Community Wishlist/Updates

Community Wishlist

July 9, 2026: Update on near-term wish work

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Hi, I'm Sonja and I work with Marshall on building out the future process for the wishlist. A couple weeks ago, Marshall shared some suggestions we have for the long-term, which is something we're planning to solidify over the next couple of months. This update is mainly about the near-term, but just to reiterate some of the main things for the long-term: we heard your concerns that the current voting and prioritization process didn't meet community expectations, and that ideally a future wishlist would complement our annual plans with dedicated wishlist work that can sit outside the Foundation's strategic goals. We are committed to shaping the new process around that. One big point to highlight here is that prioritization will rely mainly on votes moving forward, and we want to figure out with volunteers how to best use the votes to prioritize wishes. We still need to resolve some open questions, for example how we might ensure that smaller communities and projects don't get overlooked. We're planning to hold a wishlist vote later in 2026, to prioritize wishes starting in 2027.

Regarding the near-term: until we have new voted-on wishes in place in January, we will continue working on the wishes from the existing process. To be clear: we know the existing process did not capture community needs the way previous years of the wishlist had. But many useful wishes are currently underway, nominated and voted on by volunteers. This is an approach that closes out the old process, knowing that we will stand up a new and more community-aligned process over the next couple of months. Below is a list of all the work that in one way or another impacts currently open wishes and that is planned either by the Foundation, volunteers, or affiliates between now and December 2026 (so that's why there are a lot of wishes in the list). We're sharing this table as a one-time snapshot to create clarity for the next few months and plan to share a closeout report before we start picking up new wishes in January. In the meantime, you'll be seeing our regular monthly updates in the usual format.

Here is what the timeline will look like:

Now through December
Work on previously prioritized wishes will be continued, either through larger related projects or dedicated wish work (more details in table below).
October / November
Wish submission and voting period takes place. We are ironing out the details for this and plan to co-create this process with the community.
January
The Foundation starts picking up explicit wish work per new prioritization process, based on a prioritization framework built with community. Exact details are still to be determined in collaboration with the community.

We need your ideas for creating a process that meets the needs of the community, so please participate in the discussion on the talk page. You can post in your own language if you prefer – my colleagues will help translate so every input is considered. I'm especially interested in hearing about how we can set up the process to surface wishes that can make a big difference for experienced editors.

Wishes overview
# Title Votes Status Contact Details Notes Next steps
W100 Apply AI to article improvement suggestions on the homepage. 3 Prioritized Contributor Growth T430230, project page W100 & W316 propose extending and improving the Suggested Edits system. This maps directly onto the Personal Dashboard project's goal of personalized task recommendations across the full contributor journey, so we're marking this wish as prioritized, assuming that the problem it is addressing will be solved by our strategic plans. Finalize designs and plans and start engineering efforts.
W496 Highlight edit button 23 Prioritized Editing T428816 This wish is prioritized because it overlaps with work we have in our annual plan to make it easier for people to regularly discover clear opportunities to contribute constructively. This work will begin in July 2026. The first intervention will invite logged-in readers and editors to edit by showing them signals about articles that can be improved, starting with the number of edit suggestions available within the articles they are reading. Publish public project page with more details on Q1 (July through September) work.
W385 Special pages should have language links 23 Prioritized LPL T123063, T355262 This was originally prioritized by CommTech and will transition over to the LPL team. LPL will work on a timeline in July.
W22 Make it easier for newcomers to create their first article 1 In progress LPL project page This wish is prioritized because it overlaps with work we had planned for FY25/26 anyways. Experiment in progress with further iterations planned through Q2-2026/27.
W29 Improve Parsoid's language variant conversion functionality 2 In progress MediaWiki CTT T43716 Prioritized by Content Transform Team Close to resolution – Parsoid read view roll outs to all wikis in progress by end of July. However, necessary layers to unblock Parsoid support for language variants have been implemented; these can be accessed through the REST API (which WME is planning to use soon).
W506 Discovery feed in Wikipedia app similar to social media apps (incl article segments, vids, …) 17 In progress Mobile Apps project page This wish is prioritized because it overlaps with work we are planning to do. We will use this wish to inform phase 2 of the Mobile App team's Explore Feed Refresh project, which aims to add new content into the redesigned Explore Feed, releasing in July/August 2026. Scope and test next phases outlined on project page.
W514 Better more meaningful games in the Wikipedia app 4 Prioritized Mobile Apps project page This wish is prioritized because it overlaps with work we were already planning to do based on other past user requests. The Mobile App team is scoping concepts for future knowledge games within the Apps, and plans to release an additional game in the 26-27 fiscal year. Continue scoping game concepts, and testing prototypes.
W386 Customizable number of 'Because You Read' tiles in the Wikipedia app 1 In progress Mobile Apps project page This wish is related to ongoing work, but will not be directly fulfilled (the feature being mentioned will be redesigned). This wish informed the Mobile App team's Explore Feed Refresh project, which is a large redesign to increase engagement through several smaller improvements and experiments. The refresh was released on Android in May 2026, and is planned for iOS in August 2026. Continue to identify improvements to the Explore Feed.
W384 Articles that fit your interests & were recently edited a lot / got updated' module in WP app 1 In progress Mobile Apps project page This wish is prioritized because it aligns with work planned for the Apps Explore feed: experimenting with showing new articles related to users' topics of interest. The concept is currently in usability testing as of June 2026. Early design and prototyping, and usability testing.
W313 Wikimedia Dashboard 1 Prioritized Moderator Tools T408987, project page Strategy-directed project, which wasn't prioritized specifically because of this wish. Ongoing project throughout FY25/26 and FY26/27. PersonalDashboard extension. See milestones in project page; pending de-duplicating or marking clear scope for related wishes.
W250 Help editors plan their work more easily 2 In progress Moderator Tools T404391, project page, T424000 Partially being serviced as part of Watchlist labels. Partially being worked on in the Personal Dashboard project, partially being addressed by the Connection team's upcoming work on Editing lists, building on reading lists. Partially being worked on as part of our structured editing investments. See milestones in project page and phab tickets.
W247 To-do list 1 Prioritized Moderator Tools, Connection T408987, project page, T424000 Partially being worked on in the Personal Dashboard project, partially being addressed by the Connection team's upcoming work on Editing lists, building on reading lists. Partially being worked on as part of our structured editing investments. See milestones in project page; pending de-duplicating or marking clear scope for related wishes.
W503 Make "Who Wrote That" tool and P&E Dashboard's Authorship Highlighting feature work in all languages 13 In progress Moderator Tools, Volunteers: Sage (Wiki Ed), SuperGrey and Xinacod / Contact: MusikAnimal (WMF) T372340, T414075 This wish was prioritized by CommTech because it's small enough to be done at a hackathon, though it ended up taking more time due to unforeseen challenges with CJK languages. However, volunteers stepped in to resolve dependencies. Code complete; just waiting for script to finish running.
W278 Integrate the functionality of the Reuse tab into the Auto tab inside the "Add source" feature 1 Prioritized Outreach Intern, WMDE, Editing T418284, Diff post This is affiliate-led. Align with intern and sponsor on development proposal: intern to build PoC that WMDE/WMF can evaluate once internship is complete.
W102 Add Wikipedia Mobile App's Reading Lists to the Website 4 In progress Reader Experience T416259, project page We are hoping to address optimization and performance issues and graduate Reading Lists on web from beta in Q1. However, the Apps allow users to save articles to custom lists, which we still have to build on web before we can consider this wish fulfilled. Wait for Beta feedback and analysis before full rollout.
W505 Show recommended articles on Wikipedia Main page on desktop & mobile web, not just in app 1 Prioritized Reader Experience T419904 As a part of the annual plan, the Reader Experience team is planning to run an experiment on mobile web (likely, Q2) to see whether providing reading recommendations based on topics or prior articles selected by a user will improve reader retention. Pending planning for new financial year.
W414 Make the Chart extension beginner-friendly 25 In progress Reader Growth T393637 This wish was prioritized by CommTech because of votes, user engagement and potential impact. MusikAnimal will wrap it up with support of the Reader Growth team. Implementation continues with the latest launched feature being realtime preview for Chart JSON.
W304 Software for turning articles into spoken Wikipedia audios using novel AI voice tech 3 Prioritized Reader Growth We prioritized this work to address a casual reader need for consumption modes that help keep focus unbroken. Our plan is to build an "immersion" experience that expands article text to full-screen, highlighting the words as they are read aloud (think: karaoke lyrics). Share experiment (Q2: October to December) project page.
W416 An annotation tool 1 Prioritized Reader Growth Consider dividing into two wishes since for now the RG team is scoping the second half of the wish in the new financial year.
W221 Add a date range filter to Special:MediaSearch 13 In progress Search and Wikidata / Contact: KFilbert-WMF T329961, T413319 This wish was prioritized by Katie Filbert (Reader Growth) in her volunteer time at a hackathon because it seemed small enough. Katie prioritized this as a volunteer at a hackathon and is wrapping up with support from another volunteer plus Search and Wikidata.
W258 Search should be better at handling typos 2 Prioritized Search Platform Upgrading Open Search may provide improvements to did-you-mean suggestions, but implementation would be different than suggested due to technical challenges. As planning becomes concrete in the next few months for upgrading Open Search version, the team will share details such as a project page about efforts to improve better handling of these types of typos.
W519 Enable Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) for Wikimedia sites 7 Prioritized SRE T205378 SRE had attempted some work here in the past, and are now motivated to try again because of the wish filed by the user. Pending planning for new financial year.
W326 Support full colour 3D models on Wikimedia projects 43 In progress Contractor, contact: Technical Program Management T246901, project page Top voted wish for months, so even though we know that the voting process didn't meet community expectations, we understand that this is a wish that the community cares about and that we should continue to prioritize until the new voting process is in place. WMF work with contractor on potential security review.
W317 A proper audio player 12 Prioritized Contractor, contact: Technical Program Management This wish is in progress because of the directive from the Unsupported Tools Working Group to focus on Commons. Pending UX and alignment with WMF Reader teams on related audio player work (W304).
W526 Guidance/facilitation of categorization of files at upload in UploadWizard 7 In progress Contractor, contact: Technical Program Management T427044, T427045, T427046, T427047 This wish is in progress because of the directive from the Unsupported Tools Working Group to focus on Commons. Unblocked now, so WMF to follow up on timeline expectation.
W298 Image Editor for Commons 5 In progress Contractor, contact: Technical Program Management T426106 This wish is in progress because of the directive from the Unsupported Tools Working Group to focus on Commons. Decide on closure criteria due to some overlap with W222.
W46 Add chunked uploading to Special:Upload 5 In progress Contractor, contact: Technical Program Management T74768 This wish is in progress because of the directive from the Unsupported Tools Working Group to focus on Commons. May slip to late July to account for requirements from reviewers to deprecate two fields though these are out of scope. However, another suggestion will be implemented since it lowers the complexity of the patch.
W222 A set of tools for image editing directly in Wikimedia Commons 1 In progress Contractor, contact: Technical Program Management T428062 This wish is in progress because of the directive from the Unsupported Tools Working Group to focus on Commons. WMF to clarify some remaining requests with user.
W393 A way to see why a file is somewhere underneath a specific category (tool to show cat-path) 5 In progress Volunteer (Bawolff) Volunteer-led The existing proof of concept satisfied the author although they wanted it merged into deepcat gadget, which there may not be consensus for, so Mike will follow up with users on suggested course of action.
W459 In the Global Watchlist, move buttons first like in normal Watchlists so their locations don't vary 2 In progress Volunteer (IKhitron) T388336]] Volunteer-led Pending user consensus.
W353 Reverse (inverse) partial blocks 4 In progress Volunteer (MolecularPilot) T240311, T27400 Volunteer-led Patch is blocked on feedback – escalated to PSI to see if there is a path forward or not.
W405 Wikidata: date time picker needs improvement and OSM integration should be improved 2 In progress WMDE project page Affiliate-led Timeline is pending Beta feedback before rolling out additional features to wrap up.
W389 Possibilidade de editar tudo na interface móvel do wikidata 1 In progress WMDE T394621 Affiliate-led Most milestones have been resolved in Phabricator with the focus now being some additional functionality and code cleanup.
W440 Unique and useful automatic reference names instead of ref name=":1" etc 2 Prioritized WMDE project page Affiliate-led Timeline is pending as consensus with community is in progress.
W17 Improve VE references' automatic names and reuse 21 Prioritized WMDE project page Affiliate-led Timeline is pending community consensus and iteration, which is ongoing on talk page.
W215 Open the Wikimedia Commons file page directly 14 TBD Contractor, contact: Technical Program Management T421188 This wish was prioritized by CommTech because of votes and because it's small enough to be done at a hackathon. Based on the feedback we've received from the community we understand that the voting process didn't meet expectations, so rather than start work on this now, this wish will be ready to be voted on under the new process later this year. This is pending UX feedback for the open questions in Phabricator before the Contractor can determine feasibility and timeline.
W117 Edit introduction instead of the entire article 5 Deprioritized N/A This wish was marked as prioritized by CommTech because it's small enough to be done at a hackathon. However, there are some design dependencies that have the potential to make it a bigger project. Based on the feedback we've received from the community we understand that the voting process didn't meet expectations, so rather than start work on this now, this wish will be ready to be voted on under the new process later this year. This will not be worked on in the near-term, but is ready to be included in the annual vote.
W469 Allow sorting of discussions on talk pages 19 Deprioritized N/A T33919, T422073 This wish was prioritized by CommTech because of votes and user engagement, but they didn't get beyond scoping and soliciting feedback. This could potentially be a big project and based on the feedback we've received from the community we understand that the voting process didn't meet expectations, so rather than start work on this now, this wish will be ready to be voted on under the new process later this year. This will not be worked on in the near-term, but is ready to be included in the annual vote.
W338 Add the "hide templates" option to What links here page 13 Deprioritized N/A This wish was prioritized by CommTech because of votes and user engagement, but they didn't get beyond scoping and soliciting feedback. This could potentially be a big project and based on the feedback we've received from the community we understand that the voting process didn't meet expectations, so rather than start work on this now, this wish will be ready to be voted on under the new process later this year. This will not be worked on in the near-term, but is ready to be included in the annual vote.
W21 Improve how wide tables interact with the tools panel 3 Deprioritized Reader Experience T361737 There is no current consensus on whether this issue needs to be fixed by the Foundation or by the editors. If editors attempt to make a table with more columns than a template can support, we don't currently have a technical solution that scales to all tables and all templates. This wish is deprioritized for now, but will be ready to be voted on during the annual voting process. This will not be worked on in the near-term, but is ready to be included in the annual vote.

July 6, 2026: Services and Ownership Update

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Hi, I’m Sonja and I lead the Contributor product teams at the Foundation. I’m currently helping with closing out the current wishlist process and defining what the future of the wishlist should look like. You’ll soon hear more from me to follow up on Marshall's last update on long-term proposals and next steps. In the meantime, I have an update on maintenance assignments for the 27 tools and production services previously maintained by CommTech – we know that many of these are critical tools for editors, and so it is important that there are teams ready to address issues when they occur. Suman and other engineering leaders worked on this list. While filing Phabricator tasks and other modes of contacting WMF will work to raise issues, contacting the product managers or engineering managers on these teams is also an option. Note that since our last post we've added a few more tools to this list per volunteer feedback.

As we shared in our June update, in April we introduced our approach to ensuring continuity of ownership for production services: every service we run in production will have an assigned team responsible for it. This is an important step for the Foundation. Our goal is to move away from individual ownership of tools and services, and instead establish clear team assignments. By assigning teams, we can create a more sustainable and reliable model for maintaining and supporting our production services.

In that vein, this “Maintainers” page is being updated to indicate some of what I listed above (though not all of the tools will be on the Maintainers page, as that page is meant for production software).

June 24, 2026: Latest updates for the Community Wishlist

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Hello everyone,

Since our last monthly update on 13th May, substantial changes have been made to how the wishlist will work going forward, and there has been a large amount of community discussion. You can read those updates here and here, and we are asking for community input on how exactly the wishlist should operate in the future. Please join the discussion.

We’re proposing several changes to how we take in and prioritize wishes (such as a return to annual voting), but even as we discuss with communities how the wishlist will work in the future, existing wishes are in progress and continue to be completed by the various teams in the Product and Technology department, by affiliates, and by volunteers. So this is an update on those recently completed wishes, in-progress wishes, and upcoming ones.

The work we did in the last month

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The Mobile Apps team has been working on more games (W514): “Which came first?” is now available on Android, and an iOS release will follow in July; “Did you know?” is on hold due to technical and linguistic constraints, though feedback is still welcome.

The Reader Growth team evaluated an experiment to Make 'Table of Contents' available in Wikipedia (Web) Mobile (W423). Results showed it lowered the retention rate for readers (primary success metric) by about 1.5% and shortened the amount of time they spent on wiki. As a result, the team will not implement the Table of Contents for readers on mobile web. Feedback is still welcome on the experiment talk page.

Make subreferencing work with inline refs and reflist (W309) is now done. The feature will be gradually deployed to all wikis starting June 2026 (deployment plan). Feedback can be shared with the WMDE Technical Wishes team on the project page.

Along with Sage (Wiki Ed), SuperGrey and Xinacod, MusikAnimal (WMF) is wrapping up adding new languages to “Who Wrote That” and to the P&E Dashboard (W503) with 56 languages total. Chinese, Japanese and Korean are taking additional time due to large XML dumps to import.

What we currently have in progress

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The Wikidata team is working on giving editors an easy and seamless experience when contributing to Wikidata on mobile (W389). Editors can now enable a beta feature for mobile statement editing. The team is taking all the feedback into account as part of the mobile editing work, which will eventually also come to desktop.

The Moderator Tools team has continued the expansion of the Personal Dashboard (W313) to make it easier for editors to identify where their attention is needed. Users with more than 100+ edits (and no more than 500 edits on English Wikipedia) received a UI invite and personal tools menu link to view the page. Learn more about this on their project page.

Aude is working, with support from the Search and Wikidata teams plus Matěj Suchánek, on a patch to ensure to add a date range filter for MediaSearch (W221).

Make the Chart extension beginner-friendly (W414) will be owned by Reader Growth as MusikAnimal wraps up the implementation with their support. This week the realtime preview feature will be added to the JSON editor. The project page will be updated.

Three mobile app wishes related to discovery (W506), customization (W386), and personalization (W384) are informing the Mobile App team’s Explore Feed Refresh project, which is a large redesign to increase engagement through several smaller improvements and experiments. Phase 1 has recently had an Android beta rollout to 50% of users in production. iOS is being targeted for July. You can post feedback on the talk page.

The Language and Product Localization (LPL) team is working on allowing users to pin/unpin specific languages in interwiki links (W264). They aim to release it as part of the language selector UX improvements by the end of June.

The Unsupported Tools Working Group has prioritized Commons work such as uploads, including guidance on categories on upload (W526) and chunked uploading to Special:Upload (W46), which are being worked on by This Dot along with support from the group’s members Sohom Datta and Cormac Parle.

What we are scoping next

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The Unsupported Tools Working Group has prioritized additional Commons wishes to be implemented by This Dot, who have been doing Wishlist work on a contractual basis since November 2025, along with collaboration with teams such as Reader Growth and Wishlist UX for an updated audio player (W317), while the latter team focuses on the related spoken Wikipedia (W304) wish. Moreover, we continue to scope tools for image editing directly in Wikimedia Commons (W222), while support for brightness, contrast, and saturation filters was made possible thanks to support from Bawolff.

The Editing team has started to scope ways to highlight the edit button (W496) for potential new editors who may not be aware that they can edit. An initial experiment is planned for next quarter (July through September). A project page with more details is forthcoming.

With support of Wikimedia Brasil, Wikimedia Deutschland, and the Editing team, an intern from Outreachy is planning the automatic verification of duplicate references in the Visual Editor (W278). More details are in this Diff post.

Wikimedia Deutschland’s Technical Wishes team has also started a project page to possibly scope improving VE references' automatic names and reuse (W17). Possible solutions are listed on the project page, where you can also join discussions on the respective talk page.

Some statistics

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Here is a recent snapshot all current wishes followed by notes on diffs since our last update on 13th May:

 
Community Wishlist wishes count as of June 24, 2026

The most notable shifts in numbers are “in progress” growing from 18 to 24. These wishes are actively being worked on as seen in patches and user-facing experiments and beta phases.

For wishes marked “Done” in the pie chart, we have heard that some of these should have been declined for existing functionality. A few months ago we added a new sub-status for “Decline” that covers this use case.

You can read more about status details in the FAQ.

We need your feedback

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For adding the mobile app reading lists to desktop (W102), the Reader team has updated their project page with a timeline and experiment details – you can join the talk page discussions, and also follow how feedback will be incorporated in Phabricator.

As always, if you have questions or feedback about it, please let us know in the Community Wishlist’s talk page. We are eager to hear from you!

June 17, 2026: Wishlist program in the future

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Hi everyone – I’m Marshall Miller; I’m a senior director of product working with the teams that build the user-facing parts of the wiki software, which will be doing much of the work of accomplishing wishes going forward. As I posted on the talk page last week, Sonja Perry, MikeZ and I are on point for working with communities on how the wishlist program will operate in the future.

Over the past few weeks, over 100 volunteers have spoken up about what they need from the wishlist and how they think it should function, and we committed that we’ll work with volunteers over three months to clarify those plans. We’ve heard that the wishlist is a vital way that the needs of experienced editors get voiced. We’ve heard about the importance of the annual cadence of voting to draw volunteers’ attention to the wishlist and to create a moment when the community considers priorities together. We’ve heard that it’s important to ensure that sufficient WMF resources will be dedicated to accomplishing wishes. We’ve heard that volunteers need clear points of contact to whom they can ask questions and bring up problems around wishlist work.

Sonja, Mike, and I have been discussing with some users with extended rights (thank you!) to make some proposals about how the wishlist program can meet those needs. The proposals listed below are meant to cover some of the large aspects of the wishlist, but don’t cover all the many smaller details (we will get to those!). Please let us know on the talk page what you think of these. I also list some open questions we want to hear from communities on.

I want to note that while the below points are about how the wishlist program might run in the future, we also need to share with communities how we’ll accomplish wishes in the nearer term, over the coming months. We’ll get into those details in another update.

Proposals for the future

  • We’ll return to a widely-advertised annual wishlist vote to identify the wishes that are the highest priority for the communities.
  • To make the voting as useful as possible, a working group coordinated by the wishlist program manager will categorize and de-dupe wishes, and ask clarifying questions to the wishers. The working group will have staff from the various WMF teams that will work on the wishes (e.g. someone from the Editing team, someone from the Moderator Tools team, etc.) We will also invite volunteers to join in this process to prepare for voting, and we want to figure out how that can work best.
  • After wishes are voted on, WMF will take those vote counts and all the volunteer discussion into our annual planning process, so that we can prioritize them alongside the other non-wishlist work that we’re planning – making sure that highly-voted wishlist work gets resourced (and is not an afterthought). At that point, we’ll figure out which teams are well-positioned to work on which wishes, and build in time on team roadmaps to work on wishes. It’s important to note that, just as in the past, not all highly-voted wishes can be worked on – some wishes may be technically infeasible, or negatively affect certain users, or need to wait for the attention of a team that is focused on a different important priority.
  • To make sure we’re dedicating sufficient resources toward wishes, we’ll look at past wishlist years and plan to accomplish similar amounts of wishlist work in upcoming years (with the knowledge that wishes vary in size).
  • As part of sharing our annual plan with the communities in coming years, we’ll share which wishes will be worked on, by which teams, and roughly when in the year.
  • We will make clear who the WMF contact points are for each wish that we’ll work on, so that volunteers can easily contact them with ideas and questions.

Open questions – we want to hear from you

  • Sometimes there are multiple wishes that are related to each other, or especially large wishes. These might indicate some important area that requires major investment for editors. An example is the Page Curation and New Pages Feed improvements from the 2019 wishlist, which constituted substantial upgrades to that system. How might the wishlist help surface those major areas?
  • In the past, the wishlist tried various approaches to make sure that wishes from sister projects and smaller languages were prioritized. How might we make sure that smaller projects and languages get attention?
  • Although it is crucial to have a period of high visibility for soliciting wishes and voting, would it be good to still allow submitting wishes year-round, so that when people have ideas/needs, they can submit them instead of needing to remember to do so months later?
  • Past wishlist years have used various systems for determining exactly which highly-voted wishes are prioritized, and have taken into account aspects like the size of the wish and how to serve smaller projects and languages. We’re still thinking about what would work best going forward and want to hear your thoughts.

We hope to hear from you on the talk page, and we’ll continue to share updates.

June 5, 2026: Ownership updates and next steps

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Hi all, Suman again – Deputy Chief Product & Technology Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation. I am writing to share a few more updates since last week.

  • Ownership of Tools and Services: Many of you have asked about the ownership of the tools maintained by CommTech. We are aware of 27 tools and production services that were maintained by CommTech. This list was populated with the help of the former CommTech team members and aligns with what the community members have shared with us. We know code ownership continuity is important so that tools keep working. In April, we shared with the community how the Foundation will manage continuity of ownership for services in production – everything we run in production will have a team assigned to it. This is in progress now. We are putting the production services previously owned by CommTech through that process, which will mean we’ll assign new teams for their ongoing maintenance and support. When it comes to the tools owned by CommTech (different from the production services), we are working with the former CommTech engineers who have been placed in other P&T teams to establish what other teams will maintain and own those tools.
  • Ownership of active CommTech Wishes: CommTech had been working on 9 wishes when the restructuring took place: Make the “Who Wrote That?” tool work in all languages; Add the “hide templates” option to What links here; Edit the introduction instead of the entire article; Make the Chart extension beginner-friendly; Support full color 3D models on Wikimedia projects; Allow sorting of discussions on talk pages; Special pages should have language links; Open the Wikimedia Commons file page directly, and the remaining Watchlist Labels work. Of those 9, two were close to completion and will stay with the former CommTech team members that were previously assigned to them, together with volunteer developers (“Who Wrote That?” And “Hide Templates”). The others have been divided and incorporated into existing roadmaps amongst the Editing and UX team, the Moderator Tools team and Wishlist Program Management, who will partner with volunteers where relevant on development work.
  • Focus Areas: As Selena noted in her update, focus areas will no longer be applied as the majority of community feedback indicated that they made the process less clear. We will be updating our documentation to reflect the change in focus areas in the next week, and will continue to make updates based on what we hear from you in the coming weeks.
  • Triaging and Tracking Incoming Wishes: This past week, the Foundation Product teams have continued to triage incoming wishes. Over the last few days, the PSI team prioritized sentiment analysis tools and[1] the SRE team prioritized Enable Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) for Wikimedia sites. In terms of tracking, we’ve been in conversations with community members about better tracking progress on wishes through Phabricator and on-wiki monthly updates crediting volunteer developers, Foundation teams and anyone else helping to support this work. You can follow this triaging and tracking work, including individual wishes submitted, through our monthly updates and our statistics.
  • Longer term: Though we’re talking about a few clear improvements to make to the wishlist going forward, there are many other ideas that volunteers have brought up and that we should consider together. Like Selena said in her previous update, that’s something we want to keep doing over the next three months, and we’ll figure out how to get more organized about it and synthesize all the ideas and proposals – so let’s please keep the conversations going.

Since the last update, one member of the CommTech team has joined the Mediawiki Engineering Team focusing on media infrastructure and two (one, two), the Moderator tools team. These existing teams are in a good position along with others to continue working with the community to tackle future wishes related to mediawiki engineering and moderator tools.

References

  1. After some further discussion, since we have some work that is closely related to this wish, but do not know yet whether we will pursue the wish exactly, we are moving this back to "Under Review". For more, see our comments to the wish author, and the related project page.

May 29, 2026: Wishlist process changes in response to feedback; staffing update

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Hello all, I am Selena Deckelmann, CPTO of the Wikimedia Foundation. I have been engaged on the discussion page and continue to follow all conversations here and on en.wiki, as well as other forums, to ensure that I am hearing from as many people as I possibly can about the changes announced on May 20.

I wanted to thank everyone for the feedback and suggestions for improvements to the Wishlist going forward. In thinking about different aspects of the wishlist work, I have noticed a few recommendations we can already move forward with, and let’s keep the conversation going to better define how the wishlist can go well in the future.

  • Focus areas: themed focus areas were added to the Community Wishlist around 2024 as they were a feature of the WMDE Wishlist that seemed to help that system work. It sounds like these made the process less clear as a whole. We can commit to removing these.
  • Response time: Multiple editors have mentioned slow or no response to wishes and phabricator tickets. I am also interested in solving the phabricator backlog and responsiveness problems, but will focus on the Wishlist for the purpose of this conversation. We have committed to a 10 business day response time for submitted wishes. We will publish information about response time going forward, as we have been for the last two months in our Monthly Updates, so that community members can track how we perform.
  • Annual cadence and voting on wishes: Last October, we added voting back. However, what many editors have noted is that we don’t run banners to invite people to participate, leading to only about 30% of the volume of unique participants. I understand that it’s important for the wishlist to have broad exposure, because it’s an accessible way for average editors to express their needs and ideas (whereas Phabricator or direct contact with WMF staff are higher barriers). We can commit to working with community members to invite participation. Suman has opened a thread about what annual participation might look like going forward. I welcome more conversation about how we can move forward with more voting and a better system.
  • Hackathon wishes: This hasn’t come up, but over the last 2 years, we have introduced wishes to Wikimedia Hackathon. An example from this past hackathon, is that hacker Katie Filbert fulfilled a wish written by Nosferattus to add a date range filter for MediaSearch. We plan to continue making this an explicit part of Hackathon preparation.
  • Fulfillment of wishes: I appreciate that Barkeep has posted an analysis of wishes, as well as Prototypeperspective ‘s analysis from a few months ago. Mike asked Barkeep to compare notes on his manual analysis of 46 wishes. I’m interested in ways of making this more accurate over time and proposed that we automatically create phabricator tickets for wishes that are adopted. I have a list of wishes that teams at the Foundation committed to as part of the FY26-27 annual plan in March 2026, and are planned to be implemented over the next 12 months or so. As new wishes we can commit to arise, I will add to this list.

Another issue raised by Rhododendrites is around how to engage with the right people at the right time. The Wishlist isn’t the only way that community input goes into WMF work – there’s Phabricator, Discord, discussions at events, talk pages for specific projects and teams, and regular meetings for users with extended rights. I would love proposals from you all on how to best make use of all these channels together, and for volunteers to be able to see the outputs that come from all these inputs.

Finally, an update on staffing. As my team has shared in our past posts, all six Community Tech team members are currently still working at the Foundation and are receiving expedited internal support to interview for open roles at the organization. We have concluded some of those hiring processes, and I’m pleased to share that three of the engineers have received offers for roles in other teams, two of which have been accepted already. They have been encouraged to update their team pages and other external pages as they feel comfortable. These changes will formally take effect next week.

May 20, 2026: Community Tech becomes a program

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Hello all, my name is Suman and I'm the Deputy Chief Product & Technology Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation. I'm writing to share with all of you that we've decided to do some internal restructuring about how WMF responds to and supports wishes. After noticing that having a centralized team was leading to frequent bottlenecks and delays as CommTech staff coordinated with other teams, we've decided to shift Community Tech into a program that multiple teams are officially responsible for supporting. This is a model that has proven success already, but it will involve disbanding the Community Tech team and the roles of five engineers and one manager. We still have dedicated staff managing the wishlist intake and triage process and will continue the same financial support for this work, just under a different structure.

Moving forward, the wishlist will continue to work on wishes from across languages and wikis, and complements many of the other channels where we regularly hear ideas and feedback from volunteers (talk pages, Village Pumps, chat platforms, calls, conferences, etc.) Our latest community update offers a detailed update about our progress over the last month, including completing a wish for tagging and tracking which pages users need to edit and adding new languages to “Who Wrote That” and the P&E Dashboard. In the coming weeks and months, we hope you all will continue to see an uptick in the speed and number of wishes we are able to address over time via our monthly statistics.

May 13, 2026: Latest updates from the Community Tech team

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Hello everyone! It’s time to share with you an update of the work we’ve done in the last month, and what lies ahead in terms of what we’re going to work on.

The work we did in the last month

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As part of the work on Watchlist labels, we closed another wish that was asking for tagging and tracking which pages users need to edit based on priority, interest levels, topics, and page improvement tasks. In addition, some of the required features of the wish were included in the newly deployed Personal Dashboard.

Also, we continued working on adding new languages to “Who Wrote That” and to the P&E Dashboard, with an additional 12 languages now available for those tools. There may be additional languages that will be available in the future.

Moreover, the Editing Team has been working on a wish related to a warning message when large amounts of content are being copy-pasted: a feature for this has now been deployed to all wikis and the team is currently asking for feedback about it.

Lastly, during the Wikimedia Hackathon in Milan, Katie Filbert worked on a patch to ensure to add a date range filter for MediaSearch. The patch is currently awaiting review.

What we currently have in progress

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This is what we are currently focusing on this month:

What we are scoping next

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Looking ahead, we already identified our priorities for the months to come:

Some statistics

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Here is a snapshot showing the breakdown of wish status over the past month:

 
Community Wishlist wishes count as of April 30, 2026

These numbers are regularly shifting due to new incoming wishes and more in depth review of wishes under review with stakeholders. The most notable shifts in numbers over the past month have been under review (down from 87 to 79), prioritised (up from 15 to 21) and long-term opportunity (up from 204 to 210).

Lastly, in April we reached a turnaround time of just under 3 business days for all new incoming wishes.

We need your feedback

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As always, there are topics and areas for which we are seeking your feedback. In particular:

  • The Wikimedia Foundation’s 2026–2027 Annual Plan has been published, and six Key Results are relevant for recurring wishes. Join the talk page, which includes various prompts, authored collectively by the Product & Technology department.
  • The draft we shared last month about how we triage and prioritise wishes to work on has now been published, and the page has been reorganised into sections due to the increased length.
  • As we enter the new financial year in July, we have started to think about refreshing Focus Areas and have posted some initial thoughts where you can participate.

As always, if you have questions or feedback about it, please let us know in the Community Wishlist’s talk page. We are eager to hear from you!

April 7, 2026: What we have done so far and what the team will be working on in the next months

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Hello everyone! This time, we have a lot of news to share regarding the work done so far, and what’s coming next. This will also be the format going forward to provide more visibility into work.

The work we did in the last month

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First of all, we are wrapping up work on Watchlist labels on all projects. This new feature allows users to add labels to items in their watchlist to help with managing and filtering watchlists, especially large ones. So far, 1,595 users across projects have created at least one label, and 3,554 labels have been created, for a total of 250,279 watchlist pages that have been assigned a label. We are happy about these initial results, and we expect these statistics to grow with time.

Other smaller wishes that we implemented in the last month are:

What we currently have in progress

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We are also wrapping up work to be completed in the next few months, in collaboration with other Wikimedia Foundation teams, on wishes such as:

What we are scoping next

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Looking ahead, we already identified our priorities for the months to come, and it is a lot of work! Here’s a sneak peak at some of the work we defined as our next priorities:

We will also keep on our table the Support full colour 3D models on Wikimedia projects, a very popular wish among those submitted with 37 supporters. The team has already started working on it and is resolving new productionalization dependencies now. We also are continuing to evaluate and plan on how to scope and decompose Make the Chart extension beginner-friendly, since this is another well-supported wish (see discussion page to add feedback).

Meanwhile, we are working closely with other teams to solve other wishes, such as:

Some statistics

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We also wanted to share some statistics with you regarding the current situation of wishes:

  • so far, we closed 44 wishes as fulfilled (8% of the total of wishes);
  • we have 17 wishes in progress and we have prioritized another 15 (meaning we will start working on them soon), totaling 7% of wishes;
  • 204 wishes are categorized as long-term opportunities, but we commit to continually revisit these to determine whether some could become actionable in the near future;
  • 78 wishes are considered community responses and we invite community to look at this to solve them;
  • 79 wishes were closed due to duplication, alignment with community guidelines rather than technical issues, or lack of feasibility;
  • lastly, another 87 are still under review by our various Foundation teams.

These numbers are regularly shifting due to new incoming wishes. For the past two months, we have also been responding to wishes consistently within a week of submission.

We need your feedback

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To provide more transparency about how we triage and prioritize wishes, we want to also update our guidelines with tips on how to write a good wish. Please, join the discussion and have your say.

As always, if you have questions or feedback about it, please let us know in the Community Wishlist’s talk page. We are eager to hear from you!

February 18, 2026: Update on current and future work

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Hello everyone! We have some more news to share regarding the work done so far, and what’s coming next in our line of work.

First of all, we successfully deployed Watchlist labels on all projects. This new feature allows users to add labels to items in their watchlist to help with managing and filtering watchlists, especially large ones. So far, 1,088 users across projects have created at least one label, and 2,325 labels have been created, for a total of 76,459 watchlist pages that have been assigned a label. We are happy about these initial results, and we expect these statistics to grow with time.

Our team’s work is not done, by the way. We will take up two new wishes from the community. The first one will be “Add the "hide templates" option to What links here page”, previously wish #6 in the Community Wishlist Survey 2022, that focuses on removing articles from “What links here” page if included in a template, rather than included directly in the text.

The second one will be “Support full colour 3D models on Wikimedia projects”, a very popular wish among those submitted with 34 supporters. The team will probably work on it starting from what the community has already done in the past on the matter.

We also are evaluating and planning on how to scope and decompose “Make the Chart extension beginner-friendly”, since it's a very open wish. This is another very popular wish among those submitted. We will keep you posted on relevant developments.

As always, if you have questions or feedback about it, please let us know in the Community Wishlist’s talk page. We are eager to hear from you!

January 7, 2026: Update to statuses and to users’ watchlists

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Hello everyone! For the first update of 2026, we got some interesting news to share with you.

First of all, we will revisit slightly the statuses for wishes, to better align our work with the needs of the users: more specifically, the “accepted” status will be merged with the “under review” status, and we will open the possibility to vote “under review” wishes; moreover, we will remove the “unsupported” status, that will be merged with the “community opportunity” status. This will mean that “unsupported” wishes can be part of the workstream of the Unsupported Tools Working Group, that has recently started an independent process to resolve some of these issues through shorter development cycles. In the next few days, we will update accordingly the statuses of the involved wishes.

In addition to this, we have some changes to Special:Watchlist that are coming, as part of our current work on the Watchlist labels project:

As always, if you have questions or feedback about it, please let us know in the Community Wishlist’s talk page. We are eager to hear from you!