward 3RR, but not Hey ~2025-12345-68, you did some good editing as ~2025-12345-67)
See Wikipedia:Temporary account IP viewer § What can and can't be said for more detailed guidelines.

Useful tools for patrollers

It is possible to view if a user has opted-in to view temporary account IPs via the User Info card, available in Preferences → Appearance → Advanced options → Enable the user info card
- This feature also makes it possible for anyone to see the approximate count of temporary accounts active on the same IP address range.
Special:IPContributions allows viewing all edits and temporary accounts connected to a specific IP address or IP range.
Similarly, Special:GlobalContributions supports global search for a given temporary account's activity.
The auto-reveal feature (see video below) allows users with the right permissions to automatically reveal all IP addresses for a limited time window.

Videos

How to use Special:IPContributions
How automatic IP reveal works
How to use IP Info
How to use User Info

Further information and discussion

For more information and discussion regarding this change, please see the announcement from the Wikimedia Foundation at Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF) § Temporary accounts rollout.

Most of this message was written by Mz7 (source). Thanks, 🎃 SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 02:47, 31 October 2025 (UTC)

Re User talk:97.79.218.3

User talk:97.79.218.3 popped up in Category:Pages with disallowed DISPLAYTITLE modifications. I cleaned up, which was promptly undone by the IP. Anything you can do? Paradoctor (talk) 04:17, 31 October 2025 (UTC)

Yanked talk page access Sohom (talk) 05:49, 31 October 2025 (UTC)

WikiCup 2025 November newsletter

The 2025 WikiCup has come to an end. Our top scorers, based on the tournament point rankings (which can be seen here), are:

BeanieFan11 (submissions) with 1,604 tournament points, will receive the 1st place award.
Gog the Mild (submissions) with 1,075 tournament points, will receive the 2nd place award.
Arconning (submissions) with 860 tournament points, will receive the 3rd place award.
History6042 (submissions) with 804 tournament points
Sammi Brie (submissions) with 635 tournament points
TheDoctorWho (submissions) with 386 tournament points
AirshipJungleman29 (submissions) with 373 tournament points
Thebiguglyalien (submissions) with 362 tournament points

Our high scorers in the final round were:

BeanieFan11 (submissions) with 1,035 round points, mostly from 19 good articles and 21 did you know articles about athletes
vigilantcosmicpenguin (submissions) with 819 round points, mostly from 13 good articles and 11 did you know articles about a wide range of topics from abortion topics to African cities
TheNuggeteer (submissions) with 508 round points from 9 good articles, 4 good topic articles and 6 did you know articles mainly about Philippines topics, along with 19 good article reviews

The final round was very productive, and contestants had 2 featured articles, 4 featured lists, 106 good articles, 5 good topic articles, 178 article reviews, 76 did you know articles, and 9 in the news articles. Altogether, Wikipedia has benefited greatly from the activities of WikiCup competitors all through the contest. Well done everyone!

The top eight scorers will receive awards shortly. The following special awards will be made, based on high performance in particular areas of content creation. These prizes are awarded to the competitor who scored the highest in any particular field during the competition.

Gog the Mild (submissions) wins the featured article prize, with 12 featured articles total, and the featured topic prize, with 9 featured topic articles in total
Hey man im josh (submissions) wins the featured list prize, with 10 featured lists total
AirshipJungleman29 (submissions) wins the featured picture prize, submitting the only featured picture in the entire contest during round 3
History6042 (submissions) wins the featured content reviewer prize, with 127 featured content reviews. He will also share the ITN prize, with 20 in the news articles in total.
BeanieFan11 (submissions) wins the good article prize, with 100 good articles total, and the DYK prize, with 147 did you know articles in total. He will also share the ITN prize, with 20 in the news articles in total.
TheDoctorWho (submissions) wins the good topic prize, with 16 good topic entries in total
Arconning (submissions) wins the good article reviewer prize, with 68 good article reviews in total

A special mention also goes to these users who scored the highest in a particular category in a single round:

Sammi Brie (submissions), with 27 good articles in round 3, and 45 good article reviews in round 1
Tails Wx (submissions), with 10 in the news articles in round 3

Next year's competition will begin on 1 January. You are invited to sign up to participate. The WikiCup is open to all Wikipedians, both novices and experienced editors, and we hope to see you all in the 2026 competition. Until then, it only remains to once again congratulate our worthy winners, and thank all participants for their involvement!

On behalf of the judges, Cwmhiraeth (talk · contribs · email), Epicgenius (talk · contribs · email), Frostly (talk · contribs · email), Guerillero (talk · contribs · email) and Lee Vilenski (talk · contribs · email):

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:25, 1 November 2025 (UTC)

If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send.

Removed autopatrolled and new-page reviewer

I don't recall when, if ever, that I would have used those features, so no great loss. As to the lists of ballparks articles, anyone who is interested in the subject is free to improve them. I created many of them, but I don't own them. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 06:01, 3 November 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 HTML class="title-shortlink". The /s/ URLs will keep working.
On Thursday, October 30, the MediaWiki Interfaces and SRE Service Operations teams began rerouting Action API traffic through a common API gateway. Individual wikis will be updated based on the standard release groups, with total traffic increased over time. This change is expected to be non-breaking and non-disruptive. If any issues are observed, please file a Phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board.
MediaWiki Train deployments will pause for the final two weeks of 2025: 22 December and 29 December. Backport windows will also pause between Monday, 22 December 2025 and Thursday, 2 January 2026. A backport window is a scheduled time to add things like bug fixes and configuration changes. There are seven deployment trains remaining for 2025.
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.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:31, 3 November 2025 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – November 2025

News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2025).

Administrator changes

Toadspike

CheckUser changes

asilvering

Guideline and policy news

The speedy deletion criteria U5 has been repealed, with U6 and U7 replacing it. See the FAQ for more clarifications.
Community-designated contentious topics may now be enforced and appealed at the arbitration enforcement noticeboard (AE) as a result of an RfC.

Technical news

You can enable a handy user info card next to usernames, which when clicked displays edit count, blocks, thanks, and other information. To enable this feature, visit Preferences → Appearance → Advanced options → Enable the user info card

Arbitration

The arbitration case Transgender healthcare and people has been closed
- Uninvolved administrators may impose an AE participation restriction on any thread at the Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard.

Miscellaneous

An unreferenced articles backlog drive is happening in November 2025 to reduce the backlog of articles tagged with {{Unreferenced}}. You can help reduce the backlog by adding citations to these articles. Sign up to participate!

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:35, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

Pending

Hi @Sohom Datta Could you please review my request at New Page Reviewer permission page? Kirokeer (talk) 18:23, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

Will take a look. Sohom (talk) 13:37, 5 November 2025 (UTC)

Page protection indicators

Hi, in case you haven't seen it: T12347#11342115 Matma Rex talk 19:53, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

Block modified

Hiya! Note that I modified your rangeblock here from a hard block to anon-only. It's a huge range with far too much collateral to hard block.-- Ponyo^{bons mots} 20:42, 7 November 2025 (UTC)

Fair enough! Sohom (talk) 21:20, 7 November 2025 (UTC)

The Signpost: 10 November 2025

News and notes: Temporary accounts go live and WMF board member self-suspends
ArbCom elections draw close, and Wikimania '27 in Santiago.

Community view: Six Wikipedians' thoughts on Grokipedia, and the humanity of it all
It ain't a five course meal, according to one of our interviewees.

Wikicup report: BeanieFan11, WikiCup victor of 2025, covers the results
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

In the media: Jimbo's book, an argument about genocide, and a train of shame
Wikipedia's new rival, political controversy in Italy and other Wiki-reports.

Recent research: Taking stock of the 2024–2025 research grants
$400,000 USD in total funding: what did we get?

Opinion: With Grokipedia, top-down control of knowledge is new again
Does it shed any light on particular topics that are better suited to LLM-generation than others?

Obituary: Struway
Rest in peace.

Traffic report: The documentaried, the disowned, the deceased, Diwali and the Dodgers
You know your man is working hard, he's worth a deuce.

Comix: Head of steam
'Sblood!

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:55, 10 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

Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.

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> to mw:<identity type>:<user id>, where <identity type> is typically CentralAuth: (for SUL wikis) or local:<wiki id> (for other wikis). This is to avoid conflicts between different user ID types, and to make OAuth 2 access tokens and the sessionJwt cookie more similar. Old access tokens will still work.
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 $9 or emailing other users $10.
A REL1_45 branch for MediaWiki core and each of the extensions and skins in Wikimedia git has been created. This is the first step in the release process for MediaWiki 1.45.0, scheduled for late November 2025. If you are working on a critical bug fix or working on a new feature, you may need to take note of this change.
The process for generating CirrusSearch dumps has been updated due to slowing performance. If you encounter any issues migrating to the replacement dumps, please contact the Search Platform Team for support.
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 20:36, 10 November 2025 (UTC)

December 2025 administrator elections - schedule

Administrator Elections | Schedule

The December 2025 administrator elections are set to proceed.
We plan to use the following schedule:
- Nov 25 – Dec 1: Candidate sign-up
- Dec 4 – Dec 8: Discussion phase
- Dec 9 – Dec 15: SecurePoll voting phase
If you have any questions, concerns, or thoughts before we get started, please ask at Wikipedia talk:Administrator elections.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:47, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

ACE MMS test

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) 16:06, 17 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.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 17:24, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

ArbCom 2025 Elections voter message

November thanks

Quick facts

story · music · places

Thank you for support in November! - On St. Cecilia's Day - patron saint of music - I remember a composition by Benjamin Britten, and have a woman on the main page who illustrated songs, with a sense of humour. My places take you to Milan, my first visit to La Scala, and music features our latest choral Abendlob, with English music. -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:11, 22 November 2025 (UTC)

Canticle I: My beloved is mine and I am his was a interesting read! Thanks for this! Sohom (talk) 02:11, 23 November 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for reading! - Look, today's image, - she "portrayed" herself with her husband at the end of the table, - would have been good for Thanksgiving ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:55, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

Articles for Creation backlog drive

Hello Sohom Datta:

WikiProject Articles for creation is holding a month long Backlog Drive in December!
The goal of this drive is to reduce the backlog of unreviewed drafts to less than half a month of outstanding reviews from the current 2+ months. Bonus points will be given for reviewing drafts that have been waiting more than 30 days. The drive is running from 1 December 2025 through 31 December 2025.

You may find Category:AfC pending submissions by age or other categories and sorting helpful.

Barnstars will be given out as awards at the end of the drive.
There is a backlog of over 3000 pages, so start reviewing drafts. We're looking forward to your help! MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:07, 23 November 2025 (UTC)

If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself from the mailing list or alternatively to opt-out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.

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

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

MediaWiki message delivery 15:54, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

Thank you!

		The Barnstar for the Oops
		Thank you for fixing my .css mistake! (in reference to [this edit]) Randomdude123459 \| Talk \| Contribs \| 22:09, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

Administrator Elections - Call for Candidates

The administrator elections process has officially started! Interested editors are encouraged to self-nominate or arrange to be nominated by reviewing the instructions at Wikipedia:Administrator elections/December 2025/Candidates.

Here is the schedule:

November 25 – December 1 - Call for candidates
December 4–8 - Discussion phase
December 9–15 - SecurePoll voting phase

Please note the following:

The requirements to run are identical to RFA—a prospective candidate must be extended confirmed.
Prospective candidates are advised to become familiar with the community's expectations of administrators, which are much higher than the minimum requirement of having extended confirmed status. This includes reviewing successful and unsuccessful RFAs, reading the essay Wikipedia:Advice for admin elections candidates, and possibly requesting an optional poll on their chances of passing.
The process will have a seven day call for candidates phase, a two day pause, a five day discussion phase, and a seven day private vote using SecurePoll. Discussion and questions are only allowed on the candidate pages during the discussion phase.
The outcome of this process is identical to making a request for adminship. There is no official difference between an administrator appointed through RFA versus administrator elections.
Administrator elections are also a valid means of regaining adminship for de-sysopped editors.

Ask any questions about the process at the talk page. Later, a user talk message will be sent to official candidates with additional information about the process.

If you are interested in the process, please make sure to watchlist the appropriate pages. A watchlist notice will be added when the discussion phase opens, and again when the voting phase opens.

You're receiving this message because you signed up for the mailing list. To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself from the list.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:49, 25 November 2025 (UTC)

Turkey

Buster7 has given you a turkey! Turkeys promote WikiLove and hopefully this has made your day better. Spread the WikiLove by giving someone else a turkey, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend. Happy Thanksgiving! Buster Seven Talk (UTC) 19:03, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

Spread the goodness of turkey by adding {{subst:Thanksgiving Turkey}} to their talk page with a friendly message.

Happy Thanksgiving! :) Sohom (talk) 19:09, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

David Walter Horologist

Hi Sohom I saw you removed my entry today.

NGS Arts (talk) 18:48, 29 November 2025 (UTC)

@NGS Arts, It was AI generated (AI generated content is disallowed on Wikipedia) and did not explain why the person has a claim to importance. Note that inclusion into the encyclopedia, requires the person is notable among other things. I'd personally suggest that you try to recreate the article without the use of AI and use the article wizard and article for creation process so that experienced editors can guide you through the process and review your article. Sohom (talk) 18:55, 29 November 2025 (UTC)

Ok thanks - I'd written it from notes then put it through ChatGPT to check spelling and yr system took it as Ai so frustrating... won't do that again!! NGS Arts (talk) 18:59, 29 November 2025 (UTC)

WWalter is highly regarded in the Horology world as a leading maker. He's been awarded for his work by several leading institutions along with quite a good amount of published articles so I am surprised at having to look at this. NGS Arts (talk) 19:01, 29 November 2025 (UTC)

NGS Arts has given you a turkey! Turkeys promote WikiLove and hopefully this has made your day better. Spread the WikiLove by giving someone else a turkey, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend. Happy Thanksgiving! NGS Arts (talk) 19:03, 29 November 2025 (UTC)

Spread the goodness of turkey by adding {{subst:Thanksgiving Turkey}} to their talk page with a friendly message.

NGS Arts (talk) 19:03, 29 November 2025 (UTC)

The Signpost: 1 December 2025

News and notes: Election cycles come and go, and Wikimedia Foundation achieves record revenue in 2024–2025!
Admin and ArbCom elections upcoming, BoT elects two new members, task force advises to close Wikinews and keep Wikispore, and other news from the Wikimedia world.

In the media: Wales walk-off, antisemitism, supernatural powers, feminism turmoil, saints, and sex
Plus mammoth mummy sex-change operation completed!

Recent research: At least 80 million inconsistent facts on Wikipedia – can AI help find them?
And other recent publications about contradictions and retractions.

Disinformation report: Epstein email exchanges planned strategy, edits and reported progress
At work on Wikipedia whitewashing. How much should they be paid?

Traffic report: It's a family affair
Even in these times there is something to be thankful for!

Book review: The Seven Rules of Trust
Jimmy Wales and Dan Gardner write a book inspired by Wikipedia. What's in it?

From the archives: "I have been asked by Jeffrey Epstein ..."
The twists and turns of Epstein’s portrayal on Wikipedia.

Humour: An interview with Wikipe-tan
A conversation about being the mascot of Wikipedia.

Opinion: AI finds errors in 90% of Wikipedia's best articles
Using ChatGPT to fact-check a month's worth of Today's featured articles.

Serendipity: Highlights from the itWikiCon 2025
A recap of the latest convention of the Italian Wiki-community, held in Catania from 7–9 November.

Comix: Madness
It could happen to anyone.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:14, 1 December 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:)

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.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 18:56, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

Administrator Elections - Discussion Phase

The discussion phase of the December 2025 administrator elections is officially open. As a reminder, the schedule of the election is:

Dec 4–8 - Discussion phase (we are here)
Dec 9–15 - SecurePoll voting phase
Scrutineering phase

We are currently in the discussion phase. The candidate subpages are open to questions and comments from everyone, in the same style as a request for adminship. You may discuss the candidates at Wikipedia:Administrator elections/December 2025/Discussion phase.

On December 9, we will start the voting phase. The candidate subpages will close to public questions and discussion, and everyone will have a week to use the SecurePoll software to vote, which uses a secret ballot. You can see who voted, but not who they voted for. Please note that the vote totals cannot be made public until after voting has ended and as such, it will not be possible for you to see an individual candidate's totals during the election. You must be extended confirmed to vote.

Once voting concludes, we will begin the scrutineering phase, which typically lasts between a couple days and a week. Once everything is certified, the results will be posted on the results page (you may want to watchlist this page) and transcluded to the main election page. In order to be granted adminship, a candidate who has not been recalled must have received at least 70.0% support, calculated as Support / (Support + Oppose), and must also have received a minimum of 20 support votes. A candidate that has been recalled must have at least 55.0% support. Because this is a vote and not a consensus, there are no bureaucrat discussions ("crat chats").

Any questions or issues can be asked on the election talk page. Thank you for your participation. Happy electing.

You're receiving this message because you signed up for the mailing list. To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself from the list.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:47, 4 December 2025 (UTC)

Recent block recipient

FYI in case you didn't see, Wang claimed to be Thcsphuninh2025 prior to being blocked. Special:Contributions/Thcsphuninh2025 who also has Las Vegas interests and disruptive with TP access revoked. Zinnober9 (talk) 06:33, 7 December 2025 (UTC)

@Zinnober9, reported to SRG and tp and email revoked per that! Sohom (talk) 06:44, 7 December 2025 (UTC)

Sweet. TP was going regardless based on their behavior though. Tbhotch had suspicions a couple of hours ago and started a SPI report at Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Thcsphuninh2025. I parked this evidence over there too. Thanks for the swift actions. The page history on Tropicana Las Vegas for the WP:RPPD request they made was a large red flag, so not surprised at all they were a sock. Hope you are having a nice weekend. Zinnober9 (talk) 06:55, 7 December 2025 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – December 2025

News and updates for administrators from the past month (November 2025).

Administrator changes

Valereee

CheckUser changes

Spicy

Technical news

Starting on November 4, the IP addresses of logged-out editors are no longer being publicly displayed. Instead, they will have a temporary account associated with their edits.
Administrators will now find that Special:MergeHistory is now significantly more flexible about what it can merge. It can now merge sections taken from the middle of the history of the source (rather than only the start) and insert revisions anywhere in the history of the destination page (rather than only the start). T382958

Miscellaneous

The December 2025 administrator elections are scheduled from Nov 25 – Dec 15.
An Articles for Creation backlog drive is happening in December 2025, with over 1,000 drafts awaiting review from the past two months. In addition to AfC participants, all administrators and new page patrollers can help review using the Yet Another AFC Helper Script, which can be enabled in the Gadgets settings. Sign up here to participate!

Sent byMediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:45, 8 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.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 17:43, 8 December 2025 (UTC)

Administrator Elections - Voting Phase

The voting phase of the December 2025 administrator elections has started and will continue until Dec 15 at 23:59 UTC. You can participate in the voting phase at Wikipedia:Administrator elections/December 2025/Voting phase.

As a reminder, the schedule of the election is:

Dec 9–15 - SecurePoll voting phase
Scrutineering phase

In the voting phase, the candidate subpages close to public questions and discussion, and everyone who qualifies to vote has a week to use the SecurePoll software to vote, which uses a secret ballot. You can see who voted, but not who they voted for. Please note that the vote totals cannot be made public until after voting has ended and as such, it will not be possible for you to see an individual candidate's vote total during the election. The suffrage requirements are similar to those at RFA.

Once voting concludes, we will begin the scrutineering phase, which will last for a few days, perhaps longer. Once everything is certified, the results will be posted on the results page (this is a good page to watchlist), and transcluded to the main election page. In order to be granted adminship, a non-recall candidate must have received at least 70.0% support, calculated as Support / (Support + Oppose), and a minimum of 20 support votes. Recall candidates must achieve 55.0% support. Because this is a vote and not a consensus, there are no bureaucrat discussions ("crat chats").

Any questions or issues can be asked on the election talk page. Thank you for your participation. Happy electing.

You're receiving this message because you signed up for the mailing list. To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself from the list.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:06, 9 December 2025 (UTC)

Discussion re early voting

This is to let you know that the scrutineers have started a discussion about how best to handle votes submitted before the official start of the current admin elections. You may wish to comment, as your vote is amongst those being discussed. Risker (talk) 20:09, 10 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 externallinks table on database replicas. In the future this may be extended to other highly-linked trusted websites on a per-wiki basis, such as Creative Commons links on Wikimedia Commons.
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 19:01, 15 December 2025 (UTC)

Permanent grant for temporary account IP viewer

Hi, you gave me permissions till Jan for the temporary account IP viewer, saying I could ask for it to be extended. Could you please extend me to a permanent grant? Likeanechointheforest (talk) 22:42, 15 December 2025 (UTC)

@Likeanechointheforest Could you throw me some examples of instances of where you used TAIV! I think the main concern I had when I granted you TAIV was you demonstrating a usecase for the userright, looking at your contribs I can't still easily spot a case of you using TAIV (to revert a vandal or SPI report), if you use it regularly I'll be happy to grant it indefinitely. Sohom (talk) 06:13, 17 December 2025 (UTC)

Hey, if you look in my last few days' contribs, I've been able to identify a number of vandalism edits tracing back to two specific IP ranges (I've reverted more besides these) Likeanechointheforest (talk) 23:05, 21 December 2025 (UTC)

Done per that. Sohom (talk) 10:12, 22 December 2025 (UTC)

The Signpost: 17 December 2025

Interview: Part 1: Bernadette Meehan
Say hello to the new WMF CEO.

News and notes: We're gonna have a party!
And a new WMF CEO!

In the media: The "bigg" bosses: Robertsky and the Pope
Pay up, big guys!

Traffic report: Death and stranger things
And going for the FIFA prize!

Gallery: A feast of holidays and carols
Something old and something new!

Obituary: Michal Lewi (Iwelam) and Alan R. King (A R King)
Rest in peace.

Concept: List of xxtreme sports (redirected from Electrojousting)
You are viewing an old revision of this page, as edited on 2065-11-10 04:33:10.

Comix: display: flex-inline;
ampersand nb semicolon ampersand nb semicolon ampersand nb semicolon

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:03, 17 December 2025 (UTC)

Seasons Greetings

Peace is a state of balance and understanding in yourself and between others, where respect is gained by the acceptance of differences, tolerance persists, conflicts are resolved through dialog, peoples rights are respected and their voices are heard, and everyone is at their highest point of serenity without social tension. Happy Holidays to you and yours. Buster Seven Talk (UTC) 03:31, 19 December 2025 (UTC)

to you as well! Sohom (talk) 19:20, 19 December 2025 (UTC)

Happy holidays!

Happy holidays and a prosperous 2026!

Soda, I think TechnoSquirrel69 put it best in your EOTW nomination when he said you seemingly do[] it all. From technical work to writing high quality articles about complex topics (which, I will add, is not exactly a cake walk), you do a great deal of stuff, which I truly appreciate. And thank you again for your assistance over at {{Wikisource/Author}}! Happy holidays, and the best to you and yours in 2026 :)

My favorite small-s soda is root beer

House Blaster (talk • he/they) 01:06, 22 December 2025 (UTC)

@HouseBlaster Thank you soo much for your kind words! Hope you have a super Christmas break and new year! (To confess, I've never had root beer, hope to have it once I'm done with my vacation :) Sohom (talk) 13:03, 22 December 2025 (UTC)

Ditto! Root beer is definitely not for everyone, but I look forward to hearing how you liked it :) House Blaster (talk • he/they) 22:41, 22 December 2025 (UTC)

December thanks

Quick facts

story · music · places

Thank you for improving article quality in December! - The 1715 Advent Bach cantata translates to "Prepare the ways", - listen to quite stunning music if you haven't ;) - "places" take you to Copenhagen. -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:58, 22 December 2025 (UTC)

Clarification regarding Draft:Atomesus deletion

Hello Sohom Datta, I hope you are doing well. I’m writing regarding the deletion of Draft:Atomesus, which was removed under G5 (created by a banned or blocked user – AmanSharma111). I would like to respectfully clarify that I am not connected in any way to Aman Sharma / AmanSharma111, nor am I attempting to recreate content on behalf of any blocked or banned editor. I am an independent editor and the draft I intend to create is original, rewritten from scratch, and will fully comply with Wikipedia’s policies, including notability, neutrality, reliable sourcing, and conflict-of-interest guidelines. Before proceeding further, I wanted to check with you to ensure there is no misunderstanding and to ask for guidance on how I can move forward correctly without violating Wikipedia policies. If you require any verification or additional clarification from my side, I’m happy to provide it. Thank you for your time and for the work you do to maintain Wikipedia’s standards. Kind regards, - Starbabie1 (talk) 08:04, 22 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 with data-mw-interface="", to avoid potential conflicts with other data-mw attributes, which are generated by Parsoid.
There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.

Meetings and events

The Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026 will take place on 13-14 March 2026 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Applications just opened mid-December and will close in mid-January or earlier if capacity is reached. With space for approximately 100 participants, early application is encouraged.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 21:43, 22 December 2025 (UTC)

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2026!

Hello Sohom Datta, may you be surrounded by peace, success and happiness on this seasonal occasion. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Sending you heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2026.
Happy editing,
Vacant0 (talk • contribs) 17:04, 24 December 2025 (UTC)

Spread the love by adding {{subst:Seasonal Greetings}} to other user talk pages.

Vacant0 (talk • contribs) 17:04, 24 December 2025 (UTC)

Happy Holidays!

      *             ,
                  _/^\_
                 <     >
*                 /.-.\         *
         *        `/&\`                   *
                 ,@.*;@,
                /_o.I %_\    *
   *           (`'--:o(_@;
              /`;--.,__ `')             *
             ;@`o % O,*`'`&\
       *    (`'--)_@ ;o %'()\      *
            /`;--._`''--._O'@;
           /&*,()~o`;-.,_ `""`)
*          /`,@ ;+& () o*`;-';\
          (`""--.,_0 +% @' &()\
          /-.,_    ``''--....-'`)  *
     *    /@%;o`:;'--,.__   __.'\
         ;*,&(); @ % &^;~`"`o;@();         *
         /(); o^~; & ().o@*&`;&%O\
   jgs   `"="==""==,,,.,="=="==="`
      __.----.(\-''#####---...___...-----._
    '`         \)_`"""""`
            .--' ')
          o(  )_-\

Original by Joan G. Stark

Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 21:03, 24 December 2025 (UTC)

Season's greetings

Happy holidays!!!!!

Sohom, I appreciate all that you do for Wikipedia - including the technical work you do as well as the CSDs - I see you from time to time on my watchlist deleting all the G11s I tag, which I greatly appreciate :D Also, it's been fun talking with you on the Discord server as well, and thank you for being such an amazing person and admin! Happy holidays to you and yours, ~delta _{{talk • cont • 🇰🇷 • 🎢}} 00:22, 26 December 2025 (UTC)

@~delta Was traveling until yesterday, thank you for the kind words and happy holidays to you as well :) Sohom (talk) 12:39, 29 December 2025 (UTC)

New pages patrol January–February 2026 Backlog drive

January–February 2026 Backlog Drive | New pages patrol

New Pages Patrol is hosting a one-time, two-month experimental backlog drive aimed at reducing the backlog. This will be a combo drive: both articles and redirects will earn points.

The drive will run from 1 January to 28 February 2026.
The drive is divided into two phases. Participants may take part in either phase or across both phases, depending on availability.
Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles and redirects patrolled during the drive.
Two-month drive-exclusive barnstars will be awarded to eligible participants.
Each article review earns 1 point, while each redirect review earns 0.2 points.
Streak awards will be granted based on consistently meeting weekly point thresholds.
Barnstars will also be awarded for re-reviewing articles previously reviewed by other patrollers during the drive.
Interested in participating? Sign up here.

You are receiving this message because you are a New Pages Patrol reviewer. To opt out of future mailings, please remove yourself from here.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:23, 27 December 2025 (UTC)

Upcoming expiry of your electionclerk right

Hi, this is an automated reminder as part of Global reminder bot to let you know that your permission "electionclerk" (Election clerks) will expire on 00:00, 31 December 2025 (UTC). For most rights, you will need to renew at WP:PERM, unless you have been told otherwise when your right was approved. To opt out of user right expiry notifications, add yourself to m:Global reminder bot/Exclusion. Leaderbot (talk) 19:41, 28 December 2025 (UTC)

Happy New Year, Sohom Datta!

Happy New Year!

Sohom Datta,
Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia.
Abishe (talk) 16:26, 31 December 2025 (UTC)

Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year fireworks}} to user talk pages.

Abishe (talk) 16:26, 31 December 2025 (UTC)

o/ @Abishe Happy New Year to you as well! Sohom (talk) 16:28, 31 December 2025 (UTC)

Welcome to the 2026 WikiCup!

Happy New Year and Happy New WikiCup! The 2026 competition has just begun and all article creators, expanders, improvers and reviewers are welcome to take part. Even if you are a novice editor, we hope the WikiCup will give you a chance to improve your editing skills as you go. If you have already signed up, your submissions page can be found here. If you have not yet signed up, you can add your name here, and a bot will set up your submissions page within one day, ready for you to take part. Any questions on the scoring, rules or anything else should be directed to one of the judges, or posted to the WikiCup talk page.

For the 2026 WikiCup, the highest-ranking contestants will receive tournament points at the end of each round, and final rankings are decided by the number of tournament points each contestant has. This is the same scoring system that we had last year. If you're busy and can't sign up in January, don't worry: Signups are open throughout the year. To make things fairer for latecomers, the lowest-scoring contestants are no longer eliminated at the end of each round.

The first round will end on 26 February. The judges for the WikiCup this year are: Cwmhiraeth (talk · contribs · email), Epicgenius (talk · contribs · email), Frostly (talk · contribs · email), Guerillero (talk · contribs · email) and Lee Vilenski (talk · contribs · email). Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:38, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

Happy New Year, Sohom!

	Happy New Year!
	Hello Sohom Datta: Did you know ... that back in 1885, Wikipedia editors wrote Good Articles with axes, hammers and chisels? Thank you for your contributions to this encyclopedia using 21st century technology. I hope you don't get any unnecessary blisters. Rtpaz (talk) 16:46, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

Spread the WikiLove; use {{subst:Happy New Year elves}} to send this message

Rtpaz (talk) 16:46, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

Wishing you a happy 2026!

Happy New Year!

MMXXVI Lunar Calendar

Sohom Datta,
Have a great 2026 and thanks for your continued contributions to Wikipedia.

– Background color is Very Peri (#6868ab), Pantone's 2026 Color of the year

Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year 2026}} to user talk pages.

– CAPTAIN RAJU^(T) 05:57, 2 January 2026 (UTC)

How are you doing?

Glad to see you working speedy deletions. G13s bot seems to run at about 23 minutes after each hour, so if you swing by Category:Candidates for speedy deletion a few minutes later, you'll often find work to do. Always check page history just in case the bot mangled it. Need any help just ask. BusterD (talk) 12:03, 8 January 2026 (UTC)

@BusterD Nice to see you around, I'm mostly doing well :) It's been a while since I've done CSDs (my activity decreased a bit after the U6-U7 overhaul, because during the transition period I was unsure if my internal compass aligned with the community). I'll keep the 23 minute rule in mind and check the page history for G13s! Sohom (talk) 17:30, 8 January 2026 (UTC)

I actually gave the U6 bot a barnstar because it has changed the way I look at ragpicking. BusterD (talk) 17:47, 8 January 2026 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – January 2026

News and updates for administrators from the past month (December 2025).

Administrator changes

Fathoms Below

CheckUser changes

Oversight changes

Guideline and policy news

All general sanctions imposed by the community may now be enforced at the Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard (WP:AE) as a result of a recent RfC.
Due to the result of a recent RFC, the administrator recall process is amended to extend the deadline for a re-request for adminship to 30 days or the next administrator election, whichever is later.
Changes to the Access to Temporary Account IP Addresses Policy's disclosure rules include broadening the consecutive-blocks exception to cover all admin actions and removing the requirement to revision-delete permissible disclosures once they become unnecessary (instead requiring only their removal). See WP:TAIVDISCLOSE for more information.

Arbitration

Following the 2025 Arbitration Committee elections, the following editors have been elected to the Arbitration Committee: Aoidh, Asilvering, Girth Summit, Guerillero, HJ Mitchell, HouseBlaster, Izno, Sdrqaz, SilverLocust.
The arbitration case Pbsouthwood has been suspended.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:30, 8 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

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:31, 12 January 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 15 January 2026

News and notes: Wikipedia's 25th anniversary is here!
Where does the time go?

Special report: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call
The internet is booming. We are not.

Serendipity: The WMF wants to buy you books!
Really! A major triumph.

WikiProject report: Time for a health check: the Vital Signs 2026 campaign
The campaign to get all of our top-importance medical articles up to B-class or above.

In the media: Fake Acting President Trump and a Wikipedia infobox
D.J.T. assumes a new position.

Community view: The inbox behind Wikipedia
What the Volunteer Response Team actually does!

Recent research: Art museums on Wikidata; comparing three comparisons of Grokipedia and Wikipedia
And other research.

Traffic report: Tonight I'm gonna rock you tonight
A world in white gets underway.

Comix: Oh come on man.
Really?

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:16, 15 January 2026 (UTC)

Good Article Gazette, Issue 10

Issue 10, 18 January 2026

Ongoing discussions

February 2026 GAN Drive
Commentary ability for Good Article reviewers (at Village pump)

News

Wikipedia celebrates its 25th anniversary.

Current statistics

Number of GAs: 43,188 (+87)
Number of nominations: 900 (+23)
GAs for reassessment: 68 (+9)

-- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:28, 18 January 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-04

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

The tray shown on Special:Diff in mobile view has been redesigned. It is now collapsed by default, and incorporates a link to undo the edit being viewed, making it easier for mobile editors and reviewers to take action while keeping the interface uncluttered.
The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension continues to improve — it now automatically determines the text direction (ensuring correct display of sites with unusual domain names) and shows detailed descriptions for log actions. Later this week, a new permanent link for page creations and CSS classes for each entry element will be added.
View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the previously observed issue in Vector 2022, where anchor link targets were obscured by the sticky header, has now been addressed.

Updates for technical contributors

As mentioned in the October 2025 deprecation announcement, MediaWiki Interfaces team will begin sunsetting all transform endpoints containing a trailing slash from the MediaWiki REST API the week of January 26. Changes are expected to roll out to all wikis on or before January 30th. All API users currently calling them are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. Both endpoint variations can be found, compared, and tested using the REST Sandbox. If you have questions or encounter any problems, please file a ticket in Phabricator to the #MW-Interfaces-Team board.
Interactive reference documentation for the Wikimedia REST API has moved. Requests to API docs previously hosted through RESTBase (e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/) are now redirected to the REST Sandbox.
The WMF Wikidata Platform team (WDP) has published its January 2026 newsletter. It includes updates on the legacy full-graph endpoint decommissioning, the User-Agent policy change, the monthly Blazegraph migration office hours, and efforts to reduce regressions caused by the legacy endpoint shutdown. As a reminder, you can subscribe to the WDP newsletter!
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

The Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026 will take place on 13-14 March 2026 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Applications opened mid-December and will close soon or when capacity is reached. It's a two-day, technically oriented hackathon bringing together Wikimedians from the region. Hope to see you there!

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:28, 19 January 2026 (UTC)

January music

Quick facts

story · music · places

Thank you for improving article quality in January! - 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) 21:53, 20 January 2026 (UTC)

David Tudor was a nice shout. Most of my work in the new year has been to Privacy Sandbox and nomed a old article CSS fingerprinting for GA (doing content after a long while) Sohom (talk) 12:05, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

Sodium bot

I want to thank you again for taking over the bot that handles WP:FRS, when it was more than I could handle.

FYI. I mention the bot and WP:FRS concerns here:

Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_comment#RfC_bot_concerns_that_might_be_addressed (permalink)

I want to be clear I in no way blame you for the problem. It came from the code you inherited. I mentioned it to you before, and I didn't follow up on it. I'm ready to talk about it in more depth now and hopefully you are open to digging more deeply into the concern and ideally correcting it in accordance with whatever the community thinks would be best.

--David Tornheim (talk) 16:28, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

I'm up to do some digging into the code, I'll keep an eye on the discussion to see what the consensus is on the changes! Sohom (talk) 02:02, 23 January 2026 (UTC)

"Runnning" typos

Is "Runnning" [sic] an intentional typo on your bot's user page? If not, then both instances of the same typo under the "Status" column should be fixed. GTrang (talk) 20:04, 23 January 2026 (UTC)

Nope, good catch! Sohom (talk) 20:11, 23 January 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-05

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

Updates for editors

Wikimedia Foundation invites comments on proposed future of the Product and Technology Advisory Council until 28 February.
All users with registered accounts can now use passkeys for two-factor authentication (2FA). Passkeys are a simple way to log in without using a second device. They verify the user's identity using a fingerprint, face scan, or a PIN code. To set up a passkey, first set up a regular 2FA method. Currently, to log in with a passkey, users must also use a password. Later this quarter, passwordless login will allow users to log in with a single click and a passkey. Users with advanced rights will also be required to have 2FA enabled. This is part of the Account Security project.
Unregistered contributors on blocked IPs or blocked IP ranges can now interact on-wiki to appeal a block by creating a temporary account to appeal a block on the user talk page, unless the "prevent this user from editing their own talk page" is enabled. This solves the problem of logged-out users unable to use the default unblock process via user talk page.
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) methods description on the management page has been updated. It is now clearer and easier for users to understand and make use of.

Updates for technical contributors

A new AbuseFilter variable, account_type, has been added to provide a reliable way to determine the account type being created in the createaccount and autocreateaccount actions. As part of this change, the variable accountname has been renamed to account_name, and accountname is now deprecated. Edit filter managers should update any filters that use hardcoded account type checks or the deprecated variable.
Image thumbnails that are requested in non-standard sizes, and using non-standard methods such as direct requests to upload.wikimedia.org/… will stop working in the near future. This change is to prevent ongoing external abuse by web-scrapers and bots. Some users with custom CSS/JS, Interface Admins who can fix gadgets and local skins, and Tool-authors, will need to update their code to use standard thumbnail sizes. Details, search-links, and examples of how to fix them, are available in the task.
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 21:15, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 January 2026

Traffic report: The most viewed articles of 2025
Everybody had a hard year, everybody had a good time.

News and notes: Good news... but also bad news for the Public Domain
Benvenuto Betty Boop, arrivederci Italian Photos.

News from Diff: Solving puzzles together
Maryana Iskander says farewell.

In the media: Every view on the 25th anniversary of everything
Media about hard-core nerds, a place with paragraphs, baby globes, and wikipedes.

Comix: Perspectives
Everybody has one.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:29, 29 January 2026 (UTC)

Good Article Gazette, Issue 11

Logo: Good Article Gazette - the official GAN newsletter

Issue 11, 30 January 2026

More information Ongoing discussions, News ...

Ongoing discussions	News	Current statistics
What to do if nominator has been blocked? Commentary ability for Good Article reviewers (at Village pump)	Sign up for the February 2026 GAN backlog drive	Number of GAs: 43,228 (+40) Number of nominations: 968 (+68) GAs for reassessment: 64 (–4)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:23, 30 January 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-06

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

The "Page information" feature, which gives validating information about a page (example), now automatically includes a table of contents. If there is a local MediaWiki:Pageinfo-header page created by individual users, it can now be removed.
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, VisualEditor previously added bold or italic formatting inside link descriptions, making the wikicode complex. This has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

There was no XML dump on 20 January. Additionally, from now on, dumps will be generated once per month only.
The MediaWiki Interfaces team removed support for all transform endpoints containing a trailing slash from the MediaWiki REST API. All API users currently calling those endpoints are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. If you have questions or encounter any problems, please file a ticket in phabricator to the #MW-Interfaces-Team board.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Weekly highlight

Users are reminded that the Wikimedia Foundation has shared some guiding questions for the July 2026–June 2027 Annual Plan on Meta and Diff. These focus on global trends, faster and healthier experimentation, better support for newcomers, strengthening editors and advanced users, improving collaboration across projects, and growing and retaining readership. Feedback and ideas are welcome on the talk page.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 17:42, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

FRS notifications aren't happening

It looks like the Wikipedia:Feedback request service notifications stopped on 22 January 2026. Can you look into that soon? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:27, 7 February 2026 (UTC)

Sure! Sohom (talk) 21:31, 7 February 2026 (UTC)

Okay, it should be fixed but I will keep an eye on it for a bit. Sohom (talk) 22:06, 7 February 2026 (UTC)

Looks like a bit over 200 messages were delivered today. Thanks. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:01, 8 February 2026 (UTC)

I have sometimes wished for a "self-tattling" feature in that bot. Could it be set up so that it checks its own contributions once every 48 hours, and if there are no edit summaries about FRS notifications in the last 48 hours, maybe it could post a note at WT:RFC or on someone's User_talk: page, or something, so we'll notice it? I check every few weeks, and but that's not as often as would be useful. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:05, 8 February 2026 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing I did two things, I've added the bot to Wikipedia:Bot activity monitor/Configurations so that SDZeroBot will send notifications to the talk page (and thus to my email + whoever is watching the page) about the fact that the bot has not made any edits. I've also made a few errors "recoverable" (i.e. the bot should ignore the page/the error and created a page at User:SodiumBot/FRS/Errors to track them) so that folks other than me can go and fix/diagnose them (there are going to be two, that a specific GAN/RFC page could not be parsed (which caused the previous failure) and the other one being "nobody was notified for this RFC/GAN" -- which I see in the logs but haven't investigated the severity/reason for). Sohom (talk) 04:07, 8 February 2026 (UTC)

Are the bot's other tasks sufficiently infrequent that no edits effectively means no FRS notifications? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:13, 8 February 2026 (UTC)

No edits to is definitely a problem especially over 2-3+ days since that means the bot did not notify anyone over that period of time. (The SDZeroBot config looks for 24 hours with no edits to that page). The other tasks are infrequent enough that they shouldn't be too much of the problem. Sohom (talk) 04:26, 8 February 2026 (UTC)

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:
- a Wikipedia in Jju (w:kaj:)
- a Wikipedia in Nawat (w:ppl:)
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.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:28, 9 February 2026 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – February 2026

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2026).

Administrator changes

Vacant0

Crisco 1492

CheckUser changes

Daniel Quinlan

Vanamonde93

Mkdw

Oversight changes

Daniel Quinlan

Arbitration

Due to the result of a recent motion, a rough consensus of administrators at the arbitration enforcement noticeboard may impose an expanded topic ban on Israel, Israelis, Jews, Judaism, Palestine, Palestinians, Islam, and/or Arabs, if an editor's Arab-Israeli conflict topic ban is determined to be insufficient to prevent disruption. At least one diff per area expanded into should be cited.

Miscellaneous

Voting in the 2026 Steward elections started on 06 February 2026 at 14:00 (UTC) and will end on 27 February 2026 at 14:00 (UTC). The confirmation process for current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:10, 10 February 2026 (UTC)

Questions for upcoming Signpost piece

Hello, as a participant in the WMF annual planning discussion, I am hoping you can take some time to answer questions I made for a Signpost piece I am working on. Thanks! Czarking0 (talk) 15:55, 12 February 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-08

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

The SRE Team will be performing a cleanup of Wikimedia's Etherpad instance, the web-based editor for real-time collaborative document editing. All pads will be permanently deleted after 30 April, 2026 – if there are still migration projects in progress at that point the team can revisit the date on a case by case basis. Please create local backups of any content you wish to keep, as deleted data cannot be recovered. This cleanup helps reduce database size and minimize infrastructure footprint. Etherpad will continue to support real-time collaboration, but long-term storage should not be expected. Additional cleanups may occur in the future without prior notice.

Updates for editors

The Information Retrieval team will be launching an Android mobile app experiment that tests hybrid search capabilities which can handle both semantic and keyword queries. The improvement of on-platform search will enable readers to find what they’re looking for directly on Wikipedia more easily. The experiment will first be launched on Greek Wikipedia in late February, followed by English, French, and Portuguese in March. Read more on Diff blog.
The Reader Growth team will run an experiment for mobile web users, that adds a table of contents and automatically expands all article sections, to learn more about navigation issues they face. The test will be available on Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
Previously, site notices (MediaWiki:Sitenotice and MediaWiki:Anonnotice) would only render on the desktop site. Now, they will render on all platforms. Users on mobile web will now see these notices and be informed. Site administrators should be prepared to test and fix notices on mobile devices to avoid interference with articles. To opt out, interface admins can add #siteNotice { display: none; } to MediaWiki:Minerva.css.
View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue on Special:RecentChanges has been fixed. Previously, clicking hide in the active filters caused the "view new changes since…" button to disappear, though it should have remained visible. The button now behaves as expected.

Updates for technical contributors

New documentation is now available to help editors debug on-site search features. It supports troubleshooting when pages do not appear in results, when ranking seems unexpected, and when you need to inspect what content is being indexed, helping make search behavior easier to understand and analyze. Learn more.
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 19:15, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 17 February 2026

In the media: Global powers see Wikipedia as fundamental target for manipulation
Attempted Wikipedia shenanigans apparent from Epstein, AI, various governments.

News and notes: Discussions open for the next WMF Annual Plan
Plus, WikiFlix going places, steady progress on older FAs and other news from the Wikimedia world.

Serendipity: Maintenance crews continue to slog through Wikipedia's oldest Featured Articles
Hundreds of old FAs have been triaged since project began, but thousands remain — and they need reviewers.

Disinformation report: Epstein's obsessions
The sex offender's attempts to whitewash Wikipedia run deeper than we first thought.

Technology report: Wikidata Graph Split and how we address major challenges
A personal perspective on a major update to the Wikimedia social machine.

Traffic report: Deaths, killings, films, and the Olympics
I'll have the usual!

Opinion: Incoming Incurables
A poem for Wikipedia Day 2026.

Crossword: Pop quiz
Sharpen your pencil. How well do you really know Wikipedia?

Comix: herculean
efforts.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:01, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

Good Article Gazette, Issue 12

Logo: Good Article Gazette - the official GAN newsletter

Issue 12, 20 February 2026

More information Ongoing discussions, News ...

Ongoing discussions	News	Current statistics
What should ChristieBot do when an article is moved mid-review? How should ChristieBot notify nominators of malformed nominations? Amount of articles in video game categories Lack of spot check References in a GAN article; and the associated discussion at Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates: Identifying locations in sources without page numbers	February 2026 GAN backlog drive continues. Two reviewers are looking for mentors. WikiProject Food and Drink hits 500 Good Articles, with Chiswick Chap and Another Believer together contributing a third.	Number of GAs: 43,446 (+218) Number of nominations: 841 (–127) GAs for reassessment: 46 (–18)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:19, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

February music

Quick facts

story · music · places

Thank you for improving article quality in February! - My story today is again about Percy Grainger (FA by Brian Boulton), this time with a video that surprised me. -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:57, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

Quick facts Two years! ...

Precious
Two years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:24, 23 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) 15:55, 24 February 2026 (UTC)

Your nomination of CSS fingerprinting is under review

Your good article nomination of the article CSS fingerprinting is under review. See the review page for more information. This may take up to 7 days; feel free to contact the reviewer with any questions you might have. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of Esculenta -- Esculenta (talk) 16:33, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-09

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

Weekly highlight

Reference Check has been deployed to English Wikipedia, completing its rollout across all Wikipedias. The feature prompts newcomers to add a citation before publishing new content, helping reduce common citation-related reverts and improve verifiability. In A/B testing, the impact was substantial: newcomers shown Reference Check were approximately 2.2 times more likely to include a reference on desktop and about 17.5 times more likely on mobile web.

Updates for editors

The InterwikiSorting extension, which allowed for the sorting of interwiki links, has been undeployed from Wikipedia. As a result, editors who had enabled interwiki link sorting in non-compact mode (full list format) will now see links reordered. The links moving forward will be listed in the alphabetical order of language code.
Later this week, people who are editing a page-section using the mobile visual editor, will notice a new "Edit full page" button. When tapped, you will be able to edit the entire article. This helps when the change you want to make is outside the section you initially opened.
The Reader Experience team is inviting editors to assess whether dark mode should still be considered "beta" on their wiki, based on their experience of how well it functions on desktop and mobile. If the feature is deemed mature, editors can update the interface messages in MediaWiki:skin-theme-description and MediaWiki:Vector-night-mode-beta-tag to indicate that dark mode is ready and no longer considered beta.
The improved Activity tab which displays user-insights is now available to all users of the Wikipedia iOS app (version 7.9.0 and later). Following earlier A/B testing that showed higher account creation among users with access to the feature, it has been rolled out to 100% of users along with some updates. The Activity tab now shows your edited articles in the timeline, offers editing impact insights like contribution counts and article view trends, and customization options to improve in-app experience for users.
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug that prevented DiscussionTools from working on mobile has now been fixed, restoring full functionality.

Updates for technical contributors

The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension that makes this possible continues to improve. The latest upgrade is the inclusion of a new hook, ext.globalwatchlist.rebuild, which fires after each watchlist rebuild. This allows you to run gadgets and user scripts for the Special page.
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 19:02, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

WikiCup 2026 March newsletter

The first round of the 2026 WikiCup ended on 26 February. As some of you may have noticed, good article nomination reviews now receive 10 points, an increase from 5 points in the previous year, as per a consensus at WT:CUP. This point increase has been retroactively applied to all good article reviews for which competitors have claimed points in this round. Peer reviews, which continue to be worth 5 points, are now listed in the same section as featured article candidate reviews, rather than with good article reviews. Everyone who competed in round 1 will advance to round 2 unless they have withdrawn or been banned. No other changes to the round-point system have been made for this year.

Round 1 was competitive. Three contestants scored more than 1,000 round points, and the top 16 contestants all scored more than 300 round points. The following competitors scored more than 800 round points:

Bgsu98 (submissions) with 1,467 round points, largely gained from 1 featured article, 5 featured lists, 15 good articles, and 42 FAC and GAN reviews;
Olliefant (submissions) with 1,246 round points, largely from 4 featured lists, 9 good articles, 2 featured topic articles, 4 did you know articles, and 75 FAC and GAN reviews;
Generalissima (submissions) with 1,095 round points, largely from 3 featured articles, 6 good articles, and 5 did you know articles;
MCE89 (submissions) with 848 round points, largely from 1 featured article, 8 good articles, 1 did you know article, and 32 FAC and GAN reviews; and
Rollinginhisgrave (submissions) with 838 round points, largely from 1 featured article, 8 good articles, 1 did you know article, and 14 FAC, GAN, and peer reviews.

The full scores for round 1 can be seen here. During this round, contestants have claimed 7 featured articles, 16 featured lists, 2 featured-topic articles, 168 good articles, 13 good-topic articles and more than 50 Did You Know articles. In addition, competitors have worked on 14 In the News articles, and they have conducted nearly 700 reviews. The tournament points table will be updated within the next few days.

Remember that any content promoted after 26 February but before the start of Round 2 can be claimed in Round 2. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. If you want to help out with the WikiCup, feel free to review one of the nominations listed on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:57, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – March 2026

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2026).

Administrator changes

CheckUser changes

Ks0stm

Oversight changes

Ks0stm

Guideline and policy news

Following an RfC, the web archival service archive.today has been deprecated; links to the site should be removed.
A request for comment is open to discuss retiring CSD criterion R3 in favour of handling such redirects through RfD.

Arbitration

Following a motion, remedy 9.1 of the Conduct in deletion-related editing case has been amended to limit TenPoundHammer to one XfD nomination or PROD per 24-hour period.
Following a motion, the Iskandar323 further POV pushing motion has been rescinded.
The Arbitration Committee has passed a housekeeping motion rescinding a number of outdated remedies and enforcement provisions across multiple legacy cases. In most instances, existing sanctions remain in force and continue to be appealable through the usual processes, while some case-specific remedies were amended or clarified.

Miscellaneous

Following the 2026 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: A09, AmandaNP, Barras, Count Count, M7, SHB2000, Teles and VIGNERON.
An Unreferenced articles backlog drive is taking place in March 2026 to reduce the backlog of articles tagged with {{Unreferenced}}. You can help reduce the backlog by adding citations to these articles. Sign up to participate!

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:37, 1 March 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)

Your nomination of CSS fingerprinting has failed

Your good article nomination of the article CSS fingerprinting has failed. See the review page for more information. If or when the reviewer's feedback has been addressed, you may nominate the article again. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of Esculenta -- Esculenta (talk) 18:01, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

Notification of administrators without tools

	Greetings, Sohom Datta. You are receiving this notification because you've agreed to consider endorsing prospective admin candidates identified by the process outlined at Administrators without tools. Recently, the following editor(s) received this distinction and the associated endearing title: Drm310
Thank you for supporting this effort. Your contributions are an integral part of overall success, and an example for others to follow. To stop receiving these notifications, remove your name from the list.

Tol Bot (talk) 21:00, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

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.
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.
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

Interview: Bernadette Meehan, new Wikimedia Foundation CEO
Part 2.

News and notes: Security testing unleashes computer worm on Meta-wiki
Dormant worm awakes; a sketchy archiving site struck; ether burns.

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?

In the media: Indonesian government blocks Wikimedia logins; archive site scoured from Wikipedia after owner runs malware
As well as controversy over LLM translations.

Recent research: To wiki, perchance to groki
Comparisons continue.

Obituary: Madhav Gadgil, Fredrick Brennan, Mark Miller, Chip Berlet
Rest in peace.

Opinion: Interface administrators and trusting trust
Potential attacks are the logical consequence of giving a group of users unlimited control over JavaScript.

Technology report: English Wikipedia deprecates archive.today after DDoS against blog, altered content
After the archive site launched a DDoS campaign against a small blog in January 2026, a request for comment was started, with consensus to deprecate the site used almost 700 thousand times.

Op-ed: Why is "Trypsin-sensitive photosynthetic activities in chloroplast membranes" cited in "List of tallest buildings in Chicago"?
The answer is slop.

Essay: The pursuit of a button click
Volunteering for Wikipedia has its rewards. The thank-button, for example.

In focus: Short descriptions: One year later
A discussion of the challenge set forth to the Wikipedia community one year ago!

WikiProject report: Unreferenced articles backlog drive
Unreferenced articles in English Wikipedia - help us in the backlog drive!

Community view: Speaking of planning ...
The WMF planning process is underway.

Traffic report: Over the mountain, kissing silver inlaid clouds
Death and the Winter Olympics.

Crossword: "It will never happen"
Want to take a break?

Comix: BRIEn't
Or is it.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:13, 10 March 2026 (UTC)

TAIV question

Hi Sohom, Hope you are doing well! Since you are the admin who gave me TAIV, I have a question about an edge case. I was reminded of an incident not too long ago where a user stated that they may be in the threat of harm. This was done via a TA. Would it be abuse of TAIV to direct the user to their emergency services line using their IP location? (Fortunately, the TA in question gave a rough estimate of their location.) TheTechie^[she/they] | talk? 05:00, 10 March 2026 (UTC)

For the specific case, emailing ca

wikimedia.org (the Trust and Safety team) would be the correct thing to do in that context. Keep in mind that geolocation is not that accurate in a lot of places in the world, so you might end up calling folks in a area where the user does not reside. (which might be problematic from a real-world POV).

More abstractly with respect to TA use, it's definitely a grey zone, but trying to save a life would probably of the few cases where I don't think you would necessarily face consequences for breaching ToU requirements if any (for obvious reasons) and when it comes to onwiki policy, in those kinds of scenarios WP:IAR applies in my opinion. Sohom (talk) 05:24, 10 March 2026 (UTC)

Yeah, I ended up emailing Trust & Safety. But thank you for clarifying. TheTechie^[she/they] | talk? 14:44, 10 March 2026 (UTC)

Notification of administrators without tools

	Greetings, Sohom Datta. You are receiving this notification because you've agreed to consider endorsing prospective admin candidates identified by the process outlined at Administrators without tools. Recently, the following editor(s) received this distinction and the associated endearing title: GoldRomean
Thank you for supporting this effort. Your contributions are an integral part of overall success, and an example for others to follow. To stop receiving these notifications, remove your name from the list.

Tol Bot (talk) 21:00, 11 March 2026 (UTC)

IP Block Exemption

I would like to request before the expiry that my IP Block Exemption be renewed. W00zles (talk) 06:30, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

Done Sohom (talk) 12:38, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

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