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Request to enable the AI recognition of further diacritic letters
Dear Wikisource Community & Tech Experts,
I am a contributor of the
Northern Min language
and the current AI software is unable to recognize several of the diacritic letters of the pages, for example,
THIS PAGE
Index page is here
).
At present contributors of the Northern Min language are needing to manually type out this text and each page takes approximately thirty minutes to complete. This means it would take 19,500 minutes (325 hours) to type out the entire New Testament of this language (650 pages approx).
If the AI can be enhanced to correctly recognize those texts, then each page would only take 5 seconds to complete and therefore the entire New Testament could be completed in 3,250 seconds (54 minutes), thus a time saving of 99%.
The AI software only needs to recognize these additional Special Characters (the ones highlighted in
Red
are currently unrecognizable by the AI software):
Acute:
á í ú é ó
á̤ é̤ ó̤ ṳ́
Á Í Ú É Ó
Á̤ É̤ Ó̤ Ṳ́
Circumflex:
â î û ê ô
â̤ ê̤ ô̤ ṳ̂
Â Î Û Ê Ô
Â̤ Ê̤ Ô̤ Ṳ̂
Double macron:
a̿ i̿ u̿ e̿ o̿ a̤̿ e̤̿ o̤̿ ṳ̿ A̿ I̿ U̿ E̿ O̿ A̤̿ E̤̿ O̤̿ Ṳ̿
Macron:
ā ī ū ē ō
ā̤ ē̤ ō̤ ṳ̄
Ā Ī Ū Ē Ō
Ā̤ Ē̤ Ō̤ Ṳ̄
Breve:
ă ĭ ŭ ĕ ŏ
ă̤ ĕ̤ ṳ̆ ŏ̤
Ă Ĭ Ŭ Ĕ Ŏ
Ă̤ Ĕ̤ Ṳ̆ Ŏ̤
Grave:
à ì ù è ò
à̤ è̤ ṳ̀ ò̤
À Ì Ù È Ò
À̤ È̤ Ṳ̀ Ò̤
Where does Wikisource derive its AI letter recognistion software from?
Which organization is responsible for developing/updating/enhancing this AI Recognition software?
How can they be contacted on this matter?
Any feedback would be welcome. --
DaveZ123
talk
22:49, 1 January 2025 (UTC)
reply
I may be too ignorant here, but the software is optical character recognition (OCR), which I don't think uses AI. There are multiple OCR scanning solutions here at Wikisource. If you open up a page to edit (
e.g.
), then you should see a button that says "Transcribe text" which has a drop-down menu that allows you to use three different OCR tools, which will yield different results. Are all of them equally bad at transcribing Northern Min? One thing that
could
help is changing the
page's information
so that the language is
mnp
(note that only admins can do this). Unfortunately,
mnp
is not on the list currently. So I think step one is to file a bug at
phab:
asking for
mnp
to be added to the list of languages available here.
Then
change the page information on various pages to
mnp
and see if that helps with the OCR scans. If it does, then the solution is more language changes to make transcription more efficient. If it does not, then we may need to come up with another solution. —
Justin (
ko
vf
11:17, 2 January 2025 (UTC)
reply
I tried to transcribe using all three OCR Egnines (Google Cloud Vision OCR, Tesseract OCR, and Transkribus OCR). Of the three, Google Cloud Vision OCR is the most accurate and can transcribe macrons: ā ī ū ē ō Ā Ī Ū Ē Ō and also Breves: ă ĭ ŭ ĕ ŏ Ă Ĭ Ŭ Ĕ Ŏ.
However Double Macrons and diacritics with diaresis below, namely:
a̿ i̿ u̿ e̿ o̿ A̿ I̿ U̿ E̿ O̿
ā̤ ē̤ ō̤ ṳ̄ A̤̿ E̤̿ O̤̿ Ṳ̿
á̤ é̤ ó̤ ṳ́ Á̤ É̤ Ó̤ Ṳ́
ă̤ ĕ̤ ṳ̆ ŏ̤ Ă̤ Ĕ̤ Ṳ̆ Ŏ̤
à̤ è̤ ṳ̀ ò̤ À̤ È̤ Ṳ̀ Ò̤
â̤ ê̤ ô̤ ṳ̂ Â̤ Ê̤ Ô̤ Ṳ̂
a̤̿ e̤̿ o̤̿ ṳ̿ A̤̿ E̤̿ O̤̿ Ṳ̿
are still unable to be transcribed. The letters highlighted in red above are the letters that all three OCR's are currently unable to transcribe. --
DaveZ123
talk
01:57, 5 January 2025 (UTC)
reply
I have now added
Phabricator Bug Request T383001
to request "mnp" to be added to the list of language drop down options.
Phabricator Bug Request T383002
is requesting for fifty eight new letters to be added to Google OCR. --
DaveZ123
talk
02:31, 5 January 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-03
Latest
tech 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. See
the SUL3 project page
for more details and a timeline.
Updates for editors
On wikis with
PageAssessments
installed, you can now
filter search results
to pages in a given WikiProject by using the
inproject:
keyword. (These wikis: Arabic Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage, French Wikipedia, Hungarian Wikipedia, Nepali Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia)
[1]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in
Tigre
w:tig:
[2]
View all 35 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, there was a bug with updating a user's edit-count after making a rollback edit, which is now fixed.
[3]
Updates for technical contributors
Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. Starting the week of January 13, we will begin rerouting
some 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 the
MediaWiki 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 for
OAuth 1
and
OAuth 2
returned a JSON object with an integer in its
sub
field, which was incorrect (the field must always be a string). This has been fixed; the fix will be deployed to Wikimedia wikis on the week of January 13.
[4]
Many wikis currently use
Cite CSS
to render custom footnote markers in Parsoid output. Starting January 20 these rules will be disabled, but the developers ask you to
not
clean up your
MediaWiki:Common.css
until February 20 to avoid issues during the migration. Your wikis might experience some small changes to footnote markers in Visual Editor and when using experimental Parsoid read mode, but if there are changes these are expected to bring the rendering in line with the legacy parser output.
[5]
Meetings and events
The next meeting in the series of
Wikimedia Foundation Community Conversations with the Wikimedia Commons community
will take place on
January 15 at 8:00 UTC
and
at 16:00 UTC
. The topic of this call is defining the priorities in tool investment for Commons. Contributors from all wikis, especially users who are maintaining tools for Commons, are welcome to attend.
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01:42, 14 January 2025 (UTC)
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Launching! Join Us for Wiki Loves Ramadan 2025!
Dear All,
We’re happy to announce the launch of
Wiki Loves Ramadan 2025
, an annual international campaign dedicated to celebrating and preserving Islamic cultures and history through the power of Wikipedia. As an active contributor to the Local Wikipedia, you are specially invited to participate in the launch.
This year’s campaign will be launched for you to join us write, edit, and improve articles that showcase the richness and diversity of Islamic traditions, history, and culture.
Topic:
Wiki Loves Ramadan 2025 Campaign Launch
When: Jan 19, 2025
Time: 16:00 Universal Time UTC and runs throughout Ramadan (starting February 25, 2025).
Join Zoom Meeting:
Zoom meeting hosted by
Wikimedia Bangladesh
To get started, visit the
campaign page
for details, resources, and guidelines: Wiki Loves Ramadan 2025.
Add
your community here
, and organized Wiki Loves Ramadan 2025 in your local language.
Whether you’re a first-time editor or an experienced Wikipedian, your contributions matter. Together, we can ensure Islamic cultures and traditions are well-represented and accessible to all.
Feel free to invite your community and friends too. Kindly reach out if you have any questions or need support as you prepare to participate.
Let’s make Wiki Loves Ramadan 2025 a success!
For the
International Team
12:08, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
AbuseFilter
Hi, I just ran into an abuse filter while trying to blank some user talk page vandalism
[6]
[7]
. Please either blank the talk page yourself or speedy delete it (no meaningful content). I didn't ask for speedy deletion right away, because many projects never delete user talk pages.
Additionally I would suggest some changes to
Special:AbuseFilter/13
Going by the filter title, the action should just be "create" instead of "edit" (or you should change the title).
I recommend using
user_rights
instead of
user_groups
, that way you avoid false positives with crosswiki patrollers with global permissions.
If you want to keep the action "edit" instead of just page creations, I recommend adding namespace 2 and probably also 3 to the exempted name space, in order to avoid false positives like these
[8]
[9]
. Users should be allowed to blank their own user page or anything else in their own user space
[10]
[11]
Pinging @
Koavf
because you appear to be the admin who did most abuse filter changes in the last ~2 years.
Johannnes89
talk
07:22, 20 January 2025 (UTC)
reply
Johannnes89
Imagine my face while waking up to that notification
PhilBrvni
talk
09:01, 20 January 2025 (UTC)
reply
Thanks. For what it's worth, the page is deleted now. —
Justin (
ko
vf
16:39, 20 January 2025 (UTC)
reply
Done
Justin (
ko
vf
16:40, 20 January 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-04
Latest
tech 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 using
Extension: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.
[12]
On
wikis that use
the
Patrolled 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 use
filters
on Recent Changes may need to update their filter settings.
[13]
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved 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 been
fixed
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 by
DiscussionTools
, 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 ping
Trizek (WMF)
at your wiki.
[14]
The latest quarterly
Technical 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.
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01:36, 21 January 2025 (UTC)
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Universal Code of Conduct annual review: provide your comments on the UCoC and Enforcement Guidelines
Please help translate to your language.
I am writing to you to let you know the annual review period for the Universal Code of Conduct and Enforcement Guidelines is open now. You can make suggestions for changes through 3 February 2025. This is the first step of several to be taken for the annual review.
Read more information and find a conversation to join on the UCoC page on Meta
The
Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee
(U4C) is a global group dedicated to providing an equitable and consistent implementation of the UCoC. This annual review was planned and implemented by the U4C. For more information and the responsibilities of the U4C,
you may review the U4C Charter
Please share this information with other members in your community wherever else might be appropriate.
-- In cooperation with the U4C,
Keegan (WMF)
talk
01:11, 24 January 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-05
Latest
tech 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 and
13 other questions
to shape the technical direction for next year.
Updates for editors
iOS Wikipedia App users worldwide can now access a
personalized 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 in
Special:RecentChanges
and
Special:NewPages
[15]
Later this week, there will be a new warning for editors if they attempt to create a redirect that links to another redirect (a
double redirect
). The feature will recommend that they link directly to the second redirect's target page. Thanks to the user SomeRandomDeveloper for this improvement.
[16]
Wikimedia wikis allow
WebAuthn
-based second factor checks (such as hardware tokens) during login, but the feature is
fragile
and has very few users. The MediaWiki Platform team is temporarily disabling adding new WebAuthn keys, to avoid interfering with the rollout of
SUL3
(single user login version 3). Existing keys are unaffected.
[17]
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
For developers that use the
MediaWiki History dumps
: The Data Platform Engineering team has added a couple of new fields to these dumps, to support the
Temporary 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 the
mediawiki_user_history
dump, the
anonymous
field will be renamed to
is_anonymous
. The changes will take effect with the next release of the dumps in February.
[18]
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22:14, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
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new Scriptorium head
hi everyone, i just created
Template:Scriptorium Header
for the head part. kindly let me know how can we improve it further or use it here --
KuldeepBurjBhalaike
Talk
06:37, 2 February 2025 (UTC)
reply
Courtesy link to the current template:
Template:Scriptoriumhead
. I'm fine either way, but please don't abuse the
small
tag
and once we've decided on a final layout, please redirect one template to the other. Thanks
. —
Justin (
ko
vf
09:29, 2 February 2025 (UTC)
reply
thanks for the quick response @
Koavf
, i'll update the header and will redirect old template when we are ready. --
KuldeepBurjBhalaike
Talk
09:53, 2 February 2025 (UTC)
reply
update: i have redirected the old template to new template
KuldeepBurjBhalaike
Talk
12:13, 16 February 2025 (UTC)
reply
Global ban proposal for Shāntián Tàiláng
Hello. This is to notify the community that there is an ongoing global ban proposal for
User:Shāntián Tàiláng
who has been active on this wiki. You are invited to participate at
m:Requests for comment/Global ban for Shāntián Tàiláng
Wüstenspringmaus
talk
12:52, 2 February 2025 (UTC)
reply
Reminder: first part of the annual UCoC review closes soon
Please help translate to your language.
This is a reminder that the first phase of the annual review period for the Universal Code of Conduct and Enforcement Guidelines will be closing soon. You can make suggestions for changes through
the end of day
, 3 February 2025. This is the first step of several to be taken for the annual review.
Read more information and find a conversation to join on the UCoC page on Meta
. After review of the feedback, proposals for updated text will be published on Meta in March for another round of community review.
Please share this information with other members in your community wherever else might be appropriate.
-- In cooperation with the U4C,
Keegan (WMF)
talk
00:49, 3 February 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-06
Latest
tech 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.
[19]
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.
[20]
You can now also insert
tags using a new toolbar button.
[21]
Thanks to user stjn for these improvements.
Help is needed to ensure the
citation generator
works properly on each wiki.
(1) Administrators should update the local versions of the page
MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json
to include entries for
preprint
standard
, and
dataset
; Here are example diffs to replicate
for 'preprint'
and
for '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 updates
for 'preprint'
and
for 'standard' and 'dataset'
. The new fields that may need to be supported are
archiveID
identifier
repository
organization
repositoryLocation
committee
, and
versionNumber
[22]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in
Central Kanuri
w:knc:
[23]
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, the
OCR (optical character recognition) tool
used for Wikisource now supports a new language, Church Slavonic.
[24]
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00:08, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2025-07
Latest
tech 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 published
a draft of their recommendations
for the Wikimedia Foundation's Product and Technology department. They have recommended focusing on
mobile experiences
, particularly contributions. They request community
feedback 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 at
T385346
[25]
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 out
the project page
for more information.
Template editors who use TemplateStyles can now customize output for users with specific accessibility needs by using accessibility related media queries (
prefers-reduced-motion
prefers-reduced-transparency
prefers-contrast
, and
forced-colors
). Thanks to user Bawolff for these improvements.
[26]
View all 22 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved 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.
[27]
Updates for technical contributors
Wikidata
now 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.
[28]
The function
getDescription
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.
[29]
As part of the RESTBase deprecation
effort
, 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, and
a migration example
is available. The MediaWiki Interfaces team
can be contacted
for any questions.
[30]
In depth
The latest quarterly
Language 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 latest
Chart 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.
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00:11, 11 February 2025 (UTC)
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Template:New texs
Hello everyone! Sometime ago I found the
Template:New texts
that was created years ago, but never used in this project. Would the community believe that it would be interesting to add this template in the main page? Inspired by @
Koavf
:, I've experimented a little at the
Sandbox
, but I bet that someone here could create a more interesting visual for this template in the main page. Thanks,
Erick Soares3
talk
22:17, 11 February 2025 (UTC)
reply
Vandalism
Good evening! Please block the user
Drochun
. Vandalism.
1nter pares
talk
19:13, 13 February 2025 (UTC)
reply
Courtesy link:
User:Drochun
. —
Justin (
ko
vf
19:19, 13 February 2025 (UTC)
reply
Done
Justin (
ko
vf
19:20, 13 February 2025 (UTC)
reply
Thank you!
1nter pares
talk
19:23, 13 February 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-08
Latest
tech 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 the
Special: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 at
Special:CommunityConfiguration
. To learn more about this feature, please read
the Diff post
, have a look
at the documentation
, or contact
the 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 get
a new design
. This change was extensively tested as a Beta feature and is the last step of
talk pages improvements
[31]
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.
[32]
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 to
modernize 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 can
help to update the localized versions
. Thanks to user Msz2001 for these improvements.
A new filter has been added to the
Special: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.
[33]
Non-administrators can now check which pages are able to be deleted using the
Special:Nuke
tool. Thanks to user MolecularPilot for this and the previous improvements.
[34]
View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, a bug was fixed in the configuration for the AV1 video file format, which enables these files to play again.
[35]
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 the
Parsoid/Parser Unification
project page.
[36]
[37]
Developers of tools that run on-wiki should note that
mw.Uri
is deprecated. Tools requiring
mw.Uri
must explicitly declare
mediawiki.Uri
as a ResourceLoader dependency, and should migrate to the browser native
URL
API soon.
[38]
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21:16, 17 February 2025 (UTC)
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Upcoming Language Community Meeting (Feb 28th, 14:00 UTC) and Newsletter
Hello everyone!
We’re excited to announce that the next
Language Community Meeting
is happening soon,
February 28th at 14:00 UTC
! If you’d like to join, simply sign up on the
wiki page
This is a participant-driven meeting where we share updates on language-related projects, discuss technical challenges in language wikis, and collaborate on solutions. In our last meeting, we covered topics like developing language keyboards, creating the Moore Wikipedia, and updates from the language support track at Wiki Indaba.
Got a topic to share?
Whether it’s a technical update from your project, a challenge you need help with, or a request for interpretation support, we’d love to hear from you! Feel free to
reply to this message
or add agenda items to the document
here
Also, we wanted to highlight that the sixth edition of the Language & Internationalization newsletter (January 2025) is available here:
Wikimedia Language and Product Localization/Newsletter/2025/January
. This newsletter provides updates from the October–December 2024 quarter on new feature development, improvements in various language-related technical projects and support efforts, details about community meetings, and ideas for contributing to projects. To stay updated, you can subscribe to the newsletter on its wiki page:
Wikimedia Language and Product Localization/Newsletter
We look forward to your ideas and participation at the language community meeting, see you there!
MediaWiki message delivery
08:29, 22 February 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-09
Latest
tech 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 the
Babel feature
creates categories using
Special:CommunityConfiguration/Babel
. They can rename language categories, choose whether they should be auto-created, and adjust other settings.
[39]
The
wikimedia.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 as
wikibooks.org
, now support dark mode when a reader is using that system setting.
[40]
[41]
[42]
One new wiki has been created: a Wiktionary in
Santali
wikt:sat:
[43]
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved 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.
[44]
Meetings and events
The next Language Community Meeting is happening soon, February 28th at
14:00 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, simply
sign up on the wiki page
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00:41, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2025-10
Latest
tech 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 the
Advanced mobile contributions
setting.
[45]
Interface administrators can now help to remove the deprecated Cite CSS code matching "
mw-ref
" from their local
MediaWiki:Common.css
. The list of wikis in need of cleanup, and the code to remove,
can be found with this global search
and in
this example
, and you can learn more about how to help on the
CSS migration project page
. The Cite footnote markers ("
[1]
") are now rendered by
Parsoid
, 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.
[46]
In contrast, transcluding a file description page (e.g.
{{:File:MediaWiki.png}}
) will now restrict edits to the page.
[47]
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,
[48]
and respects cascading protection.
[49]
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.
[50]
The
previously 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 on
Group0
wikis this week. See
the 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.
[51]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in
Sylheti
w:syl:
[52]
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, a bug was fixed with loading images in very old versions of the Firefox browser on mobile.
[53]
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
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02:30, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
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Universal Code of Conduct annual review: proposed changes are available for comment
Please help translate to your language.
I am writing to you to let you know that
proposed changes
to the
Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC) Enforcement Guidelines
and
Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) Charter
are open for review.
You can provide feedback on suggested changes
through the
end of day
on Tuesday, 18 March 2025. This is the second step in the annual review process, the final step will be community voting on the proposed changes.
Read more information and find relevant links about the process on the UCoC annual review page on Meta
The
Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee
(U4C) is a global group dedicated to providing an equitable and consistent implementation of the UCoC. This annual review was planned and implemented by the U4C. For more information and the responsibilities of the U4C,
you may review the U4C Charter
Please share this information with other members in your community wherever else might be appropriate.
-- In cooperation with the U4C,
Keegan (WMF)
18:51, 7 March 2025 (UTC)
reply
Wikisource:Administrators
backlogs
-jkb-
Ooswesthoesbes
: This wiki may or may not need bureaucrats while not very big, so in order to keep them, please clear the backlogs and consider more nominations while I am open to this role with past experience on
Commons
. Or collective resignations of all bureaucrats? Either way, please act on.--
Jusjih
talk
03:54, 8 March 2025 (UTC)
reply
Thanks for the ping. I'd be more than happy if you join the team, so be free to nominate yourself. --
Ooswesthoesbes
talk
06:50, 8 March 2025 (UTC)
reply
You are very welcome and I just nominated myself per your encouragement.--
Jusjih
talk
17:40, 8 March 2025 (UTC)
reply
Please archive finished ones as many closed cases clutter the page.--
Jusjih
talk
02:33, 19 March 2025 (UTC)
reply
Done myself as the newest bureaucrat.--
Jusjih
talk
00:33, 22 March 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-11
Latest
tech 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 the
SUL3 project
which aims to improve how our unified login works, and to keep it compatible with ongoing changes to the web-browsers we use.
[54]
[55]
The Wikipedia Apps Team is inviting interested users to help improve Wikipedia’s offline and limited internet use. After discussions in
Afrika Baraza
and the last
ESEAP 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 email
aramadan@wikimedia.org
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 19. This is planned at
14:00 UTC
. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
In depth
The latest quarterly
Growth 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 can
read more details about this change
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23:09, 10 March 2025 (UTC)
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FYI: Wikisource and Wikidata together: lessons from the Wikisource Conference
Justin (
ko
vf
07:50, 12 March 2025 (UTC)
reply
Gaelic pages to import from enws
Hi there! Could someone with importer rights take in
en:Index:Gille dubh ciar-dhubh.pdf
and its pages through
Special:Import
? Coming here because I believe there's no gaelic ws to host it. We're at some point in the near future going to delete that as out of scope (not in english), but we're waiting to see if first we can bring it where it belongs. (I'm an admin on enws.) Cheers, —
Alien
3 3
12:58, 12 March 2025 (UTC)
reply
Done
Justin (
ko
vf
17:16, 12 March 2025 (UTC)
reply
Also
en:Index:Ioram na truaighe, le Issachari M'Aula do Thighearna Assinn.pdf
, please. Same situation. --
Beardo
talk
04:14, 13 March 2025 (UTC)
reply
Done
and proposed for deletion at en.ws. —
Justin (
ko
vf
20:49, 13 March 2025 (UTC)
reply
Your wiki will be in read-only soon
Read this message in another language
Please help translate to your language
The
Wikimedia Foundation
will switch the traffic between its data centers. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster.
All traffic will switch on
19 March
. The switch will start at
14:00 UTC
Unfortunately, because of some limitations in
MediaWiki
, all editing must stop while the switch is made. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.
A banner will be displayed on all wikis 30 minutes before this operation happens. This banner will remain visible until the end of the operation.
You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.
You will not be able to edit for up to an hour on Wednesday 19 March 2025.
If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.
Other effects
Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
We expect the code deployments to happen as any other week. However, some case-by-case code freezes could punctually happen if the operation require them afterwards.
GitLab
will be unavailable for about 90 minutes.
This project may be postponed if necessary. You can
read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org
. Any changes will be announced in the schedule.
Please share this information with your community.
MediaWiki message delivery
23:14, 14 March 2025 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2025-12
Latest
tech 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 performs
a 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 can
read 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 on
March 19 at 14:00 UTC
Updates for editors
The
improved Content Translation tool dashboard
is now available in
10 Wikipedias
and will be available for all Wikipedias
soon
. With
the unified dashboard
, desktop users can now: Translate new sections of an article; Discover and access topic-based
article suggestion filters
(initially available only for mobile device users); Discover and access the
Community-defined lists
filter, also known as "Collections", from wiki-projects and campaigns.
On Wikimedia Commons, a
new 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 the
Multiblocks
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 the
project talk page
Starting March 25, the Editing team will test a new feature for Edit Check at
12 Wikipedias
Multi-Check
. Half of the newcomers on these wikis will see all
Reference 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 documented
on Phabricator
[56]
The
Global 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 the
listing of existing translations and documentation
to check if their language needs updating or creation.
The
GlobalPreferences
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.
[57]
View all 26 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, the Wikipedia App for Android had a bug fixed for when a user is browsing and searching in multiple languages.
[58]
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 issues
please report them
. See the linked task for details, screenshots, and documentation on how to fix any affected gadgets.
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
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23:48, 17 March 2025 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2025-13
Latest
tech 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 Wikimedia Foundation is seeking your feedback on the
drafts of the objectives and key results that will shape the Foundation's Product and Technology priorities
for the next fiscal year (starting in July). The objectives are broad high-level areas, and the key-results are measurable ways to track the success of their objectives. Please share your feedback on the talkpage, in any language, ideally before the end of April.
Updates for editors
The
CampaignEvents extension
will be released to multiple wikis (see
deployment 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
, and
Invitation 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 the
extension 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 in
Event Registration
, as part of the
CampaignEvents
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 by
requesting 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 customized
MediaWiki: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.
[59]
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.
[60]
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
VisualEditor has introduced a
new 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 be
shared in the task
Developers who use the
mw.Api
JavaScript library, can now identify the tool using it with the
userAgent
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.
[61]
[62]
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
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22:42, 24 March 2025 (UTC)
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Special:Contributions/ဇော်ဦးငြိမ်း
Does anyone understand the language being used by that user?--
Jusjih
talk
02:39, 28 March 2025 (UTC)
reply
This is Burmese, which I do not understand, but we recently had Burmese graduate to its own subdomain, so I will try to inform this user using DuckDuckGo's translation feature. —
Justin (
ko
vf
02:49, 28 March 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-14
Latest
tech 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 new
Edit 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 messaging
Trizek (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.
View all 35 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
Starting on March 31st, the MediaWiki Interfaces team will begin a limited release of generated OpenAPI specs and a SwaggerUI-based sandbox experience for
MediaWiki 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 the
on 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 to
share 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.
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
In depth
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 serving
maps.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 a
datacenter 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 of
extensive work
by two developers on porting the last component of the maps stack over to
kubernetes
, 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.
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00:05, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
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Wikidata and Sister Projects: an online event
Hello everyone, I’m writing to announce an upcoming event called
Wikidata and Sister Projects
that will be a mini online conference to highlight the different ways Wikidata can be connected and integrated with the other WM projects.
We are currently looking for session ideas and speakers for our program and wanted to reach out in case there were any editors here that might have a cool idea for a session proposal (sessions can be found on the Event
discussion page
).
This event would like to showcase examples of the relationship between Wikisource and Wikidata, which could be connecting source texts with their Wikidata item, the use if metadata in infoboxes, indexing editions and translations, as some examples..
The event is scheduled between
May 29 - June 1st, 2025
. If you have any questions about the event, would like more information or have a session idea to propose, please feel free to get in touch by replying to this post or writing on the event page or on my
talk page
. Thanks for reading, -
Danny Benjafield (WMDE)
talk
07:38, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
reply
Final proposed modifications to the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines and U4C Charter now posted
The proposed modifications to the
Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines
and the U4C Charter
are now on Meta-wiki for community notice
in advance of the voting period. This final draft was developed from the previous two rounds of community review. Community members will be able to vote on these modifications starting on 17 April 2025. The vote will close on 1 May 2025, and results will be announced no later than 12 May 2025. The U4C election period, starting with a call for candidates, will open immediately following the announcement of the review results. More information will be posted on
the wiki page for the election
soon.
Please be advised that this process will require more messages to be sent here over the next two months.
The
Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C)
is a global group dedicated to providing an equitable and consistent implementation of the UCoC. This annual review was planned and implemented by the U4C. For more information and the responsibilities of the U4C, you may
review the U4C Charter
Please share this message with members of your community so they can participate as well.
-- In cooperation with the U4C,
Keegan (WMF)
talk
02:05, 4 April 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-15
Latest
tech 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
From now on,
interface admins
and
centralnotice admins
are technically required to enable
two-factor authentication
before they can use their privileges. In the future this might be expanded to more groups with advanced user-rights.
[63]
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
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 the
2.0 overview documentation
, which includes guidance related to a few of the breaking changes such as
font-size
line-height
, and
size-icon
The results of the
Developer 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.
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
Meetings and events
The
2025 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 a
visa
or
e-visa
to enter the country.
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18:52, 7 April 2025 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2025-16
Latest
tech 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.
[64]
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.
[65]
[66]
Updates for editors
The Wikimedia Foundation are working on a system called
Edge Uniques
which will enable
A/B testing
, help protect against
Distributed 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 password
emailed to their account
. It is recommended that you
check
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.
[67]
"Are you interested in taking a short survey to improve tools used for reviewing or reverting edits on your Wiki?" This question will be
asked at 7 wikis starting next week
, on Recent Changes and Watchlist pages. The
Moderator 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.
On April 15, the full Wikidata graph will no longer be supported on
query.wikidata.org
. After this date, scholarly articles will be available through
query-scholarly.wikidata.org
, while the rest of the data hosted on Wikidata will be available through the
query.wikidata.org
endpoint. This is part of the scheduled split of the Wikidata Graph, which was
announced in September 2024
. More information is
available on Wikidata
The latest quarterly
Wikimedia Apps Newsletter
is now available. It covers updates, experiments, and improvements made to the Wikipedia mobile apps.
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
The latest quarterly
Technical 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.
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
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00:24, 15 April 2025 (UTC)
reply
Vote now on the revised UCoC Enforcement Guidelines and U4C Charter
The voting period for the revisions to the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines ("UCoC EG") and the UCoC's Coordinating Committee Charter is open now through the end of 1 May (UTC) (
find in your time zone
).
Read the information on how to participate and read over the proposal before voting
on the UCoC page on Meta-wiki.
The
Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C)
is a global group dedicated to providing an equitable and consistent implementation of the UCoC. This annual review of the EG and Charter was planned and implemented by the U4C. Further information will be provided in the coming months about the review of the UCoC itself. For more information and the responsibilities of the U4C, you may
review the U4C Charter
Please share this message with members of your community so they can participate as well.
In cooperation with the U4C --
Keegan (WMF)
talk
00:35, 17 April 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-17
Latest
tech 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 with
Dagbani Wikipedia
since April 15. It is the first project that will be able to call
functions 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 of
a stable and global function
, rather than via a local template.
[68]
A new type of lint error has been created:
Empty headings
documentation
). The
Linter 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.
[69]
View all 37 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
Following its publication on HuggingFace, the "Structured Contents" dataset, developed by Wikimedia Enterprise, is
now 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 overall
Structured Contents project
, and about the
first 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 discuss
Peacock check
, which is the latest
Edit 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. The
meeting will be on April 28, 2025
at
18:00–19:00 UTC
and hosted on Zoom.
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21:00, 21 April 2025 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2025-18
Latest
tech 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 on
multiple wikis
, including Bengali, Japanese, and Korean Wikipedias, will have access to the
CampaignEvents 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 as
requested by a community
View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
The release of the next major version of
Codex
, 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 of
breaking changes
and minor
visual changes
. Instructions on handling the breaking and visual changes are documented on
this page
. Pre-release testing is reported in
T386298
, with post-release issues tracked in
T392379
and
T392390
Users of
Wiki Replicas
will notice that the database views of
ipblocks
ipblocks_ipindex
, and
ipblocks_compat
are
now deprecated
. Users can query the
block
and
block_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.
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
In depth
The latest quarterly
Language and Internationalization Newsletter
is now available. This edition includes an overview of the improved
Content Translation Dashboard Tool
support for new languages
highlights from the Wiki Loves Ramadan campaign
results from the Language Onboarding Experiment
, an analysis of topic diversity in articles, and information on upcoming community meetings and events.
Meetings and events
The
Let's Connect Learning Clinic
will take place on
April 29 at 14:30 UTC
. This edition will focus on "Understanding and Navigating Conflict in Wikimedia Projects". You can
register now
to attend.
The
2025 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.
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19:31, 28 April 2025 (UTC)
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Vote on proposed modifications to the UCoC Enforcement Guidelines and U4C Charter
The voting period for the revisions to the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines and U4C Charter closes on 1 May 2025 at 23:59 UTC (
find in your time zone
).
Read the information on how to participate and read over the proposal before voting
on the UCoC page on Meta-wiki.
The
Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C)
is a global group dedicated to providing an equitable and consistent implementation of the UCoC. This annual review was planned and implemented by the U4C. For more information and the responsibilities of the U4C, you may
review the U4C Charter
Please share this message with members of your community in your language, as appropriate, so they can participate as well.
In cooperation with the U4C --
Keegan (WMF)
talk
03:41, 29 April 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-19
Latest
tech 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 Wikimedia Foundation has shared the latest draft update to their
annual plan
for next year (July 2025–June 2026). This includes an
executive summary
(also on
Diff
), details about the three main
goals
Infrastructure
Volunteer Support
, and
Effectiveness
),
global trends
, and the
budget
and
financial model
. Feedback and questions are welcome on the
talk page
until the end of May.
Updates for editors
For wikis that have the
CampaignEvents extension enabled
, two new feature improvements have been released:
Admins can now choose which namespaces are permitted for
Event Registration
via
Community 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 now
transclude
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.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
Developers who use the
moment
library in gadgets and user scripts should revise their code to use alternatives like the
Intl
library or the new
mediawiki.DateFormatter
library. The
moment
library has been deprecated and will begin to log messages in the developer console. You can see a global search for current uses, and
ask 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
[70]
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
In depth
The latest
Chart 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.
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00:14, 6 May 2025 (UTC)
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We will be enabling the new Charts extension on your wiki soon!
(Apologies for posting in English)
Hi all! We have good news to share regarding the ongoing problem with graphs and charts affecting all wikis that use them.
As you probably know, the
old Graph extension
was disabled in 2023
due to security reasons
. We’ve worked in these two years to find a solution that could replace the old extension, and provide a safer and better solution to users who wanted to showcase graphs and charts in their articles. We therefore developed the
Charts extension
, which will be replacing the old Graph extension and potentially also the
EasyTimeline extension
After successfully deploying the extension on Italian, Swedish, and Hebrew Wikipedia, as well as on MediaWiki.org, as part of a pilot phase, we are now happy to announce that we are moving forward with the next phase of deployment, which will also include your wiki.
The deployment will happen in batches, and will start from
May 6
. Please, consult
our page on MediaWiki.org
to discover when the new Charts extension will be deployed on your wiki. You can also
consult the documentation
about the extension on MediaWiki.org.
If you have questions, need clarifications, or just want to express your opinion about it, please refer to the
project’s talk page on Mediawiki.org
, or ping me directly under this thread. If you encounter issues using Charts once it gets enabled on your wiki, please report it on the
talk page
or at
Phabricator
Thank you in advance! --
User:Sannita (WMF)
talk
15:07, 6 May 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-20
Latest
tech 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 a
QR 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 called
Edge Uniques
, which will enable
A/B testing
, help protect against
distributed 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 has
previously 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 the
talk page
Starting May 19, 2025, Event organisers in wikis with the
CampaignEvents extension
enabled can use
Event 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 at
Special:CommunityConfiguration/CampaignEvents
The Wikipedia project now has a Wikipedia in
Nupe
w:nup:
). This is a language primarily spoken in the North Central region of Nigeria. Speakers of this language are invited to contribute to
new Wikipedia
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
Developers can now access pre-parsed Dutch Wikipedia, amongst others (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese) through the
Structured 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 is
scheduled to be turned off
on June 7, 2025.
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
In depth
The
IPv6 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 out
this blog post
for an in-depth look at the journey to IPv6.
Meetings and events
The 2nd edition of 2025 of
Afrika Baraza
, a virtual platform for African Wikimedians to connect, will take place on
May 15 at 17:00 UTC
. This edition will focus on discussions regarding
Wikimedia Annual planning and progress
The
MENA Connect Community Call
, a virtual meeting for
MENA
Wikimedians to connect, will take place on
May 17 at 17:00 UTC
. You can
register now
to attend.
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22:37, 12 May 2025 (UTC)
reply
FYI: Wikisource: Preserving the Past for the Future
Justin (
ko
vf
22:34, 13 May 2025 (UTC)
reply
Call for Candidates for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C)
The results of voting on the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines and Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) Charter is
available on Meta-wiki
You may now
submit your candidacy to serve on the U4C
through 29 May 2025 at 12:00 UTC. Information about
eligibility, process, and the timeline are on Meta-wiki
. Voting on candidates will open on 1 June 2025 and run for two weeks, closing on 15 June 2025 at 12:00 UTC.
If you have any questions, you can ask on
the discussion page for the election
. -- in cooperation with the U4C,
Keegan (WMF)
talk
22:07, 15 May 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-21
Latest
tech 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 are
invited 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
and
checkusers
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.
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. Please
contact the team
if you have concerns. Administrators can test the new user interface now on your own wiki by browsing to
Special:Block?usecodex=1
, and can test the full multiblocks functionality
on 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 the
help page
for more information.
[71]
Later this week, the
Special:SpecialPages
listing of almost all special pages will be updated with a new design. This page has been
redesigned
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 be
previewed
at Beta Cluster now, and feedback shared in the task.
[72]
The
Chart extension
is being enabled on more wikis. For a detailed list of when the extension will be enabled on your wiki, please read the
deployment timeline
Wikifunctions
will be deployed on May 27 on five Wiktionaries:
Hausa
Igbo
Bengali
Malayalam
, and
Dhivehi/Maldivian
. This is the second batch of deployment planned for the project. After deployment, the projects will be able to call
functions 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 of
a stable and global function
, rather than via a local template.
Later this week, the Wikimedia Foundation will publish a hub for
experiments
. This is to showcase and get user feedback on product experiments. The experiments help the Wikimedia movement
understand new users
, how they interact with the internet and how it could affect the Wikimedia movement. Some examples are
generated video
, the
Wikipedia Roblox speedrun game
and
the Discord bot
View all 29 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, there was a bug with creating an account using the API, which has now been fixed.
[73]
Updates for technical contributors
Gadgets and user scripts that interact with
Special:Block
may need to be updated to work with the new
manage blocks interface
. Please review the
developer 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 the
talk page
[74]
The
mw.title
object allows you to get information about a specific wiki page in the
Lua
programming language. Starting this week, a new property will be added to the object, named
isDisambiguationPage
. This property allows you to check if a page is a disambiguation page, without the need to write a custom function.
[75]
User script developers can use a
new reverse proxy tool
to load javascript and css from
gitlab.wikimedia.org
with
mw.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 on
gitlab.wikimedia.org
without a separate copy-and-paste step to publish scripts to a Wikimedia wiki for integration and acceptance testing. See
Tool:Gitlab-content on Wikitech
for more information.
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
Meetings and events
The 12th edition of
Wiki Workshop 2025
, a forum that brings together researchers that explore all aspects of Wikimedia projects, will be held virtually on 21-22 May. Researchers can
register now
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23:12, 19 May 2025 (UTC)
reply
RfC ongoing regarding Abstract Wikipedia (and your project)
(Apologies for posting in English, if this is not your first language)
Hello all! We opened a discussion on Meta about a very delicate issue for the development of
Abstract Wikipedia
: where to store the abstract content that will be developed through functions from Wikifunctions and data from Wikidata. Since some of the hypothesis involve your project, we wanted to hear your thoughts too.
We want to make the decision process clear: we do not yet know which option we want to use, which is why we are consulting here. We will take the arguments from the Wikimedia communities into account, and we want to consult with the different communities and hear arguments that will help us with the decision. The decision will be made and communicated after the consultation period by the Foundation.
You can read the various hypothesis and have your say at
Abstract Wikipedia/Location of Abstract Content
. Thank you in advance! --
Sannita (WMF)
talk
15:27, 22 May 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-22
Latest
tech 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 of
Abstract 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 at
Abstract 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 except
the largest 20
, people using the mobile visual editor will have
additional 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 is
scheduled
to happen in June.
The
#ifexist
parser function will no longer register a link to its target page. This will improve the usefulness of
Special: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.
[76]
This week, the Moderator Tools team will launch
a 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.
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.
The
Newsletter extension
that is available on MediaWiki.org allows the creation of
various 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.
[77]
View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
The previously deprecated
ipblocks
views in
Wiki Replicas
will be removed in the beginning of June. Users are encouraged to query the new
block
and
block_target
views instead.
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
Meetings and events
Wikidata and Sister Projects
is a multi-day online event that will focus on how Wikidata is integrated to Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects. The event runs from May 29 – June 1. You can
read the Program schedule
and
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20:04, 26 May 2025 (UTC)
reply
Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees 2025 Selection & Call for Questions
More languages
Please help translate to your language
Dear all,
This year, the term of 2 (two) Community- and Affiliate-selected Trustees on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees will come to an end [1]. The Board invites the whole movement to participate in this year’s selection process and vote to fill those seats.
The Elections Committee will oversee this process with support from Foundation staff [2]. The Governance Committee, composed of trustees who are not candidates in the 2025 community-and-affiliate-selected trustee selection process (Raju Narisetti, Shani Evenstein Sigalov, Lorenzo Losa, Kathy Collins, Victoria Doronina and Esra’a Al Shafei) [3], is tasked with providing Board oversight for the 2025 trustee selection process and for keeping the Board informed. More details on the roles of the Elections Committee, Board, and staff are here [4].
Here are the key planned dates:
May 22 – June 5: Announcement (this communication) and call for questions period [6]
June 17 – July 1, 2025: Call for candidates
July 2025: If needed, affiliates vote to shortlist candidates if more than 10 apply [5]
August 2025: Campaign period
August – September 2025: Two-week community voting period
October – November 2025: Background check of selected candidates
Board’s Meeting in December 2025: New trustees seated
Learn more about the 2025 selection process - including the detailed timeline, the candidacy process, the campaign rules, and the voter eligibility criteria - on this Meta-wiki page
[link]
Call for Questions
In each selection process, the community has the opportunity to submit questions for the Board of Trustees candidates to answer. The Election Committee selects questions from the list developed by the community for the candidates to answer. Candidates must answer all the required questions in the application in order to be eligible; otherwise their application will be disqualified. This year, the Election Committee will select 5 questions for the candidates to answer. The selected questions may be a combination of what’s been submitted from the community, if they’re alike or related.
[link]
Election Volunteers
Another way to be involved with the 2025 selection process is to be an Election Volunteer. Election Volunteers are a bridge between the Elections Committee and their respective community. They help ensure their community is represented and mobilize them to vote. Learn more about the program and how to join on this Meta-wiki page
[link].
Thank you!
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
Best regards,
Victoria Doronina
Board Liaison to the Elections Committee
Governance Committee
MediaWiki message delivery
talk
03:08, 28 May 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-23
Latest
tech 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
Chart 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 legacy
Graph extension
Updates for editors
It is now easier to configure automatic citations for your wiki within the visual editor's
citation generator
. Administrators can now set a default template by using the
_default
key in the local
MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json
page (
example diff
). Setting this default will also help to future-proof your existing configurations when
new 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.
[78]
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
Starting the week of June 2, bots logging in using
action=login
or
action=clientlogin
will fail more often. This is because of stronger protections against suspicious logins. Bots using
bot passwords
or using a loginless authentication method such as
OAuth
are not affected. If your bot is not using one of those, you should update it; using
action=login
without a bot password was deprecated
in 2016
. For most bots, this only requires changing what password the bot uses.
[79]
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 is
async
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.
[80]
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
Meetings and events
Scholarship applications to participate in the
GLAM 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 can
apply here
. Scholarship applications close on June 7th.
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23:54, 2 June 2025 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2025-24
Latest
tech 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
Trust and Safety Product team
is finalizing work needed to roll out
temporary 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 the
talk page
, and
join a CEE Catch Up
this Tuesday.
Updates for editors
The
watchlist 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. The
preferences
also allow you to set different default watch periods for editing existing pages, pages you create, and when using rollback.
[81]
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 changes
on
Diff
. It is possible to opt out of these changes
in user preferences
("Show discussion activity").
[82]
[83]
Users with specific extended rights (including administrators, bureaucrats, checkusers, oversighters, and stewards) can now have IP addresses of all temporary accounts
revealed automatically
during time-limited periods where they need to combat high-speed account-hopping vandalism. This feature was requested by stewards.
[84]
This week, the Moderator Tools and Machine Learning teams will continue the rollout of
a 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 include
the rest of the Wikipedias in this project
[85]
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
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 are
available on Phabricator
Lua modules now have access to the name of a page's associated thumbnail image, and on
some wikis
to the WikiProject assessment information. This is possible using two new properties on
mw.title objects
, named
pageImage
and
pageAssessments
[86]
[87]
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
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01:16, 10 June 2025 (UTC)
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Vote now in the 2025 U4C Election
Please help translate to your language
Eligible voters are asked to participate in the 2025
Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee
election. More information–including an eligibility check, voting process information, candidate information, and a link to the vote–are available on Meta at the
2025 Election information page
. The vote closes on 17 June 2025 at
12:00 UTC
Please vote if your account is eligible. Results will be available by 1 July 2025. -- In cooperation with the U4C,
Keegan (WMF)
talk
23:01, 13 June 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-25
Latest
tech 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 can
nominate your favorite tools
for the sixth edition of the
Coolest Tool Award
. Nominations are anonymous and will be open until June 25. You can re-use the survey to nominate multiple tools.
View all 33 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
In depth
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 can
read more about their plans to evolve the APIs in this Techblog post
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23:38, 16 June 2025 (UTC)
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Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees 2025 - Call for Candidates
More languages
Please help translate to your language
Hello all,
The
call for candidates for the 2025 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees selection is now open
from June 17, 2025 – July 2, 2025 at 11:59 UTC [1]. The Board of Trustees oversees the Wikimedia Foundation's work, and each Trustee serves a three-year term [2]. This is a volunteer position.
This year, the Wikimedia community will vote in late August through September 2025 to fill two (2) seats on the Foundation Board. Could you – or someone you know – be a good fit to join the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees? [3]
Learn more about what it takes to stand for these leadership positions and how to submit your candidacy on
this Meta-wiki page
or encourage someone else to run in this year's election.
Best regards,
Abhishek Suryawanshi
Chair of the Elections Committee
On behalf of the Elections Committee and Governance Committee
[1]
[2]
[3]
MediaWiki message delivery
talk
17:44, 17 June 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-26
Latest
tech 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 of
a 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 include
the rest of the Wikipedias in this project
[88]
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.
[89]
Later this week, the Editing team will release
Multi Check
to all Wikipedias (except English Wikipedia). This feature shows multiple
Reference 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%).
[90]
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 in
the 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 were
resolved last week
. For example, a bug was fixed that had caused pages to scroll upwards when text near the top was selected.
[91]
Updates for technical contributors
Editors can now use Lua modules to filter and transform tabular data for use with
Extension: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
[92]
The
all_links
variable in
AbuseFilter
is now renamed to
new_links
for consistency with other variables. Old usages will still continue to work.
[93]
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
In depth
The latest quarterly
Growth newsletter
is available. It includes: the recent updates for the "Add a Link" Task, two new Newcomer Engagement Features, and updates to Community Configuration.
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23:21, 23 June 2025 (UTC)
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Sister Projects Task Force reviews Wikispore and Wikinews
Dear Wikimedia Community,
The
Community Affairs Committee (CAC)
of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees assigned
the Sister Projects Task Force (SPTF)
to update and implement a procedure for assessing the lifecycle of Sister Projects – wiki
projects supported by Wikimedia Foundation (WMF)
A vision of relevant, accessible, and impactful free knowledge has always guided the Wikimedia Movement. As the ecosystem of Wikimedia projects continues to evolve, it is crucial that we periodically review existing projects to ensure they still align with our goals and community capacity.
Despite their noble intent, some projects may no longer effectively serve their original purpose.
Reviewing such projects is not about giving up – it's about responsible stewardship of shared resources
. Volunteer time, staff support, infrastructure, and community attention are finite, and the non-technical costs tend to grow significantly as our ecosystem has entered a different age of the internet than the one we were founded in. Supporting inactive projects or projects that didn't meet our ambitions can unintentionally divert these resources from areas with more potential impact.
Moreover, maintaining projects that no longer reflect the quality and reliability of the Wikimedia name stands for, involves a reputational risk. An abandoned or less reliable project affects trust in the Wikimedia movement.
Lastly,
failing to sunset or reimagine projects that are no longer working can make it much harder to start new ones
. When the community feels bound to every past decision – no matter how outdated – we risk stagnation. A healthy ecosystem must allow for evolution, adaptation, and, when necessary, letting go. If we create the expectation that every project must exist indefinitely, we limit our ability to experiment and innovate.
Because of this, SPTF reviewed two requests concerning the lifecycle of the Sister Projects to work through and demonstrate the review process. We chose Wikispore as a case study for a possible new Sister Project opening and Wikinews as a case study for a review of an existing project. Preliminary findings were discussed with the CAC, and a community consultation on both proposals was recommended.
Wikispore
The
application to consider Wikispore
was submitted in 2019. SPTF decided to review this request in more depth because rather than being concentrated on a specific topic, as most of the proposals for the new Sister Projects are, Wikispore has the potential to nurture multiple start-up Sister Projects.
After careful consideration, the SPTF has decided
not to recommend
Wikispore as a Wikimedia Sister Project. Considering the current activity level, the current arrangement allows
better flexibility
and experimentation while WMF provides core infrastructural support.
We acknowledge the initiative's potential and seek community input on what would constitute a sufficient level of activity and engagement to reconsider its status in the future.
As part of the process, we shared the decision with the Wikispore community and invited one of its leaders, Pharos, to an SPTF meeting.
Currently, we especially invite feedback on measurable criteria indicating the project's readiness, such as contributor numbers, content volume, and sustained community support. This would clarify the criteria sufficient for opening a new Sister Project, including possible future Wikispore re-application. However, the numbers will always be a guide because any number can be gamed.
Wikinews
We chose to review Wikinews among existing Sister Projects because it is the one for which we have observed the highest level of concern in multiple ways.
Since the SPTF was convened in 2023, its members have asked for the community's opinions during conferences and community calls about Sister Projects that did not fulfil their promise in the Wikimedia movement.
[1]
[2]
[3]
Wikinews was the leading candidate for an evaluation because people from multiple language communities proposed it. Additionally, by most measures, it is the least active Sister Project, with the greatest drop in activity over the years.
While the Language Committee routinely opens and closes language versions of the Sister Projects in small languages, there has never been a valid proposal to close Wikipedia in major languages or any project in English. This is not true for Wikinews, where there was a proposal to close English Wikinews, which gained some traction but did not result in any action
[4]
[5], see section 5
as well as a draft proposal to close all languages of Wikinews
[6]
Initial metrics
compiled by WMF staff also support the community's concerns about Wikinews.
Based on this report, SPTF recommends a community reevaluation of Wikinews. We conclude that its current structure and activity levels are the lowest among the existing sister projects. SPTF also recommends pausing the opening of new language editions while the consultation runs.
SPTF brings this analysis to a discussion and welcomes discussions of alternative outcomes, including potential restructuring efforts or integration with other Wikimedia initiatives.
Options
mentioned so far (which might be applied to just low-activity languages or all languages) include but are not limited to:
Restructure how Wikinews works and is linked to other current events efforts on the projects,
Merge the content of Wikinews into the relevant language Wikipedias, possibly in a new namespace,
Merge content into compatibly licensed external projects,
Archive Wikinews projects.
Your insights and perspectives are invaluable in shaping the future of these projects. We encourage all interested community members to share their thoughts on the relevant discussion pages or through other designated feedback channels.
Feedback and next steps
We'd be grateful if you want to take part in a conversation on the future of these projects and the review process. We are setting up two different project pages:
Public consultation about Wikispore
and
Public consultation about Wikinews
. Please participate between 27 June 2025 and 27 July 2025, after which we will summarize the discussion to move forward. You can write in your own language.
I will also host a community conversation 16th July Wednesday 11.00 UTC and 17th July Thursday 17.00 UTC (call links to follow shortly) and will be around at Wikimania for more discussions.
--
Victoria
on behalf of the Sister Project Task Force,
20:57, 27 June 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-27
Latest
tech 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
CampaignEvents extension
has been enabled on all Wikipedias. 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
, and
Invitation List
. To request the extension for your wiki, visit the
Deployment information page
Updates for editors
AbuseFilter maintainers can now
match against IP reputation data
in
AbuseFilters
. 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.
[94]
Hidden content that is within
collapsible 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.
[95]
[96]
A new feature, called
Favourite 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 a
community wishlist focus area
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, a bug was fixed that had caused some Notifications to be sent multiple times.
[97]
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
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23:40, 30 June 2025 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2025-28
Latest
tech 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, and
Repository
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 think
on the talk page
Users of the Wikipedia Android app in some languages can now play the new
trivia 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.
[98]
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 the
Tabbed Browsing project page
Bureaucrats on Wikimedia wikis can now use
Special:VerifyOATHForUser
to check if users have enabled
two-factor authentication
[99]
A new feature related to
Template Recall and Discovery
will be deployed later this week to all Wikimedia projects: a
template 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 community
through 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.
[100]
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
As part of
MediaWiki 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 at
Manual:Notifications
, information about migration in
T388663
and details on deprecated hooks in
T389624
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
Meetings and events
WikidataCon 2025
, the conference dedicated to Wikidata is now open for
session proposals
and for
registration
. 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".
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00:05, 8 July 2025 (UTC)
reply
Help with Creating an Index Page on Wikisource
Dear all,
I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I need some help. I just created an Index page on Wikisource for a Mon (mnw) page. However, it shows the following error: "Error: Invalid interval."
Could anyone help me understand what this means or how to fix it?
This is the link of the page:
Thank you in advance!
Htawmonzel
talk
13:19, 12 July 2025 (UTC)
reply
Htawmonzel
: I guess it’s because MediaWiki cannot parse the PDF correctly – notice how the cover image is a link instead of an image. I don’t know why MediaWiki cannot parse it, but since PDF parsing is not Wikisource-specific, you may have better chances for an answer at
c:Commons:Village pump/Technical
. —
Tacsipacsi
talk
17:10, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
reply
Htawmonzel
: I have fixed it. Enjoy your index.
Draco flavus
talk
21:11, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
reply
How did you do it? I don’t see any edits by you. —
Tacsipacsi
talk
21:16, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
reply
The trick is to purge the pages (the
index -page
, the
File-page
(if the file is hosted on Commons - then both the page on Wikisource AND the page on Commons)). You can accomplish this by chaining the address of the page in the browser with
?action=purge
or
&action=purge
. Do this twice.
Draco flavus
talk
15:53, 20 July 2025 (UTC)
reply
Additionally, there are user gadgets and scripts to add purging to one's interface. I have a couple and it makes purging very simple. —
Justin (
ko
vf
16:28, 20 July 2025 (UTC)
reply
CropTool
Bonjour à tous. Je corrige en ce moment un livre en Toki Pona (
Index:Toki soweli tan jan Beatrix Potter.pdf
) avec de nombreuses illustrations. Ma question est la suivante : comment faire apparaître l'option "CropTool" ? Sur fr.wikisource, cette option m'est pourtant disponible ! Bien cordialement
*j*jac
talk
18:03, 12 July 2025 (UTC)
reply
Français:
Pardon, je parle un petit francais... je suis de l'etat unis... :/ Vous devriez
utiliser CropTool sur Wikimedia Commons
. Si vous avez besoin d'aide, je peux faire le recadrage. Voir
c:Commons:CropTool
English:
Sorry, I only speak a little French. I'm from the United States. You should
use CropTool on Wikimedia Commons
. If you need help, I can do the cropping. See
c:Commons:CropTool
*j*jac
:. —
Justin (
ko
vf
22:59, 13 July 2025 (UTC)
reply
Bonjour et grand merci pour l'info. Ca marche !
Hello and thank you very much for the info. It works!
*j*jac
talk
08:15, 15 July 2025 (UTC)
reply
Koavf
: bonjour.
Dans
toki soweli tan jan Beatrix Potter/soweli Nija
, il y a des retours à la ligne que je ne comprends pas. Comment les supprimer (There are line breaks that I don't understand. How do I remove them) ?
Cordialement, --
*j*jac
talk
12:18, 15 July 2025 (UTC)
reply
English:
You can use
, either by importing the script or just copying and pasting it to
User:*j*jac/common.js
Français:
Vous pouvez utiliser
, soit en important le script, soit simplement en le copiant et en le collant dans
User :*j*jac/common.js
Justin (
ko
vf
17:29, 15 July 2025 (UTC)
reply
Koavf
Thanks!
Wikidata Item and Property labels soon displayed in Wiki Watchlist/Recent Changes
(Apologies for posting in English, you can help by translating into your language)
Hello everyone, the
Wikidata For Wikimedia Projects
team is excited to announce an upcoming change in how Wikidata edit changelogs are displayed in your
Watchlists
and
Recent Changes
lists. If an edit is made on Wikidata that affects a page in another Wikimedia Project, the changelog will contain some information about the nature of the edit. This can include a QID (or Q-number), a PID (or P-number) and a value (which can be text, numbers, dates, or also QID or PID’s). Confused by these terms? See the
Wikidata:Glossary
for further explanations.
The upcoming change is scheduled for
17.07.2025
, between
1300 - 1500 UTC
The change will display the label (item name) alongside any QID or PIDs, as seen in the image below:
These changes will only be visible if you have Wikidata edits enabled in your User Preferences for Watchlists and Recent Changes, or have the active filter ‘Wikidata edits’ checkbox toggled on, directly on the Watchlist and Recent Changes pages.
Your bot and gadget may be affected! There are thousands of bots, gadgets and user-scripts and whilst we have researched potential effects to many of them, we cannot guarantee there won’t be some that are broken or affected by this change.
Further information and context about this change, including how your bot may be affected can be found on this
project task page
. We welcome your questions and feedback, please write to us on this dedicated
Talk page
Thank you, -
Danny Benjafield (WMDE)
on behalf of the Wikidata For Wikimedia Projects Team.
MediaWiki message delivery
talk
12:46, 14 July 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-29
Latest
tech 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 to
Template 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 community
through the Community Wishlist
[101]
[102]
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, the request to add Malayalam fonts in the
Wikisource Book Export Tool
was resolved and now, the rendering of Malayalam letters in exported Wikisource books are accurate.
[103]
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
In depth
Developers, designers, and all Wikimedians are invited to
submit a project idea
for the Wikimania Hackathon 2025. Read
this Diff blog post
for more details.
Meetings and events
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. Submit
your scholarship application
and
program 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!
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20:09, 14 July 2025 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2025-30
Latest
tech 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 the
Content 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.
[104]
Administrators can now limit "Add a Link" to newcomers. The
"Add a Link"
Structured Task
helps 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 the
Community Configuration
feature.
View all 29 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
For AbuseFilter editors on
some 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 the
ORES/AbuseFilter variables
documentation.
The
Beta Cluster
wikis have
been moved
from
beta.wmflabs.org
to
beta.wmcloud.org
. Users may need to update URLs in any tools, or in their password managers. Any related issues can be
reported in the task
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
Meetings and events
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.
[105]
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23:42, 21 July 2025 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2025-31
Latest
tech 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. Please
read the latest update
, and if you have ideas, please
submit a wish
on the topic.
Updates for editors
The Wikimedia Commons community has decided to block
cross-wiki uploads
to Wikimedia Commons, for all users without autoconfirmed rights on that wiki, starting on August 16. This is because of
widespread 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 the
message
or give feedback on the message text. Please also update your local help pages to explain this restriction.
[106]
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 named
MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer-temp
[107]
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
Meetings and events
Wikimania 2025
will run from August 6–9. The
program 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, please
for a free virtual ticket. For example, you may be interested in technical sessions such as:
Temporary Accounts: Enhancing privacy for our unregistered editors
Building a Sustainable Future for Wikimedia Contributors
A dozen visions for wikitext!
Coordinate Across Stakeholders with the Product and Technology Advisory Council
The
MediaWiki 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.
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Upcoming Deployment of the CampaignEvents Extension
Hello everyone,
(Apologies for posting in English if English is not your first language. Please help translate to your language.)
The Campaigns Product Team is planning a global deployment of the
CampaignEvents extension
to all Wikisource, including this Wikisource, during the
week of August 25th
This extension is designed to help organizers plan and manage events, WikiProjects, and other on-wiki collaborations - and to make these efforts more discoverable.
The three main features of this extension are:
Event Registration
: A simple way to sign up for events on the wiki.
Collaboration List
: A global list of events and a local list of WikiProjects, accessible at
Special:AllEvents
Invitation Lists
: A tool to help organizers find editors who might want to join, based on their past contributions.
Note
: The extension comes with a new user right called
"Event Organizer"
, which will be managed by administrators on this Wikisource. Organizer tools like Event Registration and Invitation Lists will only work if someone is granted this right. The Collaboration List is available to everyone immediately after deployment.
The extension is already live on several wikis, including
all Wikipedia, Meta, Wikidata
, and more (
See the full deployment list
If you have any questions, concerns, or feedback, please feel free to share them on the
extension talkpage
. We’d love to hear from you before the rollout.
Thank you!
Udehb-WMF
talk
15:40, 31 July 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-32
Latest
tech 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 the
User 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 in
your global preferences
, and later this week it will be available in local preferences.
[108]
Everybody is invited to share comments on
Collaborative Contributions
, a project recently launched by the
Connection 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 the
project talk page
[109]
Administrators can now define the default block duration for temporary accounts. To do that, they need to create a page named
MediaWiki:Ipb-default-expiry-temporary-account
and use a value defined in
MediaWiki: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.
[110]
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
Gadgets can now include
.vue
files. This makes it easier to develop modern user interfaces using
Vue.js
, in particular using
Codex
, 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, an
API module
now exists to load Codex icons.
[111]
[112]
Module developers can now use a
Lua 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 to
watch the demo video
, read more about
translatable modules
to understand how it works, refer to Meta-Wiki's
Module:User Wikimedia project
for example usage, and
share 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.
[113]
Developers of external tools that connect to Wikimedia pages must set a user-agent that complies with
the user-agent policy
. This policy will start to be more strongly enforced in August because of external crawlers that are
overusing
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 the
Parsoid/Parser Unification
project page.
[114]
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
Meetings and events
Wikimania 2025
will run from August 6–9. The
program 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, please
for a free virtual ticket. For example, you may be interested in technical sessions such as:
Wikimedia’s knowledge infrastructure in a changing internet: Establishing sustainable pathways for content reuse
Wikifunctions is coming soon to a wiki near you!
Shaping the Future of Wikipedia’s Reader Experience
Making Wikipedia More Readable: What Comes Next
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03:40, 5 August 2025 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2025-33
Latest
tech 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 includes
its keyboard shortcuts
in the tooltips for its buttons. This will help to improve the discoverability of this feature.
[115]
The
Product and Technology Advisory Council
published a set of
proposed experiments
the Wikimedia Foundation can try to improve communication with community. Feedback on the proposals are welcomed until August 22 on
this talk page
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.
[116]
Editors on some wikis will see a new toggle for "Group results by page" on watchlist, related changes, and recent changes pages. This is
an 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.
[117]
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
The multiwiki datasets of
Unicode data
have been moved to
Category: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 at
the talkpage
[118]
Lua code can add warnings when something is wrong, by using the
mw.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.
[119]
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
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23:29, 11 August 2025 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2025-34
Latest
tech 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
[120]
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.
[121]
An A/A test to measure the baseline for reader retention was launched 12 August using
Experimentation 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.
[122]
Five new wikis have been created:
a Wikisource in
Tagalog
s:tl:
[123]
a Wikisource in
Madurese
s:mad:
[124]
a Wikipedia in
Rakhine
w:rki:
[125]
a Wikibooks in
Minangkabau
b:min:
[126]
a Wiktionary in
Standard Moroccan Amazigh
wikt:zgh:
[127]
View all 46 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
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Subscribe or unsubscribe
MediaWiki message delivery
00:37, 19 August 2025 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2025-35
Latest
tech 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
Template authors can now use additional CSS properties, since the CSS sanitizer used by
TemplateStyles
was updated. For example:
width: fit-content
ruby-align
; relative units such as
lh
; and custom strings in
list-style-type
. These improvements are a
Community Wishlist wish
[128]
[129]
[130]
[131]
[132]
[133]
[134]
[135]
[136]
[137]
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.
[138]
Administrators can now access the
Special:BlockedExternalDomains
page from the
Special:CommunityConfiguration
list page. This makes it easier to find.
[139]
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.
[140]
[141]
One new wiki has been created: a Wiktionary in
Betawi
wikt:bew:
[142]
View all 39 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
Two fields of the
recentchanges database table
are being removed.
rc_new
and
rc_type
are being removed in favor of
rc_source
. Queries to these older fields will start to fail starting this week and developers should use
rc_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.
[143]
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
In depth
The latest quarterly
Language 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 next
Language Community Meeting
is happening soon, August 29th at
15:00 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.
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00:12, 26 August 2025 (UTC)
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Temporary accounts will be rolled out soon
Hello, we are the Wikimedia Foundation
Product Safety and Integrity
team. We would like to announce that
we plan to enable
temporary accounts
for this wiki in the week of September 1
Temporary accounts are successfully live on 30 wikis, including many large ones like German, Japanese, and French. The change they bring is especially relevant to logged-out editors, who this feature is designed to protect. But it is also relevant to community members like mentors, patrollers, and admins – anyone who reverts edits, blocks users, or otherwise interacts with logged-out editors as part of keeping the wikis safe and accurate.
Why we are building temporary accounts
Our wikis should be safer to edit by default for logged-out editors. Temporary accounts allow people to continue editing the wikis without creating an account, while avoiding publicly tying their edits to their IP address. We believe this is in the best interest of our logged-out editors, who make valuable contributions to the wikis and who may later create accounts and grow our community of editors, admins, and other roles. Even though the wikis do warn logged-out editors that their IP address will be associated with their edit, many people may not understand what an IP address is, or that it could be used to connect them to other information about them in ways they might not expect.
Additionally, our moderation software and tools rely too heavily on network origin (IP addresses) to identify users and patterns of activity, especially as IP addresses themselves are becoming less stable as identifiers. Temporary accounts allow for more precise interactions with logged-out editors, including more precise blocks, and can help limit how often we unintentionally end up blocking good-faith users who use the same IP addresses as bad-faith users.
How temporary accounts work
Any time a logged-out user publishes an edit on this wiki, a cookie will be set in this user's browser, and a temporary account tied with this cookie will be automatically created. This account's name will follow the pattern:
~2025-12345-67
(a tilde, current year, a number). On pages like Recent Changes or page history, this name will be displayed. The cookie will expire 90 days after its creation. As long as it exists, all edits made from this device will be attributed to this temporary account. It will be the same account even if the IP address changes, unless the user clears their cookies or uses a different device or web browser. A record of the IP address used at the time of each edit will be stored for 90 days after the edit. However, only some logged-in users will be able to see it.
What does this mean for different groups of users?
For logged-out editors
This increases privacy: currently, if you do not use a registered account to edit, then everybody can see the IP address for the edits you made, even after 90 days. That will no longer be possible on this wiki.
If you use a temporary account to edit from different locations in the last 90 days (for example at home and at a coffee shop), the edit history and the IP addresses for all those locations will now be recorded together, for the same temporary account. Users who
meet the relevant requirements
will be able to view this data. If this creates any personal security concerns for you, please contact talktohumanrights at wikimedia.org for advice.
For community members interacting with logged-out editors
A temporary account is uniquely linked to a device. In comparison, an IP address can be shared with different devices and people (for example, different people at school or at work might have the same IP address).
Compared to the current situation, it will be safer to assume that a temporary user's talk page belongs to only one person, and messages left there will be read by them. As you can see in the screenshot, temporary account users will receive notifications. It will also be possible to thank them for their edits, ping them in discussions, and invite them to get more involved in the community.
For users who use IP address data to moderate and maintain the wiki
For patrollers
who track persistent abusers, investigate violations of policies, etc.: Users who
meet the requirements
will be able to reveal temporary users' IP addresses and all contributions made by temporary accounts from a specific IP address or range (
Special:IPContributions
). They will also have access to useful information about the IP addresses thanks to the
IP Info
feature. Many other pieces of software have been built or adjusted to work with temporary accounts, including AbuseFilter, global blocks, Global User Contributions, and more. (For information for volunteer developers on how to update the code of your tools – see the last part of the message.)
For admins blocking logged-out editors
It will be possible to block many abusers by just blocking their temporary accounts. A blocked person won't be able to create new temporary accounts quickly if the admin selects the
autoblock
option.
It will still be possible to block an IP address or IP range.
Temporary accounts will not be retroactively applied to contributions made before the deployment. On Special:Contributions, you will be able to see existing IP user contributions, but not new contributions made by temporary accounts on that IP address. Instead, you should use Special:IPContributions for this.
Our requests for you, and next steps
If you know of any tools, bots, gadgets etc. using data about IP addresses or being available for logged-out users, you may want to test if they work on
testwiki
or
test2wiki
. If you are a volunteer developer,
read our documentation for developers
, and in particular, the section on
how your code might need to be updated
If you want to test the temporary account experience, for example just to check what it feels like, go to testwiki or test2wiki and edit without logging in.
Tell us if you know of any difficulties that need to be addressed. We will try to help, and if we are not able, we will consider the available options.
Look at our
previous message
about requirements for users without extended rights who may need access to IP addresses.
To learn more about the project, check out
our FAQ
– you will find many useful answers there. You may also
look at the updates
(we have just posted one) and
subscribe to our new newsletter
. If you'd like to talk to me (Szymon) off-wiki, you will find me on Discord and Telegram. Thank you!
NKohli (WMF)
SGrabarczuk (WMF)
21:36, 26 August 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-36
Latest
tech 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 in
T402601
, or to share their list with
Trizek_(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
The
CampaignEvents 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
, and
Invitation List
. To request the extension for your wiki, visit the Deployment information page.
[144]
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.
[145]
On September 3rd, 2025 we will increase the sampling percentages of our
group by toggle experiment
of the
Special:RecentChanges
Special:Watchlist
, and
Special: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.
[146]
[147]
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.
View all 37 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
In depth
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 is
a newsletter
to learn more.
The latest
Readers 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.
Meetings and events
Spotlight on some Wikimania 2025 Sessions:
Identifying AI-generated text by searching for ISBNs whose checksums fail: Mathias Schindler of WMDE
shared tools to help communities search for these
La durabilité du mouvement Wikimedia face aux défis actuels et futurs
: This session explored how Wikimedia can stay a trusted source of knowledge in the age of generative AI, information overload, and disinformation.
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20:50, 1 September 2025 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2025-37
Latest
tech 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, please
tell us in this task
, or
contact the team
Updates for editors
Later this week, users of the "Improved Syntax Highlighting"
beta feature
will be able to use a
linting tool
to see errors or other potential problems in wikitext in real time. See the
help page for more information
[148]
When browsing a wiki (like
en.wikipedia.org
), the software responds in one of two ways: a desktop page, or a redirect to a mobile version on an "m" domain (like
en.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.
[149]
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.
[150]
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.
[151]
[152]
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.
[153]
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
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01:14, 9 September 2025 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2025-38
Latest
tech 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
tag
will now automatically display with columns in Vector 2022 when readers are using its 'standard' settings for text-size and page-width.
[154]
Starting in the week of October 6, on
small wikis
and
medium wikis
that have the
CampaignEvents extension
enabled, all autoconfirmed users will be able to use
Event Registration
as an organizer. No changes will be made for
large 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.
Users that search using regular expressions (regex) can now use additional features including:
for the
intitle:
keyword:
metacharacters
for start-of-line (
) and end-of-line (
) anchors
[155]
for both
intitle:
and
insource:
keywords: shorthand
character classes
for digits (
\d
), whitespace (
\s
), and word characters (
\w
); and
escape codes
for line feed (
\r
), newline (
\n
), tab (
\t
), and unicode (e.g.
\uHHHH
).
[156]
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.
[157]
All wikis will be read-only
for a few minutes on September 24. This is planned at
15:00 UTC
. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests which happen twice a year. You can
read more about the background and details of this process on the Diff blog
View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved 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.
[158]
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 to
join an upcoming discovery interview
, or
leave feedback onwiki
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.
[159]
The new
Unicode 17.0
version has been released. The
datasets on Commons
for the
Module: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 the
Wikimedia Enterprise
Structured Contents endpoints can now access
Parsed Tables
. The new Parsed Tables feature extracts and represents Wikipedia tables in structured JSON. This improves machine accessibility as part of the
Structured Contents initiative
. Structured Contents output is freely available through the
On-demand API
, or through Wikimedia Cloud Services.
dataset of English Wikipedia biographical information
from
Wikimedia 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).
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
Meetings and events
Scholarship applications
for Wikimania 2026 in Paris, France, are open until October 31.
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17:06, 15 September 2025 (UTC)
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Server switch - Your wiki will be read-only for a short time soon
Read this message in another language
Please help translate to your language
The
Wikimedia Foundation
will switch the traffic between its data centers. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster.
All traffic will switch on
24 September
. The switch will start at
15:00 UTC
Unfortunately, because of some limitations in
MediaWiki
, all editing must stop while the switch is made. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.
A banner will be displayed on all wikis 30 minutes before this operation happens. This banner will remain visible until the end of the operation.
You can contribute to the
translation or proofreading
of this banner text.
You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.
You will not be able to edit for up to an hour on Wednesday 24 September 2025.
If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.
Other effects
Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
We expect the code deployments to happen as any other week. However, some case-by-case code freezes could punctually happen if the operation require them afterwards.
GitLab
will be unavailable for about 90 minutes.
This project may be postponed if necessary. You can
read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org
. Any changes will be announced in the schedule.
Please share this information with your community.
Trizek (WMF)
Discussion
15:41, 18 September 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-39
Latest
tech 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 scheduled
datacenter 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 can
read more about the process on the Diff blog
Updates for editors
Editors of
60 more Wiktionaries
will soon be able to call
functions 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 other
65 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 new
parser function
has been added:
{{#contentmodel}}
. Template editors and admins can use it to get the localized or canonical name of the
content model
of a specific page. The function makes it easier to create and edit system messages, such as
MediaWiki:editinginterface
, even when you switch types of pages, like wiki, JavaScript, CSS or JSON page.
[160]
Adding or editing a
DISPLAYTITLE
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 in
this ticket
Beta users of the Wikipedia Android app can now try the redesigned
Activity 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.
View all 12 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
In depth
Wikifunctions users can now import many essential facts involving
geo-coordinates
quantities
and
time
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 in
this video
and Wikifunctions'
August 1 newsletter
(for quantities) and
August 22 newsletter
(for geo-coordinates).
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22:55, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2025-40
Latest
tech 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 to
Phabricator
. 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.
[161]
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 this
in the latest update
or you can consult the
current documentation on MediaWiki
As announced
on Diff blog
, the production trial of the
hCaptcha
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 existing
CAPTCHA
(FancyCaptcha). The goal with the trial is to better block bots while also improving usability and accessibility for users who encounter CAPTCHA challenges.
The
CampaignEvents
extension has been
deployed
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 the
event organizer right
Sub-referencing
, a new feature to re-use references with different details has been released to German Wikipedia. You can
test the feature
on testwiki or
on betawiki
as well. Please share your thoughts on
using templates in sub-references
or
volunteer to become a pilot wiki
On wikis using the
Mentorship
system, communities can now opt experienced editors out of Mentorship through
Special: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.
[162]
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 are
invited 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 of
multiblocks
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 with
sp-contributions-blocked-notice
will be removed and replaced with
those prefixed with
blocked-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.
[163]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikiquote in
Malay
q:ms:
[164]
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, the
User Info Card
now displays currently active global lock/blocks.
[165]
Updates for technical contributors
Later this week, editors using Lua modules will be able to use the
mw.title.newBatch
function to look up the existence of up to 25 pages at once, in a way that only increases the
expensive function
count once.
A new
Unsupported Tools Working Group
has been formed as part of ongoing efforts to collectively determine technical work priorities, similar to the
Product & 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.
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
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20:52, 29 September 2025 (UTC)
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Upcoming Dark Mode user interface rollout for anonymous Wikimedia sites users
Hello Wikimedians,
Apologies if this message is not in your language. Please help translate to your language.
The
Reader Experience team
will launch the Dark mode feature for anonymous users on all Wikimedia sites, including yours, on October 29, 2025.
Dark mode
is an option that allows users to view pages in light-coloured text, and icons on a dark background. Once it is available for anonymous users, they can enable it when using various devices. More information on ways to enable it can be found on
this page
Given many pages are still not compatible with dark mode this will be an opt-in feature and not automatically apply to pages.
Dark mode requires modifications to content pages and templates, and since our initial launch
in July 2024
, we have been working with communities and helping them prepare for dark mode. Before the rollout, it is essential that template authors and technical contributors test dark mode and read
this page
to learn how to make pages Dark mode-ready and address any compatibility issues found in templates.
We will fix most color compatibility issues only on the most-viewed pages on projects with over 5 million monthly page views. Technical contributors with an account should opt into dark mode currently using preferences or settings and test pages and seek help before the release to ensure everything complies before the enablement.
If you have any questions or need help, please
contact the Reader Experience team
for support.
Thank you!
UOzurumba (WMF)
02:08, 30 September 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-41
Latest
tech 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 (like
en.wikipedia.org
), instead of via a redirect to an "m" domain (like
en.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.
[166]
New
date filters
creationdate:
and
lasteditdate:
, 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.
[167]
Wikifunctions
now supports rich text in embedded calls across the 150 wikis where it's enabled. To showcase this, the team created a
Latin declination table
that Wiktionary editors can use to automatically generate noun forms, producing clear, formatted results — see an
example output
. If you need any help or have any feedback, please
contact the Wikifunctions Team
[168]
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.
[169]
View all 34 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, there was a problem downloading pdf files last week and that has been resolved.
[170]
Updates for technical contributors
The field
rev_sha1
in the revision database table is being removed in favor of
content_sha1
in the content database table. See
the announcement
for more information.
The
Reader Experience team
will roll out
Dark 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 to
learn 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 on
this talk page
before the enablement.
[171]
Starting on Monday, October 6, API endpoints under the
rest.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 the
Service Ops team board
[172]
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
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17:23, 6 October 2025 (UTC)
reply
Have your say: vote for the 2025 Board of Trustees
Hello all,
The voting period for the
2025 Board of Trustees election
is now open. Candidates are running for two (2) seats on the Board.
To check your voter eligibility, please visit the
voter eligibility page
Learn more about them by
reading their application statements and watch their candidacy videos
When you are ready, go to the
SecurePoll voting page to vote
The vote is open from October 8 at 00:00 UTC to October 22 at 23:59 UTC.
Best regards,
Abhishek Suryawanshi
Chair, Elections Committee
MediaWiki message delivery
talk
04:48, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
reply
Norwegian Wikisource 10000+
Hi
The Norwegian community has reached 10300 published titles. Could an admin please move us up to the 10000+ category on the main page?
Øystein Tvede
talk
13:00, 11 October 2025 (UTC)
reply
Øystein Tvede
Gjort. Godt jobba! 🥳
Jon Harald Søby
talk
23:01, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
reply
Takk!
Øystein Tvede
talk
10:14, 14 October 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-42
Latest
tech 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 for
Special: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 the
Account 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 at
Special: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.
[173]
This week, users at wikis where talk page
Usability Improvements
are already available by default (everywhere
except
the 12 wikis listed in
T379264
) 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 can
learn more about this change
[174]
Users who have not
verified 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.
[175]
[176]
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved 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.
[177]
Updates for technical contributors
The Unsupported Tools Working Group has chosen
Video2Commons
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
Detailed code updates later this week:
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18:59, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
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Help us decide the name of the new Abstract Wikipedia project
Hello. Please help pick a name for the new Abstract Wikipedia wiki project. This project will be a wiki that will enable users to combine functions from
Wikifunctions
and data from Wikidata in order to generate natural language sentences in any supported languages. These sentences can then be used by any Wikipedia (or elsewhere).
There will be two rounds of voting, each followed by legal review of candidates, with votes beginning on 20 October and 17 November 2025. Our goal is to have a final project name selected on mid-December 2025. If you would like to participate, then
please learn more and vote now
at meta-wiki.
Thank you!
--
User:Sannita (WMF)
talk
11:43, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-43
Latest
tech 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.
[178]
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, there was a broken link from the GlobalContributions interface message to the XTools GlobalContributions page which has now been fixed.
[179]
Updates for technical contributors
The work to reroute all traffic to API endpoints under the
rest.php
route through a common API gateway is now complete. If any issues are observed, please file a phabricator ticket to the
Service 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.
[180]
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
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19:36, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2025-44
Latest
tech 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 can
read more on the project page
Autoconfirmed users on
small
and
medium wikis
with the CampaignEvents extension can now use
Event 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 were
resolved 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.
[181]
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 the
Special:RestSandbox
page. Please report any issues to the MediaWiki Interfaces team board, or join the discussion on the
project launch
page.
[182]
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 the
REST Sandbox
. See the
MediaWiki REST API Deprecation
page for more detailed information about the API deprecation policies and procedures.
A dedicated
changelog 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, please
join 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 from
Q130635582
. 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.
[183]
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
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19:31, 27 October 2025 (UTC)
reply
Seeking volunteers to join several of the movement’s committees
Each year, typically from October through December, several of the movement’s committees seek new volunteers.
Read more about the committees on their Meta-wiki pages:
Affiliations Committee (AffCom)
Ombuds commission (OC)
Case Review Committee (CRC)
Applications for the committees open on October 30, 2025. Applications for the Affiliations Committee, Ombuds commission and the Case Review Committee close on December 11, 2025. Learn how to apply by
visiting the appointment page on Meta-wiki
. Post to the talk page or email cst
wikimedia.org with any questions you may have.
For the Committee Support team,
MKaur (WMF)
14:13, 30 October 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-45
Latest
tech 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 that
Special: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).
[184]
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.
[185]
Scribunto modules can now be used to
generate 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.
[186]
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.
[187]
Users with large watchlists have long faced timeouts when editing
Special: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. A
community wish
has been created to explore alternative ways to restore sort-by-expiry. If this feature is important to you, please support the wish!
[188]
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, the fixing of the persisting highlighting when using VisualEditor find and replace during a query.
[189]
Updates for technical contributors
Since 2019 the
Wikimedia URL Shortener
at
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 HTML
class="title-shortlink"
. The
/s/
URLs will keep working.
[190]
On Thursday, October 30, the
MediaWiki Interfaces
and
SRE 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 the
Service 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.
[191]
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
In depth
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 in
a Diff blog post
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19:34, 3 November 2025 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2025-46
Latest
tech 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.
Starting November 12, users will see a change in the
appearance of talk pages
on
some Wikipedias
. Almost
all wikis
have received this design change;
English Wikipedia
will get these changes later. You can read more
on
Diff
. Users can opt out of these changes
in their user preferences
in "Show discussion activity".
[192]
MediaWiki can now display a
page indicator
automatically while a page is protected. This feature is disabled by default. It can be enabled by
community request
[193]
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.
[194]
[195]
[196]
Wikivoyage wikis can use
colored 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.
[197]
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.
[198]
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.
[199]
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example the inability to lock accounts on mobile sites has been fixed.
[200]
Updates for technical contributors
Nominations are open on Wikitech
for new
Toolforge standards committee
members. The committee oversees the Toolforge
Right to fork policy
and
Abandoned tool policy
among other duties. Nominations will remain open through 2025-11-28.
The
JWT issuer field
in
OAuth 2 access tokens
for
SUL wikis
has been changed to
. Old access tokens will still work.
[201]
The
JWT subject field
in
OAuth 2 access tokens
will soon change from
to
mw:
, where
is typically
CentralAuth:
(for
SUL wikis
) or
local:
(for other wikis). This is to avoid conflicts between different user ID types, and to make OAuth 2 access tokens and the
sessionJwt
cookie more similar. Old access tokens will still work.
[202]
MediaWiki's block messages (
blockedtext
blockedtext-partial
autoblockedtext
systemblockedtext
blockedtext-tempuser
autoblockedtext-tempuser
) now support additional parameters indicating whether the user is blocked from editing their own user talk page
$9
or emailing other users
$10
[203]
REL1_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.
[204]
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.
[205]
[206]
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
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and posted by
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20:38, 10 November 2025 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2025-47
Latest
tech 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
Reader Experience team
is experimenting with
reading 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 the
Account 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.
One new wiki has been created: a Wikisource in
Minangkabau
s:min:
[207]
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
As part of the
Parser 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 the
Extension: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 the
Content Transform Team in Phabricator
Unsupported Tools: Several issues with
Video2Commons
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 the
Phabricator board
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
Meetings and events
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 email
hackathon@wikimedia.org
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17:26, 17 November 2025 (UTC)
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Reminder: Help us decide the name of the new Abstract Wikipedia project
Hello. Reminder: Please help to choose name for the new Abstract Wikipedia wiki project. The finalist vote starts today. The finalists for the name are:
Abstract Wikipedia, Multilingual Wikipedia, Wikiabstracts, Wikigenerator, Proto-Wiki
. If you would like to participate, then
please learn more and vote now
at meta-wiki.
Thank you!
--
User:Sannita (WMF)
talk
14:22, 20 November 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-48
Latest
tech 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, the
Wikimedia 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 for
cxfcnmt
on Russian Wikipedia will now add suggestions for
счастье
("happiness") that the user probably intended. They plan to enable this feature for other Russian and Hebrew wikis this week.
[208]
Later this week, users of the "Improved Syntax Highlighting"
beta feature
will have syntax highlighting available in
DiscussionTools
. This requires that the "Enable editing tools in source mode" preference be set.
[209]
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 as
Collaborative contribution
to help organizers and participants see the impact of activities has also been added. Join the upcoming
learning session
to see the new feature in action and share your feedback.
View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, the bug which stopped CodeReviewBot from working, has now been fixed.
[210]
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 the
recruitment survey
[211]
The MediaWiki Interfaces team is deprecating XSLT stylesheets within the Action API. Support for
format=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).
[212]
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 (
- Main graph or
- Scholarly graph). For support with migrating use cases, please review the
Data Access
and
Request a Query
pages for details and assistance on alternative access methods.
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
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15:56, 24 November 2025 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2025-49
Latest
tech 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 Year in Review 2025 will be available on December 2 for users of iOS and Android Wikipedia apps, featuring new personalized insights, updated reading highlights, and refreshed designs. Learn more on the review's
project page
The Growth team is working on improving the text and presentation of the Verification Email sent to new users to make them more welcoming, useful and informative. Some new text have been drafted for A/B testing and you can help by translating them. See
Phabricator
Add a link
will now be deployed at Japanese, Urdu and Chinese Wikipedias on December 2. Add a link is based on a prediction model that suggests links to be added to articles. While this feature has already been available on most Wikipedias, the prediction model could not support certain languages. A new model has now been developed to handle these languages, and it will be gradually rolled out to other Wikipedias over time. If you would like to know more, please contact
Trizek (WMF)
View all 34 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, the issue where search boxes on some Commons pages showed no results due to switch from SpecialSearch to MediaSearch, has now been fixed.
[213]
Two new wikis have been created:
a Wikipedia in
Toki Pona
w:tok:
[214]
a Wikiquote in
Nigerian Pidgin
q:pcm:
[215]
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
In depth
The Wikimedia Foundation is in the early stages of exploring approaches to
Article guidance
. The initiative aims to identify interventions that could help new editors easily understand and apply existing Wikipedia practices and policies when creating an article. The project is in the exploration and early experimental design phase. All community members are encouraged to
about the project, and share their thoughts on
the talk page
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18:57, 1 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
AI generated images as added illustrations acceptable?
Incidentally, I came across
Beim Docter
where AI generated image
File:E Patient beim Dokter (ChatGPT).png
has been
added
. This illustration has obviously not been previously published by any edition of Auguste Liesch's poems. Shouldn't we remove this?
AFBorchert
talk
19:20, 2 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Hi,
Yes, it can be removed. I wanted to illustrate the poem, but the illustration is definitely not by A. Liesch. |
GilPe
talk
08:42, 8 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Ok, thank you
GilPe
. I've
removed
it now. --
AFBorchert
talk
09:35, 28 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-50
Latest
tech news
from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations
are available.
Weekly highlight
Anybody who wishes to secure their user account can now use
two-factor authentication
(2FA). This is available to all registered users of all Wikimedia projects. This is part of the
Account Security
initiative. Later, 2FA will be required for all users who can take security- or privacy-sensitive actions.
Updates for editors
Following last week's deployments, the
Add a link
feature, which allows editors to add suggested links during editing, will be available to an additional
33 Wikipedias
starting on 9 December. This expansion is possible thanks to the new prediction model that now supports all languages, including those that were previously not covered. While the feature has been available on most Wikipedias for some time, this rollout brings us closer to using the improved model everywhere. If you have any questions or would like more details please contact
Trizek (WMF)
Last week, the
Search Platform team
added
transliterated
as-you-type search suggestions to Georgian wikis. If there are only a few regular search suggestions, then queries in Latin or Cyrillic script
are now rewritten into Georgian script
to look for more matches. For example, searching for either
bedniereba
or
бедниереба
will now suggest the existing article about
ბედნიერება
("happiness"). You can recommend other languages where transliterated suggestions would be useful
on Phabricator
for future development.
Later this week, a controlled experiment will begin for editors on the 100 largest Wikipedias who are editing a section in the mobile web visual editor. 50% of these editors will notice a new "Edit full page" button that will enable them to expand their editing session to the whole page. This feature is intended to make it easier for people on mobile web to edit any article section, regardless of which section-edit icon they tapped to begin. The experiment will last ~4 weeks. You can find
more details
about the project.
Later this week, the
Reader Growth team
will launch a
mobile web experiment
to expand all article sections by default (currently they are collapsed by default) and pin the section header the user is currently reading to the top of the page. The experiment will affect 10% of users on Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
[216]
The
Wikipedia Year in Review 2025
, a feature in the Wikipedia mobile apps (iOS and Android) that provides users with a personalised summary of their engagement with Wikipedia over the year, is now available on the iOS and Android apps. This edition includes expanded personalised insights, improved reading highlights, new donor messaging, and updated designs. Open the app to view your Year in Review and explore your reading journey from 2025.
A recent software bug caused edits made with VisualEditor to make unintended changes to wikitext, including removing whitespace and replacing spaces with underscores in wikilinks inside citations. This was partially fixed last week, and further fixes are in progress. Editors who used VisualEditor between November 28 and December 2 should review their edits for unexpected modifications.
[217]
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, the incorrect handling of URLs copied from the address bar of Microsoft Edge users, has been resolved.
[218]
Updates for technical contributors
Starting this week, users of the "Improved Syntax Highlighting"
beta feature
will have
CodeMirror
as the editor for Lua, JavaScript, CSS, JSON and Vue content models, instead of
CodeEditor
. With this, the
linters
will be upgraded. This is part of a larger effort to eventually replace CodeEditor and provide a consistent code editing experience.
[219]
Developers are encouraged to take the
2025 Developer Satisfaction Survey
, which remains open until 5 January 2026. If you build software for the Wikimedia ecosystem and would like to share your experiences or feedback, your participation is greatly appreciated.
[220]
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
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17:45, 8 December 2025 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2025-51
Latest
tech 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
View all 18 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, one of the fixes addressed an issue for temporary accounts adding an external URL, which triggered an hCaptcha request in more cases than intended, and did not display the required popup on the first attempt to publish the edit.
[221]
Updates for technical contributors
To improve database and site performance, external links to Wikimedia projects will no longer be stored in the database. This means they will not be searchable in
Special:LinkSearch
, will not be checked by the Spam Blacklist or AbuseFilter as new links, and will not be in the
externallinks
table on database replicas. In the future this may be extended to other highly-linked trusted websites on a per-wiki basis, such as Creative Commons links on Wikimedia Commons.
[222]
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
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19:02, 15 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Spanish poem
Why is
Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924)
here? Shouldn't it be on
the Spanish site
? Can it be transferred over there?
Eievie
talk
20:33, 16 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Eievie
Prospectprospekt
: Same for
Index:Tentativa del hombre infinito.djvu
. I think that they have been created here to bypass present
es.source rules
: works created after 1923 [sic] which are not public domain in Chile, so not acceptable in es.source. For these cases we used the alternative
Wikilivres
but I see that
no activity since 2019
... Now, I think they are here by
Wikisource:Copyright policy#Works that are in the public domain in the US only
: «
(...) Such works may be published here if it can clearly be shown that they are in the public domain under US law (...)
» I'm not keen on US PD, so more opinions are welcome! -
Aleator
22:05, 16 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Aleator
sorry for the late reply, but you are correct—
Veinte poemas
is PD in the US due to publication before 1931. Because it is not allowed on the Spanish Wikisource (it was deleted after
TE(æ)A,ea.
tried to create it), it is allowed on Multilingual Wikisource per its inclusion criteria.
Prospectprospekt
talk
04:41, 16 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Tech News: 2025-52
Latest
tech 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
From January, edit filters
can be set
to automatically suppress their details such as rules and list of attempted edits and actions. This will help oversighters use edit filters to prevent doxxing or other suppressible material.
[223]
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 12 January 2026 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 16 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, the crash that occurred when tapping "First Steps" in the Wikipedia Android Year in Review has now been fixed, and the feature opens as expected.
[224]
Updates for technical contributors
Interface elements such as diffs and categories generated by MediaWiki used to have the attribute
data-mw="interface"
to distinguish from wiki content. The attribute has been replaced with
data-mw-interface=""
, to avoid potential conflicts with other
data-mw
attributes, which are generated by Parsoid.
[225]
There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.
Meetings and events
The
Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026
will take place on 13-14 March 2026 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Applications just opened mid-December and will close in mid-January or earlier if capacity is reached. With space for approximately 100 participants, early application is encouraged.
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21:45, 22 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Retrieved from "
Wikisource
Scriptorium/Archives/2025
Add topic
US