User talk:Amorymeltzer/Archive 35
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Wikimedia Apps newsletter – Third quarter of 2025
In this edition, we’ll walk you through the major updates, experiments, and improvements that took place in the Wikipedia mobile apps during July, August, and September.
iOS
- In July, we released the first iteration of Tabbed Browsing to all users.
- Our 30-day A/B test showed mixed but promising results: while logged-out user retention gains were modest compared to Android, survey feedback was overwhelmingly positive (93% rated the feature “Neutral to Very Satisfactory”).
- We continued improvements throughout August and September, including a design review for “More Dynamic Tabs,” a new tab controller, and bug fixes such as inconsistent tab sizing on iPad mini and tooltip issues.
- Work continued on Year in Review upgrades, with spikes exploring features such as sharing entire reviews, custom app icons, and showing which geographies users read about the most.
- We also began preparing overall app data to share richer collective insights.
- We improved code behind the History tab and recent searches to prepare for future navigational changes.
Other iOS Updates
- Released several app versions (7.8.1 through 7.8.3), with smoke tests completed.
- Resolved numerous bugs including crashes (tooltips, gestures, search), iPad layout issues, and visual problems with captions, Quick Facts, and images in Dark Mode.
- Added a new REST endpoint for remote configuration and upgraded fundraising configurations to support A/B testing.
- Verified continued compatibility with multi-factor authentication (MFA).
Android
- In August, we launched the Customizable Donation Reminder experiment in Italy. The reminder will allow users to decide if they want to be reminded to donate, and how often.
- By September, we finalized core modules, onboarding, instrumentation, and validation tasks needed for the A/B test of the new Activity Tab against the Edit Tab.
- This marks a major step toward testing whether an Activity space can improve multi-day engagement and retention.
Bug Fixes & Improvements
- Fixed crashes with image gallery long-press, saved article syncing for Chinese, edit previews, and special links.
- Addressed rendering and Dark Mode issues affecting math tags, GIFs, and citation numbers.
Other Android Updates
- We released a new beta and conducted multiple regression tests to ensure stability.
- We added a general-purpose remote configuration REST endpoint, aligned with iOS.
- Continued technical debt cleanup, including removing allowMainThreadQueries and adding suspend to DAO functions.
- Upgraded fundraising configuration to support A/B testing.
Cross-Platform
- Both apps upgraded fundraising A/B test support and created a shared remote configuration REST endpoint.
- We began tracking Account Vanish events on iOS and Android for privacy features.
Looking Ahead
This quarter marked a big step forward on Tabbed Browsing, Activity Tab, and Year in Review — three projects aimed at making Wikipedia more personal, navigable, and engaging. We also advanced donation experiments and backend improvements to support future flexibility.
Make sure you’re subscribed to this newsletter to stay in the loop — and thank you for being part of the journey!
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2025 Issue 19
Upcoming and current events and conversations
Let's Talk continues
- Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Selection: Announcement of the final ballot for the 2025 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election and more answers about the decision. Eligible voters can vote between October 8 – October 23.
- Wikipedia 25: Are you planning to organize events to celebrate Wikipedia's 25th birthday? The Wikimedia Foundation offers grants to support active Wikimedia groups in organizing short-term, low-cost projects to celebrate this milestone. Applications are open until November 1.
- WikiConference North America 2025: WikiConference North America will take place from October 16–19 in New York City, USA.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Mobile Editing: Insights on mobile web editing on Wikipedia in 2025 are now available. This report highlights that ~95% of IP mobile users editing via wikitext open the editor but make no changes at all, a vast untapped potential. It also pinpoints where contributors most often drop off.
- Dark Mode: Dark Mode user interface will be rolled out on all Wikimedia sites on October 29. All anonymous users of Wikimedia sites will have the option to activate a color scheme that features light-colored text on a dark background. This is designed to provide a more comfortable reading experience, especially in low-light situations.
- Community wishlist extension: The new Community Wishlist extension has been released. This will allow users to add tags to their wishes to better categorise them, and (in a future iteration) to filter them by status, tags and focus areas. It will also be possible to support individual wishes again, as requested by the community in many instances.
- Paste Check: 22 Wikis are now testing a new Edit Check feature, Paste Check, to help avoid and fight copyright violations. When editors paste text into an article, Paste Check prompts them to confirm the origin and licensing of the content.
- Tone Check: The Wikimedia Foundation is working on a new check for newcomers: Tone check. Using a prediction model, this check will encourage editors to improve the tone of their edits.
- Search Suggestions: Search Suggestions was deployed on English Wikipedia. Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users see suggestions of articles for further reading. The feature is available on both desktop and mobile.
- Unsupported Tools Working Group: A new Unsupported Tools Working Group has been formed to help prioritize and review requests for support of unmaintained extensions, gadgets, bots, and tools. The group has chosen Video2Commons as the first tool for its pilot cycle. The group will explore ways to improve and sustain the tool over the coming months.
- Tech News: Read updates from Tech News week 40 and 41 including about Sub-referencing – a new feature to re-use references with different details.
- Wikimedia Research Showcase: Don't miss the next Wikimedia Research Showcase, "Celebrating 13 Years: Wikidata's Role in Learning and Culture" taking place on October 15 at 16:30 UTC.
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · list of movement events
- Wikimania: Wikimania Nairobi has been featured in more than 100 stories across community platforms and international media outlets.
- Wikifunctions: Rich text is now available for embedded Wikifunctions calls across the 150 wikis where it’s enabled.
- WikiLearn: New Wikipedia online courses you can join to strengthen your Wikimedia editing skills.
- Human Rights: Making sure AI serves people and knowledge stays human: Wikimedia Foundation publishes a Human Rights Impact Assessment on the interaction of AI and machine learning with Wikimedia projects.
- Don't blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
- Digital Safety & Privacy: Frequently Asked Questions about Wikimedia Foundation's Legal Work.
- Transparency Report: Wikimedia Foundation publishes its Latest Transparency Report.
- Privacy Policy: The Wikimedia Foundation Privacy Policy is getting a minor update in preparation for Temporary Accounts.
- Learning Clinic: Join the next Let's Connect Learning Clinic on the topic of "Mastering the Capacity Exchange (CapX) Tool (Part 2)" taking place on October 20 at 17:00 UTC.
Foundation statements
- Knowledge integrity: Lessons from Wikipedia on the 3 building blocks of trustworthy information. This is part of the new series from the Wikimedia Foundation that explores how Wikipedia can inspire new standards of knowledge integrity for our times.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · The Wikipedia Library · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcac
wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Tech News: 2025-43
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- To optimize how user data is stored in our databases, the saved preferences of users who haven't logged in for over five years and have fewer than 100 edits will be cleared. When those users return, default settings will apply.
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a broken link from the GlobalContributions interface message to the XTools GlobalContributions page which has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- The work to reroute all traffic to API endpoints under the
rest.phproute through a common API gateway is now complete. If any issues are observed, please file a phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board. - Edits to Wikidata references or qualifiers will now be shown in RecentChanges and Watchlist entries on other wikis less often, reducing unnecessary notifications. This will reduce the overall quantity of 'noisy' entries. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged.
- 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.
The Signpost: 20 October 2025
- News and notes: Board shuffles, LLM blocks increase, IPs are going away
And the "Global Resource Distribution Committee" emerges.
- Special report: The election that isn't
Two shortlisted WMF Board candidates removed from the ballot.
- Interview: The BoT bump
Who was bumped and why?
- In the media: An incident at WikiConference North America; WMF reports AI-related traffic drop and explains Wikipedia to US conservatives
...while Musk prepares to launch "Grokipedia".
- Traffic report: One click after another
Serial-killer miniseries, deceased scientist, government shutdowns and Sandalwood hit "Kantara" crowd the tubes.
- Humour: Wikipedia pay rates
Don't get too excited before you read this.
Tech News: 2025-44
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- The Wikipedia iOS app has launched an A/B/C test of improvements made to the tabbed browsing feature for select regions and languages. The test, named “More dynamic tabs”, explores new tab experiences and includes “Did you know” and “Because you read” article recommendations. You can read more on the project page.
- Autoconfirmed users on small and medium wikis with the CampaignEvents extension can now use Event Registration without the Event Organizer right. This feature lets organizers enable registration, manage participants, and lets users register with one click instead of signing event pages.
- View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue of flashing colors when holding or pressing the arrow keys under the dark mode settings in Vector 2022 has been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- The CampaignEvents extension will be deployed to all remaining wikis during the week of 17 November 2025. The extension currently includes three features: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List. For this rollout, Invitation List will not be enabled on Wikifunctions and MediaWiki unless requested by those communities. Visit the deployment page to learn more.
- The SwaggerUI-based REST sandbox experience is now live on all wiki projects. The sandbox can be accessed through the Special:RestSandbox page. Please report any issues to the MediaWiki Interfaces team board, or join the discussion on the project launch page.
- Transform endpoints with a trailing slash path in the MediaWiki REST API are now marked as deprecated. They will remain functional during this time, but removal is expected by the end of January 2026. All API users currently calling them are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. Both endpoint variations can be found and tested using the REST Sandbox. See the MediaWiki REST API Deprecation page for more detailed information about the API deprecation policies and procedures.
- A dedicated changelog now exists for the MediaWiki REST API. The changelog provides an overview of these changes, making it easier for developers to keep track of improvements and iterations. Announcements will also continue to flow through the standard communication channels, including Tech News and email distribution lists, but can now be more easily referenced from a central location. If you have feedback about the style, structure, or content of this changelog, please join the discussion.
- Administrators can delete the tracking category which was previously added by the JsonConfig extension, as it is no longer used. See the categories linked from Q130635582. It is OK if there are still pages listed in the category as that is just a caching issue, and they will be automatically cleared out the next time each page is edited.
- 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.
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2025 Issue 20
Upcoming and current events and conversations
Let's Talk continues
- Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees selection: Additional perspectives on current and future board selection processes.
- Global trends: We are seeing 8% declines in human page views on Wikipedia as some users don't directly visit Wikipedia to get information. Learn about this new user trend, how the Wikimedia Foundation anticipate these changes, and how you can help.
- WECUDI 2025: The second conference of Wikimedia, Education, and Digital Cultures will be held from October 29–31 in Mexico City, Mexico.
- GLAM Conference: Wiki GLAM Culture and Heritage Conference (WGCHC) will take place on 30 October – 1 November in Lisbon, Portugal.
- WikidataCon 2025: WikidataCon 2025 will take place online from October 31 – November 2.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Making it easier to say thanks: Users on most wikis will now have the ability to thank a comment directly from the talk page it appears on. Before this change, thanking could only be done by visiting the revision history of the talk page.
- Account security: Improvements to account security and two-factor authentication (2FA) features were enabled across all wikis. Another part of the project is making 2FA generally available to all users. Along with editors with advanced privileges, such as administrators and bureaucrats, 40% of editors now have access to 2FA. You can check if you have access at Special:AccountSecurity.
- Abstract Wikipedia: The naming contest for the new Wikimedia project, known until now as Abstract Wikipedia, is ongoing. Voting is now open until November 3.
- Tech News: Read updates from Tech News week 42 and 43 including the community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
- Wikimedia apps: The Wikipedia iOS App launched an A/B/C test of improvements to the Tabbed browsing feature into Beta for select regions & languages. Called “More dynamic tabs”, the experiment adds user-requested improvements and introduces article recommendations within the tabs overview, showing “Did you know” or “Because you read” content depending on how many tabs are open.
- CampaignEvents extension: Campaignevents extension will be deployed to all remaining wikis during the week of 17 November 2025. The extension currently includes three features: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List. For this rollout, Invitation List will not be enabled on Wikifunctions and MediaWiki unless requested by those communities.
- Event registration tool: Autoconfirmed users on small and medium wikis with the extension can now use Event Registration without the Event Organizer right. This feature lets organizers enable registration, manage participants, and lets users register with one click instead of signing event pages.
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · list of movement events
- Digital safety: Explore how you can help make Wikimedia safer by taking our new self-paced course, Safety for Young Wikimedians.
- Wikimedia Core Curriculum: The Wikimedia Foundation has developed seven online video learning modules covering the core English Wikipedia policies. You are invited to use, adapt, and translate the course.
- Advocacy: The Wikimedia Foundation has signed onto a statement that calls on governments and UN bodies to keep discussions about the future of internet governance accessible to non-government actors like industry and civil society. This statement is part of ongoing joint advocacy with affiliates to influence UN discussions about the future of internet governance such as the Global Digital Compact campaign and WSIS+20 deliberations.
- GLAM: The Wikimedia Foundation and several affiliates have signed onto the Open Heritage Statement, which supports galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM institutions) to have the legal rights they need to collect, preserve, and provide access to cultural heritage.
Foundation statements
- How Wikipedia works: Wikimedia Foundation responds to questions about how Wikipedia works.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · The Wikipedia Library · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Add temporary account IP viewer to userinfo.js
I'm asking that you add temporary-account-viewer to User:Amorymeltzer/userinfo.js under the name "temporary account IP viewer". Thank you! JJPMaster (she/they) 16:43, 21 October 2025 (UTC)
- @JJPMaster Yeah, pretty reasonable. Done! ~ Amory (u • t • c) 18:26, 21 October 2025 (UTC)
- Additionally, I keep seeing "oathauth-twofactorauth" a bunch. Do you know what that's about? JJPMaster (she/they) 03:11, 23 October 2025 (UTC)
- That's a two-factor thing, see Wikipedia:Oathauth-twofactorauth. You're seeing it with this, or via popups, or something else? ~ Amory (u • t • c) 16:07, 25 October 2025 (UTC)
- It appears next to the actual user groups on userinfo. Example: User talk:Tamzin. JJPMaster (she/they) 18:07, 25 October 2025 (UTC)
- Ahh, indeed! I didn't quite realize there was a local, non-global group. I went ahead and turned it off, thanks for the heads-up. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 17:32, 28 October 2025 (UTC)
- It appears next to the actual user groups on userinfo. Example: User talk:Tamzin. JJPMaster (she/they) 18:07, 25 October 2025 (UTC)
- That's a two-factor thing, see Wikipedia:Oathauth-twofactorauth. You're seeing it with this, or via popups, or something else? ~ Amory (u • t • c) 16:07, 25 October 2025 (UTC)
- Additionally, I keep seeing "oathauth-twofactorauth" a bunch. Do you know what that's about? JJPMaster (she/they) 03:11, 23 October 2025 (UTC)
Guide to temporary accounts
Hello, Amorymeltzer. This message is being sent to remind you of significant upcoming changes regarding logged-out editing.
Starting 4 November, logged-out editors will no longer have their IP address publicly displayed. Instead, they will have a temporary account (TA) associated with their edits. Users with some extended rights like administrators and CheckUsers, as well as users with the temporary account IP viewer (TAIV) user right will still be able to reveal temporary users' IP addresses and all contributions made by temporary accounts from a specific IP address or range.
How do temporary accounts work?
- When a logged-out user completes an edit or a logged action for the first time, a cookie will be set in this user's browser and a temporary account tied with this cookie will be automatically created for them. This account's name will follow the pattern:
~2025-12345-67(a tilde, year of creation, a number split into units of 5). - All subsequent actions by the temporary account user will be attributed to this username. The cookie will expire 90 days after its creation. As long as it exists, all edits made from this device will be attributed to this temporary account. It will be the same account even if the IP address changes, unless the user clears their cookies or uses a different device or web browser.
- A record of the IP address used at the time of each edit will be stored for 90 days after the edit. Users with the temporary account IP viewer (TAIV) user right will be able to see the underlying IP addresses.
- As a measure against vandalism, there are two limitations on the creation of temporary accounts:
- There has to be a minimum of 10 minutes between subsequent temporary account creations from the same IP (or /64 range in case of IPv6).
- There can be a maximum of 6 temporary accounts created from an IP (or /64 range) within a period of 24 hours.
Temporary account IP viewer user right
- Administrators may grant the temporary account IP viewer (TAIV) user right to non-administrators who meet the criteria for granting. Importantly, an editor must make an explicit request for the permission (e.g. at WP:PERM/TAIV)—administrators are not permitted to assign the right without a request.
- Administrators will automatically be able to see temporary account IP information once they have accepted the Access to Temporary Account IP Addresses Policy via Special:Preferences or via the onboarding dialog which comes up after temporary accounts are deployed.
Impact for administrators
- It will be possible to block many abusers by just blocking their temporary accounts. A blocked person won't be able to create new temporary accounts quickly if the admin selects the autoblock option.
- It will still be possible to block an IP address or IP range.
- Temporary accounts will not be retroactively applied to contributions made before the deployment. On Special:Contributions, you will be able to see existing IP user contributions, but not new contributions made by temporary accounts on that IP address. Instead, you should use Special:IPContributions for this (see a video about IPContributions in a gallery below).
Rules about IP information disclosure
- Publicizing an IP address gained through TAIV access is generally not allowed (e.g. ~2025-12345-67 previously edited as 192.0.2.1 or ~2025-12345-67's IP address is 192.0.2.1).
- Publicly linking a TA to another TA is allowed if "reasonably believed to be necessary". (e.g.
~2025-12345-67 and ~2025-12345-68 are likely the same person, so I am counting their reverts together toward 3RR
, but not Hey ~2025-12345-68, you did some good editing as ~2025-12345-67) - See Wikipedia:Temporary account IP viewer § What can and can't be said for more detailed guidelines.
Useful tools for patrollers
- It is possible to view if a user has opted-in to view temporary account IPs via the User Info card, available in Preferences → Appearance → Advanced options →
Enable the user info card
- This feature also makes it possible for anyone to see the approximate count of temporary accounts active on the same IP address range.
- Special:IPContributions allows viewing all edits and temporary accounts connected to a specific IP address or IP range.
- Similarly, Special:GlobalContributions supports global search for a given temporary account's activity.
- The auto-reveal feature (see video below) allows users with the right permissions to automatically reveal all IP addresses for a limited time window.
Videos
- How to use Special:IPContributions
- How automatic IP reveal works
- How to use IP Info
- How to use User Info
Further information and discussion
- For more information and discussion regarding this change, please see the announcement from the Wikimedia Foundation at Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF) § Temporary accounts rollout.
Most of this message was written by Mz7 (source). Thanks, 🎃 SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 02:48, 31 October 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-45
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- Administrators will now find that Special:MergeHistory is now significantly more flexible about what it can merge. It can now merge sections taken from the middle of the history of the source (rather than only the start) and insert revisions anywhere in the history of the destination page (rather than only the start).
- For users with "Automatically subscribe to topics" enabled in their preferences, starting a new topic or adding a reply to an existing topic will now subscribe them to replies to that topic. Previously, this would only happen if the DiscussionTools "Add topic" or "Reply" widgets were used. When DiscussionTools was originally launched existing accounts were not opted in to automatic topic subscriptions, so this change should primarily affect newer accounts and users who have deliberately changed their preferences since that time.
- Scribunto modules can now be used to generate SVG images. This can be used to build charts, graphics and other visualizations dynamically through Lua, reducing the need to compose them externally and upload them as files.
- Wikimedia sites now provide all anonymous users with the option to enable a dark mode color scheme, featuring light-colored text on a dark background. This enhancement aims to deliver a more enjoyable reading experience, especially in dimly lit environments.
- Users with large watchlists have long faced timeouts when editing Special:EditWatchlist. The page now loads entries in smaller sections instead of all at once due to a paging update, allowing everyone to edit their watchlists smoothly. As part of the database update, sorting by expiry has been removed because it was over 100× slower than sorting by title. A community wish has been created to explore alternative ways to restore sort-by-expiry. If this feature is important to you, please support the wish!
- View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the fixing of the persisting highlighting when using VisualEditor find and replace during a query.
Updates for technical contributors
- Since 2019 the Wikimedia URL Shortener at https://w.wiki is available for all Wikimedia wikis to create short links to articles, permalinks, diffs, etc. It is available in the sidebar as "Get shortened URL". There are 30 wikis that also install an older "ShortUrl" extension. The old extension will soon be removed. This means
/s/URLs will not be advertised under article titles via HTMLclass="title-shortlink". The/s/URLs will keep working. - On Thursday, October 30, the MediaWiki Interfaces and SRE Service Operations teams began rerouting Action API traffic through a common API gateway. Individual wikis will be updated based on the standard release groups, with total traffic increased over time. This change is expected to be non-breaking and non-disruptive. If any issues are observed, please file a Phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board.
- MediaWiki Train deployments will pause for the final two weeks of 2025: 22 December and 29 December. Backport windows will also pause between Monday, 22 December 2025 and Thursday, 2 January 2026. A backport window is a scheduled time to add things like bug fixes and configuration changes. There are seven deployment trains remaining for 2025.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- In 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation reported that AI systems and search engines increasingly use Wikipedia content without driving users to the site, contributing to an 8% drop in human pageviews compared to 2024. After detecting bots disguised as humans, Wikimedia updated its traffic data to reflect this shift. Read more about current user trends on Wikipedia in a Diff blog post.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Administrators' newsletter – November 2025
News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2025).
Administrator changes
CheckUser changes
Guideline and policy news
- The speedy deletion criteria U5 has been repealed, with U6 and U7 replacing it. See the FAQ for more clarifications.
- Community-designated contentious topics may now be enforced and appealed at the arbitration enforcement noticeboard (AE) as a result of an RfC.
Technical news
- You can enable a handy user info card next to usernames, which when clicked displays edit count, blocks, thanks, and other information. To enable this feature, visit Preferences → Appearance → Advanced options → Enable the user info card
Arbitration
- The arbitration case Transgender healthcare and people has been closed
- Uninvolved administrators may impose an AE participation restriction on any thread at the Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard.
Miscellaneous
- An unreferenced articles backlog drive is happening in November 2025 to reduce the backlog of articles tagged with {{Unreferenced}}. You can help reduce the backlog by adding citations to these articles. Sign up to participate!
The Signpost: 10 November 2025
- News and notes: Temporary accounts go live and WMF board member self-suspends
ArbCom elections draw close, and Wikimania '27 in Santiago.
- Community view: Six Wikipedians' thoughts on Grokipedia, and the humanity of it all
It ain't a five course meal, according to one of our interviewees.
- Wikicup report: BeanieFan11, WikiCup victor of 2025, covers the results
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
- In the media: Jimbo's book, an argument about genocide, and a train of shame
Wikipedia's new rival, political controversy in Italy and other Wiki-reports.
- Recent research: Taking stock of the 2024–2025 research grants
$400,000 USD in total funding: what did we get?
- Opinion: With Grokipedia, top-down control of knowledge is new again
Does it shed any light on particular topics that are better suited to LLM-generation than others?
- Obituary: Struway
Rest in peace.
- Traffic report: The documentaried, the disowned, the deceased, Diwali and the Dodgers
You know your man is working hard, he's worth a deuce.
- Comix: Head of steam
'Sblood!
Tech News: 2025-46
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
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- Starting November 12, users will see a change in the appearance of talk pages on some Wikipedias. Almost all wikis have received this design change; English Wikipedia will get these changes later. You can read more on Diff. Users can opt out of these changes in their user preferences in "Show discussion activity".
- MediaWiki can now display a page indicator automatically while a page is protected. This feature is disabled by default. It can be enabled by community request.
- Using the "Show preview" or "Show changes" buttons in the wikitext editor will now carry over certain URL parameters like 'useskin', 'uselang' and 'section'. This update also fixes an issue where, if the browser crashed while previewing an edit to a single section, saving this edit could overwrite the entire page with just that section’s content.
- Wikivoyage wikis can use colored map markers in the article text. The text of these markers will now be shown in contrasting black or white color, instead of always being white. Local workarounds for the problem can be removed.
- The Activity tab in the Wikipedia Android app is now available for all users. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging.
- The Reader Growth team is launching an experiment called "Image browsing" to test how to make it easier for readers to browse and discover images on Wikipedia articles. This experiment, a mobile-only A/B test, will go live on English Wikipedia in the week of November 17 and will run for four weeks, affecting 0.05% of users on English wiki. The test launched on November 3 on Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese wikis, affecting up to 10% of users on those wikis.
- View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example the inability to lock accounts on mobile sites has been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- Nominations are open on Wikitech for new Toolforge standards committee members. The committee oversees the Toolforge Right to fork policy and Abandoned tool policy among other duties. Nominations will remain open through 2025-11-28.
- The JWT issuer field in OAuth 2 access tokens for SUL wikis has been changed to
https://meta.wikimedia.org. Old access tokens will still work. - The JWT subject field in OAuth 2 access tokens will soon change from
<user id>tomw:<identity type>:<user id>, where<identity type>is typicallyCentralAuth:(for SUL wikis) orlocal:<wiki id>(for other wikis). This is to avoid conflicts between different user ID types, and to make OAuth 2 access tokens and thesessionJwtcookie more similar. Old access tokens will still work. - MediaWiki's block messages (blockedtext, blockedtext-partial, autoblockedtext, systemblockedtext, blockedtext-tempuser, autoblockedtext-tempuser) now support additional parameters indicating whether the user is blocked from editing their own user talk page
$9or emailing other users$10. - A
REL1_45branch for MediaWiki core and each of the extensions and skins in Wikimedia git has been created. This is the first step in the release process for MediaWiki 1.45.0, scheduled for late November 2025. If you are working on a critical bug fix or working on a new feature, you may need to take note of this change. - The process for generating CirrusSearch dumps has been updated due to slowing performance. If you encounter any issues migrating to the replacement dumps, please contact the Search Platform Team for support.
- 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.
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2025 Issue 21
Upcoming and current events and conversations
Let's Talk continues
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- Wikimania 2027: Santiago, Chile is announced as the location for Wikimania 2027. The annual conference returns to Latin America after more than 10 years, following previous editions in Buenos Aires (2009) and Mexico City (2015).
- Wikidata recognized as a Digital Public Good: Wikidata became the second Wikimedia project to be officially recognized as a digital public good by the Digital Public Goods Alliance.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Tech News: Read updates from Tech News week 44 and 45 including the community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
- Activity Tab: The Wikipedia Android app expands the new Activity tab to all users. It offers a complete view of your Wikipedia activity: reading time, saved articles, edits, and donation history (for known donors). This change aims to make Wikipedia a more engaging experience for readers and contributors alike, while keeping all personal data private and stored locally on your device.
- Tabbed browsing: Tabbed browsing is now available on the Wikipedia App for iOS. Tabs will let you keep more than one article open at a time, making it easier to explore complex topics, follow links without losing your place, and pick up where you left off.
- CampaignEvents extension: Autoconfirmed users on small and medium wikis with the CampaignEvents extension can now use Event Registration without the Event Organizer right. This feature lets organizers enable registration, manage participants, and lets users register with one click instead of signing event pages.
- Image browsing: The Wikimedia Foundation launched image browsing, an experiment that puts images on top of your Wikipedia article reading journey, on Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
- Temporary accounts: Temporary Accounts are now enabled on 1,000+ projects including English Wikipedia.
- Abstract Wikipedia naming contest: The first round of “abstract content wiki” naming vote has ended and the first legal review had begun to determine the 6 names that will make it to the second round on November 17.
- Wikifunctions: Wikifunctions is now deployed across 12 Wiktionaries and 4 Wikipedias.
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · list of movement events
- Privacy in Wikipedia research: The Wikimedia Foundation published Privacy in Public: Navigating Research, Personal Data, and Safety on Wikipedia, a whitepaper which guides researchers in navigating privacy of Wikipedia editors in their research. Read the highlights and key takeaways for researchers and Wikipedians.
- Digital Safety: The Wikimedia Foundation is launching Digital Safety Office Hours to explore how to stay safe digitally, what does digital safety mean, what extra precautions can Wikimedians take. The first session will take place on November 28 at 9 AM and 7 PM UTC. Check out also our Digital Safety Resources Center to learn practical tips and tools you can use immediately.
- Volunteer roles for movement governance: The Movement governance committees are seeking new volunteers to support essential and high-impact work across the Wikimedia ecosystem. The current appointment cycle is open for the AffCom, Ombuds Commission, and Case Review Committee. Applications for these committees will remain open until December 11. The team will host a community conversation on November 26, at 3 AM UTC.
- Don't Blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
- Wikimedia Core Curriculum: Want to learn how to edit Wikipedia? – A new free self-paced course, all in video with subtitles, is available from the Wikimedia Foundation!
Foundation statements
- Transparency builds trust: The latest edition from the series "Lessons from Wikipedia" explores how deep transparency has helped make Wikipedia one of the most trusted sources on the internet.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · The Wikipedia Library · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Tech News: 2025-47
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- The Reader Experience team is experimenting with reading lists on mobile web, allowing logged-in readers with no edits to save private lists of articles for later. The experiment is running on Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias since the week of 10 November, and will begin on English Wikipedia the week of 17 November.
- Users who can’t receive their email verification code during login can now get help by submitting a form on a new special page. This update is part of the Account Security initiative. If your account has an email address, please make sure you still have access to it. When logging in from a new device or location without 2FA, you may be asked to enter a 6-digit code sent by email to finish logging in. Learn more.
- One new wiki has been created: a Wikisource in Minangkabau (
s:min:) - View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- As part of the Parser Unification project, the Content Transform Team rolled out Parsoid as the default parser to many low-traffic Wikipedias and is preparing the next step to high traffic ones. This message is an invitation for you to opt-in to Parsoid, as described in the Extension:ParserMigration documentation, and identify any issues you might encounter with your own workflow using bots, gadgets, or user scripts. Please, let us know through the "Report Visual Bug" link in the Tools sidebar or create a phab ticket and tag the Content Transform Team in Phabricator.
- Unsupported Tools: Several issues with Video2Commons have been fixed, including filename-related upload failures, black-video imports, and retry handling. AV1 support has also been added. Ongoing work focuses on backend stability, ffmpeg errors, subtitle imports, metadata handling, and playlist uploads. To track specific tasks, check the Phabricator board.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- Save the date for the next Wikimedia Hackathon happening in Milan, Italy from May 1–3, 2026. Registration will open in January 2026. Scholarship applications are currently open, and will close on November 28, 2025. If you have any questions, please email hackathon@wikimedia.org.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
ArbCom 2025 Elections voter message
Hello! Voting in the 2025 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 1 December 2025. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
If you wish to participate in the 2025 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:20, 18 November 2025 (UTC)
Nomination for discussion of Template:Db-notwebhost-deleted
Template:Db-notwebhost-deleted has been nominated for discussion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. mwwv converse∫edits 17:39, 18 November 2025 (UTC)
Nomination for merger of Template:Edit protected
Template:Edit protected has been nominated for merging with Template:Edit semi-protected. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you. FaviFake (talk) 18:18, 21 November 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-48
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- Last week, the Wikimedia Search Team recreated the "DWIM" (Do What I Mean) gadget functionality server-side, for Russian and Hebrew Wikipedias. This feature adds cross-keyboard suggestions to the standard search-box suggestions. For example, searching for cxfcnmt on Russian Wikipedia will now add suggestions for счастье ("happiness") that the user probably intended. They plan to enable this feature for other Russian and Hebrew wikis this week.
- Later this week, users of the "⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽" beta feature will have syntax highlighting available in DiscussionTools. This requires that the "Enable editing tools in source mode" preference be set.
- Campaign events extension – the set of tools for coordinating events and other on-wiki collaborations has now been deployed to all Wikimedia wikis. A new feature known as Collaborative contribution to help organizers and participants see the impact of activities has also been added. Join the upcoming learning session to see the new feature in action and share your feedback.
- View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the bug which stopped CodeReviewBot from working, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- Users of Wikimedia API can join a usability study to help validate the new design of Wikimedia REST API sandboxes. Interested participants should fill the recruitment survey.
- The MediaWiki Interfaces team is deprecating XSLT stylesheets within the Action API. Support for
format=xml&xlst={stylesheet}will be removed from Wikimedia projects by the end of November, 2025. In addition, it will soon be disabled by default in MediaWiki release versions: v1.43 (LTS), v1.44, and v1.45. Support for XSLT stylesheets will be fully removed from MediaWiki v1.46 (expected to release between April and May 2026). - The WDQS legacy endpoint (query-legacy-full.wikidata.org) will be decommissioned at the end of December 2025, and finally closed down on 7th January 2026. After this date, users should expect requests to query.wikidata.org that require the full graph to fail or return invalid results if they are not rewritten to use SPARQL federation. The team encourages users to ensure that tools and workflows use the supported WDQS endpoints (https://query.wikidata.org/ - Main graph or https://query-scholarly.wikidata.org/ - Scholarly graph). For support with migrating use cases, please review the Data Access and Request a Query pages for details and assistance on alternative access methods.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2025 Issue 22
Upcoming and current events and conversations
Let's Talk continues
- Board election: The 2025 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees vote has elected two new trustees, Bobby Shabangu (Bobbyshabangu) and Michał Buczyński (Aegis Maelstrom), who will be appointed at the next Board meeting in December 2025.
- Wikipedia 25: Wikipedia is turning 25 and it’s time to party! Register now for Wikipedia’s 25th virtual birthday bash on 15 January at 16:00 UTC.
- Wikimedia Hackathon: The 2026 Wikimedia Hackathon will be taking place in person May 1 - 3, 2026 in Milan, Italy. Scholarship applications are open until November 28.
- Language Community: The next language community meeting will be held on November 28 at 16:00 UTC.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Tech News: Some of the latest updates from Tech News week 46 and 47: Wikimedia Foundation is experimentating with reading lists on mobile web, allowing logged-in readers with no edits to save private lists of articles for later; One new wiki has been created: a Wikisource in Minangkabau.
- Wikifunctions: The second round of voting for naming the wiki with abstract content is kicking off with six name proposals to vote for.
- Reference check: The A/B test for reference check has begun on English Wikipedia and will run until December 17. This is a feature which prompts new editors to add citations before they publish an edit adding content to an article.
- Image browsing: Wikimedia Foundation is launching an experiment called "Image browsing" to test how to make it easier for readers to browse and discover images on Wikipedia articles. This experiment, a mobile-only A/B test, is taking place on on Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese wikis, affecting a small number of users.
- CampaignEvents extension: Campaign events extension is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. The extension offers tools for running and coordinating events and other on-wiki collaborations. These features include Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List, plus a new feature, Collaborative contribution, which helps organizers and participants see the impact of their collaborative activities. Join the upcoming learning session to see the new feature in action and share your feedback.
- Dark Mode: Dark mode is now available on all Wikimedia projects for all anonymous users! This enhancement aims to deliver a more enjoyable reading experience, especially in dimly lit environments. Learn how to activate this feature.
- Wikimedia Apps: The Activity tab in the Wikipedia Android app is now available for all users. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging.
- Usability Improvements: Improvements for talk pages is being rolled out. Users can opt out of these changes in their user preferences in “Show discussion activity.”
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · list of movement events
- Wikipedia 25 Press toolkit: Wikimedia Foundation is providing press toolkit as guidance and resources to Wikimedia volunteers and affiliates to spread the word about Wikipedia’s 25th birthday to local and regional media.
- Language and Internationalization: Read some key highlights from the October 2025 edition of the Language and internationalization newsletter.
- Information integrity: Wikimedia Project from South America Selected by the UNESCO Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change Fund.
- The Wikipedia Library: The Wikipedia Library team attended the CEE Meeting 2025 celebrated a new partnership with Times of Malta.
- Understanding movement organizers: Wikimedia Foundation concluded a literature review on organizers in the Wikimedia movement focused on capturing their personas, motivations, and impact in order to highlight best practices and opportunities for further support.
Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness
See also: Progress on the annual plan
- Wikimedia Enterprise: Reef Media uses Wikimedia Enterprise Snapshot API to Fact Check and Verify Sources.
Board and Board committee updates
See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- Affiliations Committee: Draft recommendations on three strategic areas that need continuous consideration to best support Wikimedia affiliates.
Foundation statements
- Lessons from Wikipedia: The latest edition from the series explores the art of disagreement and how Wikipedia navigates disputes.
- Artificial Intelligence: In the AI era, Wikipedia has never been more valuable. This explainer shows how human-created knowledge isn’t replaceable.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · The Wikipedia Library · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
The Signpost: 1 December 2025
- News and notes: Election cycles come and go, and Wikimedia Foundation achieves record revenue in 2024–2025!
Admin and ArbCom elections upcoming, BoT elects two new members, task force advises to close Wikinews and keep Wikispore, and other news from the Wikimedia world.
- In the media: Wales walk-off, antisemitism, supernatural powers, feminism turmoil, saints, and sex
Plus mammoth mummy sex-change operation completed!
- Recent research: At least 80 million inconsistent facts on Wikipedia – can AI help find them?
And other recent publications about contradictions and retractions.
- Disinformation report: Epstein email exchanges planned strategy, edits and reported progress
At work on Wikipedia whitewashing. How much should they be paid?
- Traffic report: It's a family affair
Even in these times there is something to be thankful for!
- Book review: The Seven Rules of Trust
Jimmy Wales and Dan Gardner write a book inspired by Wikipedia. What's in it?
- From the archives: "I have been asked by Jeffrey Epstein ..."
The twists and turns of Epstein’s portrayal on Wikipedia.
- Humour: An interview with Wikipe-tan
A conversation about being the mascot of Wikipedia.
- Opinion: AI finds errors in 90% of Wikipedia's best articles
Using ChatGPT to fact-check a month's worth of Today's featured articles.
- Serendipity: Highlights from the itWikiCon 2025
A recap of the latest convention of the Italian Wiki-community, held in Catania from 7–9 November.
- Comix: Madness
It could happen to anyone.
Tech News: 2025-49
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- The Wikipedia Year in Review 2025 will be available on December 2 for users of iOS and Android Wikipedia apps, featuring new personalized insights, updated reading highlights, and refreshed designs. Learn more on the review's project page.
- The Growth team is working on improving the text and presentation of the Verification Email sent to new users to make them more welcoming, useful and informative. Some new text have been drafted for A/B testing and you can help by translating them. See Phabricator.
- Add a link will now be deployed at Japanese, Urdu and Chinese Wikipedias on December 2. Add a link is based on a prediction model that suggests links to be added to articles. While this feature has already been available on most Wikipedias, the prediction model could not support certain languages. A new model has now been developed to handle these languages, and it will be gradually rolled out to other Wikipedias over time. If you would like to know more, please contact Trizek (WMF).
- View all 34 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where search boxes on some Commons pages showed no results due to switch from SpecialSearch to MediaSearch, has now been fixed.
- Two new wikis have been created:
- a Wikipedia in Toki Pona (
w:tok:) - a Wikiquote in Nigerian Pidgin (
q:pcm:)
- a Wikipedia in Toki Pona (
Updates for technical contributors
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The Wikimedia Foundation is in the early stages of exploring approaches to Article guidance. The initiative aims to identify interventions that could help new editors easily understand and apply existing Wikipedia practices and policies when creating an article. The project is in the exploration and early experimental design phase. All community members are encouraged to learn more about the project, and share their thoughts on the talk page.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Guild of Copy Editors – December 2025 Newsletter
Guild of Copy Editors December 2025 Newsletter
  Hello, and welcome to the December newsletter, a quarterly digest of Guild activities since September. If you'd like to be notified of upcoming drives and blitzes, and other GOCE activities, the best method is to add our announcements box to your watchlist. Election news: The Guild's coordinators play an important role in the WikiProject, making sure September Drive: 43 of the 63 editors who signed up for the September Backlog Elimination Drive edited 693,541 words in 265 articles. Barnstars awarded are here. October Blitz: 14 of the 15 editors who signed up for the October Copy Editing Blitz edited 75,108 words in 31 articles. Barnstars awarded are here. November Drive: 38 of the 65 editors who signed up for the November Backlog Elimination Drive edited 590,816 words in 240 articles. Barnstars awarded are posted here. December Blitz: The December Blitz will begin at 00:00 on 14 December (UTC) and will end on 20 December at 23:59. Sign up here. Barnstars awarded will be posted here. Progress report: As of 01:49, 8 December 2025 (UTC), GOCE copy editors have completed 293 requests since 1 January, and the backlog of tagged articles stands at 1,730 articles. Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators, Dhtwiki, GoldRomean, Miniapolis and Mox Eden. To stop receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:25, 8 December 2025 (UTC)
Administrators' newsletter – December 2025
News and updates for administrators from the past month (November 2025).
Administrator changes
CheckUser changes
Technical news
- Starting on November 4, the IP addresses of logged-out editors are no longer being publicly displayed. Instead, they will have a temporary account associated with their edits.
- Administrators will now find that Special:MergeHistory is now significantly more flexible about what it can merge. It can now merge sections taken from the middle of the history of the source (rather than only the start) and insert revisions anywhere in the history of the destination page (rather than only the start). T382958
Miscellaneous
- The December 2025 administrator elections are scheduled from Nov 25 – Dec 15.
- An Articles for Creation backlog drive is happening in December 2025, with over 1,000 drafts awaiting review from the past two months. In addition to AfC participants, all administrators and new page patrollers can help review using the Yet Another AFC Helper Script, which can be enabled in the Gadgets settings. Sign up here to participate!
Happy First Edit Anniversary Amorymeltzer 🎉
Hey @Amorymeltzer. Your wiki edit anniversary is today, marking 20 years of dedicated contributions to English Wikipedia. Your passion for sharing knowledge and your remarkable contributions have not only enriched the project, but also inspired countless others to contribute. Thank you for your amazing contributions. Wishing you many more wonderful years ahead in the Wiki journey. :) -❙❚❚❙❙ GnOeee ❚❙❚❙❙ ✉ 17:34, 8 December 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-50
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- Anybody who wishes to secure their user account can now use two-factor authentication (2FA). This is available to all registered users of all Wikimedia projects. This is part of the Account Security initiative. Later, 2FA will be required for all users who can take security- or privacy-sensitive actions.
Updates for editors
- Following last week's deployments, the Add a link feature, which allows editors to add suggested links during editing, will be available to an additional 33 Wikipedias starting on 9 December. This expansion is possible thanks to the new prediction model that now supports all languages, including those that were previously not covered. While the feature has been available on most Wikipedias for some time, this rollout brings us closer to using the improved model everywhere. If you have any questions or would like more details please contact Trizek (WMF).
- Last week, the Search Platform team added transliterated as-you-type search suggestions to Georgian wikis. If there are only a few regular search suggestions, then queries in Latin or Cyrillic script are now rewritten into Georgian script to look for more matches. For example, searching for either bedniereba or бедниереба will now suggest the existing article about ბედნიერება ("happiness"). You can recommend other languages where transliterated suggestions would be useful on Phabricator for future development.
- Later this week, a controlled experiment will begin for editors on the 100 largest Wikipedias who are editing a section in the mobile web visual editor. 50% of these editors will notice a new "Edit full page" button that will enable them to expand their editing session to the whole page. This feature is intended to make it easier for people on mobile web to edit any article section, regardless of which section-edit icon they tapped to begin. The experiment will last ~4 weeks. You can find more details about the project.
- Later this week, the Reader Growth team will launch a mobile web experiment to expand all article sections by default (currently they are collapsed by default) and pin the section header the user is currently reading to the top of the page. The experiment will affect 10% of users on Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
- The Wikipedia Year in Review 2025, a feature in the Wikipedia mobile apps (iOS and Android) that provides users with a personalised summary of their engagement with Wikipedia over the year, is now available on the iOS and Android apps. This edition includes expanded personalised insights, improved reading highlights, new donor messaging, and updated designs. Open the app to view your Year in Review and explore your reading journey from 2025.
- A recent software bug caused edits made with VisualEditor to make unintended changes to wikitext, including removing whitespace and replacing spaces with underscores in wikilinks inside citations. This was partially fixed last week, and further fixes are in progress. Editors who used VisualEditor between November 28 and December 2 should review their edits for unexpected modifications.
- View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the incorrect handling of URLs copied from the address bar of Microsoft Edge users, has been resolved.
Updates for technical contributors
- Starting this week, users of the "⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽" beta feature will have CodeMirror as the editor for Lua, JavaScript, CSS, JSON and Vue content models, instead of CodeEditor. With this, the linters will be upgraded. This is part of a larger effort to eventually replace CodeEditor and provide a consistent code editing experience.
- Developers are encouraged to take the 2025 Developer Satisfaction Survey, which remains open until 5 January 2026. If you build software for the Wikimedia ecosystem and would like to share your experiences or feedback, your participation is greatly appreciated.
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2025 Issue 23
Upcoming and current events and conversations
Let's Talk continues
- CEO appointment: The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees has appointed Bernadette Meehan as the new CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. She will be meeting communities around the puzzle globe when she officially joins on January 20, 2026.
- Wikipedia's 25th birthday party: Join the virtual celebration for games, prizes, musical performances, volunteer spotlights, data visualization, surprise guests and more. January 15 at 16:00 UTC. Register on Meta.
- Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees: Join the next Conversation with the Trustees on December 11 at 17:30 UTC.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Wishathon: 15 patches were written and 5 merged, as part of a Wishathon for the Community Wishlist. One wish from the community was completed ("Preview page with this template" should not work with pages that do not transclude the template), and three more now have a clearer path forward.
- Activity Tab on Mobile App: The Wikipedia iOS app is running an experiment that replaces the History tab with a redesigned Activity tab. This new tab surfaces personalized insights about reading, editing, and donations — all stored locally on your device for privacy. The goal is to see whether the new experience increases engagement and retention among logged-in readers.
- Wikipedia Year in Review in Apps: The Wikipedia Year in Review 2025 is now available for the iOS and Android apps. This year introduces new personalized insights, updated reading highlights, and refreshed designs.
- Add a Link: A feature that suggests links to be added to articles based on a prediction model, Add a link, has been deployed at Japanese, Urdu and Chinese Wikipedias. While this feature has already been available on most Wikipedias, the prediction model could not support certain languages. A new model has now been developed to handle these languages, and it will be gradually rolled out to other Wikipedias over time.
- Abstract Wikipedia: The second round of voting on the name of Abstract Wikipedia concluded with Abstract Wikipedia as the top-voted name with 100 votes, followed by Wikigenerator with 91 votes. The name for the wiki project will now remain Abstract Wikipedia.
- Anti-vandalism tool: Automoderator, now has the option to choose between two machine learning models to power the software on wikis using the tool.
- Tools to support newcomers: Newcomers failing to add a citation to support added content has been one of the most common mistakes on Wikipedia. Reference Check, a tool that prompts them to add a citation before publishing an edit, has gone live for an A/B test on English Wikipedia.
- Tech News: Latest updates from Tech News week 48 and week 49 include the Foundation working on improving the text and presentation of the Verification Email sent to new users to make them more welcoming, useful, and informative; and two new wikis being created: a Wikipedia in Toki Pona and a Wikiquote in Nigerian Pidgin.
- Infrastructure: Unifying our mobile and desktop domains achieved 20% faster mobile response times, improved SEO, and reduced infrastructure load.
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · list of movement events
- Legal win in France: Wikimedia Foundation secures crucial legal win in France against legal attacks on freedom of speech.
- CEE Hub: Overview of three years of growth, learning, and regional impact of CEE Hub.
- Don't Blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
- Digital Violence: How the Wikimedia movement is responding to digital gender based violence.
- Wikimedia Research Showcase: The next research showcase will feature a special panel on "Experimentation on Wikipedia" and will take place on December 10 at 17:30 UTC.
Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness
See also: Progress on the annual plan
- Audit Report: Key takeaways from the Foundation’s audit report for fiscal year 2024-2025.
- Wikimedia Enterprise: Wikimedia Enterprise Financial Report for fiscal year 2024-2025.
- Annual Plan Progress: A look back at progress made against the plan during the second half of our fiscal year. Up to date regular updates are included in the Foundation Bulletin.
Board and Board committee updates
See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- Sister Projects Task Force: Results of the consultation about Wikispore and Wikinews: No immediate changes should be made to Wikispore's current technical setup and archive all editions of Wikinews, preserving their content.
Foundation statements
- Wikipedia's unique revenue model: How is Wikipedia funded and how does the Wikimedia Foundation use donations to Wikipedia?
- Most read articles: Wikipedia’s most-read articles of 2025.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · The Wikipedia Library · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Tech News: 2025-51
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- View all 18 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, one of the fixes addressed an issue for temporary accounts adding an external URL, which triggered an hCaptcha request in more cases than intended, and did not display the required popup on the first attempt to publish the edit.
Updates for technical contributors
- To improve database and site performance, external links to Wikimedia projects will no longer be stored in the database. This means they will not be searchable in Special:LinkSearch, will not be checked by the Spam Blacklist or AbuseFilter as new links, and will not be in the
externallinkstable on database replicas. In the future this may be extended to other highly-linked trusted websites on a per-wiki basis, such as Creative Commons links on Wikimedia Commons. - Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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Wikimedia Apps Newsletter – Fourth Quarter of 2025
Hello, and welcome to the final newsletter of 2025!
In this edition, we’ll walk you through the major updates, experiments, and improvements in the Wikipedia mobile apps during October, November, and early December.
iOS
Throughout October and November, the team made final updates to the Year in Review feature, preparing it for its early December release.
Key improvements included:
- Updating the Total Edits slide to represent global edits across all Wikimedia projects.
- Running usability tests, which showed strong user interest in personalized slides—especially reading patterns, top articles, categories, and geo insights.
- Preparing the A/B test that will allow some logged-out users to view personalized content.
We also added fundraising banner suppression for users who donated in the past 250 days, so that users who may have donated from the Year in Review do not see a banner.
We continued work on the New Tab Experience and ran the A/B/C test for recommendations within the tabs overview.
The experiment concluded on November 18 and showed:
- Recommendations increased pageviews and new tab openings. However, they did not improve multi-day usage or overall retention.
- “Because you read” recommendations performed better than “Did you know.”
- Group C had slightly higher satisfaction and lower dissatisfaction.
Next steps:
- Scale the new tab experience, including “close all tabs,” to all users.
- Do not scale recommendations yet until after further investigation.
Work continued on Activity Tab V2, preparing to test it against the existing History tab. Updates included:
- Integrating learnings from Android’s successful Activity Tab experiment.
- Building new onboarding, instrumentation, and module behavior.
- A first version was released in early December.
Other iOS Updates
- We ran a survey on the Explore tab launched to gather user feedback.
- OAuth adoption was explored by engineering and design.
- Bug fixes for login with 2FA, search in Saved, and other regressions.
- Compatibility testing completed for m. subdomain removal.
Android
By October, the Activity Tab experiment delivered strong results:
- Return rate for logged-in users increased by 11.6% compared to the previous Edit tab.
- Experiment had no negative impact on overall retention.
- Only 0.7% of users turned the feature off.
In November, we made several improvements, and then scaled the Activity Tab to all logged-in users.
Year in Review 2025
The team finalized core implementation, prepared for the December release, and:
- Updated the Total Edits slide to reflect global edits across projects.
- Prepared the A/B test for the Year in Review Reading List, which will offer a personalized reading list to some users.
- Conducted final usability reviews.
We began development of the second donation reminder experiment, planned for December–March.
This experiment:
- Targets users who click “Maybe later” on fundraising banners.
- Tests a fully customizable reminder flow versus the current “Maybe later” behavior.
- Allows users to adjust reminder frequency, article-count triggers, and manage their reminder settings.
Other Android Updates
- We ran a survey on the Explore tab launched to gather user feedback.
- OAuth adoption was explored by engineering and design.
- Fixed issues with “Forgot your password” in Chinese, dark-mode rendering problems, punctuation-based errors, and navigation bugs.
- Added ISO currency codes to donation forms.
- Updated several settings and entry points to prepare for the fundraising season.
Cross-Platform
Looking Ahead
This quarter brought major progress across Tabs, Activity, Year in Review, and Donation Reminder work.
As we close 2025, both apps now support a richer set of personalization features, clearer navigation paths, and more user-controlled donation experiences.
Thank you for following along, and stay tuned for our next newsletter in early 2026!
The Signpost: 17 December 2025
- Interview: Part 1: Bernadette Meehan
Say hello to the new WMF CEO.
- News and notes: We're gonna have a party!
And a new WMF CEO!
- In the media: The "bigg" bosses: Robertsky and the Pope
Pay up, big guys!
- Traffic report: Death and stranger things
And going for the FIFA prize!
- Gallery: A feast of holidays and carols
Something old and something new!
- Obituary: Michal Lewi (Iwelam) and Alan R. King (A R King)
Rest in peace.
- Concept: List of xxtreme sports (redirected from Electrojousting)
You are viewing an old revision of this page, as edited on 2065-11-10 04:33:10.
- Comix: display: flex-inline;
ampersand nb semicolon ampersand nb semicolon ampersand nb semicolon
Tech News: 2025-52
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- From January, edit filters can be set to automatically suppress their details such as rules and list of attempted edits and actions. This will help oversighters use edit filters to prevent doxxing or other suppressible material.
- The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 12 January 2026 because of the end of year holidays. Thank you to all of the translators, and people who submitted content or feedback, this year.
- View all 16 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the crash that occurred when tapping "First Steps" in the Wikipedia Android Year in Review has now been fixed, and the feature opens as expected.
Updates for technical contributors
- Interface elements such as diffs and categories generated by MediaWiki used to have the attribute
data-mw="interface"to distinguish from wiki content. The attribute has been replaced withdata-mw-interface="", to avoid potential conflicts with otherdata-mwattributes, which are generated by Parsoid. - There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.
Meetings and events
- The Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026 will take place on 13-14 March 2026 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Applications just opened mid-December and will close in mid-January or earlier if capacity is reached. With space for approximately 100 participants, early application is encouraged.
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New pages patrol January–February 2026 Backlog drive
| January–February 2026 Backlog Drive | New pages patrol |  |
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New Pages Patrol is hosting a one-time, two-month experimental backlog drive aimed at reducing the backlog. This will be a combo drive: both articles and redirects will earn points.
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| You are receiving this message because you are a New Pages Patrol reviewer. To opt out of future mailings, please remove yourself from here. | |
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:21, 27 December 2025 (UTC)
Nomination of Atba-e-Malak Badar for deletion
A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Atba-e-Malak Badar, to which you have significantly contributed, is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or if it should be deleted.
The discussion will take place at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Atba-e-Malak Badar until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article.
To customise your preferences for automated AfD notifications for articles to which you've significantly contributed (or to opt-out entirely), please visit the configuration page. Delivered by SDZeroBot (talk) 01:02, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
Feedback request: Wikipedia technical issues and templates request for comment
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Administrators' newsletter – January 2026
News and updates for administrators from the past month (December 2025).
Administrator changes
CheckUser changes
Oversight changes
Guideline and policy news
- All general sanctions imposed by the community may now be enforced at the Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard (WP:AE) as a result of a recent RfC.
- Due to the result of a recent RFC, the administrator recall process is amended to extend the deadline for a re-request for adminship to 30 days or the next administrator election, whichever is later.
- Changes to the Access to Temporary Account IP Addresses Policy's disclosure rules include broadening the consecutive-blocks exception to cover all admin actions and removing the requirement to revision-delete permissible disclosures once they become unnecessary (instead requiring only their removal). See WP:TAIVDISCLOSE for more information.
Arbitration
- Following the 2025 Arbitration Committee elections, the following editors have been elected to the Arbitration Committee: Aoidh, Asilvering, Girth Summit, Guerillero, HJ Mitchell, HouseBlaster, Izno, Sdrqaz, SilverLocust.
- The arbitration case Pbsouthwood has been suspended.
Tech News: 2026-03
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- The 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.
Updates for editors
- As part of the current work of Community Tech team on the Multiple watchlists project, the display of EditWatchlist will be updated as a first step towards multiple watchlists. Additionally, the pagination on Search will be updated too, as a part of the work on the Revamp pagination / page navigation wish.
- The Global Watchlist is a MediaWiki extension that lets you see your watchlists from different wikis on the same page. It was recently updated to look more like the regular Watchlist, such as preparing it for temporary accounts in IP masking (including rerouting user links to contributions pages), making page titles bold, and opening links in edit summaries and tags in new browser tabs.
- View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where global blocks did not have the option to disable sending emails, has now been fixed, and will be available for use in the week of January 13.
Updates for technical contributors
- The VisualEditor citation tool and Reference Previews now support "map" as a reference type.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki/MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 1
Highlights
- Wikipedia turns 25: Time to start the party! Join the virtual celebration featuring musical performances, games, and more on January 15 at 16:00 UTC. and The party will be live interpreted into Arabic, Chinese, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Annual planning: Key questions for the Wikimedia movement to shape the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2026-2027 annual goals. Join the discussion on-wiki.
- Hackathon:
- Apply to join the Northwestern Europe 2026 Hackathon from March 13-14 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Application will close mid-January 2026 or earlier based on event capacity.
- General Registration for the 2026 Wikimedia Hackathon is now open! The hackathon will take place in Milan, Italy from May 1 - 3, 2026. Event details can be found here and registration will remain open until March 30th or until event capacity is reached.
- Semantic search: Wikimedia Foundation is working on making it easier to find the information readers want.
- Tech News: Latest updates from Tech News week 50, week 51, and week 52 include that now edit filters can be set to automatically suppress their details which will help oversighters to prevent doxxing.
- Wikifunctions: The first Wikifunctions Volunteers' Corner of the next year will take place on February 9.
- Blazegraph Migration: To support the migration away from Blazegraph as the backend of Wikidata Query Service (WDQS), we are hosting regular calls starting on January 27. Wikidata users and tool maintainers are are invited to join, ask questions, and share migration-related concerns.
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · list of movement events · The Wikipedia Library
- Upcoming Conferences: Announcing the six Wikimedia conferences funded for 2026 in the first round.
- Wikimania 2026: A glimpse on what the team is currently working on to prepare for Wikimania 2026 in Paris.
- Public Policy: Explore the resources available for public policy advocacy work, including explainers that describe key policy positions, guides on how to build a campaign or write a policy brief, and examples of open letters submitted to governments.
- Don't Blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
- Public-Interest content: The Project Gayatri content expansion program brought 7,656 new articles on Indonesian Wikipedia.
- Wikimedia Research Showcase: The research showcase will return on January 22 at 17:30 UTC with the theme "Celebrating 25 Years of Wikipedia and the Research Behind It".
- Wikimedia Research Report: The Wikimedia Foundation has published its 13th bi-annual Research Report, highlighting the work completed during the first six months of this fiscal year.
Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness
See also: Past issues of the bulletin for progress on the annual plan
- Wikimedia Enterprise: Read the full annual wrap-up of 2025 of Wikimedia Enterprise and how the year marked a fundamental shift in open knowledge.
Board and Board committee updates
See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- Board of Trustees: Wikimedia Foundation welcomes two new Board Trustees Bobby Shabangu and Michał Buczyński.
- Affcom News: Read the year-end issue of AffCom News (July-December 2025), the newsletter that distributes relevant news and events about the work of Wikimedia's Affiliations Committee.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters ·Milestones ·
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletinwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
The Signpost: 15 January 2026
- News and notes: Wikipedia's 25th anniversary is here!
Where does the time go?
- Special report: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call
The internet is booming. We are not.
- Serendipity: The WMF wants to buy you books!
Really! A major triumph.
- WikiProject report: Time for a health check: the Vital Signs 2026 campaign
The campaign to get all of our top-importance medical articles up to B-class or above.
- In the media: Fake Acting President Trump and a Wikipedia infobox
D.J.T. assumes a new position.
- Community view: The inbox behind Wikipedia
What the Volunteer Response Team actually does!
- Recent research: Art museums on Wikidata; comparing three comparisons of Grokipedia and Wikipedia
And other research.
- Traffic report: Tonight I'm gonna rock you tonight
A world in white gets underway.
- Comix: Oh come on man.
Really?
Feedback request: Politics, government, and law request for comment
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Tech News: 2026-04
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- The tray shown on Special:Diff in mobile view has been redesigned. It is now collapsed by default, and incorporates a link to undo the edit being viewed, making it easier for mobile editors and reviewers to take action while keeping the interface uncluttered.
- The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension continues to improve — it now automatically determines the text direction (ensuring correct display of sites with unusual domain names) and shows detailed descriptions for log actions. Later this week, a new permanent link for page creations and CSS classes for each entry element will be added.
- View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the previously observed issue in Vector 2022, where anchor link targets were obscured by the sticky header, has now been addressed.
Updates for technical contributors
- As mentioned in the October 2025 deprecation announcement, MediaWiki Interfaces team will begin sunsetting all transform endpoints containing a trailing slash from the MediaWiki REST API the week of January 26. Changes are expected to roll out to all wikis on or before January 30th. All API users currently calling them are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. Both endpoint variations can be found, compared, and tested using the REST Sandbox. If you have questions or encounter any problems, please file a ticket in Phabricator to the #MW-Interfaces-Team board.
- Interactive reference documentation for the Wikimedia REST API has moved. Requests to API docs previously hosted through RESTBase (e.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/) are now redirected to the REST Sandbox. - The WMF Wikidata Platform team (WDP) has published its January 2026 newsletter. It includes updates on the legacy full-graph endpoint decommissioning, the User-Agent policy change, the monthly Blazegraph migration office hours, and efforts to reduce regressions caused by the legacy endpoint shutdown. As a reminder, you can subscribe to the WDP newsletter!
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- The Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026 will take place on 13-14 March 2026 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Applications opened mid-December and will close soon or when capacity is reached. It's a two-day, technically oriented hackathon bringing together Wikimedians from the region. Hope to see you there!
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Tech News: 2026-05
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- Wikimedia Foundation invites comments on proposed future of the Product and Technology Advisory Council until 28 February.
- All users with registered accounts can now use passkeys for two-factor authentication (2FA). Passkeys are a simple way to log in without using a second device. They verify the user's identity using a fingerprint, face scan, or a PIN code. To set up a passkey, first set up a regular 2FA method. Currently, to log in with a passkey, users must also use a password. Later this quarter, passwordless login will allow users to log in with a single click and a passkey. Users with advanced rights will also be required to have 2FA enabled. This is part of the Account Security project.
- Unregistered contributors on blocked IPs or blocked IP ranges can now interact on-wiki to appeal a block by creating a temporary account to appeal a block on the user talk page, unless the "prevent this user from editing their own talk page" is enabled. This solves the problem of logged-out users unable to use the default unblock process via user talk page.
- View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) methods description on the management page has been updated. It is now clearer and easier for users to understand and make use of.
Updates for technical contributors
- A new AbuseFilter variable,
account_type, has been added to provide a reliable way to determine the account type being created in thecreateaccountandautocreateaccountactions. As part of this change, the variableaccountnamehas been renamed toaccount_name, andaccountnameis now deprecated. Edit filter managers should update any filters that use hardcoded account type checks or the deprecated variable. - Image thumbnails that are requested in non-standard sizes, and using non-standard methods such as direct requests to
upload.wikimedia.org/…will stop working in the near future. This change is to prevent ongoing external abuse by web-scrapers and bots. Some users with custom CSS/JS, Interface Admins who can fix gadgets and local skins, and Tool-authors, will need to update their code to use standard thumbnail sizes. Details, search-links, and examples of how to fix them, are available in the task. - 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.
The Signpost: 29 January 2026
- Traffic report: The most viewed articles of 2025
Everybody had a hard year, everybody had a good time.
- News and notes: Good news... but also bad news for the Public Domain
Benvenuto Betty Boop, arrivederci Italian Photos.
- News from Diff: Solving puzzles together
Maryana Iskander says farewell.
- In the media: Every view on the 25th anniversary of everything
Media about hard-core nerds, a place with paragraphs, baby globes, and wikipedes.
- Comix: Perspectives
Everybody has one.
Tech News: 2026-06
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- 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.
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 2
Highlights
Let's Talk continues
- Annual planning: The Annual Plan is the Wikimedia Foundation’s description of what we hope to achieve in the coming year. This is a time of urgency and focus for the Wikimedia projects and we invite you to shape this plan together with us.
- Year 2 of PTAC: As it reached its first year, Product & Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) shared a retrospective and proposed future improvements.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Account security: All users with registered accounts can now use passkeys for two-factor authentication (2FA), providing a simple and secure way to log in.
- Wikifunctions: An overview of the quarterly plan (January–March) and how it connects to the broader goals for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions.
- Tech News: Latest updates from Tech News week 03, 04 and 05 include unregistered contributors on blocked IPs can now interact on-wiki to appeal a block by creating a temporary account.
- Collaborative contributions: Wikimedia Foundation is hosting a learning session to share new releases around collaborative contributions and discuss future project ideas.
- Structured task: The Revise Tone Structured Task is now live in A/B testing on pilot wikis: English, Arabic, Portuguese, and French Wikipedia. It helps new editors improve promotional language in existing articles through a quiz style onboarding experience and a guided in article suggestion.
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · The Wikipedia Library · list of movement events
- Wikimania 2026: Call for sessions is open until March 1.
- Wikipedia 25: Wikipedia celebrates 25 years of knowledge at its best with docuseries, time capsule, and more.
- Virtual celebration: In case you missed it, over 10,000 people have watched the virtual celebration that brought together generations of Wikimedians, featured an ode to the talk page, a dramatic reading of a real talk page, a Magnetikpunk song dedicated to Wikipedia, a passing of the cake baton from Maryana to Bernadette, "The Birthday Cake Song" and more. All of it written and performed by humans of Wikimedia.
- Birthday mascot: Meet the Wikimedian whose casual sketch inspired Wikipedia’s 25th birthday mascot.
- Legal: Learn about two recent submissions advocating the need for proportionality in Brazil’s new online child safety law.
- Policy: The Global Advocacy team shared a report from digital policy organization InternetLab about the intersection between the open knowledge movement and public interest journalism.
- Global Resource Distribution Committee: Refreshed Funding Principles are ready for review.
Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness
See also: Progress on the annual plan
- Solving puzzles together: A final reflection from Maryana Iskander.
- Wikimedia Enterprise: Mistral AI and Wikimedia Enterprise announced a new strategic partnership.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletinwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Feedback request: Politics, government, and law request for comment
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Tech News: 2026-07
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
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.
Administrators' newsletter – February 2026
News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2026).
Administrator changes
CheckUser changes
Arbitration
- Due to the result of a recent motion, a rough consensus of administrators at the arbitration enforcement noticeboard may impose an expanded topic ban on Israel, Israelis, Jews, Judaism, Palestine, Palestinians, Islam, and/or Arabs, if an editor's Arab-Israeli conflict topic ban is determined to be insufficient to prevent disruption. At least one diff per area expanded into should be cited.
Miscellaneous
- Voting in the 2026 Steward elections started on 06 February 2026 at 14:00 (UTC) and will end on 27 February 2026 at 14:00 (UTC). The confirmation process for current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.
Tech News: 2026-08
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- 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
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The Signpost: 17 February 2026
- In the media: Global powers see Wikipedia as fundamental target for manipulation
Attempted Wikipedia shenanigans apparent from Epstein, AI, various governments.
- News and notes: Discussions open for the next WMF Annual Plan
Plus, WikiFlix going places, steady progress on older FAs and other news from the Wikimedia world.
- Serendipity: Maintenance crews continue to slog through Wikipedia's oldest Featured Articles
Hundreds of old FAs have been triaged since project began, but thousands remain — and they need reviewers.
- Disinformation report: Epstein's obsessions
The sex offender's attempts to whitewash Wikipedia run deeper than we first thought.
- Technology report: Wikidata Graph Split and how we address major challenges
A personal perspective on a major update to the Wikimedia social machine.
- Traffic report: Deaths, killings, films, and the Olympics
I'll have the usual!
- Opinion: Incoming Incurables
A poem for Wikipedia Day 2026.
- Crossword: Pop quiz
Sharpen your pencil. How well do you really know Wikipedia?
- Comix: herculean
efforts.