Wikimedians for Sustainable Development - January 2026 Newsletter

Tech News: 2026-07

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.[1]
• 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.[2]
• 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.[3][4]
• 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.[5]
• Two new wikis have been created:
  • a Wikipedia inJju (w:kaj:)[6]
  • a Wikipedia inNawat (w:ppl:)[7]
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• A new global user group has been created:Local bots. It will be used internally by the software to allow community bots to bypass rate limits that are applied to 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.[8]
• Detailed code updates later this week:MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• TheMediaWiki Users and Developers Conference, Spring 2026 will be held March 25–27 in Salt Lake City, USA. This event is organized by and for the third-party MediaWiki community. You can propose sessions and register to attend.[9]

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