DePiep

The Signpost

Finlay McWalter – CC BY SA 3.0

News and notes

An exclusive club

Wikipedia Co-Founder Larry Sanger gets a community ban for canvassing.

Brian Berlin – CC BY-SA 4.0

In the media

Battle for a soul – who won?

Commissars, winners and losers, blocks or bans, a Wiki red card, social engineering on wikis, and Swift action!

Freddy2001, 2017 – CC BY-SA

Opinion

We need to innovate with Wikimedia decision-making

Rules we can actually read, trust and change!

Colin Smith – cc-sa 2.0

Recent research

LLMs and NPOV, 20 years of user blocks, Esperanto and Volapük Wikipedias

And other research findings.

Wil540 art – CC BY 4.0

News from Diff

How to host Wikicurious in your own community

The Wikicurious team shares their approach to Wiki-event organizing.

Solowomanwalks – CC BY-SA 3.0

Community view

CUNY Newmark Wikimedian-in-Residence Quarterly Brief – April to June 2026

Quarterly update on the activities of the City University of New York's Wikimedian-in-Residence, Richard Knipel.

DCastor – CC0

Special report

Wikipedia escapes Category 1 designation under the UK Online Safety Act – for now

A possible future recategorization by the UK Government remains an existential threat to Wikipedia.

Adam Jones from Kelowna, British Columbia – CC-BY-SA-2.0

On the bright side

Fatherhood, weather, and diplomacy

Father's Day, Canada Day, and the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence.

Wikimedia Foundation –

Op-ed

A Layup Easy Proposal for Wikimedia at 25: Spend 25% of Donations on the Community

If strategy priority 1.1 is supporting the community, can we not increase the support to the community? Increasing grantmaking to 25% of the budget would be a move toward equality in the movement.

YantsImages – cc-by-sa-4.0

Traffic report

The grass was greener, the light was brighter

We reached the dizzy heights of that dreamed of World Cup.

–

Comix

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on lollerskates

Single-page edition

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Administrators' newsletter

News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2026).

Administrator changes

• Chipmunkdavis
• TechnoSquirrel69

• Mlaffs
• SpuriousQ
• Lectonar
• Dennis Brown
• Hog Farm

CheckUser changes

• Giraffer
• TonyBallioni

• Dbeef
• EdJohnston

Oversight changes

• Giraffer
• TonyBallioni

L235

Guideline and policy news

• A request for comment has been started that asks whether the criteria for autoconfirmed and extended confirmed should be modified, and includes links to the main discussions over each change being proposed.
  • A request for comment has closed with consensus to change the criteria for extended confirmed so that an account's age is calculated from its first edit rather than its creation.
• A request for comment has closed with consensus to add an addendum to the Real name section of the Username policy to discourage users from using their real name or other personal information as their username.

Technical news

• The special page Special:RangeCalculator has been created for any users to use to find an IP range. (phab:T268429)
• The "indefinitely" button in Special:Block for temporary accounts can be replaced with a preferred block duration stated on MediaWiki:ipb-indefinite-expiry-temporary-account. (phab:T427125)

Arbitration

• Following a series of motions, changes to the contentious topics procedure to restructure awareness have been implemented.
• The arbitration case Michael Jackson has been closed.

Miscellaneous

• The 2026 Developing Countries WikiContest will run from 1 July to 30 September. Sign up now!
• 10 candidates have been appointed to the U4C.

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Tech News weekly

m:Tech/News/Latest

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

• Revise Tone helps newcomers identify passages in Wikipedia articles that may contain non-encyclopedic language and encourages them to consider revising the tone. The feature was A/B tested on the Arabic, English, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias, where newcomer task completion rates increased by 38.7% compared to the default Copyedit task, with no decrease in edit quality. The test ended on July 9, and the feature is now available for everyone on these wikis, configurable via Community Configuration. The plan is to release Revise Tone to more wikis.
• The community configuration that allows automatic removal of inactive mentors based on configurable criteria will be enabled on Thursday 16, on some wikis to keep mentor lists up to date. Mentors are experienced contributors who opt in to help new users on-wiki through the Growth Features. Administrators can now prepare the settings via Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship; they will take effect starting Thursday.
• View all 38 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where some users of the Wikipedia Android app were logged out immediately after signing in, preventing them from staying logged in and editing pages, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• Editing a page via user scripts or gadgets was causing watchlist labels that the user had assigned to that page to reset. This has now been fixed.
• To work around a Safari bug (see phab:T425211), on Parsoid-enabled wikis, wikilink hrefs now use absolute urls instead of protocol-relative urls. REST API output remains unchanged and continue to use protocol-relative urls. Gadgets, user scripts, bots, and CSS might need to be adapted if they relied on the presence of protocol-relative urls in wikilink hrefs.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The Wikimedia Foundation’s Experiment Platform Team has published a blog post reflecting on its first year of structured experimentation. It highlights successful experiments such as Paste Check, Reference Check, and Tone Check, which improved editing outcomes and have been rolled out to more users, as well as experiments that did not lead to product changes. Read more.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

Listing for discussion of Template:Infobox element/symbol-to-top-image

Template:Infobox element/symbol-to-top-image has been listed for discussion, which may result in the template being merged or deleted by consensus. You are invited to comment on the proposed action at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:12, 21 January 2026 (UTC)

Listing for discussion of Template:Curcent

Template:Curcent has been listed for discussion, which may result in the template being merged or deleted by consensus. You are invited to comment on the proposed action at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. Gonnym (talk) 08:55, 13 April 2026 (UTC)

Nomination for merger of Template:Lang-su-fonts

 Template:Lang-su-fonts has been nominated for merging with Template:Script/Sundanese. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you. S Y T · 三葉草 02:16, 14 April 2026 (UTC)

Category:Engvar has been nominated for renaming

Category:Engvar has been nominated for renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether it complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 22:13, 8 May 2026 (UTC)

Listing for discussion of Template:Infobox German railway vehicle/list of transclusions

Template:Infobox German railway vehicle/list of transclusions, a dependency of this page, has been listed for discussion, which may result in the template being merged or deleted by consensus. You are invited to comment on the proposed action at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:05, 21 June 2026 (UTC)