User talk:XtraJovial

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

Updates for editors

• There is a change in how new users are autoconfirmed that will improve anti-vandalism protection. Currently, users who have had an account for a few days and made a few edits are automatically added to the Autoconfirmed users group. This configuration tends to be exploited by some vandals, who create accounts and start to use them only after some time. To mitigate this, the configuration will be updated next week so that – for the purpose of becoming autoconfirmed – the account age will be counted from their first edit, instead of registration date. The numeric value of the age threshold will remain the same. This change will be deployed only to wikis which require at least one edit as part of the autoconfirmation conditions.
• All Wikipedia users with new accounts and those who activated the "automatically enable most beta features" option in their preference can now use the reading lists beta feature to save articles for later reading. This helps organize reading interests in one place for convenient access.
• View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where infobox images have huge padding in Firefox, has been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• As a reminder, the global API rate limits will be applied this week to identified API traffic. This is to help ensure fair use of infrastructure. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, including the actual rate limits, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits and Frequently Asked Questions.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

Weekly highlight

• The Article guidance team invites experienced editors of pilot Wikipedias—Arabic, Bangla, Japanese, Portuguese, Persian, Turkish, Simple English, Spanish, and French—to help translate and adapt sample outlines. These outlines will guide editors in creating clear, well-structured, and policy-compliant articles when using the feature once it is launched in May 2026. Simple instructions on how to translate and adapt the outlines are available.

Updates for editors

• The Product and Technology Advisory Council has published draft recommendations on a model that affiliates can follow when contributing to the technical space. Community members are invited to provide feedback on the recommendation until May 8th on the talk page.
• The number of available thumbnail size preferences in MediaWiki is being reduced to three standardized options—Small (180px), Regular (250px), and Large (400px), as part of ongoing efforts to improve performance and reduce strain on thumbnail services. As a result, existing preferences will be mapped to the nearest new size (for example, smaller selections like 120px or 150px will render at 180px, while larger ones like 300px or 360px will render at 400px). The preferences interface will soon be updated to reflect these changes, and users who wish to opt out or provide feedback can do so.
• From now on, even when a permission expires automatically, users will receive an Echo notification similar to the standard notification for permission changes. There is a difference between this and Global reminder bot in that the latter reminds users a week before the rights are due to expire, so that they can renew the rights.
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the problem where the ULS language selector in Special:Translate would scroll vertically when it shouldn't, has been resolved. Previously, when users opened the "Translate to English" dropdown and typed certain inputs, the dialog would scroll vertically by a few pixels even when there was enough space to display all results. The dropdown no longer shifts unnecessarily when filtering languages.
• The Global Watchlist, which lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on a single page, continues to improve. For example, watchlists for Wikibase sites such as Wikidata now support EntitySchema elements for better tracking. The Live Updates mode now refreshes the special page every 60 seconds to comply with the updated global API rate limits for improved real-time responsiveness. Additionally, a directionality bug that displayed links as "changes 3" instead of "3 changes" in mixed-direction lists has been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The second phase of global API rate limits has been rolled out to reduce the impact of AI crawlers and ensure fair, sustainable access to Wikimedia resources, prioritising human and mission-aligned traffic. Limits have been shifted from per-hour to per-minute, producing smoother traffic patterns and more predictable API load. Community users are not expected to be affected, and no action is required. Early indications show some User-Agent-based requestors are adjusting behaviour, and around 64% of automated API traffic has been identified. Monitoring continues, and Wikimedia Enterprise remains available for commercial support.
• 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.

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

Weekly highlight

• Community Tech has published new guidance explaining how wishes on Community Wishlist are triaged and prioritized. The documentation is intended to help contributors write stronger proposals by clarifying the factors that influence prioritization decisions. Beyond vote counts, the guidance highlights considerations such as potential impact on the community when determining which wishes move forward.

Updates for editors

• The Reader Growth team is launching an experiment to test a new Share Card feature that allows readers to create visually engaging cards from Wikipedia articles or selected article sections and share them online, with each card linking back to the original article to help expand readership and article discovery. The mobile-only A/B test will be available to a portion of readers on Arabic, Chinese, French, Vietnamese, and English Wikipedia to better understand reading and sharing habits, and is scheduled to begin the week of May 18 and run for four weeks.
• The Android and iOS Wikipedia apps recently released the 25-day reading challenge into Beta, as part of efforts to drive reader engagement by encouraging users to complete reading milestones. To track their reading streak during the challenge, App users can add a widget featuring Baby Globe to their home screen. The challenge officially begins May 11.
• View all 17 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the global preference for enabling syntax highlighting in wikitext could unexpectedly disable itself after being turned on, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The ResourceLoader module mediawiki.ui.input, deprecated since September 2023, will be removed this week. There is a guide for migrating from MediaWiki UI to Codex for any tools that use it.
• 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.

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

Weekly highlight

• The Abstract Wikipedia team has identified five potential pilot wikis to assess their interest in adopting abstract articles on their wikis. The pilots are Malayalam, Bengali, Dagbani, Arabic, and Indonesian Wikipedia. The feedback period will be open until May 22. If your community is interested in becoming a pilot, let us know on Meta.

Updates for editors

• An experiment to show Reading Lists to logged-out readers on mobile web will launch on May 18 across German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, and Urdu Wikipedias, and will run for one month. The effort supports broader goals of helping readers save and organize articles for later reading, while encouraging habits that could lead to future Wikipedia contributions.
• To support a bookmark button in the Reading List beta feature, the "Tools > Action" menu has been updated to display icons, including the watch star indicator that helps editors identify temporarily watched articles. The icons now also match those used on mobile, improving consistency across platforms. The change is currently limited to the actions menu and mainly affects editors with privileged user rights.
• Suggestion Mode was released as an A/B test for newcomer editors on the mobile website at ~15 Wikipedias. The experiment will measure the impact that Suggestion Mode has on the proportion of newcomer mobile web edit sessions that result in constructive (un-reverted) article edits. The experiment will also evaluate the feature's impact on editor retention, and monitor changes in revert and block rates.
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue in the Wikipedia Android app where images could sometimes fail to load after opening a recommended reading list notification, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The Wikidata Platform team has published its backend replacement recommendation and accompanying technical architecture for the migration of the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) away from Blazegraph. Feedback is invited until May 25th 2026, especially on potential gaps and impacts on advanced use cases. Wikidata community members and WDQS users are also encouraged to help identify high-impact tools and workflows that may need attention on this page. Feedback can be shared on the Migration talk page or during the next office hour. See the WDP team newsletter for more details.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• On English, French, Japanese, and a few other Wikipedias, there was a trial of hCaptcha, a third-party bot detection service. The trial showed that hCaptcha effectively detects and deters some bad-faith automated activity, on its own and by giving checkusers and stewards signals to look into. Because the results were positive, hCaptcha will be rolled out across all wikis over the next few weeks. See the hCaptcha project page for technical information about the implementation and privacy protections. Learn more.
• The latest Community Tech update is now available, with progress across several Community Wishlist initiatives, including Reading Lists expansion from the mobile app to the website, new language support for "Who Wrote That" and the Personal Dashboard, improvements to 3D rendering and Charts, and upcoming work on talk page sorting, audio playback, and editing workflows. The update also shares current priorities, wishlist status trends, and opportunities for community feedback on future focus areas and the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2026–2027 Annual Plan. Read the full newsletter for details.

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

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

Weekly highlight

• Following a successful account creation experiment, an improved logged-out edit warning message will be deployed to all Wikimedia wikis in the first week of June. The change will only affect logged-out users on mobile web who open an editing session. The updated experience is designed to encourage account creation more clearly, while still allowing users to edit with temporary accounts. Results from the experiment showed a significant increase in account creation, with a 27% relative lift among users shown the updated message. As expected, as more people funnel into account creation, temporary accounts decreased by a relative 16%. The experiment did not show any significant changes in constructive edit rates or other monitored contributor metrics.

Updates for editors

• For security reasons, members of certain user groups are required to have two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled. Members of these groups will be unable to disable the last 2FA method on their account, and it will be impossible to add users without 2FA to these groups. Users will still be able to add new authentication methods or remove them, as long as at least one method is continuously enabled. In the next few weeks, users without 2FA will be removed from these groups. Notably, this applies to bureaucrats. See the linked tasks for deployment schedules.
• WMDE Technical Wishes will run an A/B test on 10 wikis, testing potential improvements for Reference Previews. The experiment will run for ~2 weeks at the end of May / beginning of June and will affect 10% of desktop readers on the participating wikis.
• After two successful experiments, the Reader Growth team is rolling out an Image Browsing beta feature for all Wikipedias on mobile on May 25. This means that anyone who has all beta features on by default will start to see this feature, and others can check the box to turn it on in their preferences. The beta feature will include a carousel of all an article's images at the top of the article, with controls for editors to exclude images from the article's carousel or to exclude an article from the feature entirely.
• View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, three dimensional STL files were being rendered incorrectly by the media viewer 3D extension which is now fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The legacy CSS classes tleft and tright have been replaced with floatleft and floatright as the former do not work consistently across all MediaWiki platforms, notably mobile web and mobile apps. Projects relying on these classes are encouraged to review related usage and plan for migration. Please note that floatleft and floatright may also be deprecated in future, although there are currently no plans to do so. Read more.
• 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.

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

Weekly highlight

• The Reader Growth team has launched an Image Browsing beta feature on the mobile web version of all Wikipedias. The feature shows an image carousel at the top of articles with 3 or more images. Editors can configure this feature with the following controls: to hide a specific image from a page, either use class=notpageimage excluding it from thumbnail previews, or class=noviewer excluding it from MediaViewer. The carousel can also be disabled from a page entirely, with the magic word __NOMEDIAVIEWERCAROUSEL__. To submit feedback or flag bugs, please visit the project page.
• Wikitables can now be sorted in descending order on the first click by adding data-sort-order="desc" to the header cell. Previously, by default, clicking a column header for the first time sorts it in ascending order. This addition to a Wikitable gives it more control and flexibility, while the default behavior for subsequent clicks remains unchanged.

Updates for editors

• The Article guidance feature is currently being tested with some editors creating new articles on the Simple English, French, and Turkish Wikipedias. The experiment will soon begin on the Arabic and Bangla Wikipedias as well. This feature gives editors community-curated guidance to help them create articles that follow community standards. Experienced editors can continue creating or adapting outlines for specific article types that are commonly created by less experienced contributors. The outlines guide less experienced editors in creating high-quality articles. A quick guide to markups used in outlines can be found on this page. Example outlines that can be adapted and instructions for how to adapt them are on this section of the project page.
• Wikis that wish to replace the "indefinitely" button in Special:Block for temporary accounts (for example, wikis that block temporary users only until account expiration) will be able to do so by creating MediaWiki:ipb-indefinite-expiry-temporary-account with the block duration they want.
• View all 41 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• By the end of June, a valid user-agent string will be required for automated dumps downloads from the dumps.wikimedia.org website. Automated requests that provide a generic or empty user-agent will be blocked. This extends enforcement of the long standing user-agent policy. Access to dumps through Wikimedia Cloud Services will not change.
• The roll out of global API rate limits is now complete, with limits enforced across all APIs and at the documented levels for all groups. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki remain exempt. All bots should continue to follow the documented best practices to avoid being rate limited.
• The API Portal wiki will be read only starting this week (June 15-18). The following week (June 22-25), all API Portal wiki URLs will redirect to Wikimedia APIs on mediawiki.org. Learn more on the project page.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• On June 17th at 6pm UTC the WMF will be holding Discord call focused on a code review. We've heard through the Developer Satisfaction Survey that volunteers are struggling with code review and we'd like to discuss these experiences with the goal of surfacing workable solutions. You can join the call via the Wikimedia Community Discord server.
• The Latin American Wikimedia Conference will host a regional hackathon that will bring together the Wikimedia movement’s technical community including developers, system administrators, data scientists, and users with extended rights. Interested technical contributors can apply for a scholarship to participate until June 21 at midnight (Bolivia time, UTC-4).
• Sign up for Wikimania Team Challenges to join this special event. The Team challenges will take place online and in person from July 21 to 22, before Wikimania conference. Everyone is welcome, regardless of skills or Wikimania registration. Teams will work on 10 important challenges supporting the Wikimedia community. For details, visit the Team Challenges page and register there. Registration closes on June 20th at 11pm UTC.

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

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

Weekly highlight

• Growth features are now available at Wikidata. This update enables access to Mentorship (if configured), Impact module, the Help Panel, and a simplified Newcomer Homepage (without Suggested Edits). Wikidata administrators are still configuring the features through Community Configuration.

Updates for editors

• The special page Special:RangeCalculator has been created. It allows users to find an IP range without needing to rely on external tools. Until now, this tool was only available to CheckUsers.
• Sub-referencing is a new MediaWiki feature that allows editors to reuse references with different details. It will be deployed to most small and medium-sized Wikipedia language versions on June 23. The FAQ lists possible actions to take on your wiki to support the deployment. Check the rollout plan for the next deployment steps.
• Starting next week, users will get a notification when they are blocked or unblocked from editing, or if this block changes.
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Starting next week, abuse filters that are set to "require CAPTCHA verification" will begin to also affect users with the skipcaptcha right, which includes most autoconfirmed users. Bots are exempted. This change only affects edits that trigger an abuse filter. The skipcaptcha right will continue to exempt users from having to solve CAPTCHAs in the ordinary course of using the wikis.
• Reference documentation for the Lift Wing API has moved from the API Portal to the interactive REST Sandbox.
• The API Portal wiki is now closed. For API documentation, see Wikimedia APIs on mediawiki.org. All API Portal wiki URLs (https://api.wikimedia.org/wiki/) will redirect to the mediawiki.org page starting June 22.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• Join an online call on 25 June at 2:30pm UTC to meet the current Wikimedia interns for Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. Interns will provide an overview of their projects and a brief demo of their work so far. Attendees are encouraged to share ideas and connections in their community.

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

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

Updates for editors

• As part of the Account Creation Experiments, the Growth team tested adding a user account icon in the mobile web header for logged-out users, providing direct access to "Create account" and "Log in" actions. The experiment increased account creation by about 20% without negatively affecting edit quality or constructive edit rates. The feature will now be rolled out to all Wikimedia Foundation wikis on mobile web in the first week of July.
• After a successful experiment, logged-in users who did not confirm their email address when their account was created see a new banner asking them to complete that process. This helps reduce the risk that users get locked out of their account, and makes account email addresses overall more reliable. This is part of the Account Security project.
• An update to Search is refining how the -prefix: behaves when used to exclude results. Previously, using -prefix: with negation could unintentionally broaden search results by adding the namespaces included in the search scope, leading to confusing behavior for users expecting a straightforward exclusion filter. With the update, -prefix: will now strictly exclude matching page titles as intended and may display a warning if the relevant namespace has not been explicitly selected. The behavior of prefix: without negation however remains unchanged.
• View all 33 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where reviewers using the Page Curation toolbar were not automatically subscribed to talk page discussions they started has now been fixed. Reviewers will now receive notifications when someone replies to those discussions.

Updates for technical contributors

• Starting June 29th, automated downloads from the dumps.wikimedia.org website will be subject to the user-agent policy. Automated requests that provide a generic or empty user-agent will be blocked. Access to dumps through Wikimedia Cloud Services remains unaffected. This is a follow up to the announcement made in the 2026/25 issue of Tech News.
• 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.

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

Updates for editors

• View all 34 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the search bar results on Wikidata, showed English results instead of using the correct language fallback for users of language variants, has now been fixed. Search suggestions will now follow the expected language fallback chain.

Updates for technical contributors

• In preparation for Celebrate Women campaign planned for March 2027, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Content Enablement team has launched a 22-question survey to better understand technical contributions by women+ (anyone who identifies as a woman) across Wikimedia projects. The survey takes approximately 15–20 minutes to complete and will remain open until 20 July 2026. The questions are also available on-wiki for review in advance.
• The Score extension now supports rendering music scores as SVG images in addition to PNG, addressing a long-standing feature request and resolving historical image quality issues. Both formats are now provided to clients, with PNG in the src attribute and SVG in the srcset attribute.
• The new Parsoid parser continues to be deployed to additional wikis, making it easier to introduce new reading and editing features. It was enabled on French Wikipedia, bringing total progress to covering 78.9% of Wikipedia page views. Rollout to English Wikipedia desktop will progress through this week.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The Wikimedia Hackathon 2026 recap blog post is now live. It highlights the projects, sessions, and social activities from this year’s event, and shares initial plans for the 2027 Wikimedia Hackathon.

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

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

Updates for editors

• Revise Tone helps newcomers identify passages in Wikipedia articles that may contain non-encyclopedic language and encourages them to consider revising the tone. The feature was A/B tested on the Arabic, English, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias, where newcomer task completion rates increased by 38.7% compared to the default Copyedit task, with no decrease in edit quality. The test ended on July 9, and the feature is now available for everyone on these wikis, configurable via Community Configuration. The plan is to release Revise Tone to more wikis.
• The community configuration that allows automatic removal of inactive mentors based on configurable criteria will be enabled on Thursday 16, on some wikis to keep mentor lists up to date. Mentors are experienced contributors who opt in to help new users on-wiki through the Growth Features. Administrators can now prepare the settings via Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship; they will take effect starting Thursday.
• View all 38 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where some users of the Wikipedia Android app were logged out immediately after signing in, preventing them from staying logged in and editing pages, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• Editing a page via user scripts or gadgets was causing watchlist labels that the user had assigned to that page to reset. This has now been fixed.
• To work around a Safari bug (see phab:T425211), on Parsoid-enabled wikis, wikilink hrefs now use absolute urls instead of protocol-relative urls. REST API output remains unchanged and continue to use protocol-relative urls. Gadgets, user scripts, bots, and CSS might need to be adapted if they relied on the presence of protocol-relative urls in wikilink hrefs.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The Wikimedia Foundation’s Experiment Platform Team has published a blog post reflecting on its first year of structured experimentation. It highlights successful experiments such as Paste Check, Reference Check, and Tone Check, which improved editing outcomes and have been rolled out to more users, as well as experiments that did not lead to product changes. Read more.

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