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Tech News: 2026-06
[change source]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 "Page information" feature, which gives validating information about a page (example), now automatically includes a table of contents. If there is a local MediaWiki:Pageinfo-header page created by individual users, it can now be removed.
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, VisualEditor previously added bold or italic formatting inside link descriptions, making the wikicode complex. This has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- There was no XML dump on 20 January. Additionally, from now on, dumps will be generated once per month only.
- The MediaWiki Interfaces team removed support for all transform endpoints containing a trailing slash from the MediaWiki REST API. All API users currently calling those endpoints are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. If you have questions or encounter any problems, please file a ticket in phabricator to the #MW-Interfaces-Team board.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Weekly highlight
- Users are reminded that the Wikimedia Foundation has shared some guiding questions for the July 2026–June 2027 Annual Plan on Meta and Diff. These focus on global trends, faster and healthier experimentation, better support for newcomers, strengthening editors and advanced users, improving collaboration across projects, and growing and retaining readership. Feedback and ideas are welcome on the talk page.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Wikipedia translation of the week: 2026-07
[change source]Please be bold and help translate this article!
The Petites Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry is an illuminated book of hours commissioned by John, Duke of Berry between 1375 and 1385–90. It is known for its ornate miniature leaves and border decorations.
(Please update the interwiki links on Wikidata of your language version of the article after each week's translation is finished so that all languages are linked to each other.)
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Tech News: 2026-07
[change source]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
Logged-in contributors who manage large or complex watchlists can now organise and filter watched pages in ways that improve their workflows with the new Watchlist labels feature. By adding custom labels (for example: pages you created, pages being monitored for vandalism, or discussion pages) users can more quickly identify what needs attention, reduce cognitive load, and respond more efficiently. This improves watchlist usability, especially for highly active editors.- A new feature available on Special:Contributions shows temporary accounts that are likely operated by the same person, and so makes patrolling less time-consuming. Upon checking contributions of a temporary account, users with access to temporary account IP addresses can now see a view of contributions from the related temporary accounts. The feature looks up all the IPs associated with a given temporary account within the data retention period and shows all the contributions of all temporary accounts that have used these IPs. Learn more.
- When editors preview a wikitext edit, the reminder box that they are only seeing a preview (which is shown at the top), now has a grey/neutral background instead of a yellow/warning background. This makes it easier to distinguish preview notes from actual warnings (for example, edit conflicts or problematic redirect targets), which will now be shown in separate warning or error boxes.
- The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension continues to improve — it now properly supports more than one Wikibase site, for example both Wikidata and testwikidata. In addition, issues regarding text direction have been fixed for users who prefer Wikidata or other Wikibase sites in right-to-left (RTL) languages.
- The automatic "magic links" for ISBN, RFC, and PMID numbers have been deprecated in wikitext since 2021 due to inflexibility and difficulties with localization. Several wikis have successfully replaced RFC and PMID magic links with equivalent external links, but a template was often required to replace the functionality of the ISBN magic link. There is now a new built-in parser function
{{#isbn}}available to replace the basic functionality of the ISBN magic link. This makes it easier for wikis who wish to migrate off of the deprecated magic link functionality to do so. - Two new wikis have been created:
- View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- A new global user group has been created: Local bots. It will be used internally by the software to allow community bots to bypass rate limits that are applied to abusive web scrapers. Accounts that are approved as bots on at least one Wikimedia wiki will be automatically added to this group. It will not change what user permissions the bot has.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- The MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference, Spring 2026 will be held March 25–27 in Salt Lake City, USA. This event is organized by and for the third-party MediaWiki community. You can propose sessions and register to attend.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Wikipedia translation of the week: 2026-08
[change source]Please be bold and help translate this article!
Lysmata grabhami is a species of saltwater shrimp in the family Hippolytidae. It was first described by Gordon in 1935. It occurs in the tropical and subtropical Atlantic Ocean and is a cleaner shrimp, operating a cleaning station to which fish come to have parasites removed.
(Please update the interwiki links on Wikidata of your language version of the article after each week's translation is finished so that all languages are linked to each other.)
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Tech News: 2026-08
[change source]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 SRE Team will be performing a cleanup of Wikimedia's Etherpad instance, the web-based editor for real-time collaborative document editing. All pads will be permanently deleted after 30 April, 2026 – if there are still migration projects in progress at that point the team can revisit the date on a case by case basis. Please create local backups of any content you wish to keep, as deleted data cannot be recovered. This cleanup helps reduce database size and minimize infrastructure footprint. Etherpad will continue to support real-time collaboration, but long-term storage should not be expected. Additional cleanups may occur in the future without prior notice.
Updates for editors
- The Information Retrieval team will be launching an Android mobile app experiment that tests hybrid search capabilities which can handle both semantic and keyword queries. The improvement of on-platform search will enable readers to find what they’re looking for directly on Wikipedia more easily. The experiment will first be launched on Greek Wikipedia in late February, followed by English, French, and Portuguese in March. Read more on Diff blog.
- The Reader Growth team will run an experiment for mobile web users, that adds a table of contents and automatically expands all article sections, to learn more about navigation issues they face. The test will be available on Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
- Previously, site notices (MediaWiki:Sitenotice and MediaWiki:Anonnotice) would only render on the desktop site. Now, they will render on all platforms. Users on mobile web will now see these notices and be informed. Site administrators should be prepared to test and fix notices on mobile devices to avoid interference with articles. To opt out, interface admins can add
#siteNotice { display: none; }to MediaWiki:Minerva.css. - View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue on Special:RecentChanges has been fixed. Previously, clicking hide in the active filters caused the "view new changes since…" button to disappear, though it should have remained visible. The button now behaves as expected.
Updates for technical contributors
- New documentation is now available to help editors debug on-site search features. It supports troubleshooting when pages do not appear in results, when ranking seems unexpected, and when you need to inspect what content is being indexed, helping make search behavior easier to understand and analyze. Learn more.
- 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.
Wikipedia translation of the week: 2026-09
[change source]Please be bold and help translate this article!
L'elefante di Cremona (Asia, prima del 1228 - Parma, gennaio 1248) fu un esemplare di elefante donato nel 1228 a Federico II di Svevia da parte del sultano ayyubide al-Malik al-Kamil durante gli incontri che porteranno alla Pace di Giaffa. Usato principalmente per le manifestazioni trionfali del sovrano, l'elefante è citato da numerosi cronachisti e testimoni dell'epoca ed è noto per aver trainato il Carroccio dopo la grande vittoria delle armate di Federico II nella battaglia di Cortenuova del 1237. Rimasto a lungo nell'immaginario popolare collettivo, l'animale venne ucciso durante alcuni scontri occorsi nelle settimane immediatamente precedenti alla battaglia di Parma.
(Please update the interwiki links on Wikidata of your language version of the article after each week's translation is finished so that all languages are linked to each other.)
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Tech News: 2026-09
[change source]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
- Reference Check has been deployed to English Wikipedia, completing its rollout across all Wikipedias. The feature prompts newcomers to add a citation before publishing new content, helping reduce common citation-related reverts and improve verifiability. In A/B testing, the impact was substantial: newcomers shown Reference Check were approximately 2.2 times more likely to include a reference on desktop and about 17.5 times more likely on mobile web.
Updates for editors
- The InterwikiSorting extension, which allowed for the sorting of interwiki links, has been undeployed from Wikipedia. As a result, editors who had enabled interwiki link sorting in non-compact mode (full list format) will now see links reordered. The links moving forward will be listed in the alphabetical order of language code.
- Later this week, people who are editing a page-section using the mobile visual editor, will notice a new "Edit full page" button. When tapped, you will be able to edit the entire article. This helps when the change you want to make is outside the section you initially opened.
- The Reader Experience team is inviting editors to assess whether dark mode should still be considered "beta" on their wiki, based on their experience of how well it functions on desktop and mobile. If the feature is deemed mature, editors can update the interface messages in
MediaWiki:skin-theme-descriptionandMediaWiki:Vector-night-mode-beta-tagto indicate that dark mode is ready and no longer considered beta. - The improved Activity tab which displays user-insights is now available to all users of the Wikipedia iOS app (version 7.9.0 and later). Following earlier A/B testing that showed higher account creation among users with access to the feature, it has been rolled out to 100% of users along with some updates. The Activity tab now shows your edited articles in the timeline, offers editing impact insights like contribution counts and article view trends, and customization options to improve in-app experience for users.
- View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug that prevented DiscussionTools from working on mobile has now been fixed, restoring full functionality.
Updates for technical contributors
- The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension that makes this possible continues to improve. The latest upgrade is the inclusion of a new hook,
ext.globalwatchlist.rebuild, which fires after each watchlist rebuild. This allows you to run gadgets and user scripts for the Special page. - 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.
Could use your AI/LLM "spidey sense"
[change source]Could you take a look at Special:Contributions/Pinkish_Flowers and see if you're getting an AI/LLM generated vibe out of them, too? I nominated Rus'–Samanid conflicts (910–911) at RFD as it just feels "off" and has potentially hallucinated sources. The other couple of articles seem to have similar concerns. You've got a good eye/sense for picking up on them so would appreciate your additional view. CountryANDWestern (talk) 15:10, 25 February 2026 (UTC)
- CountryANDWestern, these are interesting, the references do seem dodgy but I am not getting as much of a usual AI-generated feel from a lot of it. There are some grammar mistakes which AI doesn't tend to make:
According to Al-Mas'udi, the Sea of Azov belongs to the Rus, and that no one else sails on its waters but them
andthe Rus' had good relationship with the Khazar rulers
. I checked ZeroGPT and nothing is coming back from that (though that has mixed reliability). It still could be, it doesn't have a lot of the telltale signs but there is definitely something off, I'm just not too sure at the moment. --Ferien (talk | join TBA!) 22:39, 25 February 2026 (UTC)- Good points about the grammar. I didn't catch those sentences/phrases. I'll leave the RFD open for now, but perhaps it isn't AI generated as I was thinking. CountryANDWestern (talk) 13:16, 26 February 2026 (UTC)
Dark mode conformation of FerienBot userpages
[change source]Hello, I want to report that none of the three FerienBot userpages conform to dark mode, except for the infobox. Michael21107 (talk) 10:56, 28 February 2026 (UTC)
- Hi Michael21107, thank you for the notification. This will be because of the templates involved, so other bot userpages are also broken. There have not been a load of adjustments for dark mode here yet, as you have likely spotted. I will take a look at adjusting a lot of our templates to fit when I can. --Ferien (talk | join TBA!) 13:45, 6 March 2026 (UTC)
- I have no clue how I did not realize that they are templates, or that most things on this (and hard English) wiki are made of templates, especially user/bot pages. Great seeing someone take initiative though! Michael21107 (talk) 15:35, 6 March 2026 (UTC)
- Michael21107, FerienBot and friends are now compatible. I'll take a look at the ones you posted on the talk page of. As much as I hate Vector 2022, I've put myself into dark mode to try and spot more of these :) --Ferien (talk | join TBA!) 22:25, 6 March 2026 (UTC)
- I have no clue how I did not realize that they are templates, or that most things on this (and hard English) wiki are made of templates, especially user/bot pages. Great seeing someone take initiative though! Michael21107 (talk) 15:35, 6 March 2026 (UTC)
Wikipedia translation of the week: 2026-10
[change source]Please be bold and help translate this article!
_(14596880870).jpg)
The Treaty of the Danish West Indies (Danish: Vestindiens traktat), officially the Convention between the United States and Denmark for cession of the Danish West Indies (Danish: Konventionen mellem USA og Danmark), was a 1916 treaty transferring sovereignty of the Danish West Indies from Denmark to the United States in exchange for a sum of US$25,000,000 in gold ($722 million in 2024) and a declaration from the United States that it would "not object to the Danish Government extending their political and economic interests to the whole of Greenland". It is one of the most recent permanent expansions of United States territory.
(Please update the interwiki links on Wikidata of your language version of the article after each week's translation is finished so that all languages are linked to each other.)
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Tech News: 2026-10
[change source]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
- Wikipedia 25 Birthday mode is now live on Betawi, Breton, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, Gorontalo, Indonesian, Italian, Luxembourgish, Madurese, Sicilian, Spanish, Thai, and Vietnamese Wikipedias! This limited-time campaign feature celebrates 25 years of Wikipedia with a birthday mascot, Baby Globe. When turned on, Baby Globe is shown on ~2,500 articles, waiting to be discovered by readers. Communities can choose to turn Birthday mode on by getting consensus from their community and asking an admin to enable the feature and customize it via community configuration on the local wiki.
Updates for editors
- Sub-referencing, a new feature to re-use references with different details has been released to Swedish Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia and a couple of other wikis. You can try the feature on these projects or on testwiki and betawiki. Learnings from the first pilot wiki German Wikipedia have been published in a report. Reach out to the Wikimedia Deutschland team if you are interested in becoming a pilot wiki.
- Paste Check will become available at all Wikipedias this week. The feature prompts newcomers who are pasting text they are not likely to have written into VisualEditor to consider whether doing so risks a copyright violation. Paste Check tags all edits where it is shown for potential review. Local administrators can configure various aspects of the feature via Special:EditChecks. Research across 22 wikis found that Paste Check resulted in an 18% decrease in relative reverted-edits compared to the control group. Translators can help to localize this and related features.
- The Reader Experience team will be standardizing the user menu in the top right for all mobile users so that it is closer to the desktop experience. Currently this user menu is only visible to users with Advanced Mobile Controls (AMC) turned on. The only change is that a couple buttons previously in the left-side menu will move to the top right for users who do not have AMC turned on. This change is expected to go out March 9 and seeks to improve the user interface.
- Starting in the week of March 2, the emails sent out when an email address was added, removed, or changed for an account will switch to a substantially nicer and clearer HTML email from the prior plaintext one.
- Notifications are currently limited to 2,000 historic entries per user, and extend back to 2013 when the feature was released. This is going to be changed to only store Notifications from the last 5 years, but up to 10,000 of them. This will help with long-term infrastructure health and help to prevent more recent notifications from disappearing too soon.
- The Global Watchlist which lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on a single page continues to see improvements. The latest update improves label usage experience. The extension now allows activating the language fallback system for Wikidata items without labels in the viewed language, and showing those labels in the user’s preferred Wikidata language if no
uselang=URL parameter is provided. - The Wikipedia Android team has started a beta test of hybrid search on Greek Wikipedia. Hybrid search capabilities can handle both semantic and keyword queries enabling readers to find what they’re looking for directly on Wikipedia more easily.
- For security reasons, members of certain user groups are required to have two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled. Currently, 2FA is required to use the group, but not to be a member of it. Given that this model still has some vulnerabilities, the situation will gradually change in March. Members of these groups will be unable to disable 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 second half of March, users without 2FA will be removed from these groups. This applies to: CentralNotice administrators, checkusers, interface administrators, suppressors, Wikidata staff, Wikifunctions staff, WMF Office IT and WMF Trust & Safety. Nothing will change for other users. See the linked task for deployment schedule.
- View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue preventing users from creating an instance in Wikibase.cloud has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- To help ensure fair use of infrastructure, over the next month the Wikimedia Foundation will implement global API rate limits across our APIs. In early March, stricter limits will be applied to unidentified requests from outside Toolforge/WMCS and API requests that are made from web browsers. In April, higher limits will be applied to identified traffic. 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.
- The Wikidata Query Service Linked Data Fragment (LDF) endpoint will be decommissioned in February. This endpoint served limited traffic, which was successfully migrated to other data access methods that were better suited to support existing use cases. The hardware used to support the LDF endpoint will be reallocated to support the ongoing backend migration efforts.
- The new Parsoid parser continues to be deployed to additional wikis, improving platform sustainability and making it easier to introduce new reading and editing features. Parsoid is now the default parser on 488 WMF wikis (268 Wikipedias), now covering more than 10% of all Wikipedia page views.
- The process and criteria for requesting exceptional access to the high volume feed of the Wikimedia Enterprise APIs (at no cost for mission-aligned usecases), have now been published. This is to provide more thorough and clearer documentation for users.
- Tech Blog, the blog dedicated to the Wikimedia technical community will be migrating to Diff, the community news and event blog. The migration should be complete in April 2026, after which new posts will be accepted for publishing. Readers will be able to access posts – old and new – on the landing page at https://diff.wikimedia.org/techblog.
- 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.
Restoration of article to user space
[change source]Hi,
Could you restore the latest version of the Harry Potter TV series page you deleted to my userspace so I could keep working on improving it? Could you also clarify if possible which parts of it you still see as particularly complex? I know I had made some changes in response to earlier feedback to use more active voice and simplify sentences, I think. Newsjunkie (talk) 19:33, 8 March 2026 (UTC)
- Newsjunkie, please find the new page in replacement of the old page in your userspace, at User:Newsjunkie/Harry Potter (TV series). The main issue I see is that it is very similar to the English Wikipedia article as it stands, so I would advise you bring in "translations" section-by-section as opposed to copying the page and just adjusting it, as the way you are currently doing it would prove much more difficult, but nevertheless I will try and give some more precise feedback.
- There unfortunately still are a lot of complex sentences,
Led by casting directors Lucy Bevan and Emily Brockmann, in September 2024, a casting call was released looking for child actors to play Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger.
is a good example of a really complex one. This could even just be simplified to something likeIn September 2024, the casting directors, Lucy Bevan and Emily Brockmann, started looking for child actors to play Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger.
would already be much better but even then you could cut it down further, say if you had already explained who the casting directors were in another sentence. - Not so much a complex sentence as such but it can just be stated much easier, it is written that
Holly Waddington serves as the costume designer
, just say she is the costume designer. - Lots of passive still unfortunately.
On 18 August, filming took place at Borough High Street, in Southwark, London, with McLaughlin and Frost present.
,By November, production took place in Ashridge with numerous cast members
,On 24 and 25 August, filming occurred at King's Cross station with the actors playing the Weasley family.
,In mid-September, filming took place in Hoddesdon with Daniel Rigby present,
.
- There unfortunately still are a lot of complex sentences,
- I don't want to give loads of little things because I feel like doing it this way is naturally just way more difficult. I would personally recommend focusing on a section at the time, and there is no obligation for the page to be "finished" upon completion. A shorter more simple article is prefered to a longer less simplified article. I hope this is helpful. --Ferien (talk | join TBA!) 23:24, 10 March 2026 (UTC)
- Thank you, I will take another look! Just in terms of the last paragraph you mentioned though, I think all those sentence are actually active sentences, with filming and production acting as a noun in each sentence? Passive would be something like scenes were filmed or production was witnessed maybe, but in this case "Filming" or "Production" are the active nouns with the active verb forms being took place and occurring, there is no form of "to be" that would normally be used in passive. Newsjunkie (talk) 02:20, 11 March 2026 (UTC)
Wikipedia translation of the week: 2026-11
[change source]Please be bold and help translate this article!
Steens Mountain is a large fault-block mountain in the northwest United States, located in Harney County, Oregon. Stretching some fifty miles (80 km) north to south, on its east side it rises from the Alvord Desert at an elevation of about 4,200 feet (1,280 m) to 9,738 feet (2,968 m) at the summit. Steens Mountain is not part of a mountain range but is properly a single mountain, the largest of Oregon's fault-block mountains.
(Please update the interwiki links on Wikidata of your language version of the article after each week's translation is finished so that all languages are linked to each other.)
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Tech News: 2026-11
[change source]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, 25 March 2026 at 15:00 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.
- Last week, all wikis had 2 hours of read-only time, and extended unavailability for user-scripts and gadgets. This was due to a security incident which has since been resolved. Work is ongoing to prevent re-occurrences. For current information please see the post on the Stewards' noticeboard (translations).
Updates for editors
- Users facing multiple blocks on mobile will now see the reasons for each block separately, instead of a generic message. This helps them understand why they are blocked and what steps they can take to resolve the issue. For example, users affected for using common VPNs (such as iCloud Private Relay) will receive clearer guidance on what they need to do to start editing again.
- Later this week, Suggestion Mode will become available as a beta feature within the visual editor at all Wikipedias. This feature proactively suggests various types of actions that people can consider taking to improve Wikipedia articles, and learn about related guidelines. The feature is locally configurable, and can also be locally expanded with custom Suggestions. Current settings can be seen at Special:EditChecks and there are instructions for how administrators can customize the links to point to local guidelines. The feature is connected to Edit check which suggests improvements while someone is writing new content. In the future, the Editing team plans to evaluate the feature's impact with newcomers through a controlled experiment.
- View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where the cursor became misaligned during the use of CodeMirror’s syntax highlighting, which makes wikitext and code easier to read, has now been fixed. This problem specifically affected users who defined a font rule in a custom stylesheet while creating a new topic with DiscussionTools.
Updates for technical contributors
- API rate limiting update: To help ensure fair use of infrastructure, global API rate limits will be applied this week to requests without a compliant User-Agent that originate from outside Toolforge/WMCS and to unauthenticated requests made from web browsers. Higher limits will be applied to identified traffic in April. 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.
- The new GraphQL API has been released. The API was developed as a flexible alternative to select features of the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS), to improve developer experience and foster adaptability, and efficient data access. Try it out and give feedback. You can also sign up for usability tests.
- The PTAC Unsupported Tools Working Group continued improvements to Video2Commons in February, with fixes addressing authentication errors, large-file handling, task queue visibility, and clearer upload behavior. Work is still ongoing in some areas, including changes related to deprecated server-side uploads. Read this update to learn more.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The Article Guidance team invites experienced Wikipedia editors from selected pilot wikis and interested contributors from other Wikipedias to fill out this questionnaire which is available in English, Arabic, Bengali, Japanese, Portuguese, Persian, and Turkish. Your answers will help the team customize guidance for less experienced editors and help them learn community policies and practices while creating an article. Learn more on the project page.
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Hello!
[change source]Hello! Im Wikipedian2025, i was editing Wikipedia in spring 2025 but then suddenly i went offline and now I'm back. Wikipedian2025 (talk) 09:35, 15 March 2026 (UTC)
- Hi Wikipedian2025, welcome back :D --Ferien (talk | join TBA!) 14:23, 15 March 2026 (UTC)
- How is your day going? Wikipedian2025 (talk) 16:56, 18 March 2026 (UTC)
- Hi Wikipedian2025, sorry for the late response - I have had a busy few days, I have recently been doing more part-time work. How about you? --Ferien (talk | join TBA!) 23:45, 22 March 2026 (UTC)
- Im feeling good Ferien, sorry for the late response i was just coding and programming and right now im making my own local wiki using MediaWiki Wikipedian2025 (talk) 13:36, 23 March 2026 (UTC)
- Hi Wikipedian2025, sorry for the late response - I have had a busy few days, I have recently been doing more part-time work. How about you? --Ferien (talk | join TBA!) 23:45, 22 March 2026 (UTC)
- How is your day going? Wikipedian2025 (talk) 16:56, 18 March 2026 (UTC)
Wikipedia translation of the week: 2026-12
[change source]Please be bold and help translate this article!
_Photograph_by_Shantanu_Kuveskar.jpg)
A casque is an anatomical feature found in some species of birds, reptiles, and amphibians. In birds, it is an enlargement of the bones of the upper mandible or the skull, either on the front of the face, the top of the head, or both. The casque has been hypothesized to serve as a visual cue to a bird's sex, state of maturity, or social status; as reinforcement to the beak's structure; or as a resonance chamber, enhancing calls.
(Please update the interwiki links on Wikidata of your language version of the article after each week's translation is finished so that all languages are linked to each other.)
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Tech News: 2026-12
[change source]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 Improved Syntax Highlighting beta feature, also known as CodeMirror 6, has been used for wikitext syntax highlighting since November 2024. It will be promoted out of beta by May 2026 in order to bring improvements and new features to all editors who use the standard syntax highlighter. If you have any questions or concerns about promoting the feature out of beta, please share.
- Some changes to local user groups are performed by stewards on Meta-Wiki and logged there only. Now, interwiki rights changes will be logged both on Meta-Wiki and the wiki of the target user to make it easier to access a full record of user's rights changes on a local wiki. Past log entries for such changes will be backfilled in the coming weeks.
- On wikis using Flagged Revisions, the number of pending changes shown on Special:PendingChanges previously counted pages which were no longer pending review, because they have been removed from the system without being reviewed, e.g. due to being deleted, moved to a different namespace, or due to wiki configuration changes. The count will be correct now. On some wikis the number shown will be much smaller than before. There should be no change to the list of pages itself.
- Wikifunctions composition language has been rewritten, resulting in a new version of the language. This change aims to increase service stability by reducing the orchestrator's memory consumption. This rewrite also enables substantial latency reduction, code simplification, and better abstractions, which will open the door to later feature additions. Read more about the changes.
- Users can now sort search results alphabetically by page title. The update gives an additional option to finding pages more easily and quickly. Previously, results could be sorted by Edit date, Creation date, or Relevance. To use the new option, open 'Advanced Search' on the search results page and select 'Alphabetically' under 'Sorting Order'.
- View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the bug that prevented UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons from importing files from Flickr has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- A new special page, Special:LintTemplateErrors, has been created to list transcluded pages that are flagged as containing lint errors to help users discover them easily. The list is sorted by the number of transclusions with errors. For example: Special:LintTemplateErrors/night-mode-unaware-background-color.
- Users of the Improved Syntax Highlighting beta feature have been using CodeMirror instead of CodeEditor for syntax highlighting when editing JavaScript, CSS, JSON, Vue and Lua content pages, for some time now. Along with promoting CodeMirror 6 out of beta, the plan is to replace CodeEditor as the standard editor for these content models by May 2026. Feedback or concerns are welcome.
- The CodeMirror JavaScript modules will soon be upgraded to CodeMirror 6. Leading up to the upgrade, loading the
ext.CodeMirrororext.CodeMirror.libmodules from gadgets and user scripts was deprecated in July 2025. The use of theext.CodeMirror.switchhook was also deprecated in March 2025. Contributors can now make their scripts or gadgets compatible with CodeMirror 6. See the migration guide for more information. - The MediaWiki Interfaces team is expanding coverage of REST API module definitions to include extension APIs. REST API modules are groups of related endpoints that can be independently managed and versioned. Modules now exist for GrowthExperiments and Wikifunctions APIs. As we migrate extension APIs to this structure, documentation will move out of the main MediaWiki OpenAPI spec and REST Sandbox view, and will instead be accessible via module-specific options in the dropdown on the REST Sandbox (i.e., Special:RestSandbox, available on all wiki projects).
- The Scribunto extension provides different pieces of information about the wiki where the module is being used via the mw.site library. Starting last week, the library also provides a way of accessing the wiki ID that can be used to facilitate cross-wiki module maintenance.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The 2026 Coolest Tool Award celebrating outstanding community tools, is now open for nominations! Nominate your favorite tool using the nomination survey form by 23 March 2026. For more information on privacy and data handling, please see the survey privacy statement.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Wikipedia translation of the week: 2026-13
[change source]Please be bold and help translate this article!
Etruscan sculpture was one of the most important artistic expressions of the Etruscan people, who inhabited the regions of Northern Italy and Central Italy between about the 9th century BC and the 1st century BC. Etruscan art was largely a derivation of Greek art, although developed with many characteristics of its own. Given the almost total lack of Etruscan written documents, a problem compounded by the paucity of information on their language—still largely undeciphered—it is in their art that the keys to the reconstruction of their history are to be found, although Greek and Roman chronicles are also of great help. Like its culture in general, Etruscan sculpture has many obscure aspects for scholars, being the subject of controversy and forcing them to propose their interpretations always tentatively, but the consensus is that it was part of the most important and original legacy of Italian art and even contributed significantly to the initial formation of the artistic traditions of ancient Rome.
(Please update the interwiki links on Wikidata of your language version of the article after each week's translation is finished so that all languages are linked to each other.)
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--MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:07, 23 March 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-13
[change source]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 site users can now log in without a password using passkeys. This is a secure method supported by fingerprint, facial recognition, or PIN. With this change, all users who opt for passwordless login will find it easier, faster, and more secure to log in to their accounts using any device. The new passkey login option currently appears as an autofill suggestion in the username field. An additional "Log in with passkey" button will soon be available for users who have already registered a passkey. This update will improve security and user experience. The screen recording demonstrates the passwordless login process step by step.
- All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday, 25 March 2026 at 15:00 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.
Updates for editors
- Wikimedia site users can now export their notifications older than 5 years using a new Toolforge tool. This will ensure that users retain their important notifications and avoid them being lost based on the planned change to delete notifications older than 5 years, as previously announced.
- Wikipedia editors in Indonesian, Thai, Turkish, and Simple English now have access to Special:PersonalDashboard. This is an early version of an experience that introduces newer editors to patrolling workflows, making it easier for them to move from making edits to participating in more advanced moderation work on their project.
- The Special:Block now has two minor interface changes. Administrators can now easily perform indefinite blocks through a dedicated radio button in the expiry section. Also, choosing an indefinite expiry provides a different set of common reasons to select from, which can be changed at: MediaWiki:Ipbreason-indef-dropdown.
- Mobile editors at several wikis can now see an improved logged-out edit warning, thanks to the recent updates from the Growth team. These changes released last week are part of ongoing efforts and tests to enhance account creation experience on mobile and then increase participation.
- View all 36 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the bug that prevented mobile web users from seeing the block information when affected by multiple blocks has been fixed. They can now see messages of all the blocks currently affecting them when they access Wikipedia.
Updates for technical contributors
- Images built using Toolforge will soon get the upgraded buildpacks version, bringing support for newer language versions and other upstream improvements and fixes. If you use Toolforge Build Service, review the recent cloud-announce email and update your build configuration as necessary to ensure your tools are compatible.
- The API Portal documentation wiki will shut down in June 2026. API keys created on the API Portal will continue to work normally. api.wikimedia.org endpoints will be deprecated gradually starting in July 2026. Documentation on the API Portal is moving to mediawiki.org. Learn more on the project page.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- WMDE Technical Wishes is considering improvements to automatically generated reference names in VisualEditor. Please check out the proposed solutions and participate in the request for comment.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Wikipedia translation of the week: 2026-14
[change source]Please be bold and help translate this article!
Pulse was a gay bar, dance club, and nightclub in Orlando, Florida, founded in 2004 by Barbara Poma and Ron Legler. On June 12, 2016, the club was the scene of the second-deadliest mass shooting by a single gunman in U.S. history, and the second-deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil since the September 11 attacks. Forty-nine people were killed and 58 other people were injured.
(Please update the interwiki links on Wikidata of your language version of the article after each week's translation is finished so that all languages are linked to each other.)
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--MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:38, 30 March 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-14
[change source]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 Beta version of Abstract Wikipedia a new Wikimedia project which is language-independent, was launched last week. The project allows communities to build Wikipedia articles in their native language, which can be readily accessed by other users in their own languages. The wiki is powered by instructions from Wikifunctions and also based on structured content from Wikidata. Read more.
Updates for editors
- The Growth team is running an A/B test to evaluate a clearer, more user-friendly message that promotes account creation on wikis. Currently when logged-out mobile users begin editing, they see a jarring warning message that can feel abrupt and discouraging. This also presents temporary account editing as the default rather than encouraging account creation. The test is running on ten Wikipedias, including Arabic, French, Spanish and German. Read more.
- The Wikimedia Apps team is inviting feedback on how editing should work on the Wikipedia mobile apps. The discussion focuses on improving how users access editing tools when they tap "Edit". This is part of a broader effort to convert readers who develop an interest in editing, to access a more user-friendly pathway to start contributing.
- View all 45 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where citation fetching from the large newspaper archive Newspapers.com was no longer working, due to a block in Citoid requests, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- 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.
Hey
[change source]Any way you could review rollback requests? If not it is fine. ExplorerofSpace (talk) 21:56, 30 March 2026 (UTC)
- Hey ExplorerofSpace, RfR is quite closely monitored and requests are usually left for a few days at least to see if there are comments from other admins. I will take a look at it at some point this week. Thanks! --Ferien (talk | join TBA!) 21:58, 30 March 2026 (UTC)
- Ok, no problem. ExplorerofSpace (talk) 21:58, 30 March 2026 (UTC)
Wikipedia translation of the week: 2026-15
[change source]Please be bold and help translate this article!
Tofana di Rozes (3,225 metres (10,581 ft)) is a mountain of the Dolomites in the Province of Belluno, Veneto, Italy. Located west of the resort of Cortina d'Ampezzo, the mountain's giant three-edged pyramid shape and its vertical south face, above the Falzarego Pass, makes it the most popular peak in the Tofane group, and one of the most popular in the Dolomites.
(Please update the interwiki links on Wikidata of your language version of the article after each week's translation is finished so that all languages are linked to each other.)
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--MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:27, 6 April 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-15
[change source]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 CampaignEvents extension now includes a new group goal-setting feature, enabling organizers to set and track event goals such as the number of articles created and participating contributors in real time. Similarly, participants can work toward shared targets and see their collective impact as the event unfolds. The feature is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. Learn more in the documentation.
- The new watchlist labels feature (announced in Tech News 2026-07) is now available via VisualEditor, the source editor, and the 'watchstar' (or watch link, for skins that don't have a star icon). Previously it was only possible to assign labels via EditWatchlist. In all three places it is a new field following the expiry field.
- View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where talk pages on mobile with Parsoid are unusable after empty section headers, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- The sub-referencing feature, which lets editors add details to an existing reference without duplicating it, will be gradually rolled out to more wikis later this year. Wikis using the Reference Tooltips gadget are encouraged to update their version (typically at MediaWiki:Gadget-ReferenceTooltips.js as shown here) to ensure compatibility. Other reference-related gadgets may also be affected.
- All Wikinews editions will be closed and switched to read-only mode on 4 May 2026. Content will remain accessible, but no new edits or articles can be added. This closure was approved by the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation following extended discussions. Read more.
- The Action API has had several formats for requested output. One of them,
format=php, is being removed soon. Please ensure your scripts or bots use the JSON format. This removal should affect very few scripts and bots. - The Special:NamespaceInfo page now includes namespace aliases. For example "WP" for the "Project" ("Wikipedia") namespace on the German Wikipedia.
- 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.
May i ask something?
[change source]how to become administrator 🙈 Actor1nLaw (talk) 20:37, 6 April 2026 (UTC)
- @Actor1nLaw: It takes some time but the main thing to keep in mind is that people aren't (or shouldn't be) contributing to become an admin. Eventually, it just becomes a natural extension of what you're doing already as an editor. You need to be trusted by the community and have experience to show you won't mess anything up too much. --Ferien (talk | join TBA!) 20:40, 6 April 2026 (UTC)
- Thanks for the clarification. I’ll focus on contributing and gaining experience. Actor1nLaw (talk) 20:43, 6 April 2026 (UTC)
Hi, does this bot still run on the Simple English Wikipedia? It hasn't edited since 2025. ~2026-21551-23 (talk) 02:38, 8 April 2026 (UTC)
- ~2026-21551-23, it is something I have been putting off for quite a while, I meant to get it running again back in October. I think I fixed it I just never got it back onto my Pi. --Ferien (talk | join TBA!) 08:35, 8 April 2026 (UTC)
