BRPever
Joined 13 December 2015
Latest comment: 5 days ago by MediaWiki message delivery in topic Tech News: 2026-37
Tech News: 2026-33
changeLatest 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
A new ChartWizard is now available on Wikimedia Commons for users interested in creating charts from their own data. The wizard makes the Chart extension more beginner-friendly by allowing editors to create charts, such as bar and pie charts, without needing to use JSON. Users can still switch to the JSON editor if they prefer. Feedback on the new tool is welcome on the wish talk page.
View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the Wikipedia iOS app’s Picture of the Day widget displayed the same image every day instead of updating daily, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- Math formula SVG images will soon be generated in the browser instead of on the server. MathML continues to be generated on the server and renders in the browser without JavaScript. Wikibooks will see this change on 12 August, Wikisource on 19 August and Wikipedia from 20-27 August. You can try this by selecting "MathML with SVG image (client side MathJax rendering)" in your preferences. This change is part of deprecating RESTBase and deprecating Mathoid.
- Category pages will soon support sorting entries by the time they are added to a category. This will make it easier to find recently or long-standing categorized pages. It will also improve workflows for maintenance categories such as deletion backlogs and other time-based review tasks. You can use
cldsort=timestampURL argument in category view to sort the entries. - Gadgets and user scripts on Wikimedia wikis may now use ES2018 features and ES2019 features in JavaScript code. Previously, the platform only allowed up to ES2017. MediaWiki validates the source code to protect functionality from syntax errors and to ensure scripts are valid in all supported browsers.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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Tech News: 2026-34
changeLatest 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 Worklist feature for the Event Registration tool is now live on all Wikimedia wikis. With Worklist, event organizers can add the articles their event will focus on directly to the event page. The Worklist also powers Event Pathways which notifies other editors of the upcoming or ongoing event when they edit an article featured in the event's Worklist. This is the minimum viable version (MVP), and feedback is welcome. Organizers are encouraged to try the feature. A hands-on Worklist Setup Workshop will take place on 18 August at 16:00 UTC and 19 August at 11:00 UTC.
Updates for editors
- Special:ShortPages displays short pages by their size, but in many cases it gets filled with disambiguations and soft redirects, making it harder to find the short articles themselves. Starting this weekend, you will be able to choose not to include an article in the special page by adding the magic word
__EXPECTSHORTPAGE__. - One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Bole (
w:bol:) - Starting the week of August 17, the page toolbar will wrap onto two lines when there is not enough horizontal space for all the buttons. This is a fully merged patch from the Reader Experience team which aims to reduce crowding in the Vector 2022 toolbar, that may occur on some language Wikipedias at certain screen widths.
- View all 16 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, uploading large files to Wikimedia Commons has become more stable and less prone to failure following some fixes related to the “Could not acquire lock” upload error.
Updates for technical contributors
- Debian Bullseye will reach the end of its Long Term Support on 31 August 2026. Some Cloud VPS projects still have instances running Debian Bullseye. Maintainers of those projects are encouraged to migrate to Debian Bookworm or Debian Trixie. A migration guide is available to help with the process, and users may also want to consider whether their workload is better suited to Toolforge. If you need help or cannot complete the migration by 31 August, please contact the Cloud VPS admins as soon as possible. Read more.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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Tech News: 2026-35
changeLatest 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 Special:CreateAccount page has been simplified as part of ongoing work to modernize the account creation experience. The panel showing project statistics no longer appears next to the form on desktop and mobile web. Multiple account creation experiments show that a simpler form helps newcomers complete registration.
- In order to improve page performance, images now load when they are viewed. This means images lower down an article will not load if a reader never scrolls to that part of the page, which may affect some image-related metrics.
- View all 42 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where image thumbnails in Abstract Wikipedia could fail to display after the corresponding file was moved on Wikimedia Commons, has now been fixed. Thumbnails will now update correctly when files are moved.
Updates for technical contributors
- User Info card is a feature that helps patrollers see information about user accounts. So far, it has been available only in places such as page history, logs and recent changes. Now, it's possible to place it in the page content as well, using the
{{#uic:}}parser function. It can be particularly useful in templates like{{Userlinks}}(or their specialized variants), as it will make it easier to see the context about a user on various noticeboard pages. The card will be displayed only to users who have it enabled in their preferences. - Due to user security and privacy risks, we have disabled access to
Special:MyPageURLs when specifically usingaction=raw. If you are impacted by this, consider whether you can use an alternative approach.Special:MyPageURLs can still be accessed and used withoutaction=raw. Specified user page URLs (e.g.User:Myusername) can still be used withaction=raw. - Due to an update, the thumbnailing software has been improved. This includes upgrading
librsvgto 2.60 andImageMagickto 7, as well as resolving a number of long-standing thumbnailing bugs like rendering errors.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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Tech News: 2026-36
changeLatest 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
- A new format for the Community Wishlist is open for feedback. You can read the proposed ideas on Meta. This new process plans to improve how wishes are triaged, voted on, and prioritized in a way that is transparent and balanced across project families and language editions. This consultation is open for two weeks.
Updates for editors
- The latest release of the Wikipedia Android app includes updates to the Saved feature, bringing the app’s saving experience closer to iOS and Web. The update redesigns the Saved tab with an “All articles” view, removes the default “Saved” reading list, renames reading lists to “Collections,” and modernizes the article-saving experience.
- The Reading Lists feature was enabled for all logged-in users on Bengali, Chinese, Czech and Vietnamese Wikipedias on August 25, after several months as a beta feature. Reading Lists will be available to all logged-in users on Arabic, French and Indonesian Wikipedias on September 1, followed by English Wikipedia on September 14, and all other Wikipedia wikis on September 28.
- At the end of the month, some logged-out readers on Bengali, Czech, Persian, English, and Polish Wikipedias using the Minerva skin on mobile will see an updated navigation bar in an A/B test. The test will compare the current navigation bar with a new version designed to make it easier to find information more quickly. The goal is to determine whether these changes encourage readers to return more often. This experiment will not change the experience for logged-in readers and/or editors.
- Editors who maintain redirects, templates, and categories used on redirect pages now have improved ways for finding and curating redirects. Previously, redirects pages could not be searched. Two new search keywords,
onlyredirects:andwithredirects:, now allow redirects to be searched directly and can be combined with existing keywords such asincategory:,intitle:, andinsource:. - The ISBN lookup tools for generating citations were recently not working because of external service problems. Developers are working on solutions.
- View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where searching for pages by category using
deepcatcould return no results or unrelated results has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- The domain of URLs for thumbnails is changing from upload.wikimedia.org to thumb.wikimedia.org. The old URLs will continue to work for the foreseeable future but MediaWiki will advertise the new domain instead. URLs to other types of media such as original files, videos and transcodes will still be served from upload.wikimedia.org.
- The Wikimedia Math API is now deprecated. These endpoints will be fully sunset by the end of September 2026. Developers who call these endpoints should transition to alternative math rendering solutions, such as the native MathML or MathJax. Third-party MediaWiki installations that utilize the Math extension for formula rendering are required to upgrade to v1.43+ to avoid disruption of service.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- Read more about TextMatch in a Diff post titled, Custom edit suggestions for every wiki: How communities are shaping Suggestion Mode with TextMatch.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Tech News: 2026-37
changeLatest 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
- Add a Link has been upgraded for English Wikipedia users with improved detection of links that have different capitalization. This will help reduce ambiguous suggestions caused by differences in capitalization in article titles, including articles about cultural goods. A second phase of improvements is planned, which will also prepare the feature for release in other languages.
- The Article guidance feature will be enabled by default for junior editors on Simple English and Turkish Wikipedia starting 10 September 2026 following an experiment. Junior editors with 0 to 99 edits will automatically see the feature when they click a red link or use the "Madde oluşturto" option on Turkish Wikipedia to create a new article. The change is intended to help junior editors create higher-quality articles that meet each Wikipedia’s standards. Additional improvements will continue based on the experiment results and community feedback.
- The Pageviews Analysis tool which allows users to compare pageviews across multiple pages, turns 10 years old this year and several new features have been added. They include WikiNav which provides insights into how readers of Wikipedia explore the content, editing stats in Siteviews, the ability to lookup articles belonging to a WikiProject, and support for dark mode.
- A visually simplified Minerva navigation bar is being tested for logged-out readers using mobile web on the Bengali, Czech, English, Farsi, and Polish Wikipedias. The experiment aims to determine whether simplifying the navigation improves reader retention. The test will run from August 31 to September 28, and no action is required from users.
- WMDE Technical Wishes is working on improving auto-generated reference names in VisualEditor. Editors will only notice a slight change starting this week. When adding automatic reference names the numbering will start at
:1instead of:0. Read more on the project page. - All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 23. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
- View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where Parsoid could mishandle nested nowiki tags, causing content to be lost and displaying unwanted text has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- Interface administrators can configure gadgets from MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition. The definition format has been updated and no longer requires the
ResourceLoaderoption, as gadgets are always loaded throughResourceLoader. This simplifies gadget configuration by removing an option that is no longer necessary, making gadget definitions easier for administrators. - 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.