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Tech News: 2026-16
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- Experienced editors are invited to test the Article guidance feature, designed to help less-experienced editors create well-structured, policy-compliant Wikipedia articles. Testing instructions are available. Also, after reviewing the outlines, please provide feedback on the project talk page. Based on your input, the feature will be refined and transferred to the pilot Wikipedias to translate and adapt. Check out the video explaining the feature.
Updates for editors
- On most wikis, all autoconfirmed users can now use Special:ChangeContentModel page to create new pages with custom content models, such as mass message lists, making custom page formats more accessible. Check Special:ListGroupRights for the status of your wiki.
- The Growth team has launched an account creation experiment to evaluate whether adding an account creation button to the mobile web header increases new account registrations and encourages more mobile users to contribute to the wikis. The experiment is currently live on Hindi, Indonesian, Bengali, Thai, and Hebrew Wikipedia, and targets 10% of logged-out mobile web users.
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where VisualEditor could get stuck loading on Windows devices with animations turned off, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- Starting later this week, Edit filter managers who have the ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽ beta feature enabled will have CodeMirror instead of CodeEditor as the editor at Special:AbuseFilter. This is part of the broader effort to make the user experience more consistent across all editors.
- Tools and bots that access the Notifications API (
action=query&meta=notifications) will need to update their OAuth or BotPassword grants to also include access to private notifications. - Due to a library upgrade, listings on category pages may be displayed out of order starting on Monday, 20th April. A migration script will be run to correct this, and will take hours to days depending on the size of the wiki (up to a week for English Wikipedia).
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Wikidata Platform Newsletter - April 2026
This is the 5th issue of our monthly newsletter! The next issue will be published in May 2026.
- Q3 Wrap-up: We closed out the month of March by completing all of our team goals for the quarter. This work included setting up test environments for production-replay traffic testing using on-premises hardware, the next step from last quarter’s benchmarking analyses, defining data access guidelines for our platform, and solidifying details of our migration plan such as release schedule and target use cases. The results of our Q3 efforts are currently being reviewed with internal stakeholders and will be shared with the community soon as part of our broader communication on the upcoming Blazegraph migration.
- Q4 Plans: In Q4, the Wikidata Platform team is shifting from planning to execution readiness. We are focused on finalizing our migration plan, building out automated query validation to ensure correctness of the new service, developing a communications plan to smooth the transition, and beginning the technical build of our new architecture. In parallel, we are continuing work on platform access and Quality of Service (QoS) guidelines, including rate limiting and user authentication policies aimed at reducing system abuse, improving telemetry, and aligning with broader WMF standards. We will share more details and updates throughout the quarter.
- Upcoming Feedback Cycles: Within this month of April, we will share artifacts outlining our recommendation for a Blazegraph replacement and our proposed technical architecture for the Wikidata platform. We welcome community feedback on our plans-your input will help us smooth the transition and develop mitigations for impacted use cases. We will share more details about the upcoming migration once we’ve collected and incorporated community feedback, including a timeline of changes, query rewriting best practices, and migration support documentation for the soon-to-be launched endpoints.
- Team is Growing: Our team is growing! At the beginning of March, we welcomed Andrea Westerinen to the team as a contractor. In the coming months, Andrea will assist with the upcoming Blazegraph migration by creating technical documentation, providing query rewrite support, and advising on SPARQL requirements.
- Rate Limiting Updates: As announced in last month’s update, we are working closely with site reliability engineers (SREs) to protect against WDQS service interruptions caused by increased request volume and complexity. While we work towards migrating to a more scalable backend that’s more resilient than Blazegraph, we are selectively rate-limiting users when we observe a correlation between their activity and performance incidents. Additionally, we have deployed and fine-tuned auto-remediation measures to restart servers that have been gridlocked. The intention of these changes is to stabilize the WDQS experience for the community, which we have observed to be effective. If you believe you’ve been negatively impacted by these changes, please let us know.
- Runbooks for Common WDQS Issues:
- Data reconciliation: Some WDQS users reported an issue where items deleted from Wikidata were still queryable (T407702). Here’s some background to explain the issue: WDQS is continually synced against Wikidata via a streaming-update data flow with automatic retrying in case of failure, but it can happen that an update is missed and never gets picked up by the streaming updater. This can cause Blazegraph’s state to drift from Wikidata’s. In this case, we determined that the Wikidata deletion events were indeed missed by the streaming updater, and we resolved the issue by manually running a tool that rereads the source of truth for a specific entity (or list of entities) and updates Blazegraph accordingly. We also added a Wikitech runbook to document this fix. After the migration we will have more options available for keeping WDQS’s data up to date, including regular bulk data syncing and reindexing pipelines.
- High Lag troubleshooting: Over the last two quarters the Wikidata Platform team has been working with SRE teams to troubleshoot and proactively address queries and actors that are putting a strain on WDQS infrastructure. We reviewed existing metrics, alerts and Grafana panels, and tuned our instrumentation to emerging traffic patterns. We authored and shared a new runbook that guides Wikidata Platform engineers in troubleshooting and escalation, during periods of elevated WDQS load and user-facing query failures. This work is part of a broader operational excellence effort in which we are partnering with SRE and other teams at the Foundation to streamline cross-team collaboration and protect our infrastructure.
- Wikidata through Wikimedia Enterprise: On March 31st, Wikimedia Enterprise announced the launch of Wikidata APIs as part of the suite of Enterprise offerings. These endpoints are built to support high-volume access needs by commercial reusers. This new resource will provide right-sized solutions for some of the largest consumers of Wikidata and users of our platform, supporting our vision for stable and sustainable access to Wikidata for everyone. More details can be found in WME’s full announcement.
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 7


Highlights
- Community Wishlist update: This monthly update covers how 44 wishes were fulfilled, 17 are in progress, and 15 more will start work soon. It includes completion of work on Watchlist labels, which allow users to add labels to items in their watchlist to help with managing and filtering; fixing a bug with preview page feature; indexing of Commons on Google & DuckDuckGo search; and a wish simplifying the insertion of maths formulas in articles. You can submit, vote on, and subscribe to wishes here.
- Goal setting for edit-a-thons: The CampaignEvents extension now includes a new group goal-setting feature, enabling organizers to set and track event goals such as the number of articles created and participating contributors in real time. This feature is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. Join the Connection Learning Session on April 14 at 16:00 UTC to learn more about this feature and new ways to promote events and campaigns to editors.
- Collaboration with the United Nations: Learn how the Foundation engages with the United Nations to secure our collective voice and protect free knowledge.
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

- Navigating articles on mobile: The Foundation is launching an experiment to test how to make it easier and more intuitive for readers to navigate through articles on mobile. To do this, we want to test Mobile Page Previews. This experiment will go live the week of April 20 and will run for four weeks.
- Editing tools for new editors: Tone Check was deployed on French, Japanese, and Portuguese Wikipedia as a default-on feature for editors who have published 100 or fewer edits locally. When promotional or subjective language is added, users are prompted to consider "neutralizing" the tone of the edit.
- Managing watchlist labels: The new watchlist labels feature is now available via VisualEditor, the source editor, and the "watchstar" (or watch link, for skins that don’t have a star icon). Previously it was only possible to assign labels via EditWatchlist.
- Latest experiments: See all upcoming, live, in-analysis, and completed experiments in Product & Technology. A new experiment that just went live is one which aims to establish a baseline retention rate for logged-in readers.
- Latest Wikifunctions: Check out the partial list of the 102 new functions created last week – likely the first week we have exceeded 100.
- Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News weeks 14 and 15 include an ongoing A/B test running on 10 Wikipedias to evaluate a clearer, more user-friendly message that promotes account creation on wikis. See also the 68 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
- Community discussions on Semantic Search: The Wikimedia Foundation, in collaboration with the CEE Hub, hosted a discussion session on Semantic Search for members of the CEE Youth Group.
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
- Don't Blink!: This month's highlights from the Global Advocacy team include how the Wikimedia Foundation co-presented alongside the Internet Archive at the State of the Net conference.
- Digital rights and inclusion: Take a look at the sessions that Wikimedians and allied partners will lead during Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum (DRIF) 2026.
- Manuscript preservation: The Wikimedia Foundation supported volunteer-lead workshops to write Balinese Wikipedia articles about palm-leaf manuscripts (lontar) from the Leiden University Library collection.
- Youth content creators: Wikimedia Indonesia, together with the Wikimedia Foundation, delivered an introductory session on Wikipedia for young content creators representing all 11 ASEAN member states.
- Legal and Safety Contacts: The Wikimedia Foundation has created a single "Legal and Safety Contacts" page, to be linked in the footer of each wiki page. This will ensure that everyone has access to accurate and up to date Legal contact information. Insertion of the new links on different wikis will be done in stages, based on assessment of legal risk and necessity.
- Building shared principals for the internet as a public good: The Global Advocacy team published a blog with the Center for Studies on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information (CELE) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) summarizing a workshop that brought together digital rights advocates from Latin America to dream of a "digital utopia."
Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness
See also: Progress on the annual plan
- Wikidata API: Wikidata’s structured knowledge is now available through Wikimedia Enterprise.
- Annual Planning and global trends: Join the America APP call on April 21 at 18:00 UTC. This meeting is an opportunity for the Latin American community to ensure that the region's voice helps shape the Wikimedia Foundation's work and priorities for the next fiscal year. The call will be in Spanish with interpretation into Portuguese and English. The last meeting between Wikimedia EDs and Foundation staff was dedicated to discuss global trends too. More discussions are happening on-wiki and in community spaces around different regions and projects.
- Futures Lab: The world is changing around us. As the Wikimedia movement navigates this moment over a hundred Wikimedians from different Wikimedia projects came together to deepen our understanding of how these trends are impacting our people and projects at the Wikimedia Futures Lab.
- Fundraising Hub: The Wikimedia Foundation has launched Fundraising Hub on English Wikipedia. The first discussion you can participate in is about distributing fundraising banner on English Wikipedia throughout the year.
Board and Board committee updates
See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- Ombuds Commission: Announcement of the 2026 Ombuds Commission, the small group of volunteers who investigate complaints about violations of the Privacy Policy, the Access to Nonpublic Personal Data Policy, the CheckUser Policy and the Oversight Policy.
- Wikinews closure: All Wikinews editions will be closed and switched to read-only mode on May 4. Content will remain accessible, but no new edits or articles will be able to be added. This closure was approved by the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation following extended discussions.
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 foundationbulletin
wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #244 is out: Milestones; Some major issues hopefully resolved
There is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!
In this issue, we celebrate 4000 functions on Wikifunctions and 1000 abstract articles on Abstract Wikipedia, we announce that we should have fixed some major issues with the websites, we inform you on our latest outreach activities, and we take a look at the latest software developments.
Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!
Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 10:22, 17 April 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-17
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- After two years of development, ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽, also known as CodeMirror 6, is to be promoted out of beta on Tuesday, April 21. It brings better code and wikitext readability, reduction in typing errors, and other benefits to all users of the standard syntax highlighter. A huge thank you to volunteer Bhsd who developed many of the new features, including code folding, autocompletion, and linting.
- A major update to the Wikipedia app for iOS is now rolling out, redesigning the interface to align with Apple's latest "Liquid Glass" visual design. Download the latest version and explore the update.
Updates for editors
- Reading lists is a feature which allows readers to save articles to a list for reading later. This feature is now in beta on Arabic, French, Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Chinese Wikipedias and by default for all new accounts on all Wikipedias.
- An experiment which explores extending Page Previews to mobile web will be launched in the week of April 20 on Arabic, English, French, Italian, Polish, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. Page Previews are pop-ups that display a thumbnail, lead paragraph, and a link to open the full article of a blue link, thereby improving content discovery. The feature is already available on desktop and in the apps. Read more about this experiment and others.
- On several wikis, logged-in editors who haven't confirmed their email addresses can now see a banner encouraging them to do so. Having the email address confirmed allows a user to restore access to the account if they lose it. Learn more.
View all 15 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where editing very large wiki pages in the 2017 wikitext editor caused slow loading, preview and scrolling lag, and performance issues when selecting, cutting, or pasting content, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- As part of the promotion of CodeMirror from a beta feature, all users will use CodeMirror instead of CodeEditor for syntax highlighting when editing JavaScript, CSS, JSON, Vue and Lua content pages.
- The
mirrors.wikimedia.orgservice for Debian and Ubuntu users will sunset and stop working on May 15. The resources for the service will be replaced with new and better options. Some users may need to switch to a different server which should take about a minute. You can read more. - The
imageandoldimagetable will be removed from wikireplicas. If your tools or queries accessimageoroldimagedirectly, please update them to use thefileandfilerevisiontable before 28 May. - Following the recent implementation of global API rate limits on unidentified traffic, the Wikimedia Foundation will continue efforts to ensure fair use of infrastructure by applying global limits to identified API traffic beginning the last week of April. These limits are intentionally set as high as possible to minimise impact on the community. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits and Frequently Asked Questions.
- The Attribution API is now available as a beta. The API fetches information for crediting Wikimedia articles and media files wherever they are used. Reference documentation is available through the REST Sandbox special page available on all Wikimedia wikis (such as the REST sandbox on English Wikipedia). Share your feedback on the project talk page.
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Wikidata weekly summary #728

week leading up to 2026-04-20. Missed the previous one? See issue #727.
Discussions
- Open request for adminship: Yamato Shiya - RfP scheduled to end after 26 April 2026 11:10 (UTC)
- Closed request for adminship: ZI Jony 2 - Closed as successful
Events
- Upcoming events:
- OpenStreetMap X Wikidata Meetup #88 May 11 Time: 19:30-21:00 UTC+8 at Mozilla Community Space Taipei (Q61752245).
- Wikidata turns 14 this October, and it’s time to start thinking about birthday celebrations🥳. See the various ways in which you can participate.
- Open Scholarly Profiles with Wikidata - April 22, 2026 1300 - 1430 EDT (1700 - 1830 UTC). This is an onsite event at University of Central Florida and requires registration (see link).
- University of Central Illinois - How does data power Wikipedia and Wikidata? Discover how your data skills can make an impact. Join the two onsite sessions (April 21, follow the link for registration details). Module 1 - GLAM Wiki and the Wikimedia Ecosystem: Commons and Structured Data: 0930 - 1130 CDT - An overview of GLAM-Wiki (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums). Module 2 - Wikidata: Editing, Querying, Citations and GIS Applications, 1300 - 1500 CDT
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs:
- Women in Photography – Wikidata Workshop with LightBox Photo Library - to address the underrepresentation of women photographers in the Wikimedia Projects, this workshop brought tech reporters, librarians, researchers and photography enthusiasts to understand how Wikidata can unlock data silos and connect different projects (in the Wikiverse and external) to make data on women photographers more searchable.
- Her Heritage Wiki Challenge: Art+Feminism in Ghana Month
- No Signal? No Problem: Building the Dagbanli Dictionary for Offline Use, by Mohammed Sadat Abdulai and Mohammed Awal Alhassan
- Papers: Optimising university web visibility: strategies using Wikidata identifiers and statements in Webometrics rankings By Backory et al., (2026), this study analyses Webometrics rankings of universities, applying clustering algorithms (K-means, hierarchical clustering, fuzzy C-means, GMM, and DBSCAN) to identify which identifiers and statements the top-ranked institutions have in common on their Wikidata entities.
- Videos:
- OKI Internship 2026 - Wikidata & Screening Test Preparation - Part of the Open Knowledge Initiative, hosted by Ankit V & Kasyap P.
- Charted Roots - Genealogy and worldbuilding in Obsidian - includes an example of linking to Wikidata to quickly add location data to your visualised family history.
Tool of the week
- Depictor by Hay Kranen is a tool that add structured data statements to Wikimedia Commons using a game-like interface
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- What is Wikidata? - Library Carpentry is part of The Carpentries, a registered non-profit teaching foundational coding and data science skills. They recently updated their introductory course to Wikidata and knowledge graph concepts.
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest External identifiers: ocremix.org game ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- especially (qualifier for statements to refine a value that applies more generally, but applies especially to a more specific value; a more specific qualifier than "including" (P1012))
- independent of theory (theory that proves neither this proposition nor its negation)
- EPBC conservation status (the conservation status from the Australian Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 assigned by the Australian Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water)
- part of discography (discography that this musical release is a part of)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: Thai Government Agency GFMIS Code, Conlang Database ID, Plataforma Acácia, Observatório Terras Quilombolas, LMTA folkloro archyvo ID, Kulturdenkmal-ID Rheinland-Pfalz, UNDRR-ISC Hazard Information Profile ID, Код Вестра, 19star performer ID, EM-DAT disaster number, ColBase ID, BIOSOP ID, BIOKAND ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples: Depthness of subway stations in meters (by Bouzinac)
- Newest database reports: Children of unborn parents, this list shows the child entity's birth date predates the parent entity's birth date: good candidates to check if the birth and relationship statements need correcting.
- Showcase Items: Haïlé Sélassié Ier - Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974
- Showcase Lexemes: slide (L9704) - English noun (slaɪd) meaning "a photographic transparency", "a playground or gym apparatus", or "a mass movement of earth or snow"
Development
- The Wikibase Reuse team continued their work on ensuring language fallback works for labels of linked entities in GraphQL and on refactoring wbsearchentities
- The Wikidata team worked on explored how to reduce load for low data users T400325, fixed some bugs on the new mobile editing on Items T418110, T414454 and improved some error messages T417797, T412145
- In the WIT team, engineering continued working on the LilDiffCheck prototype
You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.
Weekly Tasks
- Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
- Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country: South Korea
- Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
- Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
- Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
- Help write the next summary!
The Signpost: 21 April 2026
- News and notes: Six Serbian Wikipedia editors banned following controversy about political bias
Plus, new bans for AI-generated content in place, a new drop in active admins, pranks on pranks, May admin election, and other news from the Wikimedia world.
- In the media: Could Wikipedia be involved in Massachusetts' proposed social media ban for minors?
Another regulate-the-internet attempt casts a wide net.
- Gallery: March equinox
The progression of seasons in March.
- Traffic report: Time to change my galaxy in case, we outta space!
What catches the reader's eye? Death and film, per usual, and a loop around the moon per unusual.
- Comix: Of skirts and articles
When significant coverage is only skin deep.
Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #245 is out: The Foundation's search for the perfect language
There is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!
In this issue, we present an academic paper about Abstract Wikipedia, we discuss our latest Type created, and we take a look at the newest created functions.
Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!
Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 09:54, 25 April 2026 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #729

week leading up to 2026-04-27. Missed the previous one? See issue #728.
Discussions
- Closed request for adminship: Yamato Shiya - Congratulations to our newest Admin!
- New requests for permissions/Bot: Chamiln17@FineWiki - Task/s: Read-only Wikidata entity cache build for an academic temporal language model dataset.
Events
- Upcoming events: Next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session — 28 April 2026 at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 16:00 UTC / 6pm CEST. This session covers QuickStatements 3.0, the updated batch-editing tool for Wikidata, redeveloped by Wikimedia Brasil with support from Wikimedia Deutschland, featuring a modern interface and improved performance. Watch the previous session recording: on youtube. More details: QuickStatements3
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs:
- The Gballi Browser: Designing for the Dagbanli Alphabet, by Mohammed Sadat Abdulai and Mohammed Awal Alhassan
- Building Visibility for African Women on Wikimedia: The EmpowerHer Fellowship by Andikan Efiok Eduok.
- Papers:
- Call for Edits Nearby: Open Archives Metadata from Saxony by J. Bemme & M. Munke (2026), latest paper in the Journal of Open Humanities Data series.
- (Deutsch) [PDF] Art History Loves Wiki 2026 | digital/local.collection loves wiki - report from ArtHist.net on the recent 3rd edition of the conference, held at the Museum Schnütgen, Köln, from 27 – 29 March.
- Videos:
- Live Wikidata Editing, #121 with Jan Ainali and Abbe98.
- (Español) Build with Wikimedia open data: APIs, SPARQL and visualization with Carla Toro Fernández, Director Technology WM Chile.
- Every Airport Ever Built (1909-2024) - an animated map showing where and when airports were built. Powered by Wikidata and OurAirports.
- (Catalan) Barcelona Free Software: How to use Wikidata to make public domain digital works visible?, User:Hiperterminal presents Paulina, discusses the work done in digitising collections and how to make public domain works visible.
- Notebooks: Does the country of birth affect the likelihood of having a Wikipedia biography? by User:PAC2
Tools of the week
- The Human History Atlas (WikiTime), a browser-based atlas that uses Wikidata and Wikipedia-sourced data to construct timelines and allows exploration of significant historical events.
- Wikilympians, a real-time list of all 153,412 known Olympic competitors with Wikidata and Wikipedia coverage statistics
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Wikibase Suite 7.0 and Wikibase Suite Deploy 7.0.0 have been launched! It brings Wikibase closer to feature parity with Wikidata. Here's what's in the latest release:
- Echo Extension: User activity alerts and notifications.
- Discussion Tools Extension: Set of tools to enhance discussion pages.
- Temporary Accounts: The support for temporary accounts without IP address exposure has been added. It will, however, remain disabled by default, in line with Wikibase Cloud.
- Grouped External Identifiers (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T310898): External identifiers are now grouped on entity pages for better readability.
- “Mul” (multi-language) support: Adds support for multi-language values.
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes:
- perspective (point of view for an image of an object, for example an anatomical structure (ventral, dorsal, frontal))
- Bavarian natural monuments ID (identifier for natural monuments in Bavaria (Germany), issued by the Bayerisches Landesamt für Umwelt)
- audio version of text (The audio version of a text (e.g. book). Not the audio version of the Wikipedia article about the text (e.g. book).)
- motive (verified reasoning behind an action)
- award category or rank ((qualifier of P166) specific category or rank of an award received, for awards with more than one category or rank)
- Newest External identifiers: BE-monumen ID, Team Norway athlete ID, Kantonsspital St.Gallen author ID, Consumer Rights Wiki article ID, Central Registration Number (Indonesia Military), Conlang Database ID, EM-DAT disaster number, UNDRR-ISC Hazard Information Profile ID, EDAM Ontology ID, Turkey province ID, Kvinnehistorie.no topic ID, CNVD-ID, GiveSendGo fundraising ID, radiko person ID, Wikiparfum brand ID, Turkey district ID, OSDev article ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- different from property (This property is to be distinguished from the other property)
- SELL rating (classification in the Syndicat des éditeurs de logiciels de loisirs rating system)
- time expansion (factor by which a recording's duration has been extended or compressed relative to the original real-time event, without pitch correction; values greater than 1 indicate time expansion (e.g. 10 = ten times longer than real life, pitch lowered tenfold); values less than 1 indicate time compression (e.g. 0.1 = ten times shorter, pitch raised tenfold); 1 = real-time)
- Parental Advisory System rating (content rating for coin-operated video games)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: CINEFOX film ID (reproposal), CINEFOX parson ID (reproposal), VK video ID, Brew TV, CycleBase cyclist ID (new), Royal Australian Air Force service number, Files of the Reich Chancellery ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples: List of treaties/truces in the time by Bouzinac
- Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Occupations for enriching items occupation (P106), occupation (Q12737077) with data verified from official national occupation classification systems.
- Newest database reports: Without Claims by Site - this report will list how many Wikidata Items have 0 Statements, with a linked Wiki Article/page. Click reports/all items for a per wiki list, and consider expanding.
- Showcase Items: Okazaki fragments - short DNA sequences synthesized discontinuously during DNA replication
- Showcase Lexemes: transfer (L29733) - English noun/verb (ˈtræns.fɜːr) meaning "to move from one place to another", "a sports team member moving to another team", or "a ticket allowing continuation of a journey"
Development
- Query Service: It is now possible to download query results in Wikidata Query Service that include coordinates as KML & GPX (GeoJSON has been available since last year). Text from the first column in the results is used as the value for naming POIs. Thanks again to Atom.oil.2 for the patch. (phab:T414376)
- The Wikidata team continued working on a prototype to make WikiProjects more visible (phab:T420907) and made the new Wikidata mobile UI use auto-resizing text areas instead of single-line text inputs, in order to make longer values easier to edit (phab:T414420)
- The Wikidata Integrations team now has a working prototype of LilDiffCheck, injecting wikidata changes into recent changes only if there was a change on the wikipedia html (phab:T421390)
- Language fallback will be available this week on the labels of linked entities functionality in GraphQL (phab:T413655)
You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.
Weekly Tasks
- Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
- Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
- Govdirectory weekly focus: field of work
- Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
- Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
- Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
- Help write the next summary!
Tech News: 2026-18
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- There is a change in how new users are autoconfirmed that will improve anti-vandalism protection. Currently, users who have had an account for a few days and made a few edits are automatically added to the Autoconfirmed users group. This configuration tends to be exploited by some vandals, who create accounts and start to use them only after some time. To mitigate this, the configuration will be updated next week so that – for the purpose of becoming autoconfirmed – the account age will be counted from their first edit, instead of registration date. The numeric value of the age threshold will remain the same. This change will be deployed only to wikis which require at least one edit as part of the autoconfirmation conditions.
- All Wikipedia users with new accounts and those who activated the "automatically enable most beta features" option in their preference can now use the reading lists beta feature to save articles for later reading. This helps organize reading interests in one place for convenient access.
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where infobox images have huge padding in Firefox, has been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- As a reminder, the global API rate limits will be applied this week to identified API traffic. This is to help ensure fair use of infrastructure. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, including the actual rate limits, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits and Frequently Asked Questions.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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 8


Highlights
- Annual Planning: The Wikimedia Foundation published the draft Annual Plan for the coming fiscal year (2026–2027) which will focus on four main goals that directly respond to the external trends. The goals include increasing our reach, deepening engagement, protecting our projects and building speed and resilience to enable the change needed to respond to the internet being at an inflection point. Feedback welcome on the talk page and many other places.
- Global conversation: A global conversation about the Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan will take place on May 7 at 5:00 PM UTC.
- Sustainable reuse of Wikimedia content: The Attribution API is now in beta. It makes it easier to credit Wikimedia content fairly wherever it is used. It provides all information required by the Wikimedia Attribution Framework in a single, well-structured and easy-to-use endpoint, simplifying attribution for off-wiki reuse. Share your feedback on the project talk page.
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
- Feedback on Article guidance: Experienced editors are invited to test the Article guidance feature. This tool helps less-experienced editors create structured, policy-compliant Wikipedia articles. Review the outlines and share your feedback on the project talk page. Check out the step-by-step and video instructions.
- Games Hub available on Android: The Games Hub is live in the Wikipedia app for Android. This new feature offers a space for users to find all available games in one place, explore archives, and get updates on new games. It currently includes Which Came First?, with more games coming soon.
- Update to Wikipedia app for iOS: A major update to the Wikipedia app for iOS has rolled out, redesigning the interface to align with Apple’s latest “Liquid Glass” visual design. Download the latest version and explore the update.
- Confirming email addresses: On several wikis, logged-in editors who haven’t confirmed their email addresses now see a banner encouraging them to do so. Confirming the email address helps users restore account access if they lose it and receive messages about their accounts. It also provides an easy option to communicate with other users off-wiki if they choose. As of early 2026, about 62.9% of all registered Wikimedia user accounts that have an email set had not confirmed it.
- Testing mobile web page previews: Mobile page previews experiment was launched on Arabic, English, French, Italian, Polish, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. Page previews are pop-ups that show a thumbnail, a lead paragraph, and a link to the full article to improve content discovery. It is already available on desktop and in the apps.
- Account creation experiment: Account creation experiment is live on Hindi, Indonesian, Bengali, Thai, and Hebrew Wikipedia targeting 10% of logged-out mobile web users. It looks at whether adding a button to create accounts in the mobile web header boosts new registrations and increases mobile users contributing to the wikis.
- Experimenting with Hybrid Search on mobile apps: The Hybrid Search Phase 1 experiment on the Wikipedia Android app has concluded. It tested a combined keyword and meaning-based search methods to meet various information needs. The team is analyzing data and feedback, and will share insights and next steps soon.

- Latest experiments: See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology. One upcoming experiment is testing a refreshed Explore Feed to make it easier for readers to discover interesting content and visit Wikipedia app more often.
- Wikifunctions: Wikifunctions crossed 4,000 functions, with subtracting two complex numbers as the 4,000th function. Also, Abstract Wikipedia reached 1,000 articles. The article about the famous Indian Brahmin Chanakya marked this milestone.
- Reading lists now a beta feature: New accounts are now opted into Reading lists by default on all Wikipedia wikis. This brings the "Save pages" feature to the web, which has been popular in mobile apps. For users in the beta, a "Save page" (bookmark) button appears in the toolbar on every page. The watch/unwatch (star) option moves to the tools menu. The "Watchlist" button in the top navigation shifts to the user menu. A new "Saved pages" button takes its place. In June, the feature will be available to all users and a user preference will be added to choose between two sets of buttons: Watch + Watchlist or Save + Saved list. The other set will be in the tool and user menus.
- Structured Contents: Article Images and Lists now in Structured Contents payloads.
- Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News weeks 16 and 17 include CodeMirror 6 being promoted out of beta on Tuesday, April 21. See also the 45 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
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
- Wikimedia Research Fund submissions in review: The submission period for this year's Wikimedia Research Fund is now closed. The technical and internal reviews of the proposals have begun.
- Events and conferences: Take a look at the different community events happening later this year: ESEAP Conference (May 15-17), WikiConference India (Sep 4-6), WikiConference North America (Sep 24-27), Language Diversity Conference (Oct 2 to 4), Queering Wiki (Oct 23-25), WikiArabia (Nov 6-8).
- Around the puzzle globe in the America region: More than 60 people joined America call to discuss the annual plan and the global trends impacting the movement. Participants came from across the region, and the audience included a mix of affiliates from LATAM, online contributors, and users with extended rights.
- Transparency Report: The Wikimedia Foundation published a transparency report covering July to December 2025.
Board and Board committee updates
See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- Board selection process: The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees is reviewing and improving how it selects new members. The goal is to ensure that there is the right mix of expertise and community representation on the board. Join the conversation and share your ideas on the talk page.
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 foundationbulletin
wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #246 is out: Request for input: what should we count for Abstract Wikipedia
There is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!
In this issue, we ask you what would be the relevant metrics for Abstract Wikipedia, we discuss our latest news on Composition Language v2, and we take a look at the latest software developments.
Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!
Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 12:21, 2 May 2026 (UTC)
Affiliations Committee News (January-March 2026)
You can find this newsletter translated into additional languages on Meta-wiki. Please help translate to other languages.
Quarterly newsletter sharing news and events about the work of Wikimedia's Affiliations Committee.

Affiliate Recognition and Derecognition: This past quarter, AffCom recognized no new Affiliates due to the pause in recognizing new affiliates.
AffCom Conflict Intervention: AffCom is currently addressing eight ongoing affiliate conflict cases received in previous quarters.
Affiliate Recognition Pause Extension: The Wikimedia Foundation, together with the AffCom, has extended the pause on new affiliate recognition until September 1, 2026.
New Affiliate Model Development Efforts: The Affiliations Committee held collaborative meetings with the Global Resource Distribution Committee (GRDC) to explore the development of a new affiliations model.
Towards a Healthy Ecosystem of Wikimedia Organizations: Two major pilot initiatives were launched to address long-standing questions about the roles of movement organizations and the future of resource allocation.
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:50, 03 May 2026 (UTC)
Administrators' newsletter – May 2026
News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2026).

Interface administrator changes
- Changes to user permissions made from Meta are now included in the local user permissions log (T6055).
- The autoconfirmed user group will soon be modified such that the four-day account age requirement begins when an account makes its first edit (T418484).
- The arbitration case SchroCat has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case closed on 15 April.
- Per a recent motion, appeals of blocks from the conflict-of-interest VRT queue are, by default, appealed on-wiki through the normal unblock process. However, they may be heard by the Committee if COIVRTers disagree on the interpretation of the evidence or believe ArbCom would be better suited to hear the appeal. Administrators are also advised that loosening or lifting such blocks without the consent of someone with access to the queue or ArbCom can be grounds for desysopping.
- Per a recent motion, restrictions issued directly by the Committee may now be enforced with blocks which work exactly like contentious topic blocks.
- The arbitration case Maghreb has been closed.
- The May 2026 administrator elections are scheduled to run from April 29 to May 19. The call for candidates ends May 5.
- The 2026 Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) election is scheduled to run from April 25 to June 1. Candidacy submissions close on May 10.
- A new noticeboard for non-urgent, batch page protection requests has been created, primarily for the enforcement of contentious topic restrictions.
Wikidata weekly summary #730

week leading up to 2026-05-04. Missed the previous one? See issue #729.
Discussions
- New requests for permissions/Bot: Chamiln17@FineWiki - Task: This bot performs a read-only cache build for an academic temporal language model dataset.
- Other: better tools to support constraints implied by properties like disjoint union of
Events
- Upcoming events:
- WikiProjects Days 2026 (online, June 19 to 21). A community gathering focused on making WikiProjects more useful, visible, and alive. Propose a session (deadline for proposals: May 26, 2026) or register now.
- Language Diversity Conference - Call for Submissions ends 15 May 2026.
- Wikidata Community Summit 2026 @ COSCUP - Call for Proposals ends May 9, 2026.
- LIC Photo Walking Tour + Wikipedia & Wikidata Workshop - May 16, 12:30 - 16:00 EDT (UTC-4). A historical walking tour of Long Island City, New York, concluding with a Wiki-skills workshop at LaGuardia. Registration on the event link.
- Ongoing: COORDINATE ME 2026 - a Wikidata competition for geolocatable content has just started and ends 31 May 2026. Visit the link for details on how to participate.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs:
- Visualised Blog metadata through SPARQL queries - ChristianMahnke blog.
- Mozilla Common Voice Meets Wikidata (How the Dagbanli Dictionary Got Audio Usage Examples)
- Wiki Loves Mother Tongue 2026 in the Igbo Community
- EduWiki Workshop Highlights Practical Uses of Wikimedia Commons in Education
- Recap: Wiki for Human Rights, LGBTIQ+ Nigeria, February and March Training
- The new Art+Feminism’s Wikidata Modules are here!
- Videos:
- Panel on Wikidata and public domain in Colombia (Spanish): on April 24th, the National Library of Colombia, The Cultural Network of the Bank of the Republic of Colombia, Wikimedia Colombia and Fundación Conector discussed about digital heritage and Wikidata, its challenges and opportunities for collaboration.
- Wikibase - an introduction by Jason Evans (Open Data Manager, National Library of Wales). Produced by the Wikimedian in Residence channel, University of Edinburgh.
- A uMap based on Wikidata - a use-case of Holy Wells located in Ireland, associated with female Saints, powered by Wikidata and OpenStreetMap.
- Wikifunctions in practice: Reusable Logic for Wikimedia - Presentation given by Toby Hudson (User:99of9) at the Wikiconference Australia 2026.
- Mentor Me! Session 3A - This in-person and hands-on session is provided by the Wikimedia Tyap User Group, and continues in the following sessions: Mentor Me! Session 3B and Mentor Me! Session 3C. Led by Gwakhap D. Anthony, it will cover how to document languages with Wikidata lexemes.
- Africa Wiki Women:
- Linking images from Commons to Wikidata and Wikipedia - how images are used across the Projects with examples documenting African Women.
- Newbies Monthly Meetup for Africa Wiki Women - further training and introductory skills for Wikidata and how it interacts with the other Wikimedia Projects.
- EditHer Africa Contest (April) - a beginner-friendly hands-on Wikidata item creation guide and launch of the monthly contest, with a focus on African Women in Works and Leadership.
Tool of the week
- OpenHistory – interactive historical atlas of 21k+ Wikidata-sourced historical events, polities, and territories on a timeline+map. SPARQL-driven pipeline, MIT/CC BY-SA. (GitHub)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- WikiTrivia - the webgame about putting historical events in the correct order recently got a huge update, thanks to creator Tom Watson.
- Wikimedia API's / Rate limits - new rate limits are being added for all Wikimedia projects, to ensure sustainable use to the REST an ACTION API's. If you operate a bot and it has recently started producing an error message for producing too many API requests, please consult the linked MediaWiki page and amend your bot as needed.
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes: meta-category for (topic or class of items covered by the lowest categories in this meta-category's hierarchy)
- Newest External identifiers: KISTI article ID, FISH Monument Types Thesaurus ID, FISH Evidence Thesaurus ID, Organization in cooperation with ISO ID, ScriptSource script code, ScriptSource language code, Tube8 performer ID, Bundestag Group Minutes ID, Westra code, Myrotvorets ID, Irish State Administration Database Unit ID, Hessische Parlamentarismusgeschichte Abgeordneten-ID, YouPorn performer ID, GFMIS Agency Code, Royal Australian Air Force service number, Plataforma Acácia ID, Observatório Terras Quilombolas ID, BIOSOP ID, BIOKAND ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- (found) liable of (tort or civil wrong a person or organization was found liable of)
- DMCA takedown policy URL (DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown policy or submitting page of this hosting site or UGC (User Generated Content) distributor)
- 18 U.S.C. § 2257 policy URL (age requirement documentation URL statement of this website or company)
- monolingual text name properties ((with an associated language code) name by which a subject is recorded in a database, mentioned as a contributor of a work, or is referred to in a particular context)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: Gidrologicheskaya Izuchennost Code, QBWiki article ID, Dijital İstanbul ID, NaPTAN stop area code, Identifiant Cairn d'un éditeur, Darwin Correspondence person ID, ACM Digital Library institution ID, SensCritique person ID, National Archives of Japan Digital Archive ID, VGs drapsoversikt ID, Semanticscience Integrated Ontology ID, Senkyo.com, Objectif plumes author pages, Maoyan personage ID, critify.de publication ID, BookNotification author ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples: Script style of manuscript Qur'ans
- Newest WikiProjects:
- WikiProject Highlights: WikiProject Ontology has gathered a list of potential projects for the second offering of the Wikidata Ontology course, and has published a subpage to discuss the future of Ontology Classes and Properties.
- Newest database reports: Unmarked Supercentenarians - this list displays humans who do not have a claim supercentenarian (Q1200828) (or alleged supercentenarian (Q106991708)), but the difference between their Date of Birth and Date of Death is greater than 110 years.
- Showcase Items: Raiders of the Lost Ark - a 1981 film directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, and John Rhys-Davies.
- Showcase Lexemes: gje (L2205) - Norwegian verb (jeː) meaning "to give", "to perform/hold", or "to diminish in strength"
Development
- Mobile statement editing: We continued fixing issues uncovered in testing
- WikiProjects: We are working on adding links to the sidebar of Items to lead people to the respective WikiProjects for that Item. This way we hope to help people more easily find data modelling documentation as well as other editors interested in the same topic.
You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.
Weekly Tasks
- Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
- Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country:
- Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
- Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
- Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
- Help write the next summary!
Tech News: 2026-19
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- The Article guidance team invites experienced editors of pilot Wikipedias—Arabic, Bangla, Japanese, Portuguese, Persian, Turkish, Simple English, Spanish, and French—to help translate and adapt sample outlines. These outlines will guide editors in creating clear, well-structured, and policy-compliant articles when using the feature once it is launched in May 2026. Simple instructions on how to translate and adapt the outlines are available.
Updates for editors
- The Product and Technology Advisory Council has published draft recommendations on a model that affiliates can follow when contributing to the technical space. Community members are invited to provide feedback on the recommendation until May 8th on the talk page.
- The number of available thumbnail size preferences in MediaWiki is being reduced to three standardized options—Small (180px), Regular (250px), and Large (400px), as part of ongoing efforts to improve performance and reduce strain on thumbnail services. As a result, existing preferences will be mapped to the nearest new size (for example, smaller selections like 120px or 150px will render at 180px, while larger ones like 300px or 360px will render at 400px). The preferences interface will soon be updated to reflect these changes, and users who wish to opt out or provide feedback can do so.
- From now on, even when a permission expires automatically, users will receive an Echo notification similar to the standard notification for permission changes. There is a difference between this and Global reminder bot in that the latter reminds users a week before the rights are due to expire, so that they can renew the rights.
View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the problem where the ULS language selector in Special:Translate would scroll vertically when it shouldn't, has been resolved. Previously, when users opened the "Translate to English" dropdown and typed certain inputs, the dialog would scroll vertically by a few pixels even when there was enough space to display all results. The dropdown no longer shifts unnecessarily when filtering languages. - The Global Watchlist, which lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on a single page, continues to improve. For example, watchlists for Wikibase sites such as Wikidata now support EntitySchema elements for better tracking. The Live Updates mode now refreshes the special page every 60 seconds to comply with the updated global API rate limits for improved real-time responsiveness. Additionally, a directionality bug that displayed links as "changes 3" instead of "3 changes" in mixed-direction lists has been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- The second phase of global API rate limits has been rolled out to reduce the impact of AI crawlers and ensure fair, sustainable access to Wikimedia resources, prioritising human and mission-aligned traffic. Limits have been shifted from per-hour to per-minute, producing smoother traffic patterns and more predictable API load. Community users are not expected to be affected, and no action is required. Early indications show some User-Agent-based requestors are adjusting behaviour, and around 64% of automated API traffic has been identified. Monitoring continues, and Wikimedia Enterprise remains available for commercial support.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.