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Tech News: 2025-04
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Administrators can mass-delete multiple pages created by a user or IP address usingExtension:Nuke. It previously only allowed deletion of pages created in the last 30 days. It can now delete pages from the last 90 days, provided it is targeting a specific user or IP address.[1]
Onwikis that use thePatrolled edits feature, when the rollback feature is used to revert an unpatrolled page revision, that revision will now be marked as "manually patrolled" instead of "autopatrolled", which is more accurate. Some editors that usefilters on Recent Changes may need to update their filter settings.[2]
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, the Visual Editor's "Insert link" feature did not always suggest existing pages properly when an editor started typing, which has now beenfixed.
Updates for technical contributors
The Structured Discussion extension (also known as Flow) is being progressively removed from the wikis. This extension is unmaintained and causes issues. It will be replaced byDiscussionTools, which is used on any regular talk page.The last group of wikis (Catalan Wikiquote, Wikimedia Finland, Goan Konkani Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikibooks, Wikimedia Sweden) will soon be contacted. If you have questions about this process, please pingTrizek (WMF) at your wiki.[3]
The latest quarterlyTechnical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: updates about services from the Data Platform Engineering teams, information about Codex from the Design System team, and more.
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
Patrollers and admins - what information or context about edits or users could help you to make patroller or admin decisions more quickly or easily? The Wikimedia Foundation wants to hear from you to help guide its upcoming annual plan. Please consider sharing your thoughts on this and13 other questions to shape the technical direction for next year.
Updates for editors
iOS Wikipedia App users worldwide can now access apersonalized Year in Review feature, which provides insights based on their reading and editing history on Wikipedia. This project is part of a broader effort to help welcome new readers as they discover and interact with encyclopedic content.
Edit patrollers now have a new feature available that can highlight potentially problematic new pages. When a page is created with the same title as a page which was previously deleted, a tag ('Recreated') will now be added, which users can filter for inSpecial:RecentChanges andSpecial:NewPages.[4]
Later this week, there will be a new warning for editors if they attempt to create a redirect that links to another redirect (adouble redirect). The feature will recommend that they link directly to the second redirect's target page. Thanks to the user SomeRandomDeveloper for this improvement.[5]
Wikimedia wikis allowWebAuthn-based second factor checks (such as hardware tokens) during login, but the feature isfragile and has very few users. The MediaWiki Platform team is temporarily disabling adding new WebAuthn keys, to avoid interfering with the rollout ofSUL3 (single user login version 3). Existing keys are unaffected.[6]
For developers that use theMediaWiki History dumps: The Data Platform Engineering team has added a couple of new fields to these dumps, to support theTemporary Accounts initiative. If you maintain software that reads those dumps, please review your code and the updated documentation, since the order of the fields in the row will change. There will also be one field rename: in themediawiki_user_history dump, theanonymous field will be renamed tois_anonymous. The changes will take effect with the next release of the dumps in February.[7]
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Editors who use the "Special characters" editing-toolbar menu can now see the 32 special characters you have used most recently, across editing sessions on that wiki. This change should help make it easier to find the characters you use most often. The feature is in both the 2010 wikitext editor and VisualEditor.[8]
Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor can now create sublists with correct indentation by selecting the line(s) you want to indent and then clicking the toolbar buttons.[9] You can now also insert<code> tags using a new toolbar button.[10] Thanks to user stjn for these improvements.
Help is needed to ensure thecitation generator works properly on each wiki.
(1) Administrators should update the local versions of the pageMediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json to include entries forpreprint,standard, anddataset; Here are example diffs to replicatefor 'preprint' andfor 'standard' and 'dataset'.
(2.1) If the citoid map in the citation template used for these types of references is missing,one will need to be added. (2.2) If the citoid map does exist, the TemplateData will need to be updated to include new field names. Here are example updatesfor 'preprint' andfor 'standard' and 'dataset'. The new fields that may need to be supported arearchiveID,identifier,repository,organization,repositoryLocation,committee, andversionNumber.[11]
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
The Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) has publisheda draft of their recommendations for the Wikimedia Foundation's Product and Technology department. They have recommended focusing onmobile experiences, particularly contributions. They request communityfeedback at the talk page by 21 February.
Updates for editors
The "Special pages" portlet link will be moved from the "Toolbox" into the "Navigation" section of the main menu's sidebar by default. This change is because the Toolbox is intended for tools relating to the current page, not tools relating to the site, so the link will be more logically and consistently located. To modify this behavior and update CSS styling, administrators can follow the instructions atT385346.[14]
As part of this year's work around improving the ways readers discover content on the wikis, the Web team will be running an experiment with a small number of readers that displays some suggestions for related or interesting articles within the search bar. Please check outthe project page for more information.
View all 22 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, the global blocks log will now be shown directly on the Special:CentralAuth page, similarly to global locks, to simplify the workflows for stewards.[16]
Updates for technical contributors
Wikidatanow supports a special language as a "default for all languages" for labels and aliases. This is to avoid excessive duplication of the same information across many languages. If your Wikidata queries use labels, you may need to update them as some existing labels are getting removed.[17]
The functiongetDescription was invoked on every Wiki page read and accounts for ~2.5% of a page's total load time. The calculated value will now be cached, reducing load on Wikimedia servers.[18]
As part of the RESTBase deprecationeffort, the/page/related endpoint has been blocked as of February 6, 2025, and will be removed soon. This timeline was chosen to align with the deprecation schedules for older Android and iOS versions. The stable alternative is the "morelike" action API in MediaWiki, anda migration example is available. The MediaWiki Interfaces teamcan be contacted for any questions.[19]
In depth
The latest quarterlyLanguage and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: Updates about the "Contribute" menu; details on some of the newest language editions of Wikipedia; details on new languages supported by the MediaWiki interface; updates on the Community-defined lists feature; and more.
The latestChart Project newsletter is available. It includes updates on the progress towards bringing better visibility into global charts usage and support for categorizing pages in the Data namespace on Commons.
I wanted to give you this in addition to the Adminship Anniversary message above that I gave because you are one of my favourite admins! Thank you so so much for all of your support and care and always helping me out when I have requested assistance. You are amazing!DaniloDaysOfOurLives (talk)02:37, 11 February 2025 (UTC)
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
Communities using growth tools can now showcase one event on theSpecial:Homepage for newcomers. This feature will help newcomers to be informed about editing activities they can participate in. Administrators can create a new event to showcase atSpecial:CommunityConfiguration. To learn more about this feature, please readthe Diff post, have a lookat the documentation, or contactthe Growth team.
Updates for editors
Highlighted talk pages improvements
Starting next week, talk pages at these wikis – Spanish Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia – will geta new design. This change was extensively tested as a Beta feature and is the last step oftalk pages improvements.[20]
You can now navigate to view a redirect page directly from its action pages, such as the history page. Previously, you were forced to first go to the redirect target. This change should help editors who work with redirects a lot. Thanks to user stjn for this improvement.[21]
When a Cite reference is reused many times, wikis currently show either numbers like "1.23" or localized alphabetic markers like "a b c" in the reference list. Previously, if there were so many reuses that the alphabetic markers were all used,an error message was displayed. As part of the work tomodernize Cite customization, these errors will no longer be shown and instead the backlinks will fall back to showing numeric markers like "1.23" once the alphabetic markers are all used.
The log entries for each change to an editor's user-groups are now clearer by specifying exactly what has changed, instead of the plain before and after listings. Translators canhelp to update the localized versions. Thanks to user Msz2001 for these improvements.
A new filter has been added to theSpecial:Nuke tool, which allows administrators to mass delete pages, to enable users to filter for pages in a range of page sizes (in bytes). This allows, for example, deleting pages only of a certain size or below.[22]
Non-administrators can now check which pages are able to be deleted using theSpecial:Nuke tool. Thanks to user MolecularPilot for this and the previous improvements.[23]
View all 25 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed in the configuration for the AV1 video file format, which enables these files to play again.[24]
Updates for technical contributors
Parsoid Read Views is going to be rolling out to most Wiktionaries over the next few weeks, following the successful transition of Wikivoyage to Parsoid Read Views last year. For more information, see theParsoid/Parser Unification project page.[25][26]
Developers of tools that run on-wiki should note thatmw.Uri is deprecated. Tools requiringmw.Uri must explicitly declaremediawiki.Uri as a ResourceLoader dependency, and should migrate to the browser nativeURL API soon.[27]
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Administrators can now customize how theBabel feature creates categories usingSpecial:CommunityConfiguration/Babel. They can rename language categories, choose whether they should be auto-created, and adjust other settings.[28]
Thewikimedia.org portal has been updated – and is receiving some ongoing improvements – to modernize and improve the accessibility of our portal pages. It now has better support for mobile layouts, updated wording and links, and better language support. Additionally, all of the Wikimedia project portals, such aswikibooks.org, now support dark mode when a reader is using that system setting.[29][30][31]
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that prevented clicking on search results in the web-interface for some Firefox for Android phone configurations.[33]
Meetings and events
The next Language Community Meeting is happening soon, February 28th at14:00 UTC. This week's meeting will cover: highlights and technical updates on keyboard and tools for the Sámi languages, Translatewiki.net contributions from the Bahasa Lampung community in Indonesia, and technical Q&A. If you'd like to join, simplysign up on the wiki page.
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, the Visual Editor's "Insert link" feature did not always suggest existing pages properly when an editor started typing, which has now beenfixed.
Edit patrollers now have a new feature available that can highlight potentially problematic new pages. When a page is created with the same title as a page which was previously deleted, a tag ('Recreated') will now be added, which users can filter for inSpecial:RecentChanges andSpecial:NewPages.[4]
Wikimedia wikis allowWebAuthn-based second factor checks (such as hardware tokens) during login, but the feature isfragile and has very few users. The MediaWiki Platform team is temporarily disabling adding new WebAuthn keys, to avoid interfering with the rollout ofSUL3 (single user login version 3). Existing keys are unaffected.[6]
