During a conversation with@WereSpielChequers: and later@IJBall: the subject of identifying users who might be viable candidates for being granted the autopatrolled privilege came up. There is anexisting database report which is intended to provide this information, but the report as it stands today isn't very useful. The main issues (as far as I am aware) are that it is not filtered to show editors who have created articles recently (say, in the last 30 days) and is does not exclude bots and a few other minor things.
I wrote a quick Perl script which uses the MediaWiki API to create a report whichdoes take into account these factors. I have run it a few times, and have been manually pasting the output intomy userspace page here.
This isn't a long-term solution, because apart from anything else I am both busy and forgetful :)
WereSpielChequers would ideally like the original database report page to be updated with my version of the report, instead of Community Tech Bot's version, but obviously at present the bot and I would be in conflict with each other, and it would be terribly untidy. So there are a few options I can think of for how we might move forward, and I wonder if you might have any suggestions or input.
1. Perhaps the tidiest thing would be if the existing report could be modified to use the same criteria that I use in mine (which are described at the top of the page), and then I would just stop running my report entirely. I don't know how likely that is to happen on a short timescale, but perhaps you would have some insight on this?
2. Alternatively, perhaps Community Tech Bot could be told to stop updating that page, and I could update it manually for now (and probably seek bot approval to have it run automatically each week).
3. I could update some new page elsewhere in the Wikipedia: namespace, and the existing database report page could maybe redirect to it.
4. Some other option? Community Tech Bot running my code maybe?
I'm not very familiar with the database reports service, or Community Tech Bot, so there may be some background I'm missing here which would make everything clearer; but for now we have two things. We have a page where everyone is looking for this information, and we have a report which is regularly being run to provide the information they are looking for. Unfortunately the two things are not connected in any way :)
Hi! Firstly my apologies for this late reply. I've been on vacation. Secondly, that's a fantastic idea, thank you. I'd be very happy to modify the bot to run your script. The only thing that I need is the SQL query you used to generate it. I'll update the bot when I get it. Thanks a lot for helping maintain the reports. :)NKohli (WMF) (talk)17:28, 5 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for getting back to me, hope you enjoyed your vacation :)
The current code is not SQL-based but rather uses Perl and MediaWiki::API. Hopefully this week or next I will have time to look at a pure SQL version. I'll get back to you on this :)
OK, so I have a pure-SQL version of this now which I have tested and appears to work successfully. Note that it is an expensive and long-running query - it will probably take five to six hours to run. This is similar to the performance of the Perl version. The basic issue is that calculating how many articles a user created (with all the various conditions in place) is quite an expensive operation. It might be possible to optimize it further than I already have, but I have literally spend at least twelve hours refactoring this in various radical ways, and this is the fastest option I could find. Anyway, this code works, and I believe should be ready to go!
/* autopatrolled_eligible.sql Identify users who meet the criteria for being granted "autopatrolled" on the English Wikipedia but who don't already have it. Author: Andrew Crawford (thparkth) <acrawford@laetabilis.com> License: Public Domain*/SELECT/* "editor" consisting of user_name, wrapped in HTML tags linking to the sigma "created" tool */CONCAT('<a href="https://tools.wmflabs.org/sigma/created.py?name=',user_name,'&server=enwiki&max=100&startdate=&ns=,,&redirects=none&deleted=undeleted">',user_name,'</a>')ASeditor,/* derived column "created count" returned by this subquery */(SELECTcount(*)FROMrevision_userindexJOINpageONpage_id=rev_pageWHEREpage_namespace=0ANDrev_parent_id=0ANDrev_user_text=user_nameANDrev_deleted=0ANDpage_is_redirect=0)AScreated_countFROM(/* This query returns users who have created pages in the last 30 days and who are not already members of autoreviewed */SELECTDISTINCTuser_nameFROMrecentchangesJOINuserONrc_user=user_idJOINpageONrc_cur_id=page_idWHERE/* User created a page within the last thirty days */rc_timestamp>date_format(date_sub(NOW(),INTERVAL30DAY),'%Y%m%d%H%i%S')AND/* It was an article */rc_namespace=0AND/* The user was human */rc_bot=0AND/* It was a new page */rc_new=1AND/* It's not a redirect */page_is_redirect=0AND/* User doesn't already have autoreviewer */NOTEXISTS(SELECT1FROMuser_groupsWHEREug_user=user_idAND(ug_group='autoreviewer'ORug_group='sysop')))asInnerQueryHAVINGcreated_count>24ORDERBYcreated_countDESCLIMIT500;
This can also be found as/data/project/thparkthsql/autopatrolled_eligible.sql on Tool Labs.
By the way, I enjoy this kind of work, and I am gaining some familiarity with the schema and the Tool Labs environment so please do let me know if there is a backlog I could be helping with.
Hi@Thparkth: I'm extremely sorry it took me this long to get back to you. I just updated the report. Let's hope this works. I'm a little worried since it's an expensive query and often queries running more than a couple of hours are killed abruptly. Aside, would you like to be a co-maintainer for the database-reports labs tool? There are several other reports lying dead which could use some love. :) It's a simple python-based bot, whose code can be seen athttps://github.com/Niharika29/database-reports Thank you so much! --NKohli (WMF) (talk)09:47, 15 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks NKohli, that's great. Thanks for tolerating my eccentric SQL indentation style ;). Virtually all of the processing time is spent in working out the created count for each user. An index on rev.rev_parent_id would probably help a great deal with that. I will probably go back to this now and try to find away to avoid using that column entirely; finding the lowest rev.rev_id for the page should be logically the same thing and it's a primary key!
Yes, I would love to be a co-maintainer for database-reports, and thank-you for the opportunity.
I added you as a maintainer for the tool. Are you on Github? Then I can add you as a collaborator on the repo and you can push code easily. :) Also, are you on IRC? --NKohli (WMF) (talk)15:34, 15 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Hi NKohli (WMF)! We're so happy you wanted to play to learn, as a friendly and fun way to get into our community and mission. I think these links might be helpful to you as you get started.
Did you see theannouncement that http:// access to the API is going away in a few weeks? It looks like the Community Tech bot is going to break as a result of this change.
Thank you for pointing this out to me,Whatamidoing (WMF)! I did indeed miss the announcement. I'll fix up the bot over the weekend and try to keep an eye on the mailing list and the noticeboard as well. Really happy to help. :) Thank you so much.NKohli (WMF) (talk)03:29, 20 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Niharika.Wikipedia:Database reports/Unused templates has been broken for over two years, and I haven't had much luck finding someone from the community interested in getting it back up and running. Is this something you or others on your team might be able to help with? If it's a technically trivial extension, low transclusion templates (1 or 2 transclusions) would be of interest as well. ~Rob13Talk05:27, 27 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I noticed that Community Tech bot has stopped updating as of the end of August. Can you give the bot a push and get it working again? Or if this is a known problem, do you have an ETA on when it might be back up? Thanks.PingingThparkth on this, too. --Gogo Dodo (talk)01:58, 7 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, this should be fixed now. The bot will resume updating pages as usual. Feel free to report back if you find any more problems with this. Thanks! --NKohli (WMF) (talk)11:51, 7 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for fixing it. It is updating now. While I'm here, I noticed that a few talk pages listed are false positives and have been appearing for awhile now. Can you check it out? The ones that keep reappearing are:
It'sWikipedia:Database reports/Orphaned talk pages. All the above pages exceptTalk:DDWG were created between 22 April and 3 May 2016.DDWG was moved to that name 6 May 2016. Maybe a database got some bad entries in that period. I recall an incident where some pages were designated as mainspace pages somewhere even though their name specified another namespace, but I think that was longer ago.PrimeHunter (talk)11:42, 12 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The page itself looks the same.onlyinclude only affects how it looks when it's transcluded on another page likeWikipedia:Database reports where only the part inside<onlyinclude>...</onlyinclude> will be shown. When the bot version was current the entire page was shown in a single cell in the "Data as of" column at the "PRODed articles with deletion logs" row. My edit[4] means only "06:30, 10 September 2016 (UTC)" is currently shown in that cell. For testing, try previewing this section without nowiki around the below code.PrimeHunter (talk)15:49, 10 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for that. This should be fixed now (in future report updates, that is). I pushed those reports today so they should update soon. I'll try to keep an eye on it and make sure it behaves. --NKohli (WMF) (talk)11:12, 12 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
You need five tildes for a timestamp alone. Three tildes make a username without timestamp so this should work:~~~ <onlyinclude>~~~~~</onlyinclude>.PrimeHunter (talk)18:47, 15 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
[[Wikipedia:Database reports/PRODed articles with deletion logs]]:{{Wikipedia:Database reports/PRODed articles with deletion logs}}[[Wikipedia:Database reports/Articles by size]] (doesn't use onlyinclude but isn't currently transcluded at [[Wikipedia:Database reports]]:{{Wikipedia:Database reports/Articles by size}}
To get around the 50 page restriction, you can split the result array into multiple arrays each with 50 pages...
//Split into lists of 50 (max number for api)result_split=newArray(Math.ceil(result.length/50));for(varj=0;j<result.length;j+=50){result_split[j/50]=result.slice(j,j+49);}
Though you might still want to limit the number of watched pages to a reasonable number, as there are some pretty large categories out there. -Evad37[talk]23:48, 27 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Hello! This is a final reminder that the Wikimedia Foundation survey will close on28 February, 2017 (23:59 UTC). The survey is available in various languages and will take between 20 and 40 minutes.Take the survey now.
If you already took the survey - thank you! We won't bother you again.
About this survey: You can find more information aboutthis project here or you can read thefrequently asked questions. This survey is hosted by a third-party service and governed by thisprivacy statement. If you need additional help, or if you wish to opt-out of future communications about this survey, send an email through EmailUser function to User:EGalvez (WMF).About the Wikimedia Foundation: TheWikimedia Foundation supports you by working on the software and technology to keep the sites fast, secure, and accessible, as well as supports Wikimedia programs and initiatives to expand access and support free knowledge globally. Thank you! --EGalvez (WMF) (talk)08:15, 23 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Hi! The popular pages report shows the top-viewed 500/1000 projects in a Wikiproject in the past month. SeeWikipedia:WikiProject Alaska/Popular pages for example. There was a bot, Mr. Z bot which used to generate these reports previously but it died a few months ago and the reports were broken. So we made a new bot to do the same job. If you do not want a report for WikiProject Chicago I can remove it from the bot config. The current report is atWikipedia:WikiProject Chicago/Popular pages. Thanks. --NKohli (WMF) (talk)20:16, 24 March 2017 (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.
You can now see a new log of pages being created atSpecial:Log/create. It includes pages which are later deleted. It is now available on all Wikimedia wikis except Commons and Wikidata.[8]
You can see how many pageviews a wiki had from specific countries. TheWikistats2 maps have now been updated.[9]
Changes later this week
Your watchlist will show changes from the last seven days instead of three. If you have already set a length preference it will not change.[10]
Thenew version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 17. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from July 18. It will be on all wikis from July 19 (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be onJuly 17 at 18:30 (UTC). Seehow to join.
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be onJuly 18 at 15:00 (UTC). Seehow to join.
Future changes
Some articles have messages to readers about problems with the article. For example that it does not cite sources or might not be neutral. Readers do not see these messages on the mobile version. The developers now want to show them. You canread more and leave feedback.
You can use<inputbox> to create search boxes for specific pages. For example to search the archives of a community discussion page. Instead ofprefix:Page name you will see a text that explains which pages are being searched. You canread more and leave feedback.
Hello. How I can request WikiProject to popular pages task? I thought it will be updated after I create certain page but it didn't happened.Eurohunter (talk)13:04, 24 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
HiEurohunter. The process for enabling the bot to work on a certain project involves adding the project tothis config page. I can add the project to that page if you can tell me the details for which project you want this for, which page you want the report on and how many records would you like (maximum of 1000). Thank you. --NKohli (WMF) (talk)19:05, 24 October 2018 (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.
Recent changes
You can post proposals for theCommunity Wishlist Survey. The survey decides what theCommunity Tech team will work on. You can post proposals until 11 November. You can vote on proposals from 16 November to 30 November.
The wikis now have acontent security policy report. This means that you might get a warning in your javascript console when you load external resources in your user scripts. For security reasons it is recommended that you don't do this. It might not be possible to load external resources in your scripts in the future.[11]
Problems
Your watchlist can show which changes you have already seen. This did not work for a few days. It has been fixed.[12]
Changes later this week
Thenew version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 October. It will be on all wikis from 1 November (calendar).
The 2006 wikitext editor is no longer available. It will be removed fromSpecial:Preferences. It has not been the standard editor for a long time. It was replaced by the2010 wikitext editor.[13][14]
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on31 October at 15:00 (UTC). Seehow to join.
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can now useTemplateWizard to edit templates. This works only with the2010 wikitext editor and not in the visual editor or the2017 wikitext editor. If you click on you can enter the information in a pop-up. You can turn on TemplateWizard in your beta feature preferences.[15]
Changes later this week
You can choose to see edit conflicts in a two-column view. This is a beta feature. You can find it in your preferences. The interface for the two-column edit conflict will change. You canread more.
When you edit with the visual editor you can use the "Automatic" citation tab. This helps you generate citations. You will now be able to write plain text citations or the title of a journal article or a book in this tab. This will search theCrossref andWorldCat databases and add the top result.[16]
Thenew version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 November. It will be on all wikis from 8 November (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on7 November at 16:00 (UTC). Seehow to join.
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
Recent changes
Some old mobile browsers can use the watchlist again. This has not worked for a while. These browsers are calledgrade C browsers. This helps for example Windows Phone 8.1 with Internet Explorer and Lumia 535 with Windows 10.[17]
Problems
You can choose to see edit conflicts in a two-column view. This is a beta feature. You can find it in your preferences. Users who use this view saw the edit conflict resolution page when they wanted to see a preview. This has been fixed.[18][19][20]
Changes later this week
Thenew version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 November. It will be on all wikis from 15 November (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on14 November at 15:00 (UTC). Seehow to join.
Future changes
You can use thecontent translation tool to translate articles. The developers are working ona new version. One of the changes will be a maintenance category. Articles where users add a lot of text from machine translation without changing it will be in that category. This is so the community can review it. The users will also have been warned before they publish the article that it has a lot of unchanged text from machine translations.[21]
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
There is anA/B test forsameAs data. This is to make it easier to find the right information with a search engine. This changes themetadata for a wiki page. It doesn't change how the page looks.[22]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on21 November at 15:00 (UTC). Seehow to join.
Future changes
The Wikimedia wikis use templates to show readers there are problems with the content on some pages. For example if there are no sources or the page needs to be rewritten. The mobile website will soon show more information when you use these templates. Some templates may need to be updated.[23]
TheEducation Program extension was removed from all Wikimedia projects. Thedatabase tables used by the extension will be archived. This will happen in a month. If you want the information on your wiki you should move it to a normal wiki page.[24]
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
Recent changes
On wikis withtranslatable pages you could create a mess when you moved a page that had translatable subpages. A subpage is when you use/ to create a new page:/wiki/Page/Subpage. The subpages would be moved but not the translations. The subpages are no longer automatically be moved. This is to make it safer to move pages.[25]
Changes later this week
Theadvanced search interface will be available by default on all Wikimedia wikis. It makes it easier to use some of the special search functions that most editors don't know exist. It's already active on German, Farsi, Arabic and Hungarian Wikipedia.[26]
Special:UnusedCategories show empty categories with no files or other categories. You can soon choose to not show soft redirect categories or some maintenance categories there. You can do this with themagic word__EXPECTUNUSEDCATEGORY__.[27]
Thenew version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 November. It will be on all wikis from 29 November (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on28 November at 16:00 (UTC). Seehow to join.
Future changes
Themw.util.jsMessage() function was deprecated in 2012. It will be removed next week.Look for the warningUse of "mw.util.jsMessage" is deprecated in the JavaScript console to know if you use an affected script or gadget. If you are a gadget maintainer you should check if your JavaScript code containsmw.util.jsMessage. There is amigration guide. It explains how to usemw.notify instead.[28]
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
Recent changes
Admins will not be able to unblock themselves if they are blocked by someone other than themselves. This is because it can cause damage if someone else takes over an admin account and other admins can't block them. If this is a problem for your community you canreport it on Phabricator. You can also ask questionson Meta. There is a discussionon Phabricator about how to solve this if two admins fight with each other on a small wiki.[29]
You can go to a section from the edit summary by clicking on the section name. Before this you had to click on the arrow.[31]
When you jumped to a footnote that was referenced several times in an article it could be difficult to see where you were in the text. Now there are jump marks and highlights to help you find your way back.[32][33]
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
Changes later this week
Thenew version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 December. It will be on all wikis from 13 December (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on12 December at 16:00 (UTC). Seehow to join.
Future changes
New accounts will need passwords that are at least 8 characters long. Admins, interface admins, bureaucrats, oversighters, CentralNotice admins, global renamers, check users, stewards and some other user groups will need passwords that are at least 10 characters long. This is because an attacker could cause damage to the wikis if they took over these accounts.[34][35]
When you hover over a footnote it will show you the reference as a pop-up. This is so you don't have to jump down to the bottom of the page to see a reference. This will happen in 2019. Some wikis already have gadgets that do this. You will be able to turn it off.[36]
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
Tech News
Because of theholidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 7 January 2019.
Recent changes
Some templates that show notices about the content of the page will now be shown on the mobile website. In many cases they were hidden before.[37][38]
Admins can no longer unblock themselves, except for self-blocks. A blocked admin can block the user who blocked them but no one else. This is so no one can block all admins on a wiki without being stopped.[39]
<ref> tags can use parameters such as "name" or "group". For example<ref name="adams" group="books">. If a<ref> tag has more than two parameters all parameters are ignored. You don't get a warning that they don't work. This will soon be fixed.[40]
Changes later this week
Thenew version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 December. It will be on all wikis from 20 December (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on19 December at 16:00 (UTC). Seehow to join.
Future changes
The Wikimedia FoundationAndroid app team are working on making it easier to edit on mobile phones. You canread more about these plans. If you have an Android phone and speak at least two languages you can help testing in English. TellDchen (WMF) you want to be part of the testing by writing on her talk page or email her.
tiles.wmflabs.org andwma.wmflabs.org will stop working. They have no maintainers and run an old operating system. Tools which use it could stop working. This includesthe mapnik gadget, hill shading, and hike and bike layers. New maintainers could help out and keep it going.[41]
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
Tech News writers, editors and translators wish you a pleasant 2019 year.
Recent changes
RelatedSites extension has been undeployed. It was used to create interwiki links on Wikivoyage, now handled by Wikidata.[42]
MediaWiki logstash logging is moving to a new infrastructure. This is an ongoing deployment.[43]
codesearch.wmflabs.org has been updated, with new and updated repositories and a new search options for code.[44]
On several wikis, an account named "Edit filter" has been created on December 17 to perform some technical maintenance on AbuseFilter. This account has sysop rights but it's a system user and no human can use it. The account already existed on wikis where AbuseFilter can perform blocks, which are issued using this account. SeeT212268 for more information and future plans.
Problems
InAbuseFilter, the "Throttle" action takes three parameters: count, period and groups. They must now strictly respect the requirements listedon mediawiki.org. A list of broken filters ison Phabricator. If you're familiar with AbuseFilter, please take a look and fix them.[45]
Changes later this week
Thenew version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from January 8. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from January 9. It will be on all wikis from January 10 (calendar).
Meetings
Search Platform Office Hours is rescheduled to January 9.Check the details for time and date.
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
Problems
You can read but not edit 17 wikis for a few minutes on 10 August. This is planned at05:00 UTC. This is because of work on the database.[46]
Changes later this week
TheWikimania Hackathon will take place remotely on 13 August, starting at 5:00 UTC, for 24 hours. You can participate in many ways. You can still propose projects and sessions.
Thenew version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 August. It will be on all wikis from 12 August (calendar).
The old CSS<div></div> will not be supported after 12 August. Instead, templates and pages should use<div></div>. Please help to replace any existing uses on your wiki. There are global-search links available atT287962.
Future changes
The Wikipedia Library is a place for Wikipedia editors to get access to sources. There is anextension which has a new function to tell users when they can take part in it. It will use notifications. It will start pinging the first users in September. It will ping more users later.[47]
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can add language links in the sidebar in thenew Vector skin again. You do this by connecting the page to a Wikidata item. The new Vector skin has moved the language links but the new language selector cannot add language links yet.[49]
Problems
There was a problem on wikis which use the Translate extension. Translations were not updated or were replaced with the English text. The problems have been fixed.[50][51][52]
Changes later this week
Arevision tag will soon be added to edits that add links todisambiguation pages. This is because these links are usually added by accident. The tag will allow editors to easily find the broken links and fix them. If your wiki does not like this feature, it can behidden.[53]
Would you like to help improve the information about tools? Would you like to attend or help organize a small virtual meetup for your community to discuss the list of tools? Please get in touch on theToolhub Quality Signal Sessions talk page. We are also looking for feedbackfrom tool maintainers on some specific questions.
In the past, edits to any page in your user talk space ignored yourmute list, e.g. sub-pages. Starting this week, this is only true for edits to your talk page.[54]
Thenew version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 August. It will be on all wikis from 19 August (calendar).
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 can now request installation ofAutomoderator on their wiki. Automoderator is an automated anti-vandalism tool that reverts bad edits based on scores from the new "Revert Risk" machine learning model. You canread details about the necessary steps for installation and configuration.[55]
Updates for editors
Translators in wikis wherethe mobile experience of Content Translation is available, can now customize their articles suggestion list from 41 filtering options when using the tool. This topic-based article suggestion feature makes it easy for translators to self-discover relevant articles based on their area of interest and translate them. You cantry it with your mobile device.[56]
It is now possible for<syntaxhighlight> code blocks to offer readers a "Copy" button if thecopy=1 attribute isset on the tag. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements.[57]
Customized copyright footer messages on all wikis will be updated. The new versions will use wikitext markup instead of requiring editing raw HTML.[58]
Later this month,temporary accounts will be rolled out on several pilot wikis. The final list of the wikis will be published in the second half of the month. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets onthese 11 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts.Guidance on how to update the code is available.
Rate limiting has been enabled for the code review toolsGerrit andGitLab to address ongoing issues caused by malicious traffic and scraping. Clients that open too many concurrent connections will be restricted for a few minutes. This rate limiting is managed throughnftables firewall rules. For more details, see Wikitech's pages onFirewall,GitLab limits andGerrit operations.
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 Structured Discussion extension (also known as Flow) is starting to be removed. This extension is unmaintained and causes issues. It will be replaced byDiscussionTools, which is used on any regular talk page.A first set of wikis are being contacted. These wikis are invited to stop using Flow, and to move all Flow boards to sub-pages, as archives. At these wikis, a script will move all Flow pages that aren't a sub-page to a sub-page automatically, starting on 22 October 2024. On 28 October 2024, all Flow boards at these wikis will be set in read-only mode.[64][65]
WMF's Search Platform team is working on making it easier for readers to perform text searches in their language. Achange last week on over 30 languages makes it easier to find words with accents and other diacritics. This applies to both full-text search and to types of advanced search such as thehastemplate andincategory keywords. More technical details (including a few other minor search upgrades) are available.[66]
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example,EditCheck was installed at Russian Wikipedia, and fixes were made for some missing user interface styles.
Updates for technical contributors
Editors who use the Toolforge toolEarwig's Copyright Violation Detector will now be required to log in with their Wikimedia account before running checks using the "search engine" option. This change is needed to help prevent external bots from misusing the system. Thanks to Chlod for these improvements.[67]
Some HTML elements in the interface are now wrapped with a<bdi> element, to make our HTML output more aligned with Web standards. More changes like this will be coming in future weeks. This change might break some tools that rely on the previous HTML structure of the interface. Note that relying on the HTML structure of the interface isnot recommended and might break at any time.[69]
In depth
The latest monthlyMediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes: updates on Wikimedia's authentication system, research to simplify feature development in the MediaWiki platform, updates on Parser Unification and MathML rollout, and more.
The latest quarterlyTechnical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition include: research about improving topic suggestions related to countries, improvements to PHPUnit tests, 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
The Mobile Apps team has released anupdate to the iOS app's navigation, and it is now available in the latest App store version. The team added a new Profile menu that allows for easy access to editor features like Notifications and Watchlist from the Article view, and brings the "Donate" button into a more accessible place for users who are reading an article. This is the first phase of a larger plannednavigation refresh to help the iOS app transition from a primarily reader-focused app, to an app that fully supports reading and editing. The Wikimedia Foundation has added more editing features and support for on-wiki communication based on volunteer requests in recent years.
iOS Wikipedia App's profile menu and contents
Updates for editors
Wikipedia readers can now download a browser extension to experiment with some early ideas on potential features that recommend articles for further reading, automatically summarize articles, and improve search functionality. For more details and to stay updated, check out the Web team'sContent Discovery Experiments page andsubscribe to their newsletter.
Later this month, logged-out editors ofthese 12 wikis will start to havetemporary accounts created. The list may slightly change - some wikis may be removed but none will be added. Temporary account is a newtype of user account. It enhances the logged-out editors' privacy and makes it easier for community members to communicate with them. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 12 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts.Guidance on how to update the code is available. Read more about thedeployment plan across all wikis.
It is now possible to create functions on Wikifunctions using Wikidata lexemes, through the newWikidata lexeme type launched last week. When you go to one of these functions, the user interface provides a lexeme selector that helps you pick a lexeme from Wikidata that matches the word you type. After hitting run, your selected lexeme is retrieved from Wikidata, transformed into a Wikidata lexeme type, and passed into the selected function. Read more about this inthe latest Wikifunctions newsletter.
Updates for technical contributors
Users of the Wikimedia sites can now format dates more easily in different languages with the new{{#timef:…}} parser function. For example,{{#timef:now|date|en}} will show as "24 November 2025". Previously,{{#time:…}} could be used to format dates, but this required knowledge of the order of the time and date components and their intervening punctuation.#timef (or#timefl for local time) provides access to the standard date formats that MediaWiki uses in its user interface. This may help to simplify some templates on multi-lingual wikis like Commons and Meta.[75][76]
TheProduct and Tech Advisory Council (PTAC) now has its pilot members with representation across Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America. They will work to address theMovement Strategy's Technology Council initiative of having a co-defined and more resilient technological platform.[78]
In depth
The latest quarterlyGrowth newsletter is available. It includes: an upcoming Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module, new Community Configuration options, and details on new projects.
The Wikimedia Foundation isnow an official partner of the CVE program, which is an international effort to catalog publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities. This partnership will allow the Security Team to instantly publishcommon vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) records that are affecting MediaWiki core, extensions, and skins, along with any other code the Foundation is a steward of.
TheCommunity Wishlist is nowtesting machine translations for Wishlist content. Volunteers can now read machine-translated versions of wishes and dive into discussions even before translators arrive to translate content.
20–22 December 2024 -Indic Wikimedia Hackathon Bhubaneswar 2024 in Odisha, India. A hackathon for community members, including developers, designers and content editors, to build technical solutions that improve contributors' experiences.
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 in November, the Charts extension will be deployed to the test wikis in order to help identify and fix any issue. A security review is underway to then enable deployment to pilot wikis for broader testing. You can readthe October project update and see thelatest documentation and examples on Beta Wikipedia.
View all 32 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example,Pediapress.com, an external service that creates books from Wikipedia, can now useWikimedia Maps to include existing pre-rendered infobox map images in their printed books on Wikipedia.[79]
Updates for technical contributors
Wikis can usethe Guided Tour extension to help newcomers understand how to edit. The Guided Tours extension now works withdark mode. Guided Tour maintainers can check their tours to see that nothing looks odd. They can also setemitTransitionOnStep totrue to fix an old bug. They can use the new flagallowAutomaticBack to avoid back-buttons they don't want.[80]
Administrators in the Wikimedia projects who use theNuke Extension will notice that mass deletions done with this tool have the "Nuke" tag. This change will make reviewing and analyzing deletions performed with the tool easier.[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
Stewards can now makeglobal account blocks cause globalautoblocks. This will assist stewards in preventing abuse from users who have been globally blocked. This includes preventing globally blocked temporary accounts from exiting their session or switching browsers to make subsequent edits for 24 hours. Previously, temporary accounts could exit their current session or switch browsers to continue editing. This is an anti-abuse tool improvement for theTemporary Accounts project. You can read more about theprogress on key features for temporary accounts.[82]
Wikis that have theCampaignEvents extension enabled can now use theCollaboration List feature. This list provides a new, easy way for contributors to learn about WikiProjects on their wikis. Thanks to the Campaign team for this work that is part ofthe 2024/25 annual plan. If you are interested in bringing the CampaignEvents extension to your wiki, you canfollow these steps or you can reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for help.
The text color for red links will be slightly changed later this week to improve their contrast in light mode.[83]
View all 32 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, on multilingual wikis, userscan now hide translations from the WhatLinksHere special page.
Updates for technical contributors
XMLdata dumps have been temporarily paused whilst a bug is investigated.[84]
In depth
Temporary Accounts have been deployed to six wikis; thanks to the Trust and Safety Product team forthis work, you can read aboutthe deployment plans. Beginning next week, Temporary Accounts will also be enabled onseven other projects. If you are active on these wikis and need help migrating your tools, please reach out toUser:Udehb-WMF for assistance.
The latest quarterlyLanguage and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New languages supported in translatewiki or in MediaWiki; New keyboard input methods for some languages; details about recent and upcoming meetings, and more.
Meetings and events
MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2024 is happening in Vienna, Austria and online from 4 to 6 November 2024. The conference will feature discussions around the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies in different industries and will inspire and onboard new users.
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
On wikis with theTranslate extension enabled, users will notice that the FuzzyBot will now automatically create translated versions of categories used on translated pages.[85]
In1.44.0-wmf-2, the logic of Wikibase functiongetAllStatements changed to behave likegetBestStatements. Invoking the function now returns a copy of values which are immutable.[87]
Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. The API will be rerouting some page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newerMediaWiki REST API endpoints. Theimpacted endpoints include getting page/revision metadata and rendered HTML content. These changes will be available on testwiki later this week, with other projects to follow. This change should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints should verify behavior on testwiki, and raise any concerns on the relatedPhabricator ticket.
In depth
Admins and users of the Wikimedia projectswhere Automoderator is enabled can now monitor and evaluate important metrics related to Automoderator's actions.This Superset dashboard calculates and aggregates metrics about Automoderator's behaviour on the projects in which it is deployed. Thanks to the Moderator Tools team for this Dashboard; you can visitthe documentation page for more information about this work.[88]
Meetings and events
21 November 2024 (8:00 UTC &16:00 UTC) -Community call with Wikimedia Commons volunteers and stakeholders to help prioritize support efforts for 2025-2026 Fiscal Year. The theme of this call is how content should be organised on Wikimedia Commons.
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
Users of Wikimedia sites will now be warned when they create aredirect to a page that doesn't exist. This will reduce the number of broken redirects to red links in our projects.[89]
View all 42 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example,Pywikibot, which automates work on MediaWiki sites, was upgraded to 9.5.0 on Toolforge.[90]
Updates for technical contributors
On wikis that use theFlaggedRevs extension, pages created or moved by users with the appropriate permissions are marked as flagged automatically. This feature has not been working recently, and changes fixing it should be deployed this week. Thanks to Daniel and Wargo for working on this.[91][92]
In depth
There is a newDiff post about Temporary Accounts, available in more than 15 languages. Read it to learn about what Temporary Accounts are, their impact on different groups of users, and the plan to introduce the change on all wikis.
Meetings and events
Technical volunteers can now register for the2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which will take place in Istanbul, Turkey.Application for travel and accommodation scholarships is open fromNovember 12 to December 10 2024. The registration for the event will close in mid-April 2025. The Wikimedia Hackathon is an annual gathering that unites the global technical community to collaborate on existing projects and explore new ideas.
Join theWikimedia Commons community calls this week to help prioritize support for Commons which will be planned for 2025–2026. The theme will be how content should be organised on Wikimedia Commons. This is an opportunity for volunteers who work on different things to come together and talk about what matters for the future of the project. The calls will take placeNovember 21, 2024,8:00 UTC and16:00 UTC.
ALanguage community meeting will take placeNovember 29, 16:00 UTC to discuss updates and technical problem-solving.
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
A new version of the standard wikitext editor-modesyntax highlighter will be available as abeta feature later this week. This brings many new features and bug fixes, including right-to-left support,template folding,autocompletion, and an improved search panel. You can learn more on thehelp page.
The 2010 wikitext editor now supports common keyboard shortcuts suchCtrl+B for bold andCtrl+I for italics. A fulllist of all six shortcuts is available. Thanks to SD0001 for this improvement.[93]
Starting November 28, Flow/Structured Discussions pages will be automatically archived and set to read-only at the following wikis:bswiki,elwiki,euwiki,fawiki,fiwiki,frwikiquote,frwikisource,frwikiversity,frwikivoyage,idwiki,lvwiki,plwiki,ptwiki,urwiki,viwikisource,zhwikisource. This is done as part ofStructuredDiscussions deprecation work. If you need any assistance to archive your page in advance, please contactTrizek (WMF).
TheCodeEditor, which can be used in JavaScript, CSS, JSON, and Lua pages,now offers live autocompletion. Thanks to SD0001 for this improvement. The feature can be temporarily disabled on a page by pressingCtrl+, and un-selecting "Live Autocompletion".
Tool-maintainers who use the Graphite system for tracking metrics, need to migrate to the newer Prometheus system. They can checkthis dashboard and the list in the Description of thetask T350592 to see if their tools are listed, and they should claim metrics and dashboards connected to their tools. They can then disable or migrate all existing metrics by following the instructions in the task. The Graphite service will become read-only in April.[94]
TheNew PreProcessor parser performance report has been fixed to give an accurate count for the number of Wikibase entities accessed. It had previously been resetting after 400 entities.[95]
Meetings and events
ALanguage community meeting will take place November 29 at16:00 UTC. There will be presentations on topics like developing language keyboards, the creation of the Mooré Wikipedia, the language support track atWiki Indaba, and a report from the Wayuunaiki community on their experiences with the Incubator and as a new community over the last 3 years. This meeting will be in English and will also have Spanish interpretation.
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
Starting this week, Wikimedia wikis no longer support connections using old RSA-based HTTPS certificates, specifically rsa-2048. This change is to improve security for all users. Some older, unsupported browser or smartphone devices will be unable to connect; Instead, they will display a connectivity error. See theHTTPS Browser Recommendations page for more-detailed information. All modern operating systems and browsers are always able to reach Wikimedia projects.[96]
Starting December 16, Flow/Structured Discussions pages will be automatically archived and set to read-only at the following wikis:arwiki,cawiki,frwiki,mediawikiwiki,orwiki,wawiki,wawiktionary,wikidatawiki,zhwiki. This is done as part ofStructuredDiscussions deprecation work. If you need any assistance to archive your page in advance, please contactTrizek (WMF).[97]
This month the Chart extension was deployed to production and is now available on Commons and Testwiki. With the security review complete, pilot wiki deployment is expected to start in the first week of December. You can see a working versionon Testwiki and readthe November project update for more details.
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, a bug with the "Download as PDF" system was fixed.[98]
Updates for technical contributors
In late February, temporary accounts will be rolled out on at least 10 large wikis. This deployment will have a significant effect on the community-maintained code. This is about Toolforge tools, bots, gadgets, and user scripts that use IP address data or that are available for logged-out users. The Trust and Safety Product team wants to identify this code, monitor it, and assist in updating it ahead of the deployment to minimize disruption to workflows. The team asks technical editors and volunteer developers to help identify such tools by adding them tothis list. In addition, review theupdated documentation to learn how to adjust the tools. Join the discussions on theproject talk page or in thededicated thread on theWikimedia Community Discord server (in English) for support and to share feedback.
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
Technical documentation contributors can find updated resources, and new ways to connect with each other and the Wikimedia Technical Documentation Team, at theDocumentation hub on MediaWiki.org. This page links to: resources for writing and improving documentation, a new#wikimedia-techdocs IRC channel on libera.chat, a listing of past and upcoming documentation events, and ways to request a documentation consultation or review. If you have any feedback or ideas for improvements to the documentation ecosystem, pleasecontact the Technical Documentation Team.
Updates for editors
Layout change for the Edit Check feature
Later this week,Edit Check will be relocated to a sidebar on desktop. Edit check is the feature for new editors to help them follow policies and guidelines. This layout change creates space to present people withnew Checks that appearwhile they are typing. Theinitial results show newcomers encountering Edit Check are 2.2 times more likely to publish a new content edit that includes a reference and is not reverted.
The Chart extension, which enables editors to create data visualizations, was successfully made available on MediaWiki.org and three pilot wikis (Italian, Swedish, and Hebrew Wikipedias). You can see a working exampleson Testwiki and readthe November project update for more details.
Translators in wikis where themobile experience of Content Translation is available, can now discover articles in Wikiproject campaigns of their interest from the "All collection" category in the articles suggestion feature. Wikiproject Campaign organizers can use this feature, to help translators to discover articles of interest, by adding the<page-collection> </page-collection> tag to their campaign article list page on Meta-wiki. This will make those articles discoverable in the Content Translation tool. For more detailed information on how to use the tool and tag, please refer tothe step-by-step guide.[99]
TheNuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, now has amultiselect filter for namespace selection. This enables users to select multiple specific namespaces, instead of only one or all, when fetching pages for deletion.
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 to Chlod and the Moderator Tools team for both of these improvements.[100]
The Editing Team is working on making it easier to populate citations from archive.org using theCitoid tool, the auto-filled citation generator. They are asking communities to add two parameters preemptively,archiveUrl andarchiveDate, within the TemplateData for each citation template using Citoid. You can see anexample of a change in a template, and alist of all relevant templates.[101]
Last week, all wikis had problems serving pages to logged-in users and some logged-out users for 30–45 minutes. This was caused by a database problem, and investigation is ongoing.[103]
View all 19 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, a bug in theAdd Link feature has been fixed. Previously, the list of sections which are excluded from Add Link was partially ignored in certain cases.[104][105]
Updates for technical contributors
Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, now has an early-stageimplementation in PHP. It is available for general use in MediaWiki extensions and Toolforge apps throughComposer, with use in MediaWiki core coming soon. More information is available inthe documentation. Thanks to Doğu for the inspiration and many contributions to the library.[106]
Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. On December 4, the MediaWiki Interfaces team began rerouting page/revision metadata and rendered HTML content endpoints ontestwiki from RESTbase to comparable MediaWiki REST API endpoints. The team encourages active users of these endpoints to verify their tool's behavior on testwiki and raise any concerns on the relatedPhabricator ticket before the end of the year, as they intend to roll out the same change across all Wikimedia projects in early January. These changes are part of the work to replace the outdatedRESTBase system.
The2024 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 3 January 2025, and has an associatedprivacy statement.
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
Interested in improving event management on your home wiki? TheCampaignEvents extension offers organizers features like event registration management, event/wikiproject promotion, finding potential participants, and more - all directly on-wiki. If you are an organizer or think your community would benefit from this extension, start a discussion to enable it on your wiki today. To learn more about how to enable this extension on your wiki, visit thedeployment status page.
Updates for editors
Users of the iOS Wikipedia App in Italy and Mexico on the Italian, Spanish, and English Wikipedias, can see apersonalized Year in Review with insights based on their reading and editing history.
Users of the Android Wikipedia App in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia can see the newRabbit Holes feature. This feature shows a suggested search term in the Search bar based on the current article being viewed, and a suggested reading list generated from the user’s last two visited articles.
Theglobal reminder bot is now active and running on nearly 800 wikis. This service reminds most users holding temporary rights when they are about to expire, so that they can renew should they want to. Seethe technical details page for more information.
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 13 January 2025 because of the end of year holidays. Thank you to all of the translators, and people who submitted content or feedback, this year.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, a bug wasfixed in the Android Wikipedia App which had caused translatable SVG images to show the wrong language when they were tapped.
Updates for technical contributors
There is no new MediaWiki version next week. The next deployments will start on 14 January.[108]
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)[109]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia inTigre (w:tig:)[110]
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.[111]
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.[112]
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.[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
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.[114]
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.[115]
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.[116]
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.[117]
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.[118]
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.[119]
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.[120]
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.[121]
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.[122] You can now also insert<code> tags using a new toolbar button.[123] 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.[124]
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.[127]
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.[129]
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.[130]
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.[131]
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.[132]
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.[133]
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.[134]
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.[135]
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.[136]
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.[137]
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.[138][139]
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.[140]
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.[141]
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.[142][143][144]
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.[146]
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.[147]
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.[148] In contrast, transcluding a file description page (e.g.{{:File:MediaWiki.png}}) will now restrict edits to the page.[149]
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,[150] and respects cascading protection.[151]
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.[152]
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.[153]
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.[155]
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.[156][157]
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.[158]
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.[159]
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.[160]
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.
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.[161]
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.[162]
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.[163][164]
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.[166]
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.[167][168]
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.[169]
"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.
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.[170]
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.[171]
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.[172]
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.
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.[173]
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.[174]
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.[175]
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.[176]
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.[177]
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.[178]
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.[179]
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.
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.[180]
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.[181]
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.[182]
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.
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.[183]
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").[184][185]
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.[186]
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.[187]
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.[188][189]
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.
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.[190]
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.[191]
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%).[192]
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.[193]
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.[194]
Theall_links variable inAbuseFilter is now renamed tonew_links for consistency with other variables. Old usages will still continue to work.[195]
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.[196]
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.[197][198]
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.[199]
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.[200]
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.[202]
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".
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.[203][204]
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.[205]
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.[206]
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.[207]
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.[208]
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.[209]
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.[210]
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.[211]
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.[212]
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.[213][214]
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.[215]
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.[216]
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:
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.[217]
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.[218]
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.[219]
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.[220]
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.[221]
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.[222]
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.[223]
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.[224]
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.[240]
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.[242][243]
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.[245]
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.
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.[246]
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.[247]
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.[248][249]
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.
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.[251]
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.[252]
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.[253][254]
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.[255]
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.[256]
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[257]
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).[258]
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.[259]
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.[260]
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.[261]
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).
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.[262]
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.[263]
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.[264]
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.[265]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikiquote inMalay (q:ms:)[266]
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, theUser Info Card now displays currently active global lock/blocks.[267]
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.[268]
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.[269]
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.[270]
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.[271]
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.[272]
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.[273]
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.[274]
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.[275]
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.[276]
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.[277][278]
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.[279]
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.[280]
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.[281]
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.[282]
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 Wikipedia iOS app has launched an A/B/C test of improvements made to the tabbed browsing feature for select regions and languages. The test, named “More dynamic tabs”, explores new tab experiences and includes “Did you know” and “Because you read” article recommendations. You canread more on the project page.
Autoconfirmed users onsmall andmedium wikis with the CampaignEvents extension can now useEvent Registration without the Event Organizer right. This feature lets organizers enable registration, manage participants, and lets users register with one click instead of signing event pages.
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, the issue of flashing colors when holding or pressing the arrow keys under the dark mode settings in Vector 2022 has been fixed.[283]
Updates for technical contributors
The CampaignEvents extension will be deployed to all remaining wikis during the week of 17 November 2025. The extension currently includes three features: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List. For this rollout, Invitation List will not be enabled on Wikifunctions and MediaWiki unless requested by those communities.Visit the deployment page to learn more.
The SwaggerUI-based REST sandbox experience is now live on all wiki projects. The sandbox can be accessed through theSpecial:RestSandbox page. Please report any issues to the MediaWiki Interfaces team board, or join the discussion on theproject launch page.[284]
Transform endpoints with a trailing slash path in the MediaWiki REST API are now marked as deprecated. They will remain functional during this time, but removal is expected by the end of January 2026. All API users currently calling them are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. Both endpoint variations can be found and tested using theREST Sandbox. See theMediaWiki REST API Deprecation page for more detailed information about the API deprecation policies and procedures.
A dedicatedchangelog now exists for the MediaWiki REST API. The changelog provides an overview of these changes, making it easier for developers to keep track of improvements and iterations. Announcements will also continue to flow through the standard communication channels, including Tech News and email distribution lists, but can now be more easily referenced from a central location. If you have feedback about the style, structure, or content of this changelog, pleasejoin the discussion.
Administrators can delete the tracking category which was previously added by the JsonConfig extension, as it is no longer used. See the categories linked fromQ130635582. It is OK if there are still pages listed in the category as that is just a caching issue, and they will be automatically cleared out the next time each page is edited.[285]
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 will now find thatSpecial:MergeHistory is now significantly more flexible about what it can merge. It can now merge sections taken from the middle of the history of the source (rather than only the start) and insert revisions anywhere in the history of the destination page (rather than only the start).[286]
For users with "Automatically subscribe to topics"enabled in their preferences, starting a new topic or adding a reply to an existing topic will now subscribe them to replies to that topic. Previously, this would only happen if the DiscussionTools "Add topic" or "Reply" widgets were used. When DiscussionTools was originally launched existing accounts were not opted in to automatic topic subscriptions, so this change should primarily affect newer accounts and users who have deliberately changed their preferences since that time.[287]
Scribunto modules can now be used togenerate SVG images. This can be used to build charts, graphics and other visualizations dynamically through Lua, reducing the need to compose them externally and upload them as files.[288]
Wikimedia sites now provide all anonymous users with the option to enable a dark mode color scheme, featuring light-colored text on a dark background. This enhancement aims to deliver a more enjoyable reading experience, especially in dimly lit environments.[289]
Users with large watchlists have long faced timeouts when editingSpecial:EditWatchlist. The page now loads entries in smaller sections instead of all at once due to a paging update, allowing everyone to edit their watchlists smoothly. As part of the database update, sorting by expiry has been removed because it was over 100× slower than sorting by title. Acommunity wish has been created to explore alternative ways to restore sort-by-expiry. If this feature is important to you, please support the wish![290]
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, the fixing of the persisting highlighting when using VisualEditor find and replace during a query.[291]
Updates for technical contributors
Since 2019 theWikimedia URL Shortener athttps://w.wiki is available for all Wikimedia wikis to create short links to articles, permalinks, diffs, etc. It is available in the sidebar as "Get shortened URL". There are 30 wikis that also install an older "ShortUrl" extension. The old extension will soon be removed. This means/s/ URLs will not be advertised under article titles via HTMLclass="title-shortlink". The/s/ URLs will keep working.[292]
On Thursday, October 30, theMediaWiki Interfaces andSRE Service Operations teams began rerouting Action API traffic through a common 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.
MediaWiki Train deployments will pause for the final two weeks of 2025: 22 December and 29 December. Backport windows will also pause between Monday, 22 December 2025 and Thursday, 2 January 2026. A backport window is a scheduled time to add things like bug fixes and configuration changes. There are seven deployment trains remaining for 2025.[293]
In 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation reported that AI systems and search engines increasingly use Wikipedia content without driving users to the site, contributing to an 8% drop in human pageviews compared to 2024. After detecting bots disguised as humans, Wikimedia updated its traffic data to reflect this shift. Read more about current user trends on Wikipedia ina Diff blog post.
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
Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.
MediaWiki can now display apage indicator automatically while a page is protected. This feature is disabled by default. It can be enabled bycommunity request.[295]
Using the "Show preview" or "Show changes" buttons in the wikitext editor will now carry over certain URL parameters like 'useskin', 'uselang' and 'section'. This update also fixes an issue where, if the browser crashed while previewing an edit to a single section, saving this edit could overwrite the entire page with just that section’s content.[296][297][298]
Wikivoyage wikis can usecolored map markers in the article text. The text of these markers will now be shown in contrasting black or white color, instead of always being white. Local workarounds for the problem can be removed.[299]
The Activity tab in the Wikipedia Android app is now available for all users. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging.[300]
The Reader Growth team is launching an experiment called "Image browsing" to test how to make it easier for readers to browse and discover images on Wikipedia articles. This experiment, a mobile-only A/B test, will go live on English Wikipedia in the week of November 17 and will run for four weeks, affecting 0.05% of users on English wiki. The test launched on November 3 on Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese wikis, affecting up to 10% of users on those wikis.[301]
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example the inability to lock accounts on mobile sites has been fixed.[302]
TheJWT subject field inOAuth 2 access tokens will soon change from<user id> tomw:<identity type>:<user id>, where<identity type> is typicallyCentralAuth: (forSUL wikis) orlocal:<wiki id> (for other wikis). This is to avoid conflicts between different user ID types, and to make OAuth 2 access tokens and thesessionJwt cookie more similar. Old access tokens will still work.[304]
AREL1_45 branch for MediaWiki core and each of the extensions and skins in Wikimedia git has been created. This is the first step in the release process for MediaWiki 1.45.0, scheduled for late November 2025. If you are working on a critical bug fix or working on a new feature, you may need to take note of this change.[306]
The process for generating CirrusSearch dumps has been updated due to slowing performance. If you encounter any issues migrating to the replacement dumps, please contact the Search Platform Team for support.[307][308]
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
TheReader Experience team is experimenting withreading lists on mobile web, allowing logged-in readers with no edits to save private lists of articles for later. The experiment is running on Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias since the week of 10 November, and will begin on English Wikipedia the week of 17 November.
Users who can’t receive their email verification code during login can now get help by submitting a form on a new special page. This update is part of theAccount Security initiative. If your account has an email address, please make sure you still have access to it. When logging in from a new device or location without 2FA, you may be asked to enter a 6-digit code sent by email to finish logging in. Learn more.
As part of theParser Unification project, the Content Transform Team rolled out Parsoid as the default parser to many low-traffic Wikipedias and is preparing the next step to high traffic ones. This message is an invitation for you to opt-in to Parsoid, as described in theExtension:ParserMigration documentation, and identify any issues you might encounter with your own workflow using bots, gadgets, or user scripts. Please, let us know through the"Report Visual Bug" link in the Tools sidebar or create a phab ticket and tag theContent Transform Team in Phabricator.
Unsupported Tools: Several issues withVideo2Commons have been fixed, including filename-related upload failures, black-video imports, and retry handling. AV1 support has also been added. Ongoing work focuses on backend stability, ffmpeg errors, subtitle imports, metadata handling, and playlist uploads. To track specific tasks, check thePhabricator board.
Save the date for the next Wikimedia Hackathon happening in Milan, Italy from May 1–3, 2026. Registration will open in January 2026.Scholarship applications are currently open, and will close on November 28, 2025. If you have any questions, please emailhackathon@wikimedia.org.
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
Last week, theWikimedia Search Team recreated the "DWIM" (Do What I Mean) gadget functionality server-side, for Russian and Hebrew Wikipedias. This feature adds cross-keyboard suggestions to the standard search-box suggestions. For example, searching forcxfcnmt on Russian Wikipedia will now add suggestions forсчастье ("happiness") that the user probably intended. They plan to enable this feature for other Russian and Hebrew wikis this week.[310]
Later this week, users of the "Improved Syntax Highlighting"beta feature will have syntax highlighting available inDiscussionTools. This requires that the "Enable editing tools in source mode" preference be set.[311]
Campaign events extension – the set of tools for coordinating events and other on-wiki collaborations has now been deployed to all Wikimedia wikis. A new feature known asCollaborative contribution to help organizers and participants see the impact of activities has also been added. Join the upcominglearning session to see the new feature in action and share your feedback.
View all 24 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, the bug which stopped CodeReviewBot from working, has now been fixed.[312]
Updates for technical contributors
Users of Wikimedia API can join a usability study to help validate the new design of Wikimedia REST API sandboxes. Interested participants should fill therecruitment survey.[313]
The MediaWiki Interfaces team is deprecating XSLT stylesheets within the Action API. Support forformat=xml&xlst={stylesheet} will be removed from Wikimedia projects by the end of November, 2025. In addition, it will soon be disabled by default in MediaWiki release versions: v1.43 (LTS), v1.44, and v1.45. Support for XSLT stylesheets will be fully removed from MediaWiki v1.46 (expected to release between April and May 2026).[314]
The WDQS legacy endpoint (query-legacy-full.wikidata.org) will be decommissioned at the end of December 2025, and finally closed down on 7th January 2026. After this date, users should expect requests to query.wikidata.org that require the full graph to fail or return invalid results if they are not rewritten to use SPARQL federation. The team encourages users to ensure that tools and workflows use the supported WDQS endpoints (https://query.wikidata.org/ - Main graph orhttps://query-scholarly.wikidata.org/ - Scholarly graph). For support with migrating use cases, please review theData Access andRequest a Query pages for details and assistance on alternative access methods.
Thenew version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 17. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from July 18. It will be on all wikis from July 19 (calendar).
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be onJuly 18 at 15:00 (UTC). Seehow to join.
you can enter the information in a pop-up. You can turn on TemplateWizard in your beta feature preferences.[15]
A new version of the standard wikitext editor-modesyntax highlighter will be available as abeta feature later this week. This brings many new features and bug fixes, including right-to-left support,template folding,autocompletion, and an improved search panel. You can learn more on thehelp page.
). 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.[162].jpg)
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.[281]