VernoWhitney
Joined 23 November 2009
Latest comment: 30 minutes ago by MediaWiki message delivery in topic Tech News: 2026-30
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Tech News: 2026-26
editLatest 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
- Growth features are now available at Wikidata. This update enables access to Mentorship (if configured), Impact module, the Help Panel, and a simplified Newcomer Homepage (without Suggested Edits). Wikidata administrators are still configuring the features through Community Configuration.
Updates for editors
- The special page Special:RangeCalculator has been created. It allows users to find an IP range without needing to rely on external tools. Until now, this tool was only available to CheckUsers.
- Sub-referencing is a new MediaWiki feature that allows editors to reuse references with different details. It will be deployed to most small and medium-sized Wikipedia language versions on June 23. The FAQ lists possible actions to take on your wiki to support the deployment. Check the rollout plan for the next deployment steps.
- Starting next week, users will get a notification when they are blocked or unblocked from editing, or if this block changes.
View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Starting next week, abuse filters that are set to "require CAPTCHA verification" will begin to also affect users with the
skipcaptcharight, which includes most autoconfirmed users. Bots are exempted. This change only affects edits that trigger an abuse filter. Theskipcaptcharight will continue to exempt users from having to solve CAPTCHAs in the ordinary course of using the wikis. - Reference documentation for the Lift Wing API has moved from the API Portal to the interactive REST Sandbox.
- The API Portal wiki is now closed. For API documentation, see Wikimedia APIs on mediawiki.org. All API Portal wiki URLs (https://api.wikimedia.org/wiki/) will redirect to the mediawiki.org page starting June 22.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- Join an online call on 25 June at 2:30pm UTC to meet the current Wikimedia interns for Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. Interns will provide an overview of their projects and a brief demo of their work so far. Attendees are encouraged to share ideas and connections in their community.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Tech News: 2026-27
editLatest 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
- As part of the Account Creation Experiments, the Growth team tested adding a user account icon in the mobile web header for logged-out users, providing direct access to "Create account" and "Log in" actions. The experiment increased account creation by about 20% without negatively affecting edit quality or constructive edit rates. The feature will now be rolled out to all Wikimedia Foundation wikis on mobile web in the first week of July.
- After a successful experiment, logged-in users who did not confirm their email address when their account was created see a new banner asking them to complete that process. This helps reduce the risk that users get locked out of their account, and makes account email addresses overall more reliable. This is part of the Account Security project.
- An update to Search is refining how the
-prefix:behaves when used to exclude results. Previously, using-prefix:with negation could unintentionally broaden search results by adding the namespaces included in the search scope, leading to confusing behavior for users expecting a straightforward exclusion filter. With the update,-prefix:will now strictly exclude matching page titles as intended and may display a warning if the relevant namespace has not been explicitly selected. The behavior ofprefix:without negation however remains unchanged. - View all 33 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where reviewers using the Page Curation toolbar were not automatically subscribed to talk page discussions they started has now been fixed. Reviewers will now receive notifications when someone replies to those discussions.
Updates for technical contributors
- Starting June 29th, automated downloads from the dumps.wikimedia.org website will be subject to the user-agent policy. Automated requests that provide a generic or empty user-agent will be blocked. Access to dumps through Wikimedia Cloud Services remains unaffected. This is a follow up to the announcement made in the 2026/25 issue of Tech News.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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Administrators' newsletter – July 2026
editNews and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2026).
Administrator changes
CheckUser changes
Oversight changes
Guideline and policy news
- A request for comment asks whether the criteria for autoconfirmed and extended confirmed should be modified.
- A request for comment proposes an addendum for the Real name section of the Username policy.
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.
Tech News: 2026-28
editLatest 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 34 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the search bar results on Wikidata, showed English results instead of using the correct language fallback for users of language variants, has now been fixed. Search suggestions will now follow the expected language fallback chain.
Updates for technical contributors
- In preparation for Celebrate Women campaign planned for March 2027, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Content Enablement team has launched a 22-question survey to better understand technical contributions by women+ (anyone who identifies as a woman) across Wikimedia projects. The survey takes approximately 15–20 minutes to complete and will remain open until 20 July 2026. The questions are also available on-wiki for review in advance.
- The Score extension now supports rendering music scores as SVG images in addition to PNG, addressing a long-standing feature request and resolving historical image quality issues. Both formats are now provided to clients, with PNG in the
srcattribute and SVG in thesrcsetattribute. - The new Parsoid parser continues to be deployed to additional wikis, making it easier to introduce new reading and editing features. It was enabled on French Wikipedia, bringing total progress to covering 78.9% of Wikipedia page views. Rollout to English Wikipedia desktop will progress through this week.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The Wikimedia Hackathon 2026 recap blog post is now live. It highlights the projects, sessions, and social activities from this year’s event, and shares initial plans for the 2027 Wikimedia Hackathon.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Tech News: 2026-29
editLatest 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.
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Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment
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Your feedback is requested at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Elections and Referendums on a "All RFCs" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment
editYour feedback is requested at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (events) on a "All RFCs" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Tech News: 2026-30
editLatest 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 has incorporated community feedback around the placement of watchstar and watchlist buttons for the Reading Lists beta feature, which would allow for saving articles for later reading – a wishlist item to bring the functionality to web. Editors are invited to enable the beta feature to test it out and share their thoughts.
- Suggestion Mode offers edit suggestions within the VisualEditor for improving Wikipedia articles. All suggestions are community-configurable. The TextMatch feature is a way for volunteers to create custom local suggestions. The feature searches in articles for strings of text, and now includes support for regular expressions. This gives volunteers greater precision and flexibility over the kinds of local suggestions they can create. Note: Suggestions can be targeted based on the edit count of the person editing as well as other aspects of the page. You can find examples from other communities for inspiration, including TextMatches that detect: typos, grammar-errors, potential advertisements, clichés, incorrect dash or hyphen usage, non-specific time keywords, outdated names, and more. Any feedback is appreciated.
- View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the SVG Translate tool could use an outdated version of a file, causing existing translations to be overwritten when new ones were uploaded, has now been fixed. Overall, in the last quarter from April – June 2026 about 337 community tasks were resolved by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Updates for technical contributors
- On Parsoid-enabled wikis, Parsoid now renders a maximum of 1,250 images per page. A new tracking category, "media-limit-reached", will be soon made available to identify pages where this limit is reached, making it easier to find content whose media output may have been restricted during rendering. See phab:T430854 for more information and to provide feedback.
- 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.