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Tech News: 2026-17

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• After two years of development, ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽, also known as CodeMirror 6, is to be promoted out of beta on Tuesday, April 21. It brings better code and wikitext readability, reduction in typing errors, and other benefits to all users of the standard syntax highlighter. A huge thank you to volunteer Bhsd who developed many of the new features, including code folding, autocompletion, and linting. [1]
• A major update to the Wikipedia app for iOS is now rolling out, redesigning the interface to align with Apple's latest "Liquid Glass" visual design. Download the latest version and explore the update.

Updates for editors

• Reading lists is a feature which allows readers to save articles to a list for reading later. This feature is now in beta on Arabic, French, Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Chinese Wikipedias and by default for all new accounts on all Wikipedias.
• An experiment which explores extending Page Previews to mobile web will be launched in the week of April 20 on Arabic, English, French, Italian, Polish, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. Page Previews are pop-ups that display a thumbnail, lead paragraph, and a link to open the full article of a blue link, thereby improving content discovery. The feature is already available on desktop and in the apps. Read more about this experiment and others.
• On several wikis, logged-in editors who haven't confirmed their email addresses can now see a banner encouraging them to do so. Having the email address confirmed allows a user to restore access to the account if they lose it. Learn more. [2]
• View all 15 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where editing very large wiki pages in the 2017 wikitext editor caused slow loading, preview and scrolling lag, and performance issues when selecting, cutting, or pasting content, has now been fixed. [3]

Updates for technical contributors

• As part of the promotion of CodeMirror from a beta feature, all users will use CodeMirror instead of CodeEditor for syntax highlighting when editing JavaScript, CSS, JSON, Vue and Lua content pages. [4]
• The mirrors.wikimedia.org service for Debian and Ubuntu users will sunset and stop working on May 15. The resources for the service will be replaced with new and better options. Some users may need to switch to a different server which should take about a minute. You can read more. [5]
• The image and oldimage table will be removed from wikireplicas. If your tools or queries access image or oldimage directly, please update them to use the file and filerevision table before 28 May. [6]
• Following the recent implementation of global API rate limits on unidentified traffic, the Wikimedia Foundation will continue efforts to ensure fair use of infrastructure by applying global limits to identified API traffic beginning the last week of April. These limits are intentionally set as high as possible to minimise impact on the community. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits and Frequently Asked Questions.
• The Attribution API is now available as a beta. The API fetches information for crediting Wikimedia articles and media files wherever they are used. Reference documentation is available through the REST Sandbox special page available on all Wikimedia wikis (such as the REST sandbox on English Wikipedia). Share your feedback on the project talk page.
• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

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MediaWiki message delivery 14:57, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-18

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

• There is a change in how new users are autoconfirmed that will improve anti-vandalism protection. Currently, users who have had an account for a few days and made a few edits are automatically added to the Autoconfirmed users group. This configuration tends to be exploited by some vandals, who create accounts and start to use them only after some time. To mitigate this, the configuration will be updated next week so that – for the purpose of becoming autoconfirmed – the account age will be counted from their first edit, instead of registration date. The numeric value of the age threshold will remain the same. This change will be deployed only to wikis which require at least one edit as part of the autoconfirmation conditions. [7]
• All Wikipedia users with new accounts and those who activated the "automatically enable most beta features" option in their preference can now use the reading lists beta feature to save articles for later reading. This helps organize reading interests in one place for convenient access.
• View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where infobox images have huge padding in Firefox, has been fixed. [8]

Updates for technical contributors

• As a reminder, the global API rate limits will be applied this week to identified API traffic. This is to help ensure fair use of infrastructure. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, including the actual rate limits, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits and Frequently Asked Questions.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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MediaWiki message delivery 18:03, 27 April 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-19

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 Article guidance team invites experienced editors of pilot Wikipedias—Arabic, Bangla, Japanese, Portuguese, Persian, Turkish, Simple English, Spanish, and French—to help translate and adapt sample outlines. These outlines will guide editors in creating clear, well-structured, and policy-compliant articles when using the feature once it is launched in May 2026. Simple instructions on how to translate and adapt the outlines are available.

Updates for editors

• The Product and Technology Advisory Council has published draft recommendations on a model that affiliates can follow when contributing to the technical space. Community members are invited to provide feedback on the recommendation until May 8th on the talk page.
• The number of available thumbnail size preferences in MediaWiki is being reduced to three standardized options—Small (180px), Regular (250px), and Large (400px), as part of ongoing efforts to improve performance and reduce strain on thumbnail services. As a result, existing preferences will be mapped to the nearest new size (for example, smaller selections like 120px or 150px will render at 180px, while larger ones like 300px or 360px will render at 400px). The preferences interface will soon be updated to reflect these changes, and users who wish to opt out or provide feedback can do so. [9]
• From now on, even when a permission expires automatically, users will receive an Echo notification similar to the standard notification for permission changes. There is a difference between this and Global reminder bot in that the latter reminds users a week before the rights are due to expire, so that they can renew the rights.
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the problem where the ULS language selector in Special:Translate would scroll vertically when it shouldn't, has been resolved. Previously, when users opened the "Translate to English" dropdown and typed certain inputs, the dialog would scroll vertically by a few pixels even when there was enough space to display all results. The dropdown no longer shifts unnecessarily when filtering languages. [10]
• The Global Watchlist, which lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on a single page, continues to improve. For example, watchlists for Wikibase sites such as Wikidata now support EntitySchema elements for better tracking. The Live Updates mode now refreshes the special page every 60 seconds to comply with the updated global API rate limits for improved real-time responsiveness. Additionally, a directionality bug that displayed links as "changes 3" instead of "3 changes" in mixed-direction lists has been fixed. [11][12][13]

Updates for technical contributors

• The second phase of global API rate limits has been rolled out to reduce the impact of AI crawlers and ensure fair, sustainable access to Wikimedia resources, prioritising human and mission-aligned traffic. Limits have been shifted from per-hour to per-minute, producing smoother traffic patterns and more predictable API load. Community users are not expected to be affected, and no action is required. Early indications show some User-Agent-based requestors are adjusting behaviour, and around 64% of automated API traffic has been identified. Monitoring continues, and Wikimedia Enterprise remains available for commercial support.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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MediaWiki message delivery 20:40, 4 May 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-20

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

• Community Tech has published new guidance explaining how wishes on Community Wishlist are triaged and prioritized. The documentation is intended to help contributors write stronger proposals by clarifying the factors that influence prioritization decisions. Beyond vote counts, the guidance highlights considerations such as potential impact on the community when determining which wishes move forward.

Updates for editors

• The Reader Growth team is launching an experiment to test a new Share Card feature that allows readers to create visually engaging cards from Wikipedia articles or selected article sections and share them online, with each card linking back to the original article to help expand readership and article discovery. The mobile-only A/B test will be available to a portion of readers on Arabic, Chinese, French, Vietnamese, and English Wikipedia to better understand reading and sharing habits, and is scheduled to begin the week of May 18 and run for four weeks.
• The Android and iOS Wikipedia apps recently released the 25-day reading challenge into Beta, as part of efforts to drive reader engagement by encouraging users to complete reading milestones. To track their reading streak during the challenge, App users can add a widget featuring Baby Globe to their home screen. The challenge officially begins May 11.
• View all 17 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the global preference for enabling syntax highlighting in wikitext could unexpectedly disable itself after being turned on, has now been fixed. [14]

Updates for technical contributors

• The ResourceLoader module mediawiki.ui.input, deprecated since September 2023, will be removed this week. There is a guide for migrating from MediaWiki UI to Codex for any tools that use it. [15]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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MediaWiki message delivery 19:18, 11 May 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-21

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 Abstract Wikipedia team has identified five potential pilot wikis to assess their interest in adopting abstract articles on their wikis. The pilots are Malayalam, Bengali, Dagbani, Arabic, and Indonesian Wikipedia. The feedback period will be open until May 22. If your community is interested in becoming a pilot, let us know on Meta.

Updates for editors

• An experiment to show Reading Lists to logged-out readers on mobile web will launch on May 18 across German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, and Urdu Wikipedias, and will run for one month. The effort supports broader goals of helping readers save and organize articles for later reading, while encouraging habits that could lead to future Wikipedia contributions.
• To support a bookmark button in the Reading List beta feature, the "Tools > Action" menu has been updated to display icons, including the watch star indicator that helps editors identify temporarily watched articles. The icons now also match those used on mobile, improving consistency across platforms. The change is currently limited to the actions menu and mainly affects editors with privileged user rights. [16]
• Suggestion Mode was released as an A/B test for newcomer editors on the mobile website at ~15 Wikipedias. The experiment will measure the impact that Suggestion Mode has on the proportion of newcomer mobile web edit sessions that result in constructive (un-reverted) article edits. The experiment will also evaluate the feature's impact on editor retention, and monitor changes in revert and block rates.
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue in the Wikipedia Android app where images could sometimes fail to load after opening a recommended reading list notification, has now been fixed. [17]

Updates for technical contributors

• The Wikidata Platform team has published its backend replacement recommendation and accompanying technical architecture for the migration of the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) away from Blazegraph. Feedback is invited until May 25th 2026, especially on potential gaps and impacts on advanced use cases. Wikidata community members and WDQS users are also encouraged to help identify high-impact tools and workflows that may need attention on this page. Feedback can be shared on the Migration talk page or during the next office hour. See the WDP team newsletter for more details.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• On English, French, Japanese, and a few other Wikipedias, there was a trial of hCaptcha, a third-party bot detection service. The trial showed that hCaptcha effectively detects and deters some bad-faith automated activity, on its own and by giving checkusers and stewards signals to look into. Because the results were positive, hCaptcha will be rolled out across all wikis over the next few weeks. See the hCaptcha project page for technical information about the implementation and privacy protections. Learn more.
• The latest Community Tech update is now available, with progress across several Community Wishlist initiatives, including Reading Lists expansion from the mobile app to the website, new language support for "Who Wrote That" and the Personal Dashboard, improvements to 3D rendering and Charts, and upcoming work on talk page sorting, audio playback, and editing workflows. The update also shares current priorities, wishlist status trends, and opportunities for community feedback on future focus areas and the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2026–2027 Annual Plan. Read the full newsletter for details.

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MediaWiki message delivery 20:18, 18 May 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-22

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

• Following a successful account creation experiment, an improved logged-out edit warning message will be deployed to all Wikimedia wikis in the first week of June. The change will only affect logged-out users on mobile web who open an editing session. The updated experience is designed to encourage account creation more clearly, while still allowing users to edit with temporary accounts. Results from the experiment showed a significant increase in account creation, with a 27% relative lift among users shown the updated message. As expected, as more people funnel into account creation, temporary accounts decreased by a relative 16%. The experiment did not show any significant changes in constructive edit rates or other monitored contributor metrics. [18]

Updates for editors

• For security reasons, members of certain user groups are required to have two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled. Members of these groups will be unable to disable the last 2FA method on their account, and it will be impossible to add users without 2FA to these groups. Users will still be able to add new authentication methods or remove them, as long as at least one method is continuously enabled. In the next few weeks, users without 2FA will be removed from these groups. Notably, this applies to bureaucrats. See the linked tasks for deployment schedules. [19][20]
• WMDE Technical Wishes will run an A/B test on 10 wikis, testing potential improvements for Reference Previews. The experiment will run for ~2 weeks at the end of May / beginning of June and will affect 10% of desktop readers on the participating wikis.
• After two successful experiments, the Reader Growth team is rolling out an Image Browsing beta feature for all Wikipedias on mobile on May 25. This means that anyone who has all beta features on by default will start to see this feature, and others can check the box to turn it on in their preferences. The beta feature will include a carousel of all an article's images at the top of the article, with controls for editors to exclude images from the article's carousel or to exclude an article from the feature entirely.
• View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, three dimensional STL files were being rendered incorrectly by the media viewer 3D extension which is now fixed. [21]

Updates for technical contributors

• The legacy CSS classes tleft and tright have been replaced with floatleft and floatright as the former do not work consistently across all MediaWiki platforms, notably mobile web and mobile apps. Projects relying on these classes are encouraged to review related usage and plan for migration. Please note that floatleft and floatright may also be deprecated in future, although there are currently no plans to do so. Read more.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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MediaWiki message delivery 21:49, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-23

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• The Reader Experience team is conducting an experiment to show the reading lists feature, which is still in development, to logged-out mobile readers to test whether it encourages account creation at a higher rate compared to the watchstar button. The experiment was launched on May 18th on German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, and Urdu wikis, and it will run for a month.
• The Wikimedia Apps team released Phase 1 of the redesigned Home Feed to the Android Beta app. The new Home Feed includes a refreshed "Community" tab and a personalized "For You" tab featuring daily updated reading recommendations. The redesign is part of a broader effort to improve content discovery and create more engaging learning experiences in the Wikipedia apps.
• View all 18 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where images could fail to load for some suggested edits on Special:Homepage, leaving the thumbnail stuck in a loading state, has now been fixed. [22]

Updates for technical contributors

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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MediaWiki message delivery 21:05, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-24

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

• Wikimedia Enterprise has increased the free usage limits for its API offerings. The monthly request limit for the On-demand API has increased from 5,000 to 50,000 requests, while the Snapshot API limit has increased from 15 to 30 requests per month. In addition, Structured Contents snapshots are now available for free accounts. These changes expand access to Wikimedia Enterprise data for developers, researchers, and organizations using Wikimedia content. [23]

Updates for editors

• The refreshed Explore Feed, now called the Home Feed, is rolling out to 50% of users of the Wikipedia Android app. The Home Feed helps readers discover relevant content through two new tabs: Community and For You. The Community tab provides a scrollable feed of curated content and updates from the broader Wikimedia community and movement, while the For You tab offers a full-screen, swipeable experience that shows content tailored to a user's interests. The redesign is part of a broader effort to improve discovery and enhance the learning experience in the Wikipedia app.
• The Which came first? daily trivia game is now available in the beta version of the Wikipedia iOS app in English, German, French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Turkish. The game uses historical events from Wikipedia's "On This Day" content and challenges readers to guess which of two events happened first. The game was previously released on Android. Communities interested in making the game available in their languages can read the instructions and requirements.
• Sub-referencing, a new MediaWiki feature that allows editors to reuse references with different details, will begin rolling out to Wikimedia wikis following a successful pilot phase. Deployment will start on 8 June for most Group 1 wikis and French Wikipedia, with additional Wikipedia language editions receiving the feature over the coming months. Communities are encouraged to prepare by checking for untranslated Cite extension messages in their language and reviewing any use of Reference Tooltips, which may require updates to support the new functionality. Wikis using Reference Previews do not need to take any action. Communities may also wish to create the cite-tracking-category-ref-details tracking category as a hidden category using __HIDDENCAT__ (or a dedicated template), and connect it to the corresponding Wikidata item d:Q129764848. [24]
• The Page Previews experiment on mobile web has concluded. The team decided not to roll out the feature after the results showed no statistically significant impact on reader retention, as the primary success metric was retention improvement. Page Previews, which are already available on desktop and in the apps, display a thumbnail, lead paragraph, and link to the full article when readers tap a blue link. The experiment tested this experience on mobile web across six Wikipedias.
• The user interface icon library will be updated later this week or next week. Most of the ~300 icons have been slightly refined and ~30 new icons have been added. These changes improve the icons to make them more consistent and comprehensible, and provide more visual balance when they are used in groups.
• The Universal Language Selector (ULS) interface in MediaWiki, which helps users select content in other languages, has been updated. The new version improves speed and accessibility, and users of Wikimedia projects can now pin languages for quicker language switching. The deployment to Wikimedia sites will happen gradually in the coming weeks. You can test it now as a beta feature by selecting beta features in your profile preferences and share your feedback on the project page.
• View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the Pageviews Analysis dashboard on pageviews.wmcloud.org stopped updating graph data in May 2026, affecting all users, has been fixed. [25]

Updates for technical contributors

• The function signature for mw.util.addPortletLink() has been simplified. Developers can now pass a configuration object instead of a list of positional parameters when creating portlet links. The previous function signature remains supported for backwards compatibility. For example, instead of: mw.util.addPortletLink('p-cactions', '#', 'Stub', 'ca-stubtag', 'Add a stub tag to this page'); use mw.util.addPortletLink('p-cactions', { href: '#', text: 'Stub', id: 'ca-stubtag', tooltip: 'Add a stub tag to this page' });. Script maintainers are encouraged to review existing uses of addPortletLink() and update them where appropriate. This change will be available on all wikis from 11 June. Thanks to community volunteer Gerges for contributing this improvement. [26]
• Community Wishlist discussion: Product & Technology introduced changes meant to increase the number and complexity of wishes fulfilled, including the disbanding of the Community Tech team. They are engaging in discussions about a proposed direction for the wishlist from community members. Includes ways to structure annual voting, better tracking of wishes, removing focus areas, and staffing updates.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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MediaWiki message delivery 21:27, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-25

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• The Reader Growth team has launched an Image Browsing beta feature on the mobile web version of all Wikipedias. The feature shows an image carousel at the top of articles with 3 or more images. Editors can configure this feature with the following controls: to hide a specific image from a page, either use class=notpageimage excluding it from thumbnail previews, or class=noviewer excluding it from MediaViewer. The carousel can also be disabled from a page entirely, with the magic word __NOMEDIAVIEWERCAROUSEL__. To submit feedback or flag bugs, please visit the project page.
• Wikitables can now be sorted in descending order on the first click by adding data-sort-order="desc" to the header cell. Previously, by default, clicking a column header for the first time sorts it in ascending order. This addition to a Wikitable gives it more control and flexibility, while the default behavior for subsequent clicks remains unchanged. [27]

Updates for editors

• The Article guidance feature is currently being tested with some editors creating new articles on the Simple English, French, and Turkish Wikipedias. The experiment will soon begin on the Arabic and Bangla Wikipedias as well. This feature gives editors community-curated guidance to help them create articles that follow community standards. Experienced editors can continue creating or adapting outlines for specific article types that are commonly created by less experienced contributors. The outlines guide less experienced editors in creating high-quality articles. A quick guide to markups used in outlines can be found on this page. Example outlines that can be adapted and instructions for how to adapt them are on this section of the project page.
• Wikis that wish to replace the "indefinitely" button in Special:Block for temporary accounts (for example, wikis that block temporary users only until account expiration) will be able to do so by creating MediaWiki:ipb-indefinite-expiry-temporary-account with the block duration they want. [28]
• View all 41 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• By the end of June, a valid user-agent string will be required for automated dumps downloads from the dumps.wikimedia.org website. Automated requests that provide a generic or empty user-agent will be blocked. This extends enforcement of the long standing user-agent policy. Access to dumps through Wikimedia Cloud Services will not change.
• The roll out of global API rate limits is now complete, with limits enforced across all APIs and at the documented levels for all groups. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki remain exempt. All bots should continue to follow the documented best practices to avoid being rate limited.
• The API Portal wiki will be read only starting this week (June 15-18). The following week (June 22-25), all API Portal wiki URLs will redirect to Wikimedia APIs on mediawiki.org. Learn more on the project page.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• On June 17th at 6pm UTC the WMF will be holding Discord call focused on a code review. We've heard through the Developer Satisfaction Survey that volunteers are struggling with code review and we'd like to discuss these experiences with the goal of surfacing workable solutions. You can join the call via the Wikimedia Community Discord server.
• The Latin American Wikimedia Conference will host a regional hackathon that will bring together the Wikimedia movement’s technical community including developers, system administrators, data scientists, and users with extended rights. Interested technical contributors can apply for a scholarship to participate until June 21 at midnight (Bolivia time, UTC-4).
• Sign up for Wikimania Team Challenges to join this special event. The Team challenges will take place online and in person from July 21 to 22, before Wikimania conference. Everyone is welcome, regardless of skills or Wikimania registration. Teams will work on 10 important challenges supporting the Wikimedia community. For details, visit the Team Challenges page and register there. Registration closes on June 20th at 11pm UTC.

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MediaWiki message delivery 16:45, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-26

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

• Growth features are now available at Wikidata. This update enables access to Mentorship (if configured), Impact module, the Help Panel, and a simplified Newcomer Homepage (without Suggested Edits). Wikidata administrators are still configuring the features through Community Configuration.

Updates for editors

• The special page Special:RangeCalculator has been created. It allows users to find an IP range without needing to rely on external tools. Until now, this tool was only available to CheckUsers. [29]
• Sub-referencing is a new MediaWiki feature that allows editors to reuse references with different details. It will be deployed to most small and medium-sized Wikipedia language versions on June 23. The FAQ lists possible actions to take on your wiki to support the deployment. Check the rollout plan for the next deployment steps. [30]
• Starting next week, users will get a notification when they are blocked or unblocked from editing, or if this block changes. [31]
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Starting next week, abuse filters that are set to "require CAPTCHA verification" will begin to also affect users with the skipcaptcha right, which includes most autoconfirmed users. Bots are exempted. This change only affects edits that trigger an abuse filter. The skipcaptcha right will continue to exempt users from having to solve CAPTCHAs in the ordinary course of using the wikis. [32]
• Reference documentation for the Lift Wing API has moved from the API Portal to the interactive REST Sandbox.
• The API Portal wiki is now closed. For API documentation, see Wikimedia APIs on mediawiki.org. All API Portal wiki URLs (https://api.wikimedia.org/wiki/) will redirect to the mediawiki.org page starting June 22. [33]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• Join an online call on 25 June at 2:30pm UTC to meet the current Wikimedia interns for Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. Interns will provide an overview of their projects and a brief demo of their work so far. Attendees are encouraged to share ideas and connections in their community.

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MediaWiki message delivery 13:02, 23 June 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-27

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• As part of the Account Creation Experiments, the Growth team tested adding a user account icon in the mobile web header for logged-out users, providing direct access to "Create account" and "Log in" actions. The experiment increased account creation by about 20% without negatively affecting edit quality or constructive edit rates. The feature will now be rolled out to all Wikimedia Foundation wikis on mobile web in the first week of July. [34]
• After a successful experiment, logged-in users who did not confirm their email address when their account was created see a new banner asking them to complete that process. This helps reduce the risk that users get locked out of their account, and makes account email addresses overall more reliable. This is part of the Account Security project. [35]
• An update to Search is refining how the -prefix: behaves when used to exclude results. Previously, using -prefix: with negation could unintentionally broaden search results by adding the namespaces included in the search scope, leading to confusing behavior for users expecting a straightforward exclusion filter. With the update, -prefix: will now strictly exclude matching page titles as intended and may display a warning if the relevant namespace has not been explicitly selected. The behavior of prefix: without negation however remains unchanged. [36]
• View all 33 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where reviewers using the Page Curation toolbar were not automatically subscribed to talk page discussions they started has now been fixed. Reviewers will now receive notifications when someone replies to those discussions. [37]

Updates for technical contributors

• Starting June 29th, automated downloads from the dumps.wikimedia.org website will be subject to the user-agent policy. Automated requests that provide a generic or empty user-agent will be blocked. Access to dumps through Wikimedia Cloud Services remains unaffected. This is a follow up to the announcement made in the 2026/25 issue of Tech News.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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MediaWiki message delivery 11:45, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-28

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• View all 34 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the search bar results on Wikidata, showed English results instead of using the correct language fallback for users of language variants, has now been fixed. Search suggestions will now follow the expected language fallback chain. [38]

Updates for technical contributors

• In preparation for Celebrate Women campaign planned for March 2027, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Content Enablement team has launched a 22-question survey to better understand technical contributions by women+ (anyone who identifies as a woman) across Wikimedia projects. The survey takes approximately 15–20 minutes to complete and will remain open until 20 July 2026. The questions are also available on-wiki for review in advance.
• The Score extension now supports rendering music scores as SVG images in addition to PNG, addressing a long-standing feature request and resolving historical image quality issues. Both formats are now provided to clients, with PNG in the src attribute and SVG in the srcset attribute.
• The new Parsoid parser continues to be deployed to additional wikis, making it easier to introduce new reading and editing features. It was enabled on French Wikipedia, bringing total progress to covering 78.9% of Wikipedia page views. Rollout to English Wikipedia desktop will progress through this week.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The Wikimedia Hackathon 2026 recap blog post is now live. It highlights the projects, sessions, and social activities from this year’s event, and shares initial plans for the 2027 Wikimedia Hackathon.

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MediaWiki message delivery 13:54, 6 July 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-29

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

• Revise Tone helps newcomers identify passages in Wikipedia articles that may contain non-encyclopedic language and encourages them to consider revising the tone. The feature was A/B tested on the Arabic, English, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias, where newcomer task completion rates increased by 38.7% compared to the default Copyedit task, with no decrease in edit quality. The test ended on July 9, and the feature is now available for everyone on these wikis, configurable via Community Configuration. The plan is to release Revise Tone to more wikis.
• The community configuration that allows automatic removal of inactive mentors based on configurable criteria will be enabled on Thursday 16, on some wikis to keep mentor lists up to date. Mentors are experienced contributors who opt in to help new users on-wiki through the Growth Features. Administrators can now prepare the settings via Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship; they will take effect starting Thursday.
• View all 38 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where some users of the Wikipedia Android app were logged out immediately after signing in, preventing them from staying logged in and editing pages, has now been fixed. [39]

Updates for technical contributors

• Editing a page via user scripts or gadgets was causing watchlist labels that the user had assigned to that page to reset. This has now been fixed. [40]
• To work around a Safari bug (see phab:T425211), on Parsoid-enabled wikis, wikilink hrefs now use absolute urls instead of protocol-relative urls. REST API output remains unchanged and continue to use protocol-relative urls. Gadgets, user scripts, bots, and CSS might need to be adapted if they relied on the presence of protocol-relative urls in wikilink hrefs. [41]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The Wikimedia Foundation’s Experiment Platform Team has published a blog post reflecting on its first year of structured experimentation. It highlights successful experiments such as Paste Check, Reference Check, and Tone Check, which improved editing outcomes and have been rolled out to more users, as well as experiments that did not lead to product changes. Read more.

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MediaWiki message delivery 16:08, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-30

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 Reader Experience team has incorporated community feedback around the placement of watchstar and watchlist buttons for the Reading Lists beta feature, which would allow for saving articles for later reading – a wishlist item to bring the functionality to web. Editors are invited to enable the beta feature to test it out and share their thoughts.
• Suggestion Mode offers edit suggestions within the VisualEditor for improving Wikipedia articles. All suggestions are community-configurable. The TextMatch feature is a way for volunteers to create custom local suggestions. The feature searches in articles for strings of text, and now includes support for regular expressions. This gives volunteers greater precision and flexibility over the kinds of local suggestions they can create. Note: Suggestions can be targeted based on the edit count of the person editing as well as other aspects of the page. You can find examples from other communities for inspiration, including TextMatches that detect: typos, grammar-errors, potential advertisements, clichés, incorrect dash or hyphen usage, non-specific time keywords, outdated names, and more. Any feedback is appreciated.
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the SVG Translate tool could use an outdated version of a file, causing existing translations to be overwritten when new ones were uploaded, has now been fixed. Overall, in the last quarter from April – June 2026 about 337 community tasks were resolved by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Updates for technical contributors

• On Parsoid-enabled wikis, Parsoid now renders a maximum of 1,250 images per page. A new tracking category, "media-limit-reached", will be soon made available to identify pages where this limit is reached, making it easier to find content whose media output may have been restricted during rendering. See phab:T430854 for more information and to provide feedback.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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MediaWiki message delivery 05:44, 21 July 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-31

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• Content Translation now supports dark mode, fulfilling a Community Wishlist request. This brings the tool in line with the accessibility features available in the Vector 2022 and Minerva skins, helping reduce visual fatigue for users translating content. [42]
• DiscussionTools' source mode and the 2017 wikitext editor will now offer autocomplete for links ([[), templates ({{), HTML and parser tags (<), and magic words (__), making it quicker and easier to insert links, templates, and other wiki markup while editing. [43]
• The Readers Growth team has concluded its experiment with mobile page previews and will not roll out the feature. Page Previews are a pop-up bottom sheet that appears when readers tap a blue link, showing a thumbnail, lead paragraph, and an option to open the article. The experiment showed flat retention and negative indicator metrics, suggesting that mobile web readers preferred navigating directly to linked articles rather than using page previews.
• The Reader Experience team has seen encouraging early results from the Reading Lists feature, with 93% of participating users reporting that it was useful. Reading Lists help active readers save articles for future reading and support their learning goals on Wikimedia projects. The team plans further improvements before expanding the feature to more users.
• The Explore Feed Refresh initiative was tested with new and casual Wikipedia app readers. The refreshed feed helps readers discover new and relevant content. After a 10.5% increase in engagement with the feed, Wikimedia Apps team has decided to scale the Home Feed redesign to iOS with the learnings from the Android release applied.
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where subject names in the Article Guidance feature were displayed with incorrect capitalization on French Wikipedia, has now been fixed. Subject names will now follow the correct capitalization rules for the language. [44]

Updates for technical contributors

• After running several Account Creation Experiments to improve registration completion rates, a new version of the username field on Create Account has been rolled out. It includes a popover summarizing the username policy to provide clearer guidance during account creation. As part of this change, the messages createacct-helpusername and createacct-username-help that several communities have configured will no longer be used. If communities want to customize the guidance shown in the new popover, they can instead edit the following messages: createacct-username-policy-popover-bullet1, createacct-username-policy-popover-bullet2, and createacct-username-policy-popover-bullet3. [45]
• Later this week, the CodeMirror syntax highlighter will offer themes. The themes can be picked from a dropdown menu in the full CodeMirror preferences dialog. For wikitext, available themes are default, colorblind-friendly (previously the colorblind preference option on Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing) and no-highlighting. For code languages (i.e., CSS/JavaScript/JSON/Vue/Lua), there are several themes available. These same themes will eventually be available for wikitext, too. [46]
• From now on, wikis can restrict editing in the "User" namespace to only the page owner and certain user groups. Read the configuration documentation to learn more.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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MediaWiki message delivery 18:46, 27 July 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-32

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

• The Reader Experience team has developed a patch demo that wraps the page toolbar onto two lines when there is not enough horizontal space for all the buttons. This aims to reduce crowding in the Vector 2022 toolbar, which can occur on some language Wikipedias at certain screen widths. [47]
• The Reader Experience team is planning to launch Reading Lists, a Community Wishlist item, which is currently available to try in beta, as a full feature in September. Before then, volunteer translator help is needed for string translations into a number of languages. The feature supports reading and learning goals on Wikipedia.
• Next week, the table of contents on Wikimedia Commons file pages will be improved by consolidating the file page table of contents with the page table of contents. This will make it easier to understand a file page’s structure, navigate to specific sections, and share links to individual sections. [48]
• View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where some TIFF images failed to load after clicking their thumbnail, causing a broken image to be displayed instead of the full-size image, has now been fixed. [49]

Updates for technical contributors

• The variable and function selector in AbuseFilter has been updated to support search and autocomplete. It will allow filter maintainers to find the desired variable or function more quickly. [50]
• The MJPEG and VP8 formats are removed from the video player. The MP4 format (MPEG-4 Part 2) is added instead, which provides higher quality videos to older iPhone devices. It may take a few weeks to retroactively update all existing videos. The default format for modern devices stays the same (VP9/WebM). [51]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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MediaWiki message delivery 19:43, 3 August 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-33

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

• A new ChartWizard is now available on Wikimedia Commons for users interested in creating charts from their own data. The wizard makes the Chart extension more beginner-friendly by allowing editors to create charts, such as bar and pie charts, without needing to use JSON. Users can still switch to the JSON editor if they prefer. Feedback on the new tool is welcome on the wish talk page.
• View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the Wikipedia iOS app’s Picture of the Day widget displayed the same image every day instead of updating daily, has now been fixed. [52]

Updates for technical contributors

• Math formula SVG images will soon be generated in the browser instead of on the server. MathML continues to be generated on the server and renders in the browser without JavaScript. Wikibooks will see this change on 12 August, Wikisource on 19 August and Wikipedia from 20-27 August. You can try this by selecting "MathML with SVG image (client side MathJax rendering)" in your preferences. This change is part of deprecating RESTBase and deprecating Mathoid. [53]
• Category pages will soon support sorting entries by the time they are added to a category. This will make it easier to find recently or long-standing categorized pages. It will also improve workflows for maintenance categories such as deletion backlogs and other time-based review tasks. You can use cldsort=timestamp URL argument in category view to sort the entries. [54]
• Gadgets and user scripts on Wikimedia wikis may now use ES2018 features and ES2019 features in JavaScript code. Previously, the platform only allowed up to ES2017. MediaWiki validates the source code to protect functionality from syntax errors and to ensure scripts are valid in all supported browsers. [55]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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MediaWiki message delivery 20:42, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-34

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• The Worklist feature for the Event Registration tool is now live on all Wikimedia wikis. With Worklist, event organizers can add the articles their event will focus on directly to the event page. The Worklist also powers Event Pathways which notifies other editors of the upcoming or ongoing event when they edit an article featured in the event's Worklist. This is the minimum viable version (MVP), and feedback is welcome. Organizers are encouraged to try the feature. A hands-on Worklist Setup Workshop will take place on 18 August at 16:00 UTC and 19 August at 11:00 UTC.

Updates for editors

• Special:ShortPages displays short pages by their size, but in many cases it gets filled with disambiguations and soft redirects, making it harder to find the short articles themselves. Starting this weekend, you will be able to choose not to include an article in the special page by adding the magic word __EXPECTSHORTPAGE__. [56]
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Bole (w:bol:) [57]
• Starting the week of August 17, the page toolbar will wrap onto two lines when there is not enough horizontal space for all the buttons. This is a fully merged patch from the Reader Experience team which aims to reduce crowding in the Vector 2022 toolbar, that may occur on some language Wikipedias at certain screen widths.
• View all 16 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, uploading large files to Wikimedia Commons has become more stable and less prone to failure following some fixes related to the “Could not acquire lock” upload error. [58]

Updates for technical contributors

• Debian Bullseye will reach the end of its Long Term Support on 31 August 2026. Some Cloud VPS projects still have instances running Debian Bullseye. Maintainers of those projects are encouraged to migrate to Debian Bookworm or Debian Trixie. A migration guide is available to help with the process, and users may also want to consider whether their workload is better suited to Toolforge. If you need help or cannot complete the migration by 31 August, please contact the Cloud VPS admins as soon as possible. Read more.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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MediaWiki message delivery 21:00, 17 August 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-35

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

• The Special:CreateAccount page has been simplified as part of ongoing work to modernize the account creation experience. The panel showing project statistics no longer appears next to the form on desktop and mobile web. Multiple account creation experiments show that a simpler form helps newcomers complete registration. [59]
• In order to improve page performance, images now load when they are viewed. This means images lower down an article will not load if a reader never scrolls to that part of the page, which may affect some image-related metrics. [60]

• View all 42 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where image thumbnails in Abstract Wikipedia could fail to display after the corresponding file was moved on Wikimedia Commons, has now been fixed. Thumbnails will now update correctly when files are moved. [61]

Updates for technical contributors

• User Info card is a feature that helps patrollers see information about user accounts. So far, it has been available only in places such as page history, logs and recent changes. Now, it's possible to place it in the page content as well, using the {{#uic:}} parser function. It can be particularly useful in templates like {{Userlinks}} (or their specialized variants), as it will make it easier to see the context about a user on various noticeboard pages. The card will be displayed only to users who have it enabled in their preferences. [62]
• Due to user security and privacy risks, we have disabled access to Special:MyPage URLs when specifically using action=raw. If you are impacted by this, consider whether you can use an alternative approach. Special:MyPage URLs can still be accessed and used without action=raw. Specified user page URLs (e.g. User:Myusername) can still be used with action=raw. [63]
• Due to an update, the thumbnailing software has been improved. This includes upgrading librsvg to 2.60 and ImageMagick to 7, as well as resolving a number of long-standing thumbnailing bugs like rendering errors. [64]

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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MediaWiki message delivery 20:42, 24 August 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-36

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

• A new format for the Community Wishlist is open for feedback. You can read the proposed ideas on Meta. This new process plans to improve how wishes are triaged, voted on, and prioritized in a way that is transparent and balanced across project families and language editions. This consultation is open for two weeks.

Updates for editors

• The latest release of the Wikipedia Android app includes updates to the Saved feature, bringing the app’s saving experience closer to iOS and Web. The update redesigns the Saved tab with an “All articles” view, removes the default “Saved” reading list, renames reading lists to “Collections,” and modernizes the article-saving experience. [65]
• The Reading Lists feature was enabled for all logged-in users on Bengali, Chinese, Czech and Vietnamese Wikipedias on August 25, after several months as a beta feature. Reading Lists will be available to all logged-in users on Arabic, French and Indonesian Wikipedias on September 1, followed by English Wikipedia on September 14, and all other Wikipedia wikis on September 28.
• At the end of the month, some logged-out readers on Bengali, Czech, Persian, English, and Polish Wikipedias using the Minerva skin on mobile will see an updated navigation bar in an A/B test. The test will compare the current navigation bar with a new version designed to make it easier to find information more quickly. The goal is to determine whether these changes encourage readers to return more often. This experiment will not change the experience for logged-in readers and/or editors.
• Editors who maintain redirects, templates, and categories used on redirect pages now have improved ways for finding and curating redirects. Previously, redirects pages could not be searched. Two new search keywords, onlyredirects: and withredirects:, now allow redirects to be searched directly and can be combined with existing keywords such as incategory:, intitle:, and insource:. [66]
• The ISBN lookup tools for generating citations were recently not working because of external service problems. Developers are working on solutions. [67]
• View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where searching for pages by category using deepcat could return no results or unrelated results has now been fixed. [68]

Updates for technical contributors

• The domain of URLs for thumbnails is changing from upload.wikimedia.org to thumb.wikimedia.org. The old URLs will continue to work for the foreseeable future but MediaWiki will advertise the new domain instead. URLs to other types of media such as original files, videos and transcodes will still be served from upload.wikimedia.org. [69]
• The Wikimedia Math API is now deprecated. These endpoints will be fully sunset by the end of September 2026. Developers who call these endpoints should transition to alternative math rendering solutions, such as the native MathML or MathJax. Third-party MediaWiki installations that utilize the Math extension for formula rendering are required to upgrade to v1.43+ to avoid disruption of service.

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• Read more about TextMatch in a Diff post titled, Custom edit suggestions for every wiki: How communities are shaping Suggestion Mode with TextMatch.

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MediaWiki message delivery 20:50, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-37

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• Add a Link has been upgraded for English Wikipedia users with improved detection of links that have different capitalization. This will help reduce ambiguous suggestions caused by differences in capitalization in article titles, including articles about cultural goods. A second phase of improvements is planned, which will also prepare the feature for release in other languages. [70] [71]
• The Article guidance feature will be enabled by default for junior editors on Simple English and Turkish Wikipedia starting 10 September 2026 following an experiment. Junior editors with 0 to 99 edits will automatically see the feature when they click a red link or use the "" option on Turkish Wikipedia to create a new article. The change is intended to help junior editors create higher-quality articles that meet each Wikipedia’s standards. Additional improvements will continue based on the experiment results and community feedback.
• The Pageviews Analysis tool which allows users to compare pageviews across multiple pages, turns 10 years old this year and several new features have been added. They include WikiNav which provides insights into how readers of Wikipedia explore the content, editing stats in Siteviews, the ability to lookup articles belonging to a WikiProject, and support for dark mode. [72]
• A visually simplified Minerva navigation bar is being tested for logged-out readers using mobile web on the Bengali, Czech, English, Farsi, and Polish Wikipedias. The experiment aims to determine whether simplifying the navigation improves reader retention. The test will run from August 31 to September 28, and no action is required from users.
• WMDE Technical Wishes is working on improving . Editors will only notice a slight change starting this week. When adding automatic reference names the numbering will start at :1 instead of :0. Read more on the project page. [73]
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 23. 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. [74]
• View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where Parsoid could mishandle nested nowiki tags, causing content to be lost and displaying unwanted text has now been fixed. [75]

Updates for technical contributors

• Interface administrators can configure gadgets from MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition. The definition format has been updated and no longer requires the ResourceLoader option, as gadgets are always loaded through ResourceLoader. This simplifies gadget configuration by removing an option that is no longer necessary, making gadget definitions easier for administrators. [76]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 18:41, 7 September 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-38

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• The Future Audiences team has started a about a proposed new experiment to show a temporary notice about the new Google Preferred Sources feature to Wikipedia readers coming from Google. The experiment is to test whether this notice makes visitors come back to Wikipedia more often. Preferred Sources feature lets users choose websites they trust so Google can highlight content from those sources more prominently in Search and AI experiences. We are interested in testing this on other languages that Google supports and would welcome assistance with starting conversations on other wikis. If interested, please reach out to Future Audiences on the talk page.

Updates for editors

• The chat platform Discord is releasing a new self-service framework that websites can use to specify how their links should look when shared on Discord. The Future Audiences team is planning to start using this new framework to improve how Wikipedia links look when shared on Discord, giving better attribution and credit to contributors. The link appearance and behavior won't change in the first phase of this project as we want to first collect some baseline data to assess the impact of future changes. However, if community members who are active on Discord spot any issues, they can reach out on Phabricator or Metawiki.
• The Reader Growth team will be running an experiment to test whether compacting article lead sections on mobiles with the addition of a "read more" button improves reader retention. The test will begin on September 17 on Arabic, Spanish, French, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Vietnamese, and Chinese Wikipedias and will run for four weeks.
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 23. 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 week. [77]
• View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where Wikistats for Wikipedias was returning an HTTP 500 error and could not be reached, has now been fixed. [78]

Updates for technical contributors

• Developers who maintain a tool that queries the Wikimedia Commons links tables need to update their code to connect to the new x4 database cluster. The links tables have been moved from the s4 cluster to x4, and will no longer receive updates on s4. The page and redirect tables remain available on both clusters. A wiki replica for the x4 cluster will be set up afterwards. The change is being made because the s4 cluster has grown too large to operate efficiently. You can read more.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 15:28, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-39

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

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday, 23 September 2026 at 14:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests, which happen twice a year. During the switchover, all Wikimedia website traffic is shifted from one primary data center to the backup data center to test availability and prevent service disruption even in emergencies. [79]

Updates for editors

• The Growth team tested a new post-edit notice designed to encourage Temporary Account holders to register for a permanent account. The new notice replaced multiple dialogs and a simultaneous welcome notification with a single message highlighting the benefits of creating an account. The experiment increased permanent account creation from 1.94% to 3.66%, an 87% relative increase. The change will now be released to all wikis. [80]
• For Wikipedia editors using the "Suggestion mode" Beta Feature, there is a new opt-in user preference for showing "experimental" edit checks and suggestions. These types are listed at Special:EditChecks, and are intended for early developer-testing and for gathering feedback from experienced users. Administrators can change the configuration details for each suggestion as usual. Administrators can also use this feature to help test their community's ideas for locally created checks and suggestions. Experimental types will have a more distinct visual style later this week. Feedback is welcome.
• The CEE Technical Village Pump has been launched as a space for technical discussions and collaboration among Wikimedia communities in Central and Eastern Europe.
• A new tool, Starter Kit, is now available for new and small language Wikipedia communities. It brings together guided tasks, tools, and resources to help communities get started, monitor their progress, and collaborate with the broader Wikimedia community. Starter Kit is hosted on Wikimedia Toolforge and is designed for Wikipedias with fewer than 50,000 articles. Learn more about how Starter Kit works and how communities have been using it in this Diff blog post.
• The Reader Growth team is launching a retest of the image carousel experiment. The retest will use three new versions of the design, updated based on community feedback. The team will assess results and determine with communities whether or not to proceed with the feature. The experiment will begin the week of September 28 and will run on Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Czech, English, Farsi, French, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
• After successful rollouts to Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Czech, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias, the Reading Lists feature from the Reader Experience team will be available to all logged-in users on all Wikipedia wikis starting September 28.
• View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the mentor status script repeatedly updated mentors’ status even when nothing had changed, creating unnecessary Recent Changes entries, has now been fixed. [81]

Updates for technical contributors

• The abusefilters list query API, used to retrieve specific details about active or historical abuse filters configured on a wiki, has been updated to support the formatversion=2 configuration parameter, thereby leading to breaking changes to the API response. All users who maintain user-scripts or other code need to check if they use the abusefilters list query API, and respond to any breaking changes. [82]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 11:53, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-40

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• Users of default skins on desktop and mobile web (Vector 2022 and Minerva respectively) will now be informed if the search suggestions displayed as they type into Search come from page redirects. Previously, users could get confused when the top search suggestions did not match exactly what they had typed. The new redirect notice clarifies that these suggestions are not random, but related to the search. The suggested pages may be redirects to the most relevant destination articles being searched for. [83]
• Logged-out Wikipedia users on mobile web will begin to see a bookmark button for saving articles to their reading lists instead of the current Watchstar button. When clicked, the bookmark button prompts users to log in or create an account to save an article for later. An earlier experiment found that the bookmark icon was four times more likely than the Watchstar button to encourage logged-out users to create an account. This change is part of efforts to encourage more readers to become account holders and use features that help them save and return to content. [84]
• An experiment will begin on September 29 on Spanish, Arabic, English, and French Wikipedias to simplify the experience users encounter immediately after account creation. The test will explore whether removing friction from the current Welcome Survey helps new users understand what to do next more easily. The experiment will run through the end of October. [85]

• The Product and Technology Advisory Council has put out a call for the community to suggest topics that it should consider and discuss with the Wikimedia Foundation. Editors and technical contributors are invited to add topics to the council's talk page.
• Later this week, it will be possible for communities to configure Edit Checks and Suggestions so that they are shown within additional namespaces, such as a Draft: namespace. Feedback is welcome.
• A bug in the Global Watchlist is causing the page to fail to load for users that have unseen changes on Wikimedia Commons. Developers are working on a fix. Until then, affected users can follow the workarounds described in the relevant help section.
• New magic words {{CATEGORYSORT:TIMESTAMP}} and {{CATEGORYSORT:RTIMESTAMP}} are now available for use. They are able to change the default sorting of categories to be based on timestamp of categorization. [86]
• View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where Wikistats for Wikipedias was not reachable has now been fixed. [87]

Updates for technical contributors

• The datacenter switchover, scheduled on September 23, has been postponed. The equinox exercise revealed capacity issues, preventing the switch of all services to the other datacenter. The process has been paused, prioritizing investigating that issue, to ensure that we continue to be able to serve our users reliably. A new exercise will be scheduled. Meanwhile, all traffic and edits continue to work as usual.
• On September 23, a power loss briefly affected all wikis, creating intermittent issues on both reading and editing modes. This also affected Gerrit. This is unrelated to the datacenter switchover postponement. [88]
• Produnto has been deployed to mediawiki.org and some Indic language wikis. We want to hear your feedback on this experimental product. Produnto allows users to use Lua modules hosted in Wikimedia's GitLab. It simplifies the sharing of Lua code between wikis. Instead of copying each individual Lua module from one wiki to another, users will be able to easily share packages across all wikis.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• A Cross-wiki code collaboration workshop will be held online on October 2 at 12:30 UTC, bringing together South Asian technical contributors to learn about Produnto and begin piloting it on Hindi, Punjabi, Odia, Telugu, and Malayalam Wikipedias. Produnto is a package manager for deploying Lua modules hosted on GitLab to Wikimedia wikis, and was recently deployed on some pilot wikis.

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MediaWiki message delivery 10:46, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-41

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

• The process for this year’s Community Wishlist has been published, incorporating community feedback. The wish submission process will end on November 8. This year, a working group (open for volunteering) that includes community members familiar with the technical aspect of our wikis alongside Wikimedia Foundation staff, will take care of the triage process. The triage is expected to be completed by late November. Votes for wishes will start in January.

Updates for editors

• Editors using the visual editor will now see a warning when they paste text that is likely to have initially been copied from one of five external generative AI chatbots into Wikipedia. This feature is known as LLM Paste Check. It is a type of Edit Check that is community configurable. The check looks for markers in the copied HTML and is not using content watermark detection. Edits will also be tagged so that patrollers can review them more closely. The feature helps newcomers add content that respects Wikipedia’s policies and makes it easier for experienced editors to identify problematic edits. Communities with local policies about LLM usage can adjust the wording and policy that is linked. The team apologizes that this was rolled out without a delay for translations.
• Editors can now easily access the web visual editor directly from the iOS and Android apps. When opening the editor, users will be given a choice between visual editing and source editing. If they choose visual editing, they will be sent to a mobile web window in their phone's browser. After completing their edit, a banner will give them the option to return to the app. This enables readers to make quick contributions while casually reading.
• Users of the Wikipedia Android and iOS apps will now see a one-time account creation prompt after they have used the app for two consecutive weeks. This prompt explains the benefits of having an account. It is intended to help more casual readers become logged-in users who return to the apps regularly. [89]
• Editors on group1 wikis, including Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikivoyage, and Wikisource, will no longer see notifications on Recent Changes and Watchlist when a link to another language version of a page is added, removed, or changed in its Wikidata item. This change will begin on October 5 at 07:00 UTC as a two-week trial to reduce high-volume, low-value notifications and make important changes easier to identify. Editors who rely on these notifications can read more on the project page and share feedback or concerns on the talk page. [90]
• View all 36 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where mentors who removed themselves from the mentorship program could still have mentees assigned to them and receive questions, has now been fixed. Mentees will now be reassigned when a mentor leaves the program. [91]

Updates for technical contributors

• Wikimedia Brasil has published its Development Best Practices Framework (ABPD). It is a guide for staff, contractors and volunteers building technical tools and projects. It covers the project lifecycle, security, accessibility, personal data protection and responsible AI use, and explains how movement-wide guidelines were adapted to a local context. They encourage other affiliates to reuse it and adapt it. Read more in the Diff post.
• A new, canonical base URL for Wikimedia APIs will soon be introduced. The new canonical route follows a {projectName}/api/ pattern and will act as an alternative path for current REST APIs (for example: {projectName}/w/rest.php/). Both versions will be callable for all existing APIs, but the new structure will be the preferred path for newly created API modules. This change will be non-breaking for most users. The existing pathways will remain available for all existing endpoint requests. However, some endpoints may return URLs following the new pattern in response bodies. Changes will be available on test wiki first, with the rollout expected to cover all wikis by the end of October. [92]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki.

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18:49, 5 October 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-42

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

• Starting October 13, wikis can change the default pattern for auto-generated reference names in VisualEditor (currently <ref name=":1" />). They will be able to use human-readable, content-based reference names that are more helpful to contributors using the source editor (e.g. <ref name="Miller2026-1" />). VisualEditor reference name patterns can be defined using MediaWiki system messages, JSON, templates and modules (more information). Admins can enable these changes via community configuration. This is a community wish implemented by WMDE Technical Wishes. [93]
• Sub-referencing is a new MediaWiki feature that allows editors to reuse references with different details. It will be deployed to English Wikipedia on October 14 and to remaining Wikimedia Foundation wikis by end of October (likely October 21). The FAQ lists possible actions to take on your wiki to support the deployment. This is a long-standing community wish implemented by WMDE Technical Wishes. [94][95]

Updates for editors

• Moderator Tools will be removing the list view of the Watchlist and defaulting everyone to the changelog view. Previously, there were two versions of how the Watchlist is shown to mobile web users: the list view, where editors could see watched articles in a list format, and the changelog view, where editors could see changes to watched articles in a log format, controlled by a user's Advanced Mobile Control settings. This has created issues for code-base maintenance: two different displays means two sets of code to manage. By defaulting to the changelog view, we are simplifying the codebase and avoiding the likelihood of missing bugs.
• The Wikipedia Android app is testing a way to listen to article introductions in the “For you” feed. A text-to-speech model reads the existing article text aloud without rewriting it or adding any content. The 30-day experiment will begin in the Wikipedia Beta app during the third week of September, then move to the regular Wikipedia Android app in October for a limited group of eligible users. A small portion of app users (those with English feeds and at least one topic interest) will have access to the feature. This experiment is part of broader efforts to give app readers options in how they consume content in order to deepen engagement and user retention. Learn more and share feedback.
• CodeMirror syntax highlighting was enabled by default for all logged out and newly registered users on the English Wikipedia on September 14. With no signs of adverse effects, the same change is being proposed to be made globally across all wikis in a few weeks. If you have concerns or feedback, or if your wiki would like to opt out, please see the help page. [96]
• Wikidata mobile statement editing of all datatypes will be officially launched on October 13, when it will be removed from Wikidata beta features and become available to all editors. Users can report bugs and share feedback.
• Last week, language link changes were removed from Recent Changes and Watchlist feeds on Wikivoyage, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikiquote and Wiktionary. As no adverse effects have been observed, the Wikidata For Wikimedia Projects plans to roll out this change globally to all Wikipedias. This is scheduled for October 13 at 07:00 UTC, after which editors will no longer see when a link to another language version of a page is added, removed, or changed in its Wikidata item. Editors who rely on these notifications can read more on the project page and share feedback or ask to opt out their wiki on the talk page. [97]
• View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where accidentally touching the graph while scrolling on the Pageviews tool on mobile could unintentionally zoom in has now been fixed. Click-and-drag zoom is now disabled on touch devices. [98]

Updates for technical contributors

• There are three major changes coming to dumps: the legacy content dumps deprecated in January 2026 will now be sunset, the replacement MediaWiki Content File Exports will be delayed to implement a “safety buffer”, and they are now also available as 7zip-compressed files. Users will need to switch the URL they download their dump from. For more information, timeline and migration instructions, see Legacy content dumps sunset.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The Wikimedia Foundation discovered unauthorized activity by OpenAI agents on Wikimedia projects, including edits to wikis, attempts to exploit a public note-taking tool, and heavy automated traffic. Read the blog post on Diff for more details about the activity and the Foundation’s response.

Meetings and events

• Save the date for the next Wikimedia Hackathon! We’ll be meeting in lovely Tirana, Albania for the 2027 Wikimedia Hackathon from April 9–11, 2027. Scholarship and staff sponsorship applications are currently being accepted through Pretix and will close on October 30, 2026. General registration will open in January 2027.

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MediaWiki message delivery 07:36, 13 October 2026 (UTC)