This user is aware of the designation of the following ascontentious topics:
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
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
All users with registered accounts can now use passkeys fortwo-factor authentication (2FA). Passkeys are a simple way to log in without using a second device. They verify the user's identity using a fingerprint, face scan, or a PIN code. To set up a passkey, first set up a regular 2FA method. Currently, to log in with a passkey, users must also use a password. Later this quarter, passwordless login will allow users to log in with a single click and a passkey. Users with advanced rights will also be required to have 2FA enabled. This is part of theAccount Security project.
Unregistered contributors on blocked IPs or blocked IP ranges can now interact on-wiki to appeal a block by creating a temporary account to appeal a block on the user talk page, unless the "prevent this user from editing their own talk page" is enabled. This solves the problem of logged-out users unable to use the default unblock process via user talk page.[1]
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, the Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) methods description on the management page has been updated. It is now clearer and easier for users to understand and make use of.[2]
Updates for technical contributors
A new AbuseFilter variable,account_type, has been added to provide a reliable way to determine the account type being created in thecreateaccount andautocreateaccount actions. As part of this change, the variableaccountname has been renamed toaccount_name, andaccountname is now deprecated. Edit filter managers should update any filters that use hardcoded account type checks or the deprecated variable.[3]
Image thumbnails that are requested in non-standard sizes, and using non-standard methods such as direct requests toupload.wikimedia.org/… will stop working in the near future. This change is to prevent ongoing external abuse by web-scrapers and bots. Some users with custom CSS/JS, Interface Admins who can fix gadgets and local skins, and Tool-authors, will need to update their code to use standard thumbnail sizes.Details, search-links, and examples of how to fix them, are available in the task.
NPP unreviewed article statistics as of February 02, 2026
Welcome to Phase 2 of theJanuary–February 2026 NPP drive. DuringPhase 1, we reviewed 16,658 articles and 4,416 redirects, and there is currently a backlog of 16,475 articles and 23,782 redirects in the queue. Fantastic job! Completing 22,502 patrols in the first phase made a significant dent in the backlog. Let's keep our foot on the gas for Phase 2, and I hope we can achieve even more reviews than Phase 1. Best of luck!
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 "Page information" feature, which gives validating information about a page (example), now automatically includes a table of contents. If there is a localMediaWiki:Pageinfo-header page created by individual users, it can now be removed.[4]
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, VisualEditor previously added bold or italic formatting inside link descriptions, making the wikicode complex. This has now been fixed.[5]
Updates for technical contributors
There was no XML dump on 20 January. Additionally, from now on, dumps will be generated once per month only.[6]
The MediaWiki Interfaces team removed support for all transform endpoints containing a trailing slash from theMediaWiki REST API. All API users currently calling those endpoints are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. If you have questions or encounter any problems, please file a ticket in phabricator to the#MW-Interfaces-Team board.
Users are reminded that the Wikimedia Foundation has shared some guiding questions for the July 2026–June 2027 Annual Plan onMeta andDiff. These focus on global trends, faster and healthier experimentation, better support for newcomers, strengthening editors and advanced users, improving collaboration across projects, and growing and retaining readership. Feedback and ideas are welcome on thetalk 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
Logged-in contributors who manage large or complex watchlists can now organise and filter watched pages in ways that improve their workflows with the newWatchlist labels feature. By adding custom labels (for example: pages you created, pages being monitored for vandalism, or discussion pages) users can more quickly identify what needs attention, reduce cognitive load, and respond more efficiently. This improves watchlist usability, especially for highly active editors.
A new feature available onSpecial:Contributions showstemporary accounts that are likely operated by the same person, and so makes patrolling less time-consuming. Upon checking contributions of a temporary account, users with access to temporary account IP addresses can now see a view of contributions from the related temporary accounts. The feature looks up all the IPs associated with a given temporary account within the data retention period and shows all the contributions of all temporary accounts that have used these IPs.Learn more.[7]
When editors preview a wikitext edit, the reminder box that they are only seeing a preview (which is shown at the top), now has a grey/neutral background instead of a yellow/warning background. This makes it easier to distinguish preview notes from actual warnings (for example, edit conflicts or problematic redirect targets), which will now be shown in separate warning or error boxes.[8]
TheGlobal Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. Theextension continues to improve — it now properly supports more than one Wikibase site, for example bothWikidata andtestwikidata. In addition, issues regarding text direction have been fixed for users who prefer Wikidata or other Wikibase sites in right-to-left (RTL) languages.[9][10]
The automatic "magic links" for ISBN, RFC, and PMID numbers have beendeprecated in wikitext since 2021 due to inflexibility and difficulties with localization. Several wikis have successfully replaced RFC and PMID magic links with equivalent external links, but a template was often required to replace the functionality of the ISBN magic link. There is now a newbuilt-in parser function{{#isbn}} available to replace the basic functionality of the ISBN magic link. This makes it easier for wikis who wish to migrate off of the deprecated magic link functionality to do so.[11]
A new global user group has been created:Local bots. It will be used internally by the software to allow community bots to bypass rate limits that are applied to abusiveweb scrapers. Accounts that are approved as bots on at least one Wikimedia wiki will be automatically added to this group. It will not change what user permissions the bot has.[14]
@DreamRimmer, I'm contacting you because you're a member of the SWMT. I'm making several contributions to thevec:Wikipedia:Prinsipio, and I've also applied to be an administrator. However, the administrators haven't been in touch or responding for months. Is there any way to contact them? What can be done?Sinucep (talk)14:26, 10 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Due to the result of a recentmotion, a rough consensus of administrators at thearbitration enforcement noticeboard may impose an expanded topic ban on Israel, Israelis, Jews, Judaism, Palestine, Palestinians, Islam, and/or Arabs, if an editor'sArab-Israeli conflict topic ban is determined to be insufficient to prevent disruption. At least one diff per area expanded into should be cited.
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
TheSRE Team will be performing a cleanup of Wikimedia'sEtherpad instance, the web-based editor for real-time collaborative document editing. All pads will be permanently deleted after 30 April, 2026 – if there are still migration projects in progress at that point the team can revisit the date on a case by case basis. Please create local backups of any content you wish to keep, as deleted data cannot be recovered. This cleanup helps reduce database size and minimize infrastructure footprint. Etherpad will continue to support real-time collaboration, but long-term storage should not be expected. Additional cleanups may occur in the future without prior notice.[16]
Updates for editors
The Information Retrieval team will be launching anAndroid mobile app experiment that tests hybrid search capabilities which can handle both semantic and keyword queries. The improvement of on-platform search will enable readers to find what they’re looking for directly on Wikipedia more easily. The experiment will first be launched on Greek Wikipedia in late February, followed by English, French, and Portuguese in March.Read more on Diff blog.[17]
The Reader Growth team will runan experiment for mobile web users, that adds a table of contents and automatically expands all article sections, to learn more about navigation issues they face. The test will be available on Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
Previously, site notices (MediaWiki:Sitenotice andMediaWiki:Anonnotice) would only render on the desktop site. Now, they will render on all platforms. Users on mobile web will now see these notices and be informed. Site administrators should be prepared to test and fix notices on mobile devices to avoid interference with articles. To opt out, interface admins can add#siteNotice { display: none; } toMediaWiki:Minerva.css.[18][19]
View all 19 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, an issue onSpecial:RecentChanges has been fixed. Previously, clicking hide in the active filters caused the "view new changes since…" button to disappear, though it should have remained visible. The button now behaves as expected.[20]
Updates for technical contributors
New documentation is now available to help editors debug on-site search features. It supports troubleshooting when pages do not appear in results, when ranking seems unexpected, and when you need to inspect what content is being indexed, helping make search behavior easier to understand and analyze.Learn more.[21]
Hi DreamRimmer. I would like to ask for permission to change this task to be automatic/manual when necessary. I have resolved the issues affecting the reliability of replacements, and the remaining issues have been ironed out enough that they're not an issue or handleable via manual operation. — Tenshi! (Talk page)21:35, 16 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, the Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) methods description on the management page has been updated. It is now clearer and easier for users to understand and make use of.[2]
Logged-in contributors who manage large or complex watchlists can now organise and filter watched pages in ways that improve their workflows with the newWatchlist labels feature. By adding custom labels (for example: pages you created, pages being monitored for vandalism, or discussion pages) users can more quickly identify what needs attention, reduce cognitive load, and respond more efficiently. This improves watchlist usability, especially for highly active editors.
Administrator changes
CheckUser changes
Arbitration
Miscellaneous
