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Tech News: 2025-05
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- Patrollers and admins - what information or context about edits or users could help you to make patroller or admin decisions more quickly or easily? The Wikimedia Foundation wants to hear from you to help guide its upcoming annual plan. Please consider sharing your thoughts on this and 13 other questions to shape the technical direction for next year.
Updates for editors
- iOS Wikipedia App users worldwide can now access a personalized Year in Review feature, which provides insights based on their reading and editing history on Wikipedia. This project is part of a broader effort to help welcome new readers as they discover and interact with encyclopedic content.
Edit patrollers now have a new feature available that can highlight potentially problematic new pages. When a page is created with the same title as a page which was previously deleted, a tag ('Recreated') will now be added, which users can filter for in Special:RecentChanges and Special:NewPages. - Later this week, there will be a new warning for editors if they attempt to create a redirect that links to another redirect (a double redirect). The feature will recommend that they link directly to the second redirect's target page. Thanks to the user SomeRandomDeveloper for this improvement.
Wikimedia wikis allow WebAuthn-based second factor checks (such as hardware tokens) during login, but the feature is fragile and has very few users. The MediaWiki Platform team is temporarily disabling adding new WebAuthn keys, to avoid interfering with the rollout of SUL3 (single user login version 3). Existing keys are unaffected. 
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- For developers that use the MediaWiki History dumps: The Data Platform Engineering team has added a couple of new fields to these dumps, to support the Temporary Accounts initiative. If you maintain software that reads those dumps, please review your code and the updated documentation, since the order of the fields in the row will change. There will also be one field rename: in the
mediawiki_user_historydump, theanonymousfield will be renamed tois_anonymous. The changes will take effect with the next release of the dumps in February.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
ClueBot NG: Reverting vandalism failure
ClueBot NG's task "Reverting vandalism" failed to run per the configuration specified at Wikipedia:Bot activity monitor/Configurations. Detected only 0 edits in the last 2 hours, whereas at least 1 was expected. If/when the issue is fixed, please change the section title (e.g. append " - Fixed") or remove this section completely. When that is done, this notice will be reposted if the bot task is still broken or is re-broken. If your bot is behaving as expected, then you may want to modify the task configuration instead. Or to unsubscribe from bot failure notifications, remove the |notify= parameter from the {{/task}} template. Thanks! – SDZeroBot (talk) 06:20, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-06
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
- Editors who use the "Special characters" editing-toolbar menu can now see the 32 special characters you have used most recently, across editing sessions on that wiki. This change should help make it easier to find the characters you use most often. The feature is in both the 2010 wikitext editor and VisualEditor.
- Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor can now create sublists with correct indentation by selecting the line(s) you want to indent and then clicking the toolbar buttons. You can now also insert
<code>tags using a new toolbar button. Thanks to user stjn for these improvements. - Help is needed to ensure the citation generator works properly on each wiki.
- (1) Administrators should update the local versions of the page
MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.jsonto include entries forpreprint,standard, anddataset; Here are example diffs to replicate for 'preprint' and for 'standard' and 'dataset'. - (2.1) If the citoid map in the citation template used for these types of references is missing, one will need to be added. (2.2) If the citoid map does exist, the TemplateData will need to be updated to include new field names. Here are example updates for 'preprint' and for 'standard' and 'dataset'. The new fields that may need to be supported are
archiveID,identifier,repository,organization,repositoryLocation,committee, andversionNumber.
- (1) Administrators should update the local versions of the page
- One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Central Kanuri (
w:knc:) - View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the OCR (optical character recognition) tool used for Wikisource now supports a new language, Church Slavonic.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
The Signpost: 7 February 2025
- Recent research: GPT-4 writes better edit summaries than human Wikipedians
But an open language model is ready to help.
- News and notes: Let's talk!
The WMF executive team delivers a new update; plus, the latest EU policy report, good-bye to the German Wikipedia's Café, and other news from the Wikimedia world.
- Opinion: Fathoms Below, but over the moon
Editor Fathoms Below reminisces over their successful RfA from February 2024.
- In the media: Wikipedia is an extension of legacy media propaganda, says Elon Musk
Plus, reports on the ARBPIA5 case, new concerns over projects targeting Wikipedia editors, John Green gets his sponsor flowers, and other news.
- Community view: 24th Wikipedia Day in New York City
Wikimedians and newbies celebrate 24 years of Wikipedia in the Brooklyn Central Library. Special guests Stephen Harrison and Clay Shirky joined in conversation.
- Arbitration report: Palestine-Israel articles 5 has closed
Ending with some bans, and a new set of editing sanctions.
- Traffic report: A wild drive
The start of the year was filled with a few unfortunate losses, tragic disasters, emerging tech forces and A LOT of politics.
ClueBot NG: Reverting vandalism failure
ClueBot NG's task "Reverting vandalism" failed to run per the configuration specified at Wikipedia:Bot activity monitor/Configurations. Detected only 0 edits in the last 2 hours, whereas at least 1 was expected. If/when the issue is fixed, please change the section title (e.g. append " - Fixed") or remove this section completely. When that is done, this notice will be reposted if the bot task is still broken or is re-broken. If your bot is behaving as expected, then you may want to modify the task configuration instead. Or to unsubscribe from bot failure notifications, remove the |notify= parameter from the {{/task}} template. Thanks! – SDZeroBot (talk) 12:20, 9 February 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-07
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- The Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) has published a draft of their recommendations for the Wikimedia Foundation's Product and Technology department. They have recommended focusing on mobile experiences, particularly contributions. They request community feedback at the talk page by 21 February.
Updates for editors
- The "Special pages" portlet link will be moved from the "Toolbox" into the "Navigation" section of the main menu's sidebar by default. This change is because the Toolbox is intended for tools relating to the current page, not tools relating to the site, so the link will be more logically and consistently located. To modify this behavior and update CSS styling, administrators can follow the instructions at T385346.
- As part of this year's work around improving the ways readers discover content on the wikis, the Web team will be running an experiment with a small number of readers that displays some suggestions for related or interesting articles within the search bar. Please check out the project page for more information.
- Template editors who use TemplateStyles can now customize output for users with specific accessibility needs by using accessibility related media queries (
prefers-reduced-motion,prefers-reduced-transparency,prefers-contrast, andforced-colors). Thanks to user Bawolff for these improvements. - View all 22 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the global blocks log will now be shown directly on the Special:CentralAuth page, similarly to global locks, to simplify the workflows for stewards.
Updates for technical contributors
- Wikidata now supports a special language as a "default for all languages" for labels and aliases. This is to avoid excessive duplication of the same information across many languages. If your Wikidata queries use labels, you may need to update them as some existing labels are getting removed.
- The function
getDescriptionwas invoked on every Wiki page read and accounts for ~2.5% of a page's total load time. The calculated value will now be cached, reducing load on Wikimedia servers. - As part of the RESTBase deprecation effort, the
/page/relatedendpoint has been blocked as of February 6, 2025, and will be removed soon. This timeline was chosen to align with the deprecation schedules for older Android and iOS versions. The stable alternative is the "morelike" action API in MediaWiki, and a migration example is available. The MediaWiki Interfaces team can be contacted for any questions.
In depth
- The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: Updates about the "Contribute" menu; details on some of the newest language editions of Wikipedia; details on new languages supported by the MediaWiki interface; updates on the Community-defined lists feature; and more.
- The latest Chart Project newsletter is available. It includes updates on the progress towards bringing better visibility into global charts usage and support for categorizing pages in the Data namespace on Commons.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Tech News: 2025-08
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
- Communities using growth tools can now showcase one event on the
Special:Homepagefor newcomers. This feature will help newcomers to be informed about editing activities they can participate in. Administrators can create a new event to showcase atSpecial:CommunityConfiguration. To learn more about this feature, please read the Diff post, have a look at the documentation, or contact the Growth team.
Updates for editors
- Starting next week, talk pages at these wikis – Spanish Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia – will get a new design. This change was extensively tested as a Beta feature and is the last step of talk pages improvements.
- You can now navigate to view a redirect page directly from its action pages, such as the history page. Previously, you were forced to first go to the redirect target. This change should help editors who work with redirects a lot. Thanks to user stjn for this improvement.
- When a Cite reference is reused many times, wikis currently show either numbers like "1.23" or localized alphabetic markers like "a b c" in the reference list. Previously, if there were so many reuses that the alphabetic markers were all used, an error message was displayed. As part of the work to modernize Cite customization, these errors will no longer be shown and instead the backlinks will fall back to showing numeric markers like "1.23" once the alphabetic markers are all used.
- The log entries for each change to an editor's user-groups are now clearer by specifying exactly what has changed, instead of the plain before and after listings. Translators can help to update the localized versions. Thanks to user Msz2001 for these improvements.
- A new filter has been added to the Special:Nuke tool, which allows administrators to mass delete pages, to enable users to filter for pages in a range of page sizes (in bytes). This allows, for example, deleting pages only of a certain size or below.
- Non-administrators can now check which pages are able to be deleted using the Special:Nuke tool. Thanks to user MolecularPilot for this and the previous improvements.
- View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed in the configuration for the AV1 video file format, which enables these files to play again.
Updates for technical contributors
- Parsoid Read Views is going to be rolling out to most Wiktionaries over the next few weeks, following the successful transition of Wikivoyage to Parsoid Read Views last year. For more information, see the Parsoid/Parser Unification project page.
- Developers of tools that run on-wiki should note that
mw.Uriis deprecated. Tools requiringmw.Urimust explicitly declaremediawiki.Urias a ResourceLoader dependency, and should migrate to the browser nativeURLAPI soon.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
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