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Latest comment: 1 month ago by MediaWiki message delivery in topic Tech News: 2026-19
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Tech News: 2026-16

MediaWiki message delivery 15:17, 13 April 2026 (UTC)

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.

Udehb-WMF (talk) 17:20, 13 April 2026 (UTC)

Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 7

MediaWiki message delivery 22:09, 14 April 2026 (UTC)

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

MediaWiki message delivery 14:58, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #728

The Signpost: 21 April 2026

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

Tech News: 2026-18

MediaWiki message delivery 18:04, 27 April 2026 (UTC)

Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 8

MediaWiki message delivery 04:21, 29 April 2026 (UTC)

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.

AffCom and GRDC members at APP meeting, Lisbon, Portugal

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).

Administrator changes

readded
removed

Interface administrator changes

removed L235
added Chaotic Enby

CheckUser changes

removed

Oversight changes

removed Moneytrees

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • 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).

Arbitration

  • 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.

Miscellaneous


Wikidata weekly summary #730

Tech News: 2026-19

MediaWiki message delivery 20:41, 4 May 2026 (UTC)