Arequest for comment is open to discuss whether admins should be advised to warn users rather than issue no-warning blocks to those who have posted promotional content outside of article space.
Technical news
The Nuke feature also nowprovides links to the userpage of the user whose pages were deleted, and to the pages which were not selected for deletion, after page deletions are queued. This enables easier follow-up admin-actions.
Thanks for uploadingFile:JacksonvilleBusinessJournal.jpg. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under aclaim of non-free use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (seeour policy for non-free media).
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 Single User Login system is being updated over the next few months. This is the system which allows users to fill out the login form on one Wikimedia site and get logged in on all others at the same time. It needs to be updated because of the ways that browsers are increasingly restricting cross-domain cookies. To accommodate these restrictions, login and account creation pages will move to a central domain, but it will still appear to the user as if they are on the originating wiki. The updated code will be enabled this week for users on test wikis. This change is planned to roll out to all users during February and March. Seethe SUL3 project page for more details and a timeline.
Updates for editors
On wikis withPageAssessments installed, you can nowfilter search results to pages in a given WikiProject by using theinproject: keyword. (These wikis: Arabic Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage, French Wikipedia, Hungarian Wikipedia, Nepali Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia)[1]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia inTigre (w:tig:)[2]
View all 35 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, there was a bug with updating a user's edit-count after making a rollback edit, which is now fixed.[3]
Updates for technical contributors
Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. Starting the week of January 13, we will begin reroutingsome page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newer MediaWiki REST API endpoints for all wiki projects. This change was previously available on testwiki and should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints may raise issues directly to theMediaWiki Interfaces Team in Phabricator if they arise.
Toolforge tool maintainers can now share their feedback on Toolforge UI, an initiative to provide a web platform that allows creating and managing Toolforge tools through a graphic interface, in addition to existing command-line workflows. This project aims to streamline active maintainers’ tasks, as well as make registration and deployment processes more accessible for new tool creators. The initiative is still at a very early stage, and the Cloud Services team is in the process of collecting feedback from the Toolforge community to help shape the solution to their needs.Read more and share your thoughts about Toolforge UI.
For tool and library developers who use the OAuth system: The identity endpoint used forOAuth 1 andOAuth 2 returned a JSON object with an integer in itssub field, which was incorrect (the field must always be a string). This has been fixed; the fix will be deployed to Wikimedia wikis on the week of January 13.[4]
Many wikis currently useCite CSS to render custom footnote markers in Parsoid output. Starting January 20 these rules will be disabled, but the developers ask you tonot clean up yourMediaWiki:Common.css until February 20 to avoid issues during the migration. Your wikis might experience some small changes to footnote markers in Visual Editor and when using experimental Parsoid read mode, but if there are changes these are expected to bring the rendering in line with the legacy parser output.[5]
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.[6]
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.[7]
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.[8]
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.[9]
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.[10]
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.[11]
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.[12]
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.[13]
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.[14] You can now also insert<code> tags using a new toolbar button.[15] 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.[16]
Administrators can nownuke pages created by a user or IP address from the last 90 days, up from the initial 30 days.T380846
A 'Recreated' tag will now be added to pages that were created with the same title as a page which was previously deleted and it can be used as a filter inSpecial:RecentChanges andSpecial:NewPages.T56145
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.[19]
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.[21]
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.[22]
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.[23]
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.[24]
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.
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.[25]
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.[26]
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.[27]
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.[28]
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.[29]
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.[30][31]
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.[32]
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.[33]
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.[34][35][36]
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.[38]
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.
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
All logged-in editors using the mobile view can now edit a full page. The "Edit full page" link is accessible from the "More" menu in the toolbar. This was previously only available to editors using theAdvanced mobile contributions setting.[39]
Interface administrators can now help to remove the deprecated Cite CSS code matching "mw-ref" from their localMediaWiki:Common.css. The list of wikis in need of cleanup, and the code to remove,can be found with this global search and inthis example, and you can learn more about how to help on theCSS migration project page. The Cite footnote markers ("[1]") are now rendered byParsoid, and the deprecated CSS is no longer needed. The CSS for backlinks ("mw:referencedBy") should remain in place for now. This cleanup is expected to cause no visible changes for readers. Please help to remove this code before March 20, after which the development team will do it for you.
When editors embed a file (e.g.[[File:MediaWiki.png]]) on a page that is protected with cascading protection, the software will no longer restrict edits to the file description page, only to new file uploads.[40] In contrast, transcluding a file description page (e.g.{{:File:MediaWiki.png}}) will now restrict edits to the page.[41]
When editors revert a file to an earlier version it will now require the same permissions as ordinarily uploading a new version of the file. The software now checks for 'reupload' or 'reupload-own' rights,[42] and respects cascading protection.[43]
When administrators are listing pages for deletion with the Nuke tool, they can now also list associated talk pages and redirects for deletion, alongside pages created by the target, rather than needing to manually delete these pages afterwards.[44]
Thepreviously noted update to Single User Login, which will accommodate browser restrictions on cross-domain cookies by moving login and account creation to a central domain, will now roll out to all users during March and April. The team plans to enable it for all new account creation onGroup0 wikis this week. Seethe SUL3 project page for more details and an updated timeline.
Since last week there has been a bug that shows some interface icons as black squares until the page has fully loaded. It will be fixed this week.[45]
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed with loading images in very old versions of the Firefox browser on mobile.[47]
Arequest for comment is open to discuss whether AI-generated images (meaning those wholly created by generative AI, not human-created images modified with AI tools) should be banned from use in articles.
A new filter has been added to theSpecial:Nuke tool, which allows administrators 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.T378488
Non-administrators can now check which pages are able to be deleted using theSpecial:Nuke tool.T376378
This year, the Growth team is exploring ways to help more new account holders start editing—and do so constructively, meaning their edits are not reverted. Our latest experiments include:
Gradual rollout of "Add a Link" at English Wikipedia – We are gradually introducing the "Add a Link" structured task to newcomers at English Wikipedia (T386029). This serves as a natural A/B test to measure its impact on activation, retention, and revert rates (T382603). Previous experiments on pilot wikis showed that "Add a Link" increases newcomer participation, particularly by helping them make constructive (non-reverted) edits.
Testing in-article suggestions for first-time editors – Many new account holders want to contribute but don’t know where to start. To help, we’re piloting a feature that surfaces structured task suggestions directly in an article’s read view for brand-new editors (T385343). These suggestions will appear for logged-in users with no edits, providing a clear, simple way to begin contributing that is surfaced while they read.
Newcomers often struggle to find their place in Wikipedia’s collaborative environment. While experienced editors easily discover events like edit-a-thons and writing campaigns, newcomers often miss out.
To bridge this gap, we launched theCommunity Updates module for the Newcomer Homepage. This module is disabled by default, allowing Community Admins to decide how (or if) to use it.
If your community hosts events, consider setting up a Community Update to engage and welcome newcomers!Learn more on Diff. To configure, visit Special:CommunityConfiguration.
Community Configuration is now available across all wikis, including non-Wikipedia projects (T383910). Community Configuration allows admins to customize various features like Growth features and Automoderator for their communities, and more recently the Babel extension now allows admins to modify configuration:
Babel customization – Admins can now configure Babel settings (T374348), including category naming, automatic category creation, and more. See an example onWikimedia Commons.
Mentors play a key role in guiding new editors. If you’re interested in mentoring, or turning mentorship on at your wiki, check out theMentorship FAQ
Starting February 17, 100% of new accounts at English Wikipedia will be assigned a mentor (T384505).
At Spanish Wikipedia, on 50% of newcomers get a mentor. Experienced contributors are encouraged tojoin mentorship so that Spanish Wikipedia can provide a mentor to all new users.
In the coming months, we will continue balancing maintenance work—such as deprecating EditGrowth Config (T367574) and migrating Statslib (T359352) — with user-facing improvements that support new editors and foster the next generation of contributors.
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 password managers at multiple wikis may notice changes in the future. The way that our wikis provide information to password managers about reusing passwords across domains has recently been updated, so some password managers might now offer you login credentials that you saved for a different Wikimedia site. Some password managers already did this, and are now doing it for more Wikimedia domains. This is part of theSUL3 project which aims to improve how our unified login works, and to keep it compatible with ongoing changes to the web-browsers we use.[48][49]
The Wikipedia Apps Team is inviting interested users to help improve Wikipedia’s offline and limited internet use. After discussions inAfrika Baraza and the lastESEAP call, key challenges like search, editing, and offline access are being explored, with upcoming focus groups to dive deeper into these topics. All languages are welcome, and interpretation will be available. Want to share your thoughts?Join the discussion or emailaramadan@wikimedia.org!
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 19. This is planned at14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
The latest quarterlyGrowth newsletter is available. It includes: the launch of the Community Updates module, the most recent changes in Community Configuration, and the upcoming test of in-article suggestions for first-time editors.
An old API that was previously used in the Android Wikipedia app is being removed at the end of March. There are no current software uses, but users of the app with a version that is older than 6 months by the time of removal (2025-03-31), will no longer have access to the Suggested Edits feature, until they update their app. You canread more details about this change.
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
Twice a year, around the equinoxes, the Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team performsa datacenter server switchover, redirecting all traffic from one primary server to its backup. This provides reliability in case of a crisis, as we can always fall back on the other datacenter.Thanks to the Listen to Wikipedia tool, you can hear the switchover take place: Before it begins, you'll hear the steady stream of edits; Then, as the system enters a brief read-only phase, the sound stops for a couple of minutes, before resuming after the switchover. You canread more about the background and details of this process on the Diff blog. If you want to keep an ear out for the next server switchover, listen to the wikis onMarch 19 at 14:00 UTC.
On Wikimedia Commons, anew system to select the appropriate file categories has been introduced: if a category has one or more subcategories, users will be able to click on an arrow that will open the subcategories directly within the form, and choose the correct one. The parent category name will always be shown on top, and it will always be possible to come back to it. This should decrease the amount of work for volunteers in fixing/creating new categories. The change is also available on mobile. These changes are part of planned improvements to the UploadWizard.
The Community Tech team is seeking wikis to join a pilot for theMultiblocks feature and a refreshed Special:Block page in late March. Multiblocks enables administrators to impose multiple different types of blocks on the same user at the same time. If you are an admin or steward and would like us to discuss joining the pilot with your community, please leave a message on theproject talk page.
Starting March 25, the Editing team will test a new feature for Edit Check at12 Wikipedias:Multi-Check. Half of the newcomers on these wikis will see allReference Checks during their edit session, while the other half will continue seeing only one. The goal of this test is to see if users are confused or discouraged when shown multiple Reference Checks (when relevant) within a single editing session. At these wikis, the tags used on edits that show References Check will be simplified, as multiple tags could be shown within a single edit. Changes to the tags are documentedon Phabricator.[50]
TheGlobal reminder bot, which is a service for notifying users that their temporary user-rights are about to expire, now supports using the localized name of the user-rights group in the message heading. Translators can see thelisting of existing translations and documentation to check if their language needs updating or creation.
TheGlobalPreferences gender setting, which is used for how the software should refer to you in interface messages, now works as expected by overriding the local defaults.[51]
View all 26 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, the Wikipedia App for Android had a bug fixed for when a user is browsing and searching in multiple languages.[52]
Updates for technical contributors
Later this week, the way that Codex styles are loaded will be changing. There is a small risk that this may result in unstyled interface message boxes on certain pages. User generated content (e.g. templates) is not impacted. Gadgets may be impacted. If you see any issuesplease report them. See the linked task for details, screenshots, and documentation on how to fix any affected gadgets.
Thanks for uploadingFile:Twins girl power.jpg. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under aclaim of non-free use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (seeour policy for non-free media).
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
TheCampaignEvents extension will be released to multiple wikis (seedeployment plan for details) in April 2025, and the team has begun the process of engaging communities on the identified wikis. The extension provides tools to organize, manage, and promote collaborative activities (like events, edit-a-thons, and WikiProjects) on the wikis. The extension has three tools:Event Registration,Collaboration List, andInvitation Lists. It is currently on 13 Wikipedias, including English Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia, as well as Wikidata. Questions or requests can be directed to theextension talk page or in Phabricator (with#campaigns-product-team tag).
Starting the week of March 31st, wikis will be able to set which user groups can view private registrants inEvent Registration, as part of theCampaignEvents extension. By default, event organizers and the local wiki admins will be able to see private registrants. This is a change from the current behavior, in which only event organizers can see private registrants. Wikis can change the default setup byrequesting a configuration change in Phabricator (and adding the#campaigns-product-team tag). Participants of past events can cancel their registration at any time.
Administrators at wikis that have a customizedMediaWiki:Sidebar should check that it contains an entry for the Special pages listing. If it does not, they should add it using* specialpages-url|specialpages. Wikis with a default sidebar will see the link moved from the page toolbox into the sidebar menu in April.[53]
The Minerva skin (mobile web) combines both Notice and Alert notifications within the bell icon (). There was a long-standing bug where an indication for new notifications was only shown if you had unseen Alerts. This bug is now fixed. In the future, Minerva users will notice a counter atop the bell icon when you have 1 or more unseen Notices and/or Alerts.[54]
VisualEditor has introduced anew client-side hook for developers to use when integrating with the VisualEditor target lifecycle. This hook should replace the existing lifecycle-related hooks, and be more consistent between different platforms. In addition, the new hook will apply to uses of VisualEditor outside of just full article editing, allowing gadgets to interact with the editor in DiscussionTools as well. The Editing Team intends to deprecate and eventually remove the old lifecycle hooks, so any use cases that this new hook does not cover would be of interest to them and can beshared in the task.
Developers who use themw.Api JavaScript library, can now identify the tool using it with theuserAgent parameter:var api = new mw.Api( { userAgent: 'GadgetNameHere/1.0.1' } );. If you maintain a gadget or user script, please set a user agent, because it helps with library and server maintenance and with differentiating between legitimate and illegitimate traffic.[55][56]
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
The Editing team is working on a newEdit check:Peacock check. This check's goal is to identify non-neutral terms while a user is editing a wikipage, so that they can be informed that their edit should perhaps be changed before they publish it. This project is at the early stages, and the team is looking for communities' input:in this Phabricator task, they are gathering on-wiki policies, templates used to tag non-neutral articles, and the terms (jargon and keywords) used in edit summaries for the languages they are currently researching. You can participate by editing the table on Phabricator, commenting on the task, or directly messagingTrizek (WMF).
Single User Login has now been updated on all wikis to move login and account creation to a central domain. This makes user login compatible with browser restrictions on cross-domain cookies, which have prevented users of some browsers from staying logged in.
Starting on March 31st, the MediaWiki Interfaces team will begin a limited release of generated OpenAPI specs and a SwaggerUI-based sandbox experience forMediaWiki REST APIs. They invite developers from a limited group of non-English Wikipedia communities (Arabic, German, French, Hebrew, Interlingua, Dutch, Chinese) to review the documentation and experiment with the sandbox in their preferred language. In addition to these specific Wikipedia projects, the sandbox and OpenAPI spec will be available on theon the test wiki REST Sandbox special page for developers with English as their preferred language. During the preview period, the MediaWiki Interfaces Team also invites developers toshare feedback about your experience. The preview will last for approximately 2 weeks, after which the sandbox and OpenAPI specs will be made available across all wiki projects.
Sometimes a small,one line code change can have great significance: in this case, it means that for the first time in years we're able to run all of the stack servingmaps.wikimedia.org - a host dedicated to serving our wikis and their multi-lingual maps needs - from a single core datacenter, something we test every time we perform adatacenter switchover. This is important because it means that in case one of our datacenters is affected by a catastrophe, we'll still be able to serve the site. This change is the result ofextensive work by two developers on porting the last component of the maps stack over tokubernetes, where we can allocate resources more efficiently than before, thus we're able to withstand more traffic in a single datacenter. This work involved a lot of complicated steps because this software, and the software libraries it uses, required many long overdue upgrades. This type of work makes the Wikimedia infrastructure more sustainable.
Meetings and events
MediaWiki Users and Developers Workshop Spring 2025 is happening in Sandusky, USA, and online, from 14–16 May 2025. The workshop will feature discussions around the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies in different industries and will inspire and onboard new users. Registration and presentation signup is now available at the workshop's website.
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
The Design System Team is preparing to release the next major version of Codex (v2.0.0) on April 29. Editors and developers who use CSS from Codex should see the2.0 overview documentation, which includes guidance related to a few of the breaking changes such asfont-size,line-height, andsize-icon.
The results of theDeveloper Satisfaction Survey (2025) are now available. Thank you to all participants. These results help the Foundation decide what to work on next and to review what they recently worked on.
The2025 Wikimedia Hackathon will take place in Istanbul, Turkey, between 2–4 May. Registration for attending the in-person event will close on 13 April. Before registering, please note the potential need for avisa ore-visa to enter the country.
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
Later this week, the default thumbnail size will be increased from 220px to 250px. This changes how pages are shown in all wikis and has been requested by some communities for many years, but wasn't previously possible due to technical limitations.[58]
File thumbnails are now stored in discrete sizes. If a page specifies a thumbnail size that's not among the standard sizes (20, 40, 60, 120, 250, 330, 500, 960), then MediaWiki will pick the closest larger thumbnail size but will tell the browser to downscale it to the requested size. In these cases, nothing will change visually but users might load slightly larger images. If it doesn't matter which thumbnail size is used in a page, please pick one of the standard sizes to avoid the extra in-browser down-scaling step.[59][60]
Updates for editors
The Wikimedia Foundation are working on a system calledEdge Uniques which will enableA/B testing, help protect againstDistributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks), and make it easier to understand how many visitors the Wikimedia sites have. This is so that they can more efficiently build tools which help readers, and make it easier for readers to find what they are looking for.
To improve security for users, a small percentage of logins will now require that the account owner input a one-time passwordemailed to their account. It is recommended that youcheck that the email address on your account is set correctly, and that it has been confirmed, and that you have an email set for this purpose.[61]
"Are you interested in taking a short survey to improve tools used for reviewing or reverting edits on your Wiki?" This question will beasked at 7 wikis starting next week, on Recent Changes and Watchlist pages. TheModerator Tools team wants to know more about activities that involve looking at new edits made to your Wikimedia project, and determining whether they adhere to your project's policies.
The latest quarterlyTechnical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: an invitation for tool maintainers to attend the Toolforge UI Community Feedback Session on April 15th; recent community metrics; and recent technical blog posts.
Thanks for uploadingFile:Ho hoo tan.jpg. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under aclaim of non-free use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (seeour policy for non-free media).
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
Wikifunctions is now integrated withDagbani Wikipedia since April 15. It is the first project that will be able to callfunctions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in articles. A function is something that takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, such as adding up two numbers, converting miles into metres, calculating how much time has passed since an event, or declining a word into a case. Wikifunctions will allow users to do that through a simple call ofa stable and global function, rather than via a local template.[62]
A new type of lint error has been created:Empty headings (documentation). TheLinter extension's purpose is to identify wikitext patterns that must or can be fixed in pages and provide some guidance about what the problems are with those patterns and how to fix them.[63]
Following its publication on HuggingFace, the "Structured Contents" dataset, developed by Wikimedia Enterprise, isnow also available on Kaggle. This Beta initiative is focused on making Wikimedia data more machine-readable for high-volume reusers. They are releasing this beta version in a location that open dataset communities already use, in order to seek feedback, to help improve the product for a future wider release. You can read more about the overallStructured Contents project, and about thefirst release that's freely usable.
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings and events
The Editing and Machine Learning Teams invite interested volunteers to a video meeting to discussPeacock check, which is the latestEdit check that will detect "peacock" or "overly-promotional" or "non-neutral" language whilst an editor is typing. Editors who work with newcomers, or help to fix this kind of writing, or are interested in how we use artificial intelligence in our projects are encouraged to attend. Themeeting will be on April 28, 2025 at18:00–19:00 UTC and hosted on Zoom.
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
Event organizers who host collaborative activities onmultiple wikis, including Bengali, Japanese, and Korean Wikipedias, will have access to theCampaignEvents extension this week. Also, admins in the Wikipedia where the extension is enabled will automatically be granted the event organizer right soon. They won't have to manually grant themselves the right before they can manage events asrequested by a community.
The release of the next major version ofCodex, the design system for Wikimedia, is scheduled for 29 April 2025. Technical editors will have access to the release by the week of 5 May 2025. This update will include a number ofbreaking changes and minorvisual changes. Instructions on handling the breaking and visual changes are documented onthis page. Pre-release testing is reported inT386298, with post-release issues tracked inT392379 andT392390.
Users ofWiki Replicas will notice that the database views ofipblocks,ipblocks_ipindex, andipblocks_compat arenow deprecated. Users can query theblock andblock_target new views that mirror the new tables in the production database instead. The deprecated views will be removed entirely from Wiki Replicas in June, 2025.
The2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which brings the global technical community together to connect, brainstorm, and hack existing projects, will take place from May 2 to 4th, 2025, at Istanbul, Turkey.
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
Admins can now choose which namespaces are permitted forEvent Registration viaCommunity Configuration (documentation). The default setup is for event registration to be permitted in the Event namespace, but other namespaces (such as the project namespace or WikiProject namespace) can now be added. With this change, communities like WikiProjects can now more easily use Event Registration for their collaborative activities.
Editors can nowtransclude the Collaboration List on a wiki page (documentation). The Collaboration List is an automated list of events and WikiProjects on the wikis, accessed via Special:AllEvents (example). Now, the Collaboration List can be added to all sorts of wiki pages, such as: a wiki mainpage, a WikiProject page, an affiliate page, an event page, or even a user page.
Developers who use themoment library in gadgets and user scripts should revise their code to use alternatives like theIntl library or the newmediawiki.DateFormatter library. Themoment library has been deprecated and will begin to log messages in the developer console. You can see a global search for current uses, andask related questions in this Phabricator task.
Developers who maintain a tool that queries the Wikidata term store tables (wbt_*) need to update their code to connect to a separate database cluster. These tables are being split into a separate database cluster. Tools that query those tables via the wiki replicas must be adapted to connect to the new cluster instead.Documentation and related links are available.[64]
The latestChart Project newsletter is available. It includes updates on preparing to expand the deployment to additional wikis as soon as this week (starting May 6) and scaling up over the following weeks, plus exploring filtering and transforming source data.
An RfC was closed with consensus to allow editors to opt-out of seeing "sticky decorative elements". Such elements should now be wrapped in{{sticky decoration wrapper}}. Editors who wish to opt out can follow the instructions atWP:STICKYDECO.
An RfC has resulted ina broad prohibition on the use of AI-generated images in articles. A few common-sense exceptions are recognized.
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"Get shortened URL" link on the sidebar now includes aQR code. Wikimedia site users can now use it by scanning or downloading it to quickly share and access shared content from Wikimedia sites, conveniently.
Updates for editors
The Wikimedia Foundation is working on a system calledEdge Uniques, which will enableA/B testing, help protect againstdistributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks), and make it easier to understand how many visitors the Wikimedia sites have. This is to help more efficiently build tools which help readers, and make it easier for readers to find what they are looking for. Tech News haspreviously written about this. The deployment will be gradual. Some might see the Edge Uniques cookie the week of 19 May. You can discuss this on thetalk page.
Starting May 19, 2025, Event organisers in wikis with theCampaignEvents extension enabled can useEvent Registration in the project namespace (e.g., Wikipedia namespace, Wikidata namespace). With this change, communities don't need admins to use the feature. However, wikis that don't want this change can remove and add the permitted namespaces atSpecial:CommunityConfiguration/CampaignEvents.
The Wikipedia project now has a Wikipedia inNupe (w:nup:). This is a language primarily spoken in the North Central region of Nigeria. Speakers of this language are invited to contribute tonew Wikipedia.
Developers can now access pre-parsed Dutch Wikipedia, amongst others (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese) through theStructured Contents snapshots (beta). The content includes parsed Wikipedia abstracts, descriptions, main images, infoboxes, article sections, and references.
The/page/data-parsoid REST API endpoint is no longer in use and will be deprecated. It isscheduled to be turned off on June 7, 2025.
TheIPv6 support is a newly introduced Cloud virtual network that significantly boosts Wikimedia platforms' scalability, security, and readiness for the future. If you are a technical contributor eager to learn more, check outthis blog post for an in-depth look at the journey to IPv6.
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 Editing Team and the Machine Learning Team are working on a new check for newcomers:Peacock check. Using a prediction model, this check will encourage editors to improve the tone of their edits, using artificial intelligence. We invite volunteers to review the first version of the Peacock language model for the following languages: Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Japanese. Users from these wikis interested in reviewing this model areinvited to sign up at MediaWiki.org. The deadline to sign up is on May 23, which will be the start date of the test.
Updates for editors
From May 20, 2025,oversighters andcheckusers will need to have their accounts secured with two-factor authentication (2FA) to be able to use their advanced rights. All users who belong to these two groups and do not have 2FA enabled have been informed. In the future, this requirement may be extended to other users with advanced rights.Learn more.
Multiblocks will begin mass deployment by the end of the month: all non-Wikipedia projects plus Catalan Wikipedia will adopt Multiblocks in the week of May 26, while all other Wikipedias will adopt it in the week of June 2. Pleasecontact the team if you have concerns. Administrators can test the new user interface now on your own wiki by browsing toSpecial:Block?usecodex=1, and can test the full multiblocks functionalityon testwiki. Multiblocks is the feature that makes it possible for administrators to impose different types of blocks on the same user at the same time. See thehelp page for more information.[65]
Later this week, theSpecial:SpecialPages listing of almost all special pages will be updated with a new design. This page has beenredesigned to improve the user experience in a few ways, including: The ability to search for names and aliases of the special pages, sorting, more visible marking of restricted special pages, and a more mobile-friendly look. The new version can bepreviewed at Beta Cluster now, and feedback shared in the task.[66]
TheChart extension is being enabled on more wikis. For a detailed list of when the extension will be enabled on your wiki, please read thedeployment timeline.
Wikifunctions will be deployed on May 27 on five Wiktionaries:Hausa,Igbo,Bengali,Malayalam, andDhivehi/Maldivian. This is the second batch of deployment planned for the project. After deployment, the projects will be able to callfunctions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in their pages. A function is something that takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, such as adding up two numbers, converting miles into metres, calculating how much time has passed since an event, or declining a word into a case. Wikifunctions will allow users to do that through a simple call ofa stable and global function, rather than via a local template.
Later this week, the Wikimedia Foundation will publish a hub forexperiments. This is to showcase and get user feedback on product experiments. The experiments help the Wikimedia movementunderstand new users, how they interact with the internet and how it could affect the Wikimedia movement. Some examples aregenerated video, theWikipedia Roblox speedrun game andthe Discord bot.
View all 29 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, there was a bug with creating an account using the API, which has now been fixed.[67]
Updates for technical contributors
Gadgets and user scripts that interact withSpecial:Block may need to be updated to work with the newmanage blocks interface. Please review thedeveloper guide for more information. If you need help or are unable to adapt your script to the new interface, please let the team know on thetalk page.[68]
Themw.title object allows you to get information about a specific wiki page in theLua programming language. Starting this week, a new property will be added to the object, namedisDisambiguationPage. This property allows you to check if a page is a disambiguation page, without the need to write a custom function.[69]
User script developers can use anew reverse proxy tool to load javascript and css fromgitlab.wikimedia.org withmw.loader.load. The tool's author hopes this will enable collaborative development workflows for user scripts including linting, unit tests, code generation, and code review ongitlab.wikimedia.org without a separate copy-and-paste step to publish scripts to a Wikimedia wiki for integration and acceptance testing. SeeTool:Gitlab-content on Wikitech for more information.
The 12th edition ofWiki Workshop 2025, a forum that brings together researchers that explore all aspects of Wikimedia projects, will be held virtually on 21-22 May. Researchers canregister now.
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
A community-wide discussion about a very delicate issue for the development ofAbstract Wikipedia is now open on Meta: where to store the abstract content that will be developed through functions from Wikifunctions and data from Wikidata. The discussion is open until June 12 atAbstract Wikipedia/Location of Abstract Content, and every opinion is welcomed. The decision will be made and communicated after the consultation period by the Foundation.
Updates for editors
Since last week, on all wikis exceptthe largest 20, people using the mobile visual editor will haveadditional tools in the menu bar, accessed using the new+ toolbar button. To start, the new menu will include options to add: citations, hieroglyphs, and code blocks. Deployment to the remaining wikis isscheduled to happen in June.
The#ifexist parser function will no longer register a link to its target page. This will improve the usefulness ofSpecial:WantedPages, which will eventually only list pages that are the target of an actual red link. This change will happen gradually as the source pages are updated.[70]
This week, the Moderator Tools team will launcha new filter to Recent Changes, starting at Indonesian Wikipedia. This new filter highlights edits that are likely to be reverted. The goal is to help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic edits. Other wikis will benefit from this filter in the future.
Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users will see suggestions of articles for further reading. The feature will be available on both desktop and mobile. Readers of Catalan, Hebrew, and Italian Wikipedias and some sister projects will receive the change between May 21 and mid-June. Readers of other wikis will receive the change later. The goal is to encourage users to read the wikis more.Learn more.
Some users of the Wikipedia Android app can use a new feature for readers,WikiGames, a daily trivia game based on real historical events. The release has started as an A/B test, available to 50% of users in the following languages: English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Turkish.
TheNewsletter extension that is available on MediaWiki.org allows the creation ofvarious newsletters for global users. The extension can now publish new issues as section links on an existing page, instead of requiring a new page for each issue.[71]
The previously deprecatedipblocks views inWiki Replicas will be removed in the beginning of June. Users are encouraged to query the newblock andblock_target views instead.
You are invited to participate in The World Destubathon. It's currently planned for June 16-July 13, partly due to me having hayfever during that period and not wanting to run it throughout July or August in the hotter summer and will be run then unless multiple editors object. There is currently $3338 going into it, with $500 the top prize. As 250 countries and entities is too much to patrol, entries will be by user, but there is $500 going into prizes for editors covering the most countries. Sign up if interested! ♦Dr. Blofeld13:26, 28 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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
TheChart extension is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. Editors can use this new extension to create interactive data visualizations like bar, line, area, and pie charts. Charts are designed to replace many of the uses of the legacyGraph extension.
Updates for editors
It is now easier to configure automatic citations for your wiki within the visual editor'scitation generator. Administrators can now set a default template by using the_default key in the localMediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json page (example diff). Setting this default will also help to future-proof your existing configurations whennew item types are added in the future. You can still set templates for individual item types as they will be preferred to the default template.[72]
Starting the week of June 2, bots logging in usingaction=login oraction=clientlogin will fail more often. This is because of stronger protections against suspicious logins. Bots usingbot passwords or using a loginless authentication method such asOAuth are not affected. If your bot is not using one of those, you should update it; usingaction=login without a bot password was deprecatedin 2016. For most bots, this only requires changing what password the bot uses.[73]
From this week, Wikimedia wikis will allow ES2017 features in JavaScript code for official code, gadgets, and user scripts. The most visible feature of ES2017 isasync/await syntax, allowing for easier-to-read code. Until this week, the platform only allowed up to ES2016, and a few months before that, up to ES2015.[74]
Scholarship applications to participate in theGLAM Wiki Conference 2025 are now open. The conference will take place from 30 October to 1 November, in Lisbon, Portugal. GLAM contributors who lack the means to support their participation canapply here. Scholarship applications close on June 7th.
AnArticles for Creation backlog drive is happening in June 2025, with over 1,600 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 theGadgets settings.Sign up here to participate!
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
TheTrust and Safety Product team is finalizing work needed to roll outtemporary accounts on large Wikipedias later this month. The team has worked with stewards and other users with extended rights to predict and address many use cases that may arise on larger wikis, so that community members can continue to effectively moderate and patrol temporary accounts. This will be the second of three phases of deployment – the last one will take place in September at the earliest. For more information about the recent developments on the project,see this update. If you have any comments or questions, write on thetalk page, andjoin a CEE Catch Up this Tuesday.
Updates for editors
Thewatchlist expiry feature allows editors to watch pages for a limited period of time. After that period, the page is automatically removed from your watchlist. Starting this week, you can set a preference for the default period of time to watch pages. Thepreferences also allow you to set different default watch periods for editing existing pages, pages you create, and when using rollback.[75]
Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.
The appearance of talk pages will change at almost all Wikipedias (some have already received this design change,a few will get these changes later). You can read details about the changesonDiff. It is possible to opt out of these changesin user preferences ("Show discussion activity").[76][77]
Users with specific extended rights (including administrators, bureaucrats, checkusers, oversighters, and stewards) can now have IP addresses of all temporary accountsrevealed automatically during time-limited periods where they need to combat high-speed account-hopping vandalism. This feature was requested by stewards.[78]
This week, the Moderator Tools and Machine Learning teams will continue the rollout ofa new filter to Recent Changes, releasing it to several more Wikipedias. This filter utilizes the Revert Risk model, which was created by the Research team, to highlight edits that are likely to be reverted and help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic contributions. The feature will be rolled out to the following Wikipedias: Afrikaans Wikipedia, Belarusian Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Welsh Wikipedia, Hawaiian Wikipedia, Icelandic Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia. The rollout will continue in the coming weeks to includethe rest of the Wikipedias in this project.[79]
AbuseFilter editors active on Meta-Wiki and large Wikipedias are kindly asked to update AbuseFilter to make it compatible with temporary accounts. A link to the instructions and the private lists of filters needing verification areavailable on Phabricator.
Lua modules now have access to the name of a page's associated thumbnail image, and onsome wikis to the WikiProject assessment information. This is possible using two new properties onmw.title objects, namedpageImage andpageAssessments.[80][81]
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
You cannominate your favorite tools for the sixth edition of theCoolest Tool Award. Nominations are anonymous and will be open until June 25. You can re-use the survey to nominate multiple tools.
Foundation staff and technical volunteers use Wikimedia APIs to build the tools, applications, features, and integrations that enhance user experiences. Over the coming years, the MediaWiki Interfaces team will be investing in Wikimedia web (HTTP) APIs to better serve technical volunteer needs and protect Wikimedia infrastructure from potential abuse. You canread more about their plans to evolve the APIs in this Techblog post.
In February,Mentorship was successfully rolled out to 100% of newcomers on English Wikipedia. Following this milestone, we collaborated with Spanish Wikipedia to expand Mentorship coverage to 70% of new accounts, with plans to reach 85% soon unless concerns are raised by mentors. (T394867)
Some links types were removed to align with recommendations written in the English Wikipedia Manual of Style (T390683)
Allowing communities to limit “Add a Link” to newcomers (T393771)
The model used to suggest the links was improved to ease its training (T388258)
English Wikipedia rollout and A/B test: We increased the rollout to 20% of newcomers, with analysis underway. Preliminary data suggests this feature makes new account holders more likely to complete an unreverted edit. (T386029,T382603)
Surfacing Structured Tasks: An experiment where we show “add a link” suggestions to newly registered users while they are reading an article is running on pilot wikis (French, Persian, Indonesian, Portuguese, Egyptian Arabic). Initial results are under analysis. (T386029)
“Get Started” notification: Engineering is in progress for a new notification (Echo/email) to encourage editing among newcomers with zero edits. Early research shows this type of nudge is effective. (T392256)
Confirmation email: We are exploring ways to simplify and improve the initial account confirmation email newly registered users receive. (T215665)
The Wikimedia Foundation’s 2025–2026 Annual Plan is taking shape. The Growth and Editing teams will focus on theContributor Experiences (WE1) objective, with a focus on increasingconstructive edits by editors with fewer than 100 cumulative contributions.
We value your insights and ideas! If you would like to participate in a discussion, share feedback, or pilot new features, please reach out on the relevant Phabricator tasks orat our talk page, in any language.
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
This week, the Moderator Tools and Machine Learning teams will continue the rollout ofa new filter to Recent Changes, releasing it to the third and last batch of Wikipedias. This filter utilizes the Revert Risk model, which was created by the Research team, to highlight edits that are likely to be reverted and help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic contributions. The feature will be rolled out to the following Wikipedias: Azerbaijani Wikipedia, Latin Wikipedia, Macedonian Wikipedia, Malayalam Wikipedia, Marathi Wikipedia, Norwegian Nynorsk Wikipedia, Punjabi Wikipedia, Swahili Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Tagalog Wikipedia. The rollout will continue in the coming weeks to includethe rest of the Wikipedias in this project.[82]
Updates for editors
Last week,temporary accounts were rolled out on Czech, Korean, and Turkish Wikipedias. This and next week, deployments on larger Wikipedias will follow.Share your thoughts about the project.[83]
Later this week, the Editing team will releaseMulti Check to all Wikipedias (except English Wikipedia). This feature shows multipleReference checks within the editing experience. This encourages users to add citations when they add multiple new paragraphs to a Wikipedia article. This feature was previously available as an A/B test.The test shows that users who are shown multiple checks are 1.3 times more likely to add a reference to their edit, and their edit is less likely to be reverted (-34.7%).[84]
A few pages need to be renamed due to software updates and to match more recent Unicode standards. All of these changes are related to title-casing changes. Approximately 71 pages and 3 files will be renamed, across 15 wikis; the complete list is inthe task. The developers will rename these pages next week, and they will fix redirects and embedded file links a few minutes later via a system settings update.
View all 24 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that had caused pages to scroll upwards when text near the top was selected.[85]
Updates for technical contributors
Editors can now use Lua modules to filter and transform tabular data for use withExtension:Chart. This can be used for things like selecting a subset of rows or columns from the source data, converting between units, statistical processing, and many other useful transformations.Information on how to use transforms is available.[86]
Theall_links variable inAbuseFilter is now renamed tonew_links for consistency with other variables. Old usages will still continue to work.[87]
The latest quarterlyGrowth newsletter is available. It includes: the recent updates for the "Add a Link" Task, two new Newcomer Engagement Features, and updates to Community Configuration.
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
AbuseFilter maintainers can nowmatch against IP reputation data inAbuseFilters. IP reputation data is information about the proxies and VPNs associated with the user's IP address. This data is not shown publicly and is not generated for actions performed by registered accounts.[88]
Hidden content that is withincollapsible parts of wikipages will now be revealed when someone searches the page using the web browser's "Find in page" function (Ctrl+F or ⌘F) in supporting browsers.[89][90]
A new feature, calledFavourite Templates, will be deployed later this week on all projects (except English Wikipedia, which will receive the feature next week), following a piloting phase on Polish and Arabic Wikipedia, and Italian and English Wikisource. The feature will provide a better way for new and experienced contributors to recall and discover templates via the template dialog, by allowing users to put templates on a special "favourite list". The feature works with both the visual editor and the wikitext editor. The feature is acommunity wishlist focus area.
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that had caused some Notifications to be sent multiple times.[91]
Administrator elections will take place this month. Administrator elections are an alternative toRFA that is a gentler process for candidates due to secret voting and multiple people running together. The call for candidates is July 9–15, the discussion phase is July 18–22, and the voting phase is July 23–29. Get ready to submit your candidacy, or (with their consent) to nominate a talented candidate!
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
Temporary accounts have been rolled out on 18 large and medium-sized Wikipedias, including German, Japanese, French, and Chinese. Now, about 1/3 of all logged-out activity across wikis is coming from temporary accounts. Users involved in patrolling may be interested in two new documentation pages:Access to IP, explaining everything related to access to temporary account IP addresses, andRepository with a list of new gadgets and user scripts.
Updates for editors
Anyone can play an experimental new game,WikiRun, that lets you race through Wikipedia by clicking from one article to another, aiming to reach a target page in as few steps and in as little time as possible. The project's goal is to explore new ways of engaging readers.Try playing the game and let the team know what you thinkon the talk page.
Users of the Wikipedia Android app in some languages can now play the newtrivia game.Which came first? is a simple history game where you guess which of two events happened earlier on today's date. It was previously available as an A/B test. It is now available to all users in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, and Chinese. The goal of the feature is to help engage with new generations of readers.[92]
Users of the iOS Wikipedia App in some languages may see a new tabbed browsing feature that enables you to open multiple tabs while reading. This feature makes it easier to explore related topics and switch between articles. The A/B test is currently running in Arabic, English, and Japanese in selected regions. More details are available on theTabbed Browsing project page.
A new feature related toTemplate Recall and Discovery will be deployed later this week to all Wikimedia projects: atemplate category browser will be introduced to assist users in finding templates to put in their “favourite” list. The browser will allow users to browse a list of templates which have been organised into a given category tree. The feature has been requested by the communitythrough the Community Wishlist.
It is now possible to access watchlist preferences from the watchlist page. Also the redundant button to edit the watchlist has been removed.[94]
As part ofMediaWiki 1.44 there is now a unified built-in Notifications system that makes it easier for developers to send, manage, and customize notifications. Check out the updated documentation atManual:Notifications, information about migration inT388663 and details on deprecated hooks inT389624.
WikidataCon 2025, the conference dedicated to Wikidata is now open forsession proposals and forregistration. This year's event will be held online from October 31 – November 02 and will explore on the theme of "Connecting People through Linked Open Data".
Hi, just a courtesy message to notify you in case you haven't seen theWikipedia:The World Destubathon contest update in the last few days that we've decided to run the full month until the 16th of July. For those who have been too busy to contribute, we would love some help in reaching 4000 articles by Wednesday night! At present we're about 480 articles short!♦Dr. Blofeld16:36, 13 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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
Featured templates, a new feature related toTemplate Recall and Discovery will be deployed this week to all Wikimedia projects: With this feature, editors will be able to quickly access a list of templates that are likely to be useful. These templates will be displayed in a list, under the "featured" tab of the template discovery interface. Administrators can define the list via the Community Configuration interface. The feature fulfills a request by the communitythrough the Community Wishlist.[95][96]
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, the request to add Malayalam fonts in theWikisource Book Export Tool was resolved and now, the rendering of Malayalam letters in exported Wikisource books are accurate.[97]
WikiIndaba 2025 scholarship application and program submission is open until 23:59 GMT on July 20. WikiIndaba is a regional conference for African Wikimedians both on the continent and in the diaspora to unite and grow together. Submityour scholarship application andprogram proposal now!
WikiCon Brasil 2025 will take place on July 19-20 in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. The Brazilian community members are encouraged to register and attend!
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
The Translation Suggestions feature in theContent Translation tool now has another level of article filters added to the "... More" category. Translators who use the Suggestions feature can now select and receive article suggestions that are customized to geographical locations of their interest using the new "Regions" filter.[98]
Administrators can now limit "Add a Link" to newcomers. The"Add a Link" Structured Taskhelps new account holders start editing, but some communities have requested the ability to restrict it to its intended audience: newcomers. Administrators can configure this setting within theCommunity Configuration feature.
For AbuseFilter editors onsome wikis, it is now possible to filter edits based on the RevertRisk score of the edit being attempted. It is only populated if the action being evaluated is an edit. For more information, please see theORES/AbuseFilter variables documentation.
TheBeta Cluster wikis havebeen moved frombeta.wmflabs.org tobeta.wmcloud.org. Users may need to update URLs in any tools, or in their password managers. Any related issues can bereported in the task.
WikiCite 2025 will take place from 29–31 August, both online and in-person in Bern, Switzerland. The event's goals are to reconnect communities, institutions, and individuals working with open citations, bibliographic data, and the Wikidata/Wikibase ecosystem. Registration is open and the call for proposals will be announced soon.[99]
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 Community Tech team will be focusing on wishes related to Watchlists and Recent Changes pages, over the next few months. They are looking for feedback. Pleaseread the latest update, and if you have ideas, pleasesubmit a wish on the topic.
Updates for editors
The Wikimedia Commons community has decided to blockcross-wiki uploads to Wikimedia Commons, for all users without autoconfirmed rights on that wiki, starting on August 16. This is because ofwidespread problems related to files that are uploaded by newcomers. Users who are affected by this will get an error message with a link to the less restrictive UploadWizard on Commons. Please help translating themessage or give feedback on the message text. Please also update your local help pages to explain this restriction.[100]
On wikis with temporary accounts enabled and Meta-Wiki, administrators may now set up a footer for the Special:Contributions pages of temporary accounts, similar to those which can be shown on IP and user-account pages. They may do it by creating the page namedMediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer-temp.[101]
Wikimania 2025 will run from August 6–9. Theprogram is available for you to plan which sessions you want to attend. Most sessions will be live-streamed, with exceptions for those that show the "no camera" icon. If you are joining online to watch live-streams and use the interactive features, pleaseregister for a free virtual ticket. For example, you may be interested in technical sessions such as:
TheMediaWiki Users and Developers Conference, Fall 2025 will be held 28–30 October 2025 in Hanover, Germany. This event is organized by and for the third-party MediaWiki community. You can propose sessions and register to attend.
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 can now enable theUser Info card. This feature adds an icon next to usernames on history pages and similar user-contribution log pages. When you tap or click on the icon, it displays data related to that user account such as the number of edits, reverted edits, blocks, and more. It's part of a broader project to make it easier for moderators to evaluate account trustworthiness. The feature can be enabled inyour global preferences, and later this week it will be available in local preferences.[102]
Everybody is invited to share comments onCollaborative Contributions, a project recently launched by theConnection team. The project aims to create a new way to display the impact of collaborative editing activities (such as edit-a-thons, backlog drives, and WikiProjects) on the wikis. Post your comments on theproject talk page.[103]
Administrators can now define the default block duration for temporary accounts. To do that, they need to create a page namedMediaWiki:Ipb-default-expiry-temporary-account and use a value defined inMediaWiki:Ipboptions. This allows administrators to easily block temporary accounts for 90 days, which is functionally equivalent to an indefinite block. The advantage of this solution is that it does not clutter Special:BlockList.More documentation is available.[104]
Gadgets can now include.vue files. This makes it easier to develop modern user interfaces usingVue.js, in particular usingCodex, the official design system of Wikimedia.Codex icons can be loaded through the gadget definition.The documentation has examples. For user scripts that use Vue.js, anAPI module now exists to load Codex icons.[105][106]
Module developers can now use aLua interface to simplify the preparation of Lua modules for translation on Meta-Wiki. This improvement makes it easier for translators to find and edit module strings without dealing with raw Lua code. It helps prevent mistakes that could break the module during translation. Module developers and translators are invited towatch the demo video, read more abouttranslatable modules to understand how it works, refer to Meta-Wiki'sModule:User Wikimedia project for example usage, andshare their feedback on how well it addresses the challenges in their workflow. The interface still has some performance issues, so it should not be used in widely used modules yet.[107]
Developers of external tools that connect to Wikimedia pages must set a user-agent that complies withthe user-agent policy. This policy will start to be more strongly enforced in August because of external crawlers that areoverusing Wikimedia's resources. Tools that are hosted on Wikimedia's Toolforge or Cloud VPS will not be affected by this for now, but should still set a user-agent.More technical details are available, and related questions are welcome in that task.
Parsoid Read Views is going to be rolling out to some smaller Wikipedias over the next few weeks, following the successful transition of Wikivoyages and Wiktionaries to Parsoid Read Views. For more information, see theParsoid/Parser Unification project page.[108]
Wikimania 2025 will run from August 6–9. Theprogram is available for you to plan which sessions you want to attend. Most sessions will be live-streamed, with exceptions for those that show the "no camera" icon. If you are joining online to watch live-streams and use the interactive features, pleaseregister for a free virtual ticket. For example, you may be interested in technical sessions such as:
Followinga request for comment, there isa new policy outlining the granting of permissions to view the IP addresses oftemporary accounts. Temporary account deployment on the English Wikipedia is currently scheduled for September 2025, and editors canrequest access to the permission ahead of time. Admins are encouraged to keep an eye on the request page; there will likely be a flood of editors requesting the permission when they realize they can no longer see IP addresses.
South Asia (WP:CT/SA) is designated acontentious topic. The topic area is specifically defined asAll pages related to the region ofSouth Asia (India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal), broadly construed, including but not limited to history, politics, ethnicity, and social groups.
Wikimania 2025 is happening inNairobi,Kenya, and online from August 6 to August 9. This year marks 20 years ofWikimania. Interested users can join the online event. Registration for the virtual event is free and will remain open throughout Wikimania. You canregister here now.
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
The WikiEditor toolbar now includesits keyboard shortcuts in the tooltips for its buttons. This will help to improve the discoverability of this feature.[109]
The search bar on the Minerva skin (mobile) has been updated to use the same type-ahead search component that is used on the Vector 2022 skin. There are no changes in search functionality but there are minor visual changes. Specifically, the close-search button has been changed from an "X" to a back arrow. This helps to distinguish it from the other "X" button that is used to clear any text.[110]
Editors on some wikis will see a new toggle for "Group results by page" on watchlist, related changes, and recent changes pages. This isan A/B experiment that is planned to start on August 11, and will run for 3–6 weeks on the Bengali, Chinese, Czech, French, Greek, Portuguese, and Urdu Wikipedias. The experiment will examine how making this feature more discoverable might affect editors' ability to find the edits they are looking for.[111]
The multiwiki datasets ofUnicode data have been moved toCategory:Unicode Module Datasets on Wikimedia Commons, to follow the idea of "One common data source, multiple local wikis". Most wikis have been updated to use the Commons version. You can ask questions atthe talkpage.[112]
Lua code can add warnings when something is wrong, by using themw.addWarning() function. It is now possible to add more than one warning, instead of new warnings replacing old ones. If you maintain a Lua module that used warnings, you should check it still works as expected.[113]
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
Later this week, people who are logged-in and have the "Discussion tools"Beta Feature enabled will gain the ability to "Thank" individual comments directly from talk pages, rather than needing to navigate to page history.Learn more about this feature.[114]
An A/B test comparing two versions of the desktop donate link launched on testwiki on 12 August and on English Wikipedia 14 August for 0.1% of logged out users on the desktop site. The experiment will run for three weeks, ending on 12 September.[115]
An A/A test to measure the baseline for reader retention was launched 12 August usingExperimentation Lab. This measures the percentage of users who revisit a wiki after their initial visit over a 14-day period. No visual changes are expected. The experiment will run through 31 August.[116]
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
On large wikis, the default time period to display edits from, within the Special:RecentChanges page, has been changed from 7 days to 1 day. This is part of a performance improvement project. This should have no user-facing impact due to the quantity of edits on these wikis.[132]
Wikimedia Commons videos were not shown in the Videos tab in Google Search. The problem was investigated and reported to Google who have now fixed the issue.[134][135]
Two fields of therecentchanges database table are being removed.rc_new andrc_type are being removed in favor ofrc_source. Queries to these older fields will start to fail starting this week and developers should userc_source instead. These older fields were deprecated over 10 years ago and should not be in use. This is part of work to improve the performance and stability of queries to the recentchanges table.[137]
The latest quarterlyLanguage and Internationalization Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: support for new languages in MediaWiki and translatewiki; the start of the Language Onboarding and Development project to help support the growth of new and small wikis; updates on research projects; and more.
Meetings and events
The nextLanguage Community Meeting is happening soon, August 29th at15:00 UTC. This week's meeting will cover: the Avro keyboard developers from Wikimedia Bangladesh, who were recently awarded a national award for their contributions to this keyboard; and other topics.
Hope all is well with you! Sorry you couldn't be on the Isle of Wight this week: we all had a splendid time. During the course of the evening we decided that the date for Brighton Meetup 6 would be 6th September, and given the relatively short notice I said to Harry I would create the page and do the publicity. I understand there are also some behind-the-scenes bits you need to do: is that OK with you, and could you let me know if there are any specific things I need to do other than creating a page on Meta and sending talk page messages to regular attendees? Hope to see you there as well, if you're able to make it, and sorry for the slightly short notice – this was the only September weekend when numbers were sufficient to make it viable. Cheers,Hassocks5489 (Floreat Hova!)10:37, 29 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Oh cool, glad it was a great time. And thanks for organising another meetup. Redrose has a helpful list of places to advertise them atm:User:Redrose64#New_meetups (there's a lot!) Let me know if you would like me to help with them once you've made the initial page, I'm quite practised at it by now. Can also do the watchlist geonotice for you.
Not sure if I can make it on the 6th myself, I get back from a week in Paris the night before so it will depend on how much energy I have remaining.the wub"?!"12:03, 29 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Excellent – many thanks. I've followed all the steps on Redrose's page and have created a Geonotice requesthere. Have a good trip to Paris, and if you can make I'll look forward to seeing you on 6th!Hassocks5489 (Floreat Hova!)13:29, 29 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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 Editing team wants to compile a list of templates, jargon terms, and policies used in edit summaries when a copyright violation is removed. This will help them identify the number of edits reverted due to copyright issues. We invite community members from the following Wikis to list these terms inT402601, or to share their list withTrizek_(WMF): Arabic Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, Persian Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Vietnamese Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia. This project is open until September 9th 2025.
Updates for editors
TheCampaignEvents extension has been enabled for all Wikisources. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. The extension has three features:Event Registration,Collaboration List, andInvitation List. To request the extension for your wiki, visit the Deployment information page.[138]
The lists in the footer of the editing interface, such as "Templates used on this page," will now be organized into columns when there is enough space. This enhancement minimizes scrolling when editing lengthy articles on Wikipedia.[139]
On September 3rd, 2025 we will increase the sampling percentages of ourgroup by toggle experiment of theSpecial:RecentChanges,Special:Watchlist, andSpecial:RelatedChanges pages on the Chinese, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias to 100 percent, allowing more editors to be part of this experiment. This adjustment is intended to ensure we have sufficient data to make informed decisions when evaluating the experiment results.[140][141]
Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users will see suggestions of articles for further reading on English Wikipedia beginning the week of September 22. The feature will be available on both desktop and mobile. All non-English wikis received this change in June and July. The goal is to make it easier for users to find articles.Learn more.
Wikifunctions now has a new capability called "lightweight enumeration types", an enumeration type is simply a fixed set of values that's in the type's definition. This capability makes it quick and easy to define such a type, and allows for the reuse of values that are already present in Wikidata. Here isa newsletter to learn more.
The latestReaders Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: the formation of two new teams — Reader Growth and Reader Experience; insights into declining pageviews and account creations; highlights from the Wikimania Nairobi panel on improving the reading experience; upcoming experiments to engage new and existing readers; and more.
An RfC is open on whether use ofemojis with no encyclopedic value in mainspace and draftspace (e.g., at the start of paragraphs or in place of bullet points) should be added as a criterion underG15.
An RfC is in progress to amend the structure, rules, and procedures of the Arbitration Committee election and resolve any issues not covered by existing rules.
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 Editing team is working on a new check:Paste check. This check informs newcomers who paste text into Wikipedia that the content might not be accepted. This check is an effort to increase the likelihood that the new content people are adding to Wikipedia is aligned with the Movement's commitment to offering information under a free content license. This check will soon be tested at a few wikis. If your community is interested in this test, pleasetell us in this task, orcontact the team.
When browsing a wiki (likeen.wikipedia.org), the software responds in one of two ways: a desktop page, or a redirect to a mobile version on an "m" domain (likeen.m.wikipedia.org). Over the next three weeks, MediaWiki will start displaying the mobile version to mobile devices directly on the standard domain, without this redirect. This change does not affect existing m-dot URLs, or the "Desktop view" opt-out.Learn more.[143]
When an edit changes the categories of a page, the changes to the category membership counts are now happening asynchronously. This improves the speed of saving edits, especially when moving many pages to or from the same category, and reduces the risk of site outages, but it means that the counts can show outdated information for a few minutes.[144]
Edits on Wikidata to qualifiers (properties and values) and references (properties and values) in a Wikidata item statement will now not add entries to the RecentChanges or Watchlist pages on all other Wikis. This is a temporary change to improve performance while other solutions are created. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged.Learn more.[145][146]
Japanese-language wikis have had a major upgrade to the way that search works. The new search should generally give more accurate and more relevant search results.[147]
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
References lists that are made using the<references/>tag will now automatically display with columns in Vector 2022 when readers are using its 'standard' settings for text-size and page-width.[148]
Starting in the week of October 6, onsmall wikis andmedium wikis that have theCampaignEvents extension enabled, all autoconfirmed users will be able to useEvent Registration as an organizer. No changes will be made forlarge wikis unless requested in Phabricator. This change is being made to make it easier for more people to use Event Registration, especially on wikis that are less likely to have policies related to the Event Organizer right.Learn more.
Users that search using regular expressions (regex) can now use additional features including:
for theintitle: keyword:metacharacters for start-of-line (^) and end-of-line ($) anchors[149]
for bothintitle: andinsource: keywords: shorthandcharacter classes for digits (\d), whitespace (\s), and word characters (\w); andescape codes for line feed (\r), newline (\n), tab (\t), and unicode (e.g.\uHHHH).[150]
When you search for text that looks like an IP, the system will now show search results. It used to take you to the contributions for that IP instead of showing search results.[151]
View all 24 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that affected users who used the page-tabs to switch from wikitext editing of a section into the visualeditor.[152]
Updates for technical contributors
The MediaWiki Interfaces team is redesigning the Wikimedia REST API Sandbox with Codex. If you have feedback on improvements for the API documentation or what makes developer experiences smooth (or frustrating), you’re invited tojoin an upcoming discovery interview, orleave feedback onwiki.Learn more.
Edits to Wikidata aliases (an alternative name for an item or a property) will now be shown in RecentChanges and Watchlist entries on other wikis less often, reducing unnecessary notifications. This will reduce the overall quantity of 'noisy' entries. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged.Learn more.[153]
The newUnicode 17.0 version has been released. Thedatasets on Commons for theModule:Unicode data have been updated. Wikipedias that do not use the Commons datasets should either update their own data or switch to the Commons datasets.
Users of theWikimedia Enterprise Structured Contents endpoints can now accessParsed Tables. The new Parsed Tables feature extracts and represents Wikipedia tables in structured JSON. This improves machine accessibility as part of theStructured Contents initiative. Structured Contents output is freely available through theOn-demand API, or through Wikimedia Cloud Services.
Adataset of English Wikipedia biographical information fromWikimedia Enterprise has been published on Kaggle, for evaluation and research. This provides structured data from more than 1.5 million biographies, including birth and death dates, education, affiliations, careers, awards, and more (from a June 2024 snapshot).
Hello @The wub! Letting you know that theBrixton meetup is back for the autumn at Brixton Library next Monday 29th September at 6pm-8pm. If you're nearby and free it would be lovely to see you there! and/or please spread the word if you can. Come along if you'd like to edit and chat with other Wikimedians, I am still on the hunt for a good topic! We'll meet the last Monday of every month but also have anedit-a-thon on in October too.Colette Lambeth (talk)18:06, 22 September 2025 (UTC)"[reply]
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
On September 24th at 15:00 UTC, all Wikimedia sites users will experience a brief read-only period due to a scheduleddatacenter server switchover. The Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team will redirect all traffic from one primary server to its backup. You can listen to the switchover using the"Listen to Wikipedia" tool, where you will hear edits stop for a few minutes during the read-only phase, then resume. This twice-yearly datacenter server switchover ensures reliability by testing the backup datacenter, so that our sites can stay online even if the primary datacenter fails. You canread more about the process on the Diff blog.
Updates for editors
Editors of60 more Wiktionaries will soon be able to callfunctions from Wikifunctions and integrate them into their pages. A function takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, like adding numbers, converting miles to meters, calculating elapsed time, or declining a word into a case. They will join the other65 Wiktionary language editions, which already have access to embedded Wikifunctions calls. Later this year, plans are in place to expand to more Wiktionaries and the Incubator.
A newparser function has been added:{{#contentmodel}}. Template editors and admins can use it to get the localized or canonical name of thecontent model of a specific page. The function makes it easier to create and edit system messages, such asMediaWiki:editinginterface, even when you switch types of pages, like wiki, JavaScript, CSS or JSON page.[154]
Adding or editing aDISPLAYTITLE for an article using VisualEditor will no longer be broken. Editors who use VisualEditor mode to modify the{{DISPLAYTITLE}} would no longer have the literal text "DISPLAYTITLE" or its localized variant added to their articles. A list of pages that may have been affected and might need cleanup is documented inthis ticket.
Beta users of the Wikipedia Android app can now try the redesignedActivity tab, which replaces the Edits tab. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging.
Wikifunctions users can now import many essential facts involvinggeo-coordinates,quantities andtime values from Wikidata. This is made possible by the creation of Wikifunctions types for these values, which makes them available for use by functions in Wikifunctions. Learn more about how this works inthis video and Wikifunctions'August 1 newsletter (for quantities) andAugust 22 newsletter (for geo-coordinates).
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
A major software upgrade has been made toPhabricator. The update introduces performance improvements, a refreshed search interface, enhancements to Maniphest task search, updates to user profile pages and project workboards, new Herald automation features, as well as general text input, mobile experience improvements and more.[155]
Updates for editors
The Community Tech team will release the new Community Wishlist extension on October 1, that will improve the way wishes will be submitted. The new extension will allow users to add tags to their wishes to better categorise them, and (in a future iteration) to filter them by status, tags and focus areas. It will also be possible to support individual wishes again, as requested by the community in many instances. The old system will be retired. There will be a brief period of downtime while the extension is deployed and wishes are migrated to the new system. You can read more about thisin the latest update or you can consult thecurrent documentation on MediaWiki.
As announcedon Diff blog, the production trial of thehCaptcha service for bot detection has begun. The trial is currently using hCaptcha to protect account creation on Chinese, Persian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, and Turkish Wikipedias, where it will replace our existingCAPTCHA (FancyCaptcha). The goal with the trial is to better block bots while also improving usability and accessibility for users who encounter CAPTCHA challenges.
TheCampaignEvents extension has beendeployed to Wikimedia Commons. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. On Commons, anyone who is a registered user can use it as an event participant. To use it as an organizer, someone needs to have theevent organizer right.
On wikis using theMentorship system, communities can now opt experienced editors out of Mentorship throughSpecial:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship. Within this setting, communities may define thresholds, based on edit count and account age, to decide when an editor is considered experienced enough to no longer receive Mentorship.[156]
The Editing Team and the Machine Learning Team are working on a new check for newcomers:Tone check. Using a prediction model, this check will encourage editors to improve the tone of their edits, using artificial intelligence. We invite volunteers to review the first version of the Tone language model for the following languages: Arabic, Czech, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Farsi, Italian, Norwegian, Romanian and Latvian. Users from these wikis interested in reviewing this model areinvited to sign up at MediaWiki.org. The deadline to sign up is on October 3, which will be the start date of the test.
The rollout ofmultiblocks had the side effect that non-active block logs may have been shown on Special:Contributions and on blocked users' user and user_talk pages. This issue will be fully resolved in a few days. As part of the fix,messages prefixed withsp-contributions-blocked-notice will be removed and replaced withthose prefixed withblocked-notice-logextract in a few weeks. Please help translate the new messages and update any local overrides if needed.
There was a bug with links added using visual editor if they included characters such as[ ] | after the fragment identifier (#). They were not encoded properly creating an incorrect link. This has been fixed.[157]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikiquote inMalay (q:ms:)[158]
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, theUser Info Card now displays currently active global lock/blocks.[159]
Updates for technical contributors
Later this week, editors using Lua modules will be able to use themw.title.newBatch function to look up the existence of up to 25 pages at once, in a way that only increases theexpensive function count once.
A newUnsupported Tools Working Group has been formed as part of ongoing efforts to collectively determine technical work priorities, similar to theProduct & Technology Advisory Council (PTAC). The working group will help prioritize and review requests for support of unmaintained extensions, gadgets, bots, and tools. For the first cycle, the group will be prioritizing an unsupported Wikimedia Commons tool.
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
Paste Check is a new Edit Check feature to help avoid and fight copyright violations. When editors paste text into an article, Paste Check prompts them to confirm the origin and licensing of the content. Starting Wednesday, 8 October,22 wikis will test Paste Check. Paste Check will help new volunteers understand and follow the policies and guidelines necessary to make constructive contributions to Wikipedia projects.
Updates for editors
Mobile devices will receive mobile articles directly on the standard domain (likeen.wikipedia.org), instead of via a redirect to an "m" domain (likeen.m.wikipedia.org). This change improves performance. This week it will be enabled on Wikipedias. The existing mobile URLs and the "Desktop view" opt-out remain available.Learn more.[160]
Newdate filters,creationdate: andlasteditdate:, are now available in the wiki search engine. This allows users to filter search results by a page's first or last revision date. The filters support comparison operators (e.g.>2024) and relative dates (e.g.today-1d), making it easier to find recently updated content or pages within specific age ranges.[161]
Wikifunctions now supports rich text in embedded calls across the 150 wikis where it's enabled. To showcase this, the team created aLatin declination table that Wiktionary editors can use to automatically generate noun forms, producing clear, formatted results — see anexample output. If you need any help or have any feedback, pleasecontact the Wikifunctions Team.[162]
An edit link will now appear inside the categories box on article pages for logged in users, which will directly launch the VisualEditor category dialog.[163]
View all 34 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, there was a problem downloading pdf files last week and that has been resolved.[164]
Updates for technical contributors
The fieldrev_sha1 in the revision database table is being removed in favor ofcontent_sha1 in the content database table. Seethe announcement for more information.
TheReader Experience team will roll outDark Mode user interface on all Wikimedia sites on October 29, 2025. All anonymous users of Wikimedia sites will have the option to activate a color scheme that features light-colored text on a dark background. This is designed to provide a more comfortable reading experience, especially in low-light situations. Template authors and technical contributors are encouraged tolearn how to make pages ready for Dark mode and address any compatibility issues found in templates in their wiki before the enablement. Please contact the Web team for questions or any support onthis talk page before the enablement.[165]
Starting on Monday, October 6, API endpoints under therest.php path will be rerouted through a new internal API Gateway. Individual wikis will be updated based on the standard release groups, with total traffic increased over time. This change is expected to be non-breaking and non-disruptive. If any issues are observed, please file a Phabricator ticket to theService Ops team board.[166]
Aftera motion, arbitration enforcement page protections no longer need to be logged in the AELOG. A bot now automatically posts protections atWP:AELOG/P. To facilitate this bot, protection summaries must include a link to the relevant CT page (e.g.[[WP:CT/BLP]]), and you will receive talk page reminders if you forget to specify the contentious topic but otherwise indicate it is an AE action.
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
Last week, improvements to account security and two-factor authentication (2FA) features were enabled across all wikis. These changes include user interface improvements forSpecial:AccountSecurity, the support of multiple 2FA methods via authenticator apps and portable security keys (previously users could only enable one method), and a new Recovery Codes module which facilitates fewer account lockouts due to lost two-factor apps and devices. As part of theAccount Security project, work is continuing through the rest of 2025 on further user experience improvements, and support for passkeys as an alternate second factor.
Updates for editors
Another part of the Account security project is making 2FA generally available to all users. Along with editors with advanced privileges, such as administrators and bureaucrats, 40% of editors now have access to 2FA. You can check if you have access atSpecial:AccountSecurity. Instructions for activation are on the linked page. The plan is to continue increasing availability if it is determined that the user support capabilities are able to support global usage.[167]
This week, users at wikis where talk pageUsability Improvements are already available by default (everywhereexcept the 12 wikis listed inT379264) will gain the ability to Thank a comment directly from the talk page it appears on. Before this change, Thanking could only be done by visiting the revision history of the talk page. You canlearn more about this change.[168]
Users who have notverified their email address will soon be receiving monthly Notification reminders to do so. This is because users who have verified their email can more easily recover their account. These reminders will not be sent if the user is inactive or removes the unverified email from their account.[169][170]
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, a fix was made for an occasional error with saving translated paragraphs in the Content Translation tool, and the related error messages are now easier to see.[171]
Updates for technical contributors
The Unsupported Tools Working Group has chosenVideo2Commons as the first tool for its pilot cycle. The group will explore ways to improve and sustain the tool over the coming months.Learn more on Meta.
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
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.[172]
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, there was a broken link from the GlobalContributions interface message to the XTools GlobalContributions page which has now been fixed.[173]
Updates for technical contributors
The work to reroute all traffic to API endpoints under therest.php route through a common API gateway is now complete. If any issues are observed, please file a phabricator ticket to theService 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.[174]
Wereleased the"Add a Link" Structured Task to 100% of accounts at English Wikipedia on Tuesday, September 2nd (before then it was available to 20% of accounts).
After examining if the Growth features and Mentorship could be adapted to Wikidata, we activated the Growth features onBeta Wikidata to allow for testing and discussion (T400937).Although some features, like Suggested Edits, are Wikipedia-specific, the Growth team designed most features to be more wiki-agnostic.
The machine learning team has been working on a new model that can suggest links to more languages, including Urdu, Chinese, and Japanese Wikipedias.We are starting to release the “Add a Link” feature to Wikipedias that weren’t supported by the previous model.
The Growth team is involved in several research initiatives to help guide our future work:
Progression System – We havepublished initial findings from interviews with 10 English and French Wikipedia newcomers.The research examined motivations, challenges, and feedback on a prototype system intended to help editors build confidence, develop skills, and contribute more constructively over time.
Mobile Web Editing Research – This project combines quantitative and qualitative data, community feedback, and user journey analysis to identify possible ways to enhance the mobile editing experience.
Newcomers Survey – This project surveys successful newcomers on English Wikipedia to understand their early editing experiences, tool use, and community interactions.
The Growth team participated in several community events to listen, share, and collaborate on improving newcomer experiences across Wikimedia projects.
This session invited organizers to share how they introduce newcomers to Growth features and the challenges they encounter. The discussion focused on common newcomer questions and opportunities to strengthen collaboration in supporting new editors.
This talk demonstrated how Structured Tasks help newcomers take their first successful steps on Wikipedia. It shared impact data, community configurations, and a demo of “Add a Link,” illustrating how these tasks make editing more accessible and sustainable, particularly for mobile contributors.
With active editor numbers declining, theContributors Strategy aims to create a clearer, more engaging path for participation. This session, led by the WMF Contributors group with involvement from the Editing, Growth, Moderator Tools, and Connection (formerly Campaigns) teams, highlighted efforts to streamline contributor experiences, offer structured and mobile-friendly workflows, and foster meaningful engagement. Participants learned about ongoing initiatives and shared feedback to help shape a more inclusive and sustainable future for Wikimedia contributors.
Many communities face a decline in volunteer engagement. Newcomers often leave soon after joining, while experienced editors struggle to manage increasingly complex workflows and overwhelming backlogs. We presented theContributors Strategy and the different features and workflows that can help communities to address these challenges. We listened to the specific needs of the CEE communities to help guide the Contributors teams' work.
Hey there The wub, I'd like to wish you ahappy adminship anniversary! Congratulations on your special day, and thank you for all the contributions you've made.
Administrator changes
CheckUser changes
Guideline and policy news
Technical news
Arbitration
Miscellaneous
View all 35 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, there was a bug with updating a user's edit-count after making a rollback edit, which is now fixed.[3]
Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. Starting the week of January 13, we will begin reroutingsome page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newer MediaWiki REST API endpoints for all wiki projects. This change was previously available on testwiki and should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints may raise issues directly to theMediaWiki Interfaces Team in Phabricator if they arise.
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.[9]
Oversighter changes
). There was a long-standing bug where an indication for new notifications was only shown if you had unseen Alerts. This bug is now fixed. In the future, Minerva users will notice a counter atop the bell icon when you have 1 or more unseen Notices and/or Alerts.[54]
Bureaucrat changes
A redirect or redirects you have created has been listed atredirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets theredirect guidelines. Anyone, including you, is welcome to comment on this redirect atWikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 May 1 § Xe/xem until a consensus is reached.LIrala (talk)01:39, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Rusalkii
NaomiAmethyst(overlooked last month)
Interface administrator changes
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View all 20 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, there was a broken link from the GlobalContributions interface message to the XTools GlobalContributions page which has now been fixed.[173]
