I'm pursuing my graduate classes. As a result, expect diminished activity onwiki for a while. I'll still be available on Discord and via email (and also on Phabricator and Gerrit).
Please keep discussions about AFC drafts on-wiki on this talk page. Off-wiki attempts to contact me about drafts will be rejected and you will be blocked.
This user is aware of the designation of the following as contentious topics:
the region of South Asia (India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal), broadly construed, including but not limited to history, politics, ethnicity, and social groups
living or recently deceased subjects of biographical content on Wikipedia articles
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
Temporary accounts have been rolled out on 18 large and medium-sized Wikipedias, including German, Japanese, French, and Chinese. Now, about 1/3 of all logged-out activity across wikis is coming from temporary accounts. Users involved in patrolling may be interested in two new documentation pages: Access to IP, explaining everything related to access to temporary account IP addresses, and Repository with a list of new gadgets and user scripts.
Updates for editors
Anyone can play an experimental new game, WikiRun, that lets you race through Wikipedia by clicking from one article to another, aiming to reach a target page in as few steps and in as little time as possible. The project's goal is to explore new ways of engaging readers. Try playing the game and let the team know what you think on the talk page.
Users of the Wikipedia Android app in some languages can now play the new trivia game. Which came first? is a simple history game where you guess which of two events happened earlier on today's date. It was previously available as an A/B test. It is now available to all users in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, and Chinese. The goal of the feature is to help engage with new generations of readers. [1]
Users of the iOS Wikipedia App in some languages may see a new tabbed browsing feature that enables you to open multiple tabs while reading. This feature makes it easier to explore related topics and switch between articles. The A/B test is currently running in Arabic, English, and Japanese in selected regions. More details are available on the Tabbed Browsing project page.
A new feature related to Template Recall and Discovery will be deployed later this week to all Wikimedia projects: a template category browser will be introduced to assist users in finding templates to put in their “favourite” list. The browser will allow users to browse a list of templates which have been organised into a given category tree. The feature has been requested by the community through the Community Wishlist.
It is now possible to access watchlist preferences from the watchlist page. Also the redundant button to edit the watchlist has been removed. [3]
As part of MediaWiki 1.44 there is now a unified built-in Notifications system that makes it easier for developers to send, manage, and customize notifications. Check out the updated documentation at Manual:Notifications, information about migration in T388663 and details on deprecated hooks in T389624.
WikidataCon 2025, the conference dedicated to Wikidata is now open for session proposals and for registration. This year's event will be held online from October 31 – November 02 and will explore on the theme of "Connecting People through Linked Open Data".
The administrator elections process has officially started! Interested editors are encouraged to self-nominate or arrange to be nominated by reviewing the instructions at Wikipedia:Administrator elections/July 2025/Candidates.
Here is the schedule:
July 9–15 - Call for candidates
July 18–22 - Discussion phase
July 23–29 - SecurePoll voting phase
Please note the following:
The requirements to run are identical to RFA—a prospective candidate must be extended confirmed.
The process will have a seven day call for candidates phase, a two day pause, a five day discussion phase, and a seven day private vote using SecurePoll. Discussion and questions are only allowed on the candidate pages during the discussion phase.
The outcome of this process is identical to making a request for adminship. There is no official difference between an administrator appointed through RFA versus administrator elections.
Ask any questions about the process at the talk page. A separate user talk message will be sent to official candidates with additional information about the process.
If you are interested in the process, please make sure to watchlist the appropriate pages. A watchlist notice will be added when the discussion phase opens, and again when the voting phase opens.
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Also: an enhancement request: there is a jitter issue in the display while it is still working on the list of urls. Do you by any chance re-sort the list on the fly while it is still running? Because the display is a bit jittery, and prevented me from focusing on a single citation that interested me, from which I wanted to select and copy some info, but before I could complete the operation, the screen jittered, the citation jumped out of view to some nearby location beyond the window borders, and I had to search for it again, and try to select again, and...oops!—there it goes again. It would be nice to set a timer of maybe 30 seconds or whatever is needed to find/select/copy some info. (A checkbox option not to re-sort until done, or only at user-selected intervals, would be nice.) Thanks for a great tool! Mathglot (talk) 04:04, 9 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Additional info: I ran it again, and even when it reaches 136/137, it keeps swapping the urls around (at least the top ones, the ones I can see above the fold), with the top one rotating among these three titles:
Correspondance des deys d'Alger avec la cour de France 1579 — 1833
Rubrique : Articles N° 5
Traités de la France Avec les pays De l'Afrique du Nord Algérie, Tunisie, Tripolitaine, Maroc
For what it's worth, all three have the tag 'Detected issue: URL might be down', so I am guessing that maybe the tool keeps a list of urls that 404'd, and tries them again in a loop, is that right? If that is so, imho there is no need to place the one on top that is currently being regrabbed; what I would do, is just leave all the 404s in whatever order (alphabetical?) and maybe add an unobtrusive icon that would represent 'retrying this url' in front of the one you are retrying, without shifting the position of that one and all the others. Maybe something like 🔁 – (U+1F501: Clockwise Rightwards Open Circle Arrow), or ↻ (U+21BB: Clockwise Open Circle Arrow) which looks like a refresh icon, or an animated image that looks like that and gently pulses or rotates.
The 136/137 issue should be a worker that is erroring due to a DOI that returns a 404. The jitter problem is a VueJS problem which reorders elements on re-render, it might be a bit of a mess to fix, but I'll see what I can do. Sohom (talk) 20:05, 9 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This is not a good this for new user.how to get Extended confirmed user group tell me.you are indian people.Nation first. Olitun (talk) 10:48, 10 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Appealing to nationalistic sentiment will get you nowhere. I still stand by my actions to revoke WP:XC, you are clearly not a new user, having already submitted a WP:AELECT candidacy and a board election nomination that is completely AI generated and definitely partially fabricated. You may get back your extended confirmed user-right after making 500 substantial edits to the encyclopedia and engaging with our content properly instead of just doing edits to hat collect. Sohom (talk) 12:51, 10 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Care to disclose what that account is ? -- You've also claimed to be a Wikimedia Foundation employee until yesterday, I think I have the right to be more than a bit skeptical here. Sohom (talk) 13:36, 10 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Besides your ability to edit extended-confirmed pages, almost nothing is affected. Almost every page you previously edited is still accessible to you (yes you cannot submit a WP:AELECT nomination but that is a feature not a bug) It is within my admin discretion to remove WP:XC and I do not intend to reverse the decision outside of community consensus, if you want to appeal it feel free to take me to WP:ANI to do so. Sohom (talk) 14:05, 10 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Description:* This article covers a newly established university with an infobox, logo, and cited sources. Requesting a quality assessment and suggestions for improvement.
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
Featured templates, a new feature related to Template Recall and Discovery will be deployed this week to all Wikimedia projects: With this feature, editors will be able to quickly access a list of templates that are likely to be useful. These templates will be displayed in a list, under the "featured" tab of the template discovery interface. Administrators can define the list via the Community Configuration interface. The feature fulfills a request by the community through the Community Wishlist. [4][5]
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the request to add Malayalam fonts in the Wikisource Book Export Tool was resolved and now, the rendering of Malayalam letters in exported Wikisource books are accurate. [6]
WikiIndaba 2025 scholarship application and program submission is open until 23:59 GMT on July 20. WikiIndaba is a regional conference for African Wikimedians both on the continent and in the diaspora to unite and grow together. Submit your scholarship application and program proposal now!
WikiCon Brasil 2025 will take place on July 19-20 in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. The Brazilian community members are encouraged to register and attend!
On July 23, we will start the voting phase. The candidate subpages will close again to public questions and discussion, and everyone will have a week to use the SecurePoll software to vote, which uses a secret ballot. You can see who voted, but not who they voted for. Please note that the vote totals cannot be made public until after voting has ended and as such, it will not be possible for you to see an individual candidate's totals during the election. You must be extended confirmed to vote.
Once voting concludes, we will begin the scrutineering phase, which will last approximately four days, or perhaps a little longer. Once everything is certified, the results will be posted on the results page (you may want to watchlist this page) and transcluded to the main election page. In order to be granted adminship, a candidate must have received at least 70.0% support, calculated as Support / (Support + Oppose), and must also have received a minimum of 20 support votes. Because this is a vote and not a consensus, there are no bureaucrat discussions ("crat chats").
Any questions or issues can be asked on the election talk page. Thank you for your participation. Happy electing.
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Thank you for improving article quality in July! - Three Ukrainian topics were on the main page today, at least at the beginning, RD and DYK, - see my talk. -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:16, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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
The Translation Suggestions feature in the Content Translation tool now has another level of article filters added to the "... More" category. Translators who use the Suggestions feature can now select and receive article suggestions that are customized to geographical locations of their interest using the new "Regions" filter. [7]
Administrators can now limit "Add a Link" to newcomers. The "Add a Link" Structured Task helps new account holders start editing, but some communities have requested the ability to restrict it to its intended audience: newcomers. Administrators can configure this setting within the Community Configuration feature.
For AbuseFilter editors on some wikis, it is now possible to filter edits based on the RevertRisk score of the edit being attempted. It is only populated if the action being evaluated is an edit. For more information, please see the ORES/AbuseFilter variables documentation.
The Beta Cluster wikis have been moved from beta.wmflabs.org to beta.wmcloud.org. Users may need to update URLs in any tools, or in their password managers. Any related issues can be reported in the task.
WikiCite 2025 will take place from 29–31 August, both online and in-person in Bern, Switzerland. The event's goals are to reconnect communities, institutions, and individuals working with open citations, bibliographic data, and the Wikidata/Wikibase ecosystem. Registration is open and the call for proposals will be announced soon. [8]
In the voting phase, the candidate subpages will close to public questions and discussion, and everyone who qualifies to vote will have a week to use the SecurePoll software to vote, which uses a secret ballot. You can see who voted, but not who they voted for. Please note that the vote totals cannot be made public until after voting has ended and as such, it will not be possible for you to see an individual candidate's vote total during the election. The suffrage requirements are similar to those at RFA.
Once voting concludes, we will begin the scrutineering phase, which will last for approximately four days, perhaps longer. Once everything is certified, the results will be posted on the results page (this is a good page to watchlist), and transcluded to the main election page. In order to be granted adminship, a candidate must have received at least 70.0% support, calculated as Support / (Support + Oppose), and a minimum of 20 support votes. Because this is a vote and not a consensus, there are no bureaucrat discussions ("crat chats").
Any questions or issues can be asked on the election talk page. Thank you for your participation. Happy electing.
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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 Community Tech team will be focusing on wishes related to Watchlists and Recent Changes pages, over the next few months. They are looking for feedback. Please read the latest update, and if you have ideas, please submit a wish on the topic.
Updates for editors
The Wikimedia Commons community has decided to block cross-wiki uploads to Wikimedia Commons, for all users without autoconfirmed rights on that wiki, starting on August 16. This is because of widespread problems related to files that are uploaded by newcomers. Users who are affected by this will get an error message with a link to the less restrictive UploadWizard on Commons. Please help translating the message or give feedback on the message text. Please also update your local help pages to explain this restriction. [9]
On wikis with temporary accounts enabled and Meta-Wiki, administrators may now set up a footer for the Special:Contributions pages of temporary accounts, similar to those which can be shown on IP and user-account pages. They may do it by creating the page named MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer-temp. [10]
Wikimania 2025 will run from August 6–9. The program is available for you to plan which sessions you want to attend. Most sessions will be live-streamed, with exceptions for those that show the "no camera" icon. If you are joining online to watch live-streams and use the interactive features, please register for a free virtual ticket. For example, you may be interested in technical sessions such as:
The MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference, Fall 2025 will be held 28–30 October 2025 in Hanover, Germany. This event is organized by and for the third-party MediaWiki community. You can propose sessions and register to attend.
The claim of significance was that it was one of the oldest Godot game engine game jams. Note that WP:A7 does not require demonstrating notability, just a claim to significance. WP:A7 should be considered a mechanism for backdoor deletion. Sohom (talk) 12:18, 1 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This "claim to significance" is not even mentioned in the article. So there was no claim to significance (and even then, being "one of the oldest" is not a claim to significance anyway). Fram (talk) 12:35, 1 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I did a cursory Google search to understand the article subject, but that is because I happen to work on open-source software and programming and tend towards finding ways of documenting and (potentially) saving articles about cool programming projects/initiatives. Sohom (talk) 12:58, 1 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
So you ignored A7 and the actual article because you like the subject. That's awfully close to WP:INVOLVED. Perhaps stick to things you can neutrally assess and not ones you like. Fram (talk) 13:10, 1 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
WP:A7 requires significance, I went out of my way to look for significance. Yes, that is more work than what WP:A7 requires, but I think it still adheres to the spirit of the law rather than the exact letter. I don't think my assessment after doing a cursory Google search was necessarily wrong. Also, I did not ignore deletion policy here and I for the most part have agreed with your overall assessment that the article should be deleted (and voted as such in the deletion discussion). I do not think I did anything wrong from the POV of WP:INVOLVED. Just because I work in programming does not suddenly disqualify me from adminning on everything programming related. I generally defer to other folks (from a administration POV) in areas that I'm actually involved in IRL (particularly web security, privacy and web browsers in general etc). Sohom (talk) 13:30, 1 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
But you didn't find any significance anyway. And you claimed those things were in the article, which wasn't true. Being "one of the oldest" nor getting a nod of approval from someone from the actual engine (not an independent source, and not really a reliable one either) is indicating any significance. I don't get why you want to waste community time on this when you could have either deleted it or let it to someone less a priori enthusiastic to deal with it. I sure don't get why you would suggest merging something without any reliable independent source about it. We don't just include things because we like them or we think they are cool, and we shouldn't go around suggesting to newbies that this is an acceptable thing to do. Fram (talk) 13:39, 1 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
"Significance" is potential for notability. A project could have been notable because it is "one of the oldest". If this was any event but a game jam being "one of the oldest" would typically have encountered some coverage in tech RS (imo?). The way I interpreted that source in the moment was "oh wait Godot talks about this in their blog and I've heard about it, maybe this has some promise/potential in terms of notability". On a further evaluation, that intuition turn out to be wrong and I have since said that this should be deleted.
As I said in the AFD, what I meant when I said "merge" was to include a section about game jams in general on the page about Godot game engine and include a mention about the wild game jam (through the source I pointed to). I agree that "merge" was probably the wrong word to use in that context (in my defense, it was 8 o'clock in the morning and my first few admin actions in a hot second) but it was still a semi-accurate description of what I wanted the person to do. I did not see that they were a relatively new user and would have worded my response differently if I had realized that.
We don't just include things because we like them or we think they are cool, agreed! I have no intention of platforming non-notable stuff on Wikipedia even if they are stuff that I find cool. (I've written about notable stuff I find cool at Cross-site leaks or Site isolation and I do intend to continue doing that though) In this case, I justed wanted to give a event the benefit of doubt/second chance in a area where I know mainstream coverage is kinda hard to come by. Hope that clears up my intentions here and where my head was at. I'll take care to be more through with my evaluations and more descriptive in my communications with newbies going forward. Sohom (talk) 14:20, 1 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
We're a month into the 2025 Developing Countries WikiContest, with stiff competition at the top of the leaderboard already! Our current top five contestants are:
BeanieFan11 (submissions) – 168 points from a few GAs, a few DYKs, and a few ITNs on athletes from a variety of countries.
Looking for ways to climb up the leaderboard yourself? Help out your fellow participants by answering a few review requests, particularly the older entries. Several more nominations needing attention are listed at eligible reviews, and highlighed entries receive a 1.5× multiplier!
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 can now enable the User Info card. This feature adds an icon next to usernames on history pages and similar user-contribution log pages. When you tap or click on the icon, it displays data related to that user account such as the number of edits, reverted edits, blocks, and more. It's part of a broader project to make it easier for moderators to evaluate account trustworthiness. The feature can be enabled in your global preferences, and later this week it will be available in local preferences. [11]
Everybody is invited to share comments on Collaborative Contributions, a project recently launched by the Connection team. The project aims to create a new way to display the impact of collaborative editing activities (such as edit-a-thons, backlog drives, and WikiProjects) on the wikis. Post your comments on the project talk page. [12]
Administrators can now define the default block duration for temporary accounts. To do that, they need to create a page named MediaWiki:Ipb-default-expiry-temporary-account and use a value defined in MediaWiki:Ipboptions. This allows administrators to easily block temporary accounts for 90 days, which is functionally equivalent to an indefinite block. The advantage of this solution is that it does not clutter Special:BlockList. More documentation is available. [13]
Gadgets can now include .vue files. This makes it easier to develop modern user interfaces using Vue.js, in particular using Codex, the official design system of Wikimedia. Codex icons can be loaded through the gadget definition. The documentation has examples. For user scripts that use Vue.js, an API module now exists to load Codex icons. [14][15]
Module developers can now use a Lua interface to simplify the preparation of Lua modules for translation on Meta-Wiki. This improvement makes it easier for translators to find and edit module strings without dealing with raw Lua code. It helps prevent mistakes that could break the module during translation. Module developers and translators are invited to watch the demo video, read more about translatable modules to understand how it works, refer to Meta-Wiki's Module:User Wikimedia project for example usage, and share their feedback on how well it addresses the challenges in their workflow. The interface still has some performance issues, so it should not be used in widely used modules yet. [16]
Developers of external tools that connect to Wikimedia pages must set a user-agent that complies with the user-agent policy. This policy will start to be more strongly enforced in August because of external crawlers that are overusing Wikimedia's resources. Tools that are hosted on Wikimedia's Toolforge or Cloud VPS will not be affected by this for now, but should still set a user-agent. More technical details are available, and related questions are welcome in that task.
Parsoid Read Views is going to be rolling out to some smaller Wikipedias over the next few weeks, following the successful transition of Wikivoyages and Wiktionaries to Parsoid Read Views. For more information, see the Parsoid/Parser Unification project page. [17]
Wikimania 2025 will run from August 6–9. The program is available for you to plan which sessions you want to attend. Most sessions will be live-streamed, with exceptions for those that show the "no camera" icon. If you are joining online to watch live-streams and use the interactive features, please register for a free virtual ticket. For example, you may be interested in technical sessions such as:
Following a request for comment, there is a new policy outlining the granting of permissions to view the IP addresses of temporary accounts. Temporary account deployment on the English Wikipedia is currently scheduled for September 2025, and editors can request access to the permission ahead of time. Admins are encouraged to keep an eye on the request page; there will likely be a flood of editors requesting the permission when they realize they can no longer see IP addresses.
South Asia (WP:CT/SA) is designated a contentious topic. The topic area is specifically defined as All pages related to the region of South Asia (India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal), broadly construed, including but not limited to history, politics, ethnicity, and social groups.
Wikimania 2025 is happening in Nairobi, Kenya, and online from August 6 to August 9. This year marks 20 years of Wikimania. Interested users can join the online event. Registration for the virtual event is free and will remain open throughout Wikimania. You can register here now.
@AndreJustAndre There is toolforge:wikinav which gives you click-stream data, but it looks like it is stuck on June 2025 data. That being said, we have anonymized click stream data across a month at [18] so you could possibly write a script to check the anonymized referrer data across July to August. That being said, I don't think it can be used to find the exact referrers used in the spike, since the data is anonymized and aggregated over a month and we don't have any (non-NDA) tools that provides that data at the granularity or a day (or even a couple of days) at the moment. Sohom (talk) 20:42, 7 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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
The WikiEditor toolbar now includes its keyboard shortcuts in the tooltips for its buttons. This will help to improve the discoverability of this feature. [19]
The search bar on the Minerva skin (mobile) has been updated to use the same type-ahead search component that is used on the Vector 2022 skin. There are no changes in search functionality but there are minor visual changes. Specifically, the close-search button has been changed from an "X" to a back arrow. This helps to distinguish it from the other "X" button that is used to clear any text. [20]
Editors on some wikis will see a new toggle for "Group results by page" on watchlist, related changes, and recent changes pages. This is an A/B experiment that is planned to start on August 11, and will run for 3–6 weeks on the Bengali, Chinese, Czech, French, Greek, Portuguese, and Urdu Wikipedias. The experiment will examine how making this feature more discoverable might affect editors' ability to find the edits they are looking for. [21]
The multiwiki datasets of Unicode data have been moved to Category:Unicode Module Datasets on Wikimedia Commons, to follow the idea of "One common data source, multiple local wikis". Most wikis have been updated to use the Commons version. You can ask questions at the talkpage. [22]
Lua code can add warnings when something is wrong, by using the mw.addWarning() function. It is now possible to add more than one warning, instead of new warnings replacing old ones. If you maintain a Lua module that used warnings, you should check it still works as expected. [23]
Hi, has something recently changed with the configuration of SodiumBot? My watchlist is set to exclude bot edits, but this morning edits by SodiumBot (FRS notifications) are displaying. Thanks. Schazjmd(talk)14:05, 12 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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
Later this week, people who are logged-in and have the "Discussion tools" Beta Feature enabled will gain the ability to "Thank" individual comments directly from talk pages, rather than needing to navigate to page history. Learn more about this feature. [24]
An A/B test comparing two versions of the desktop donate link launched on testwiki on 12 August and on English Wikipedia 14 August for 0.1% of logged out users on the desktop site. The experiment will run for three weeks, ending on 12 September. [25]
An A/A test to measure the baseline for reader retention was launched 12 August using Experimentation Lab. This measures the percentage of users who revisit a wiki after their initial visit over a 14-day period. No visual changes are expected. The experiment will run through 31 August. [26]
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
Template authors can now use additional CSS properties, since the CSS sanitizer used by TemplateStyles was updated. For example: width: fit-content; ruby-align; relative units such as lh; and custom strings in list-style-type. These improvements are a Community Wishlist wish. [32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41]
On large wikis, the default time period to display edits from, within the Special:RecentChanges page, has been changed from 7 days to 1 day. This is part of a performance improvement project. This should have no user-facing impact due to the quantity of edits on these wikis. [42]
Wikimedia Commons videos were not shown in the Videos tab in Google Search. The problem was investigated and reported to Google who have now fixed the issue. [44][45]
Two fields of the recentchanges database table are being removed. rc_new and rc_type are being removed in favor of rc_source. Queries to these older fields will start to fail starting this week and developers should use rc_source instead. These older fields were deprecated over 10 years ago and should not be in use. This is part of work to improve the performance and stability of queries to the recentchanges table. [47]
The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: support for new languages in MediaWiki and translatewiki; the start of the Language Onboarding and Development project to help support the growth of new and small wikis; updates on research projects; and more.
Meetings and events
The next Language Community Meeting is happening soon, August 29th at 15:00 UTC. This week's meeting will cover: the Avro keyboard developers from Wikimedia Bangladesh, who were recently awarded a national award for their contributions to this keyboard; and other topics.
Lemme steal your brain for a little bit. There is obviously a reason why this hasn't been implemented (right? it is such an obvious feature that its omission means they don't want stalkers, right?). Do you think the world will explode if I release it? Is there something similar out there? There must be, right? But I don't see anything on Wikipedia:User_scripts/List#Watchlist_and_recent_changes.
So basically it takes the most recent diffid, stores it in localStorage, compares it. I have something similar in Java which can send me push notifications. It is probably possible to send a push notification from a Tampermonkey script but I was too lazy to google it. Polygnotus (talk) 06:44, 29 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Polygnotus, There isn't anything similar out there to best of my knowledge. I don't think the world would explode, but you might get folks who would ask you to gate it behind specific permissions (admin for example) or in a worst case scenario MFD it if there is evidence of clear abuse using the script. Things won't explode, but they might get messy fast and the WMF does not want to get into the mess. Sohom (talk) 13:32, 29 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
How do I gate a javascript behind specific permissions? Is there a snippet somewhere I can steal? Also, wouldn't it be real easy to strip out whatever code I put in to restrict it? mw.config.get('wgUserGroups').includes('sysop'); is pretty unsophisticated and easy to remove. Polygnotus (talk) 13:34, 29 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Polygnotus Gate it behind a if statement like so,
if(mw.config.get('wgUserGroups').indexOf('sysop')!==-1){// do something}else{// you are not a admin, don't do the admin-only thing}
@Polygnotus Yes, it is easy to remove, but so will almost everything else (outside of obfuscating the JS code). The real reason folks won't be removing the check is peer pressure/fear of being blocked (case to the point, the AWB check is trivial to bypass if you know a bit of game hacking, but the reason folks don't do it is because they would be blocked if they did. Sohom (talk) 14:29, 29 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Well it is pretty difficult to detect if someone is running a Tampermonkey script, unless someone spends their finite life looking at API logs; a fate worse than hell. For some reason I can't find the wgUserGroup 'hasClue'.
Also getting AWB permission is pretty damn easy, I think that is also a deterrent.
One more stupid question. Can we run User:Yapperbot/Pruner on all those WikiProjects with memberlists that are usually years out of date? Based on my calculations at least 50% of people listed as members of a WikiProject are inactive. And that makes those Wikiproject pages far less useful because you can't even find who to talk to on, for example, Wikiproject:Windmills in Belarus. The only downside is that some WikiProjects have an "inactive" users section; I am happy to remove all those manually (they add nothing of value) or add a html comment so the bot knows to skip em and have the bot deal with the rest. Ideally they would be sorted based on usercount, and even more ideally use a weighted-sort based on usercount in the specific topic (quarry:history/94218/1013390/982681). But pruning all the dead wood is a great step in the right direction. I can do it too, with User:Polygnotus/Scripts/FilterInactiveOrBlocked.js but it would be nicer to have a bot do it regularly. I've never tried Go. In these participants sections they sometimes use ordered lists, sometimes they use unordered lists, sometimes they add 1 sentence descriptions after their username, so the bot needs some minor tweaks. Thanks, Polygnotus (talk) 06:45, 31 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The fourth round of the 2025 WikiCup ended on 29 August. The penultimate round saw three contestants score more than 800 points:
BeanieFan11 (submissions) with 1,175 round points, mainly from sports-related articles, including 17 good articles, 27 did you know articles, and 9 in the news articles
AirshipJungleman29 (submissions) with 854 round points, mostly from a high-scoring featured article on the Indian leader Rani of Jhansi and two good articles, in addition to 13 featured and good article reviews
Everyone who competed in Round 4 will advance to Round 5 unless they have withdrawn. This table shows all competitors who have received tournament points so far, while the full scores for Round 4 can be seen here. During this round, contestants have claimed 9 featured articles, 12 featured lists, 98 good articles, 9 good topic articles, more than 150 reviews, nearly 100 did you know articles, and 18 in the news articles.
In advance of the fifth and final round, the judges would like to thank every contestant for their hard work. As a reminder, any content promoted after 29 August but before the start of Round 5 can be claimed in Round 5. In addition, note that Round 5 will end on 31 October at 23:59 UTC. Awards at the end of Round 5 will be distributed based on who has the most tournament points over all five rounds, and special awards will be distributed based on high performance in particular areas of content creation (e.g., most featured articles in a single round).
Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. If you want to help out with the WikiCup, feel free to review one of the nominations listed on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges – Cwmhiraeth (talk·contribs), Epicgenius (talk·contribs), Frostly (talk·contribs), Guerillero (talk·contribs) and Lee Vilenski (talk·contribs) – are reachable on their talk pages. Good luck!
Hello Sohom Datta, Good day to you. I wish to refer to my request for Autopatrolled rights in March 2025 and to the comments you made when declining same. Although I have not created an article and developed it to GA or B-class, I have made significant contributions towards improving the articles on Trinity College, Kandy ([48]) and Bradby Shield Encounter ([49]) articles. I would be grateful if you could kindly advise me whether these efforts address the concerns raised by you. Please be assured that I shall not regard any advice you provide as implicit approval. Best regards. QEnigma论07:57, 30 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@QEnigma While I do think the work you've done is admirable I think what I had in mind was a stress on the "created" part of the creation part of a article. That being said, you do have permanent NPR, and given that I'd suggest reapplying for the right, since you seem to be overall closer than you were last time. Sohom (talk) 01:06, 31 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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 Editing team wants to compile a list of templates, jargon terms, and policies used in edit summaries when a copyright violation is removed. This will help them identify the number of edits reverted due to copyright issues. We invite community members from the following Wikis to list these terms in T402601, or to share their list with Trizek_(WMF): Arabic Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, Persian Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Vietnamese Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia. This project is open until September 9th 2025.
Updates for editors
The CampaignEvents extension has been enabled for all Wikisources. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. The extension has three features: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List. To request the extension for your wiki, visit the Deployment information page. [50]
The lists in the footer of the editing interface, such as "Templates used on this page," will now be organized into columns when there is enough space. This enhancement minimizes scrolling when editing lengthy articles on Wikipedia. [51]
On September 3rd, 2025 we will increase the sampling percentages of our group by toggle experiment of the Special:RecentChanges, Special:Watchlist, and Special:RelatedChanges pages on the Chinese, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias to 100 percent, allowing more editors to be part of this experiment. This adjustment is intended to ensure we have sufficient data to make informed decisions when evaluating the experiment results. [52][53]
Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users will see suggestions of articles for further reading on English Wikipedia beginning the week of September 22. The feature will be available on both desktop and mobile. All non-English wikis received this change in June and July. The goal is to make it easier for users to find articles. Learn more.
Wikifunctions now has a new capability called "lightweight enumeration types", an enumeration type is simply a fixed set of values that's in the type's definition. This capability makes it quick and easy to define such a type, and allows for the reuse of values that are already present in Wikidata. Here is a newsletter to learn more.
The latest Readers Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: the formation of two new teams — Reader Growth and Reader Experience; insights into declining pageviews and account creations; highlights from the Wikimania Nairobi panel on improving the reading experience; upcoming experiments to engage new and existing readers; and more.
Your ongoing efforts to improve the encyclopedia have not gone unnoticed: You have been selected as Editor of the Week in recognition of your great contributions! (courtesy of the Wikipedia Editor Retention Project)
You're telling me Sohom Datta(talk·contribs·count·logs) hasn't been Editor of the Week yet?! Sohom seemingly does it all. As a developer, he's worked on all kinds of handy things: the PageTriage extension here on the English Wikipedia, ProofreadPage — the software that makes Wikisource tick — and many other indispensable (ha!) tools. Since last year, he's been a member of the Product and Technology Advisory Council, which collaborates with the Wikimedia Foundation with the aim of improving software quality across the projects. Relatedly, I've been increasingly seeing him in heated discussions employing his technical expertise and voice of reason to turn dumpster fires into productive conversations. However, he's also a seasoned content writer; he's created several articles on technical subjects like Site isolation and Cookie stuffing, and it was my pleasure to collaborate with him on Cross-site leaks and Frutiger Aero. We need more editors like Sohom, and I hope you'll join me in expressing our appreciation of his work. This nomination was seconded by DreamRimmer, Bunnypranav, Saltymagnolia, QuicoleJR, Vacant0, HouseBlaster and Vanderwaalforces
You can copy the following text to your user page to display a user box proclaiming your selection as Editor of the Week:
He has worked on all kinds of handy things: the PageTriage extension here on the English Wikipedia, ProofreadPage — the software that makes Wikisource tick — and many other indispensable tools. He is a seasoned content writer and has been a member of the Product and Technology Advisory Council, which collaborates with the Wikimedia Foundation to improve software quality across the projects. Most importantly, he employs his technical expertise and voice of reason to turn dumpster fires into productive conversations.
An RfC is open on whether use of emojis with no encyclopedic value in mainspace and draftspace (e.g., at the start of paragraphs or in place of bullet points) should be added as a criterion under G15.
An RfC is in progress to amend the structure, rules, and procedures of the Arbitration Committee election and resolve any issues not covered by existing rules.
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 Editing team is working on a new check: Paste check. This check informs newcomers who paste text into Wikipedia that the content might not be accepted. This check is an effort to increase the likelihood that the new content people are adding to Wikipedia is aligned with the Movement's commitment to offering information under a free content license. This check will soon be tested at a few wikis. If your community is interested in this test, please tell us in this task, or contact the team.
When browsing a wiki (like en.wikipedia.org), the software responds in one of two ways: a desktop page, or a redirect to a mobile version on an "m" domain (like en.m.wikipedia.org). Over the next three weeks, MediaWiki will start displaying the mobile version to mobile devices directly on the standard domain, without this redirect. This change does not affect existing m-dot URLs, or the "Desktop view" opt-out. Learn more. [55]
When an edit changes the categories of a page, the changes to the category membership counts are now happening asynchronously. This improves the speed of saving edits, especially when moving many pages to or from the same category, and reduces the risk of site outages, but it means that the counts can show outdated information for a few minutes. [56]
Edits on Wikidata to qualifiers (properties and values) and references (properties and values) in a Wikidata item statement will now not add entries to the RecentChanges or Watchlist pages on all other Wikis. This is a temporary change to improve performance while other solutions are created. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. Learn more. [57][58]
Japanese-language wikis have had a major upgrade to the way that search works. The new search should generally give more accurate and more relevant search results. [59]
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Hey Sohom so we have 1) add DOMPurify to address XML issues[60] 2) fixed the variable shapes of the play button on different machines 3) when visualizations are played they no longer jump to the top of the page and they properly return to the section the user was at when closed. Additionally User:Ragesoss has agreed to keep stuff uptodate on EN WP as we continue to make improvements. Let me know if there are other requirements you see as critical before reopening discussion. Best Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 06:32, 11 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Removed, I have some additional (non-security) concerns surrounding UI (I consider it a dead-end UI that will lead folks away from the encyclopedic content into OWID data) (Note, that it does not apply to commons since we are effectively just making commons content more engaging) but those are my personal opinion and it looks like that is in the minority here, per that I have vacated by edit removing the default flag since the major security issues have been addressed. Sohom (talk) 22:12, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
The RFC phase of the July 2025 administrator elections has started. There are 10 RFCs for consideration. You can participate in the RFC phase at Wikipedia:Administrator elections/July 2025/RFCs.
Any questions or issues can be asked on the election talk page. Thank you for your participation. Happy electing.
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Howdy. I see you are one of those who has previously granted AWB permission. I’ve been waiting a few days and haven’t gotten any feedback. Wondering if you might have a moment to take a look at my request. Sorry for being impatient. Just have a number of tasks I’m looking to perform. Thanks in advance. —Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 17:49, 13 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@EEng That link was a different issue that has since been fixed. I'll check if bare URLs get caught, but in general, properly formatted citations should not trigger the filter. Sohom (talk) 20:18, 13 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. I think the example I linked was triggered by a bare URL (or maybe there was plain text of the name in there as well, and that was the true trigger). Since bare URLs are common in talk-page discussions, I wanted to raise the point. EEng20:22, 13 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That ping didn't work for me. You may want to look into that. There's another FP reported at EFPR. It'll take me some time to get my head around the logic and regex, but I wonder if we're counting properly? Over to you Sohom. -- zzuuzz(talk)20:52, 13 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, but MediaWiki decided that you were only changing the time (you need to add a newline and add a signature for MediaWiki to consider it "ping eligible") Sohom (talk) 22:52, 13 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@EEng and @Zzuuzz (and @Green Montanan) I think I've fixed the issues (required some nasty regex hacks) to make sure we caught everything properly (yes it was a counting problem) (also thanks to @Chaotic Enby for the help they gave offwiki with sanity checking some of the regexes) Sohom (talk) 21:51, 13 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I did not test to see whether the filter would allow the name to be within the title, but that's less critical, since the title can be "adjusted" to conform to the current consensus. Green Montanan (talk) 22:02, 13 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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
References lists that are made using the <references/>tag will now automatically display with columns in Vector 2022 when readers are using its 'standard' settings for text-size and page-width. [64]
Starting in the week of October 6, on small wikis and medium wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled, all autoconfirmed users will be able to use Event Registration as an organizer. No changes will be made for large wikis unless requested in Phabricator. This change is being made to make it easier for more people to use Event Registration, especially on wikis that are less likely to have policies related to the Event Organizer right. Learn more.
Users that search using regular expressions (regex) can now use additional features including:
for the intitle: keyword: metacharacters for start-of-line (^) and end-of-line ($) anchors [65]
for both intitle: and insource: keywords: shorthand character classes for digits (\d), whitespace (\s), and word characters (\w); and escape codes for line feed (\r), newline (\n), tab (\t), and unicode (e.g. \uHHHH). [66]
When you search for text that looks like an IP, the system will now show search results. It used to take you to the contributions for that IP instead of showing search results. [67]
View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that affected users who used the page-tabs to switch from wikitext editing of a section into the visualeditor. [68]
Updates for technical contributors
The MediaWiki Interfaces team is redesigning the Wikimedia REST API Sandbox with Codex. If you have feedback on improvements for the API documentation or what makes developer experiences smooth (or frustrating), you’re invited to join an upcoming discovery interview, or leave feedback onwiki. Learn more.
Edits to Wikidata aliases (an alternative name for an item or a property) will now be shown in RecentChanges and Watchlist entries on other wikis less often, reducing unnecessary notifications. This will reduce the overall quantity of 'noisy' entries. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. Learn more. [69]
The new Unicode 17.0 version has been released. The datasets on Commons for the Module:Unicode data have been updated. Wikipedias that do not use the Commons datasets should either update their own data or switch to the Commons datasets.
Users of the Wikimedia Enterprise Structured Contents endpoints can now access Parsed Tables. The new Parsed Tables feature extracts and represents Wikipedia tables in structured JSON. This improves machine accessibility as part of the Structured Contents initiative. Structured Contents output is freely available through the On-demand API, or through Wikimedia Cloud Services.
A dataset of English Wikipedia biographical information from Wikimedia Enterprise has been published on Kaggle, for evaluation and research. This provides structured data from more than 1.5 million biographies, including birth and death dates, education, affiliations, careers, awards, and more (from a June 2024 snapshot).
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
On September 24th at 15:00 UTC, all Wikimedia sites users will experience a brief read-only period due to a scheduled datacenter server switchover. The Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team will redirect all traffic from one primary server to its backup. You can listen to the switchover using the "Listen to Wikipedia" tool, where you will hear edits stop for a few minutes during the read-only phase, then resume. This twice-yearly datacenter server switchover ensures reliability by testing the backup datacenter, so that our sites can stay online even if the primary datacenter fails. You can read more about the process on the Diff blog.
Updates for editors
Editors of 60 more Wiktionaries will soon be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them into their pages. A function takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, like adding numbers, converting miles to meters, calculating elapsed time, or declining a word into a case. They will join the other 65 Wiktionary language editions, which already have access to embedded Wikifunctions calls. Later this year, plans are in place to expand to more Wiktionaries and the Incubator.
A new parser function has been added: {{#contentmodel}}. Template editors and admins can use it to get the localized or canonical name of the content model of a specific page. The function makes it easier to create and edit system messages, such as MediaWiki:editinginterface, even when you switch types of pages, like wiki, JavaScript, CSS or JSON page. [70]
Adding or editing a DISPLAYTITLE for an article using VisualEditor will no longer be broken. Editors who use VisualEditor mode to modify the {{DISPLAYTITLE}} would no longer have the literal text "DISPLAYTITLE" or its localized variant added to their articles. A list of pages that may have been affected and might need cleanup is documented in this ticket.
Beta users of the Wikipedia Android app can now try the redesigned Activity tab, which replaces the Edits tab. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging.
Wikifunctions users can now import many essential facts involving geo-coordinates, quantities and time values from Wikidata. This is made possible by the creation of Wikifunctions types for these values, which makes them available for use by functions in Wikifunctions. Learn more about how this works in this video and Wikifunctions' August 1 newsletter (for quantities) and August 22 newsletter (for geo-coordinates).
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
A major software upgrade has been made to Phabricator. The update introduces performance improvements, a refreshed search interface, enhancements to Maniphest task search, updates to user profile pages and project workboards, new Herald automation features, as well as general text input, mobile experience improvements and more. [71]
Updates for editors
The Community Tech team will release the new Community Wishlist extension on October 1, that will improve the way wishes will be submitted. The new extension will allow users to add tags to their wishes to better categorise them, and (in a future iteration) to filter them by status, tags and focus areas. It will also be possible to support individual wishes again, as requested by the community in many instances. The old system will be retired. There will be a brief period of downtime while the extension is deployed and wishes are migrated to the new system. You can read more about this in the latest update or you can consult the current documentation on MediaWiki.
As announced on Diff blog, the production trial of the hCaptcha service for bot detection has begun. The trial is currently using hCaptcha to protect account creation on Chinese, Persian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, and Turkish Wikipedias, where it will replace our existing CAPTCHA (FancyCaptcha). The goal with the trial is to better block bots while also improving usability and accessibility for users who encounter CAPTCHA challenges.
The CampaignEvents extension has been deployed to Wikimedia Commons. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. On Commons, anyone who is a registered user can use it as an event participant. To use it as an organizer, someone needs to have the event organizer right.
On wikis using the Mentorship system, communities can now opt experienced editors out of Mentorship through Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship. Within this setting, communities may define thresholds, based on edit count and account age, to decide when an editor is considered experienced enough to no longer receive Mentorship. [72]
The Editing Team and the Machine Learning Team are working on a new check for newcomers: Tone check. Using a prediction model, this check will encourage editors to improve the tone of their edits, using artificial intelligence. We invite volunteers to review the first version of the Tone language model for the following languages: Arabic, Czech, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Farsi, Italian, Norwegian, Romanian and Latvian. Users from these wikis interested in reviewing this model are invited to sign up at MediaWiki.org. The deadline to sign up is on October 3, which will be the start date of the test.
The rollout of multiblocks had the side effect that non-active block logs may have been shown on Special:Contributions and on blocked users' user and user_talk pages. This issue will be fully resolved in a few days. As part of the fix, messages prefixed with sp-contributions-blocked-notice will be removed and replaced with those prefixed with blocked-notice-logextract in a few weeks. Please help translate the new messages and update any local overrides if needed.
There was a bug with links added using visual editor if they included characters such as [ ] | after the fragment identifier (#). They were not encoded properly creating an incorrect link. This has been fixed. [73]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikiquote in Malay (q:ms:) [74]
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the User Info Card now displays currently active global lock/blocks. [75]
Updates for technical contributors
Later this week, editors using Lua modules will be able to use the mw.title.newBatch function to look up the existence of up to 25 pages at once, in a way that only increases the expensive function count once.
A new Unsupported Tools Working Group has been formed as part of ongoing efforts to collectively determine technical work priorities, similar to the Product & Technology Advisory Council (PTAC). The working group will help prioritize and review requests for support of unmaintained extensions, gadgets, bots, and tools. For the first cycle, the group will be prioritizing an unsupported Wikimedia Commons tool.
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
Paste Check is a new Edit Check feature to help avoid and fight copyright violations. When editors paste text into an article, Paste Check prompts them to confirm the origin and licensing of the content. Starting Wednesday, 8 October, 22 wikis will test Paste Check. Paste Check will help new volunteers understand and follow the policies and guidelines necessary to make constructive contributions to Wikipedia projects.
Updates for editors
Mobile devices will receive mobile articles directly on the standard domain (like en.wikipedia.org), instead of via a redirect to an "m" domain (like en.m.wikipedia.org). This change improves performance. This week it will be enabled on Wikipedias. The existing mobile URLs and the "Desktop view" opt-out remain available. Learn more. [76]
New date filters, creationdate: and lasteditdate:, are now available in the wiki search engine. This allows users to filter search results by a page's first or last revision date. The filters support comparison operators (e.g. >2024) and relative dates (e.g. today-1d), making it easier to find recently updated content or pages within specific age ranges. [77]
Wikifunctions now supports rich text in embedded calls across the 150 wikis where it's enabled. To showcase this, the team created a Latin declination table that Wiktionary editors can use to automatically generate noun forms, producing clear, formatted results — see an example output. If you need any help or have any feedback, please contact the Wikifunctions Team. [78]
An edit link will now appear inside the categories box on article pages for logged in users, which will directly launch the VisualEditor category dialog. [79]
View all 34 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a problem downloading pdf files last week and that has been resolved. [80]
Updates for technical contributors
The field rev_sha1 in the revision database table is being removed in favor of content_sha1 in the content database table. See the announcement for more information.
The Reader Experience team will roll out Dark Mode user interface on all Wikimedia sites on October 29, 2025. All anonymous users of Wikimedia sites will have the option to activate a color scheme that features light-colored text on a dark background. This is designed to provide a more comfortable reading experience, especially in low-light situations. Template authors and technical contributors are encouraged to learn how to make pages ready for Dark mode and address any compatibility issues found in templates in their wiki before the enablement. Please contact the Web team for questions or any support on this talk page before the enablement. [81]
Starting on Monday, October 6, API endpoints under the rest.php path will be rerouted through a new internal API Gateway. Individual wikis will be updated based on the standard release groups, with total traffic increased over time. This change is expected to be non-breaking and non-disruptive. If any issues are observed, please file a Phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board. [82]
After a motion, arbitration enforcement page protections no longer need to be logged in the AELOG. A bot now automatically posts protections at WP:AELOG/P. To facilitate this bot, protection summaries must include a link to the relevant CT page (e.g. [[WP:CT/BLP]]), and you will receive talk page reminders if you forget to specify the contentious topic but otherwise indicate it is an AE action.
@Doc James I assume it is the same codebase (with improvements) but on a different server? Cool to see some work being done on this! (On the Unsupported Tools Working Group side of things I think we're looking at funding work on Video2Commons since y'all are doing a significant chunk of the work on CropTool and we didn't want to step on your toes!) Sohom (talk) 16:30, 9 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yup same codebase with improvements as the current maintainer was not very responsive to our patches.
Hello. I suppose you are an admin on this site. Can you please look into the edit disputes on the article List of current Indian governors. An user has been continuously changing the appropriate portraits used (cropped versions) and replacing them with random pictures just to differentiate between the same individuals holding two separate offices. I do not think it is constructive as well it just breaks the format of the table. Kindly look into it. Oritsu.me (talk) 03:36, 13 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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
Last week, improvements to account security and two-factor authentication (2FA) features were enabled across all wikis. These changes include user interface improvements for Special:AccountSecurity, the support of multiple 2FA methods via authenticator apps and portable security keys (previously users could only enable one method), and a new Recovery Codes module which facilitates fewer account lockouts due to lost two-factor apps and devices. As part of the Account Security project, work is continuing through the rest of 2025 on further user experience improvements, and support for passkeys as an alternate second factor.
Updates for editors
Another part of the Account security project is making 2FA generally available to all users. Along with editors with advanced privileges, such as administrators and bureaucrats, 40% of editors now have access to 2FA. You can check if you have access at Special:AccountSecurity. Instructions for activation are on the linked page. The plan is to continue increasing availability if it is determined that the user support capabilities are able to support global usage. [83]
This week, users at wikis where talk page Usability Improvements are already available by default (everywhere except the 12 wikis listed in T379264) will gain the ability to Thank a comment directly from the talk page it appears on. Before this change, Thanking could only be done by visiting the revision history of the talk page. You can learn more about this change. [84]
Users who have not verified their email address will soon be receiving monthly Notification reminders to do so. This is because users who have verified their email can more easily recover their account. These reminders will not be sent if the user is inactive or removes the unverified email from their account. [85][86]
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a fix was made for an occasional error with saving translated paragraphs in the Content Translation tool, and the related error messages are now easier to see. [87]
Updates for technical contributors
The Unsupported Tools Working Group has chosen Video2Commons as the first tool for its pilot cycle. The group will explore ways to improve and sustain the tool over the coming months. Learn more on Meta.
You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.
Thanks for uploading File:Malvertisement on a mobile phone.jpg. I noticed that this file is being used under a claim of non-free use. However, I think that the way it is being used fails the first non-free content criterion. This criterion states that files used under claims of non-free use may have no free equivalent; in other words, if the file could be adequately covered by a freely-licensed file or by text alone, then it may not be used on Wikipedia. If you believe this file is not replaceable, please:
If you have uploaded other non-free media, consider checking that you have specified how these media fully satisfy our non-free content criteria. You can find a list of description pages you have edited by clicking on this link. Note that even if you follow steps 1 and 2 above, non-free media which could be replaced by freely licensed alternatives will be deleted 2 days after this notification, per the non-free content policy. If you have any questions, please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you. Stifle (talk) 07:50, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Two weeks ago, the 2025 Developing Countries WikiContest came to a close! After three months of stiff competition at the top of the leaderboard, we have our winners. vigilantcosmicpenguin (submissions), continuing his work on covering abortion in Africa, comes in third with 692 points. simongraham (submissions) comes in second with 763 points, largely from a slew of good articles about jumping spiders. And returning to the podium for the second year in a row, BeanieFan11 (submissions) takes the Gold Belt Buckle with a mind-boggling 946 points from his series of articles on sportpersons. Congratulations to our winners!
Amazingly, the award for the most countries covered goes to both BeanieFan11 (submissions) and simongraham (submissions), who each submitted articles under 30 flags! BeanieFan11 (submissions) also wins for writing the most quality articles (16 good articles). For submitting 16 articles related to El Salvador, PizzaKing13 (submissions) wins the award for most submissions under one country. The award for most submissions related to women goes to both Spookyaki (submissions) (7 biographies about women) and vigilantcosmicpenguin (submissions) (21 related articles). And for the second year, simongraham (submissions) wins for the most reviews, having submitted 21!
Among the participants' contributions were 2 FAs, 5 FLs, 124 GAs, and an uncounted number of DYKs, ITNs, and reviews of every kind! Regardless of your level of participation, every contestant can be proud to have contributed towards a major step in countering the systemic bias on Wikipedia. Every year, millions of readers and editors around the globe use Wikipedia to educate themselves and communicate with others about parts of the world that often receive less attention than they deserve. Thank you for participating with us in the contest and contributing to this effort. The DCWC will return next year, and we look forward to seeing you contribute again! However, before that...
We need your feedback! Join the conversation on the talk page to discuss your reflections on the contest (even if you didn't participate!) and help us make it better.
Greetings, Sohom Datta. You are receiving this notification because you've agreed to consider endorsing prospective admin candidates identified by the process outlined at Administrators without tools. Recently, the following editor(s) received this distinction and the associated endearing title:
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
To optimize how user data is stored in our databases, the saved preferences of users who haven't logged in for over five years and have fewer than 100 edits will be cleared. When those users return, default settings will apply. [88]
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a broken link from the GlobalContributions interface message to the XTools GlobalContributions page which has now been fixed. [89]
Updates for technical contributors
The work to reroute all traffic to API endpoints under the rest.php route through a common API gateway is now complete. If any issues are observed, please file a phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board.
Edits to Wikidata references or qualifiers will now be shown in RecentChanges and Watchlist entries on other wikis less often, reducing unnecessary notifications. This will reduce the overall quantity of 'noisy' entries. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. [90]
Traffic report: One click after another Serial-killer miniseries, deceased scientist, government shutdowns and Sandalwood hit "Kantara" crowd the tubes.
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
The Wikipedia iOS app has launched an A/B/C test of improvements made to the tabbed browsing feature for select regions and languages. The test, named “More dynamic tabs”, explores new tab experiences and includes “Did you know” and “Because you read” article recommendations. You can read more on the project page.
Autoconfirmed users on small and medium wikis with the CampaignEvents extension can now use Event Registration without the Event Organizer right. This feature lets organizers enable registration, manage participants, and lets users register with one click instead of signing event pages.
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue of flashing colors when holding or pressing the arrow keys under the dark mode settings in Vector 2022 has been fixed. [91]
Updates for technical contributors
The CampaignEvents extension will be deployed to all remaining wikis during the week of 17 November 2025. The extension currently includes three features: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List. For this rollout, Invitation List will not be enabled on Wikifunctions and MediaWiki unless requested by those communities. Visit the deployment page to learn more.
The SwaggerUI-based REST sandbox experience is now live on all wiki projects. The sandbox can be accessed through the Special:RestSandbox page. Please report any issues to the MediaWiki Interfaces team board, or join the discussion on the project launch page. [92]
Transform endpoints with a trailing slash path in the MediaWiki REST API are now marked as deprecated. They will remain functional during this time, but removal is expected by the end of January 2026. All API users currently calling them are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. Both endpoint variations can be found and tested using the REST Sandbox. See the MediaWiki REST API Deprecation page for more detailed information about the API deprecation policies and procedures.
A dedicated changelog now exists for the MediaWiki REST API. The changelog provides an overview of these changes, making it easier for developers to keep track of improvements and iterations. Announcements will also continue to flow through the standard communication channels, including Tech News and email distribution lists, but can now be more easily referenced from a central location. If you have feedback about the style, structure, or content of this changelog, please join the discussion.
Administrators can delete the tracking category which was previously added by the JsonConfig extension, as it is no longer used. See the categories linked from Q130635582. It is OK if there are still pages listed in the category as that is just a caching issue, and they will be automatically cleared out the next time each page is edited. [93]
@Polygnotus, That should not happen. That flavor of dark mode does not apply any transformation on the image (unless you specify skin-invert-image explicitly which doesn't show up in the text) Sohom (talk) 15:24, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Polygnotus I don't think the colors are inverting, the screenshots you show are the ones I see, the colors in the the flag are still the same, black, grey, white, green, white, grey, black in that order. In dark mode the black of the background bleeds into the black of the flag, but that should be expected. A hue inverted flag should be white, grey, black, dark green, black, grey, white like this image off to the side (I've explicitly added the skin-invert-image tag to it). Sohom (talk) 11:18, 29 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
OK this is officially weird. I used my test account, turned on Wikipedia:Dark mode (gadget) in preferences, then went to Agender and switched from light to dark mode.
I confirmed with a colorpicker that the middle stripe was indeed a different color.
I disabled the invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg) line in the webdev tools and it showed the flag correctly.
But when I do <div style="filter: invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg);">[[File:Agender pride flag.svg]]</div> I get the same result you got.
I think you are broadly correct, except I don't think Stewards would be excited to handle our routine +/-sysop activity. I don't really know what kind of fundamental changes to the crat role would achieve consensus, so my broad perspective is summed up at User:L235/RfB is no big deal: make being a bureaucrat a common thing that isn't a big deal. Best, KevinL (aka L235·t·c) 13:01, 30 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hello, Sohom Datta. This message is being sent to remind you of significant upcoming changes regarding logged-out editing.
Starting 4 November, logged-out editors will no longer have their IP address publicly displayed. Instead, they will have a temporary account (TA) associated with their edits. Users with some extended rights like administrators and CheckUsers, as well as users with the temporary account IP viewer (TAIV) user right will still be able to reveal temporary users' IP addresses and all contributions made by temporary accounts from a specific IP address or range.
How do temporary accounts work?
Editing from a temporary account
When a logged-out user completes an edit or a logged action for the first time, a cookie will be set in this user's browser and a temporary account tied with this cookie will be automatically created for them. This account's name will follow the pattern: ~2025-12345-67 (a tilde, year of creation, a number split into units of 5).
All subsequent actions by the temporary account user will be attributed to this username. The cookie will expire 90 days after its creation. As long as it exists, all edits made from this device will be attributed to this temporary account. It will be the same account even if the IP address changes, unless the user clears their cookies or uses a different device or web browser.
A record of the IP address used at the time of each edit will be stored for 90 days after the edit. Users with the temporary account IP viewer (TAIV) user right will be able to see the underlying IP addresses.
As a measure against vandalism, there are two limitations on the creation of temporary accounts:
There has to be a minimum of 10 minutes between subsequent temporary account creations from the same IP (or /64 range in case of IPv6).
There can be a maximum of 6 temporary accounts created from an IP (or /64 range) within a period of 24 hours.
Temporary account IP viewer user right
How to enable IP Reveal
Administrators may grant the temporary account IP viewer (TAIV) user right to non-administrators who meet the criteria for granting. Importantly, an editor must make an explicit request for the permission (e.g. at WP:PERM/TAIV)—administrators are not permitted to assign the right without a request.
Administrators will automatically be able to see temporary account IP information once they have accepted the Access to Temporary Account IP Addresses Policy via Special:Preferences or via the onboarding dialog which comes up after temporary accounts are deployed.
Impact for administrators
It will be possible to block many abusers by just blocking their temporary accounts. A blocked person won't be able to create new temporary accounts quickly if the admin selects the autoblock option.
It will still be possible to block an IP address or IP range.
Temporary accounts will not be retroactively applied to contributions made before the deployment. On Special:Contributions, you will be able to see existing IP user contributions, but not new contributions made by temporary accounts on that IP address. Instead, you should use Special:IPContributions for this (see a video about IPContributions in a gallery below).
Rules about IP information disclosure
Publicizing an IP address gained through TAIV access is generally not allowed (e.g. ~2025-12345-67 previously edited as 192.0.2.1 or ~2025-12345-67's IP address is 192.0.2.1).
Publicly linking a TA to another TA is allowed if "reasonably believed to be necessary". (e.g. ~2025-12345-67 and ~2025-12345-68 are likely the same person, so I am counting their reverts together toward 3RR, but not Hey ~2025-12345-68, you did some good editing as ~2025-12345-67)
BeanieFan11 (submissions) with 1,035 round points, mostly from 19 good articles and 21 did you know articles about athletes
vigilantcosmicpenguin (submissions) with 819 round points, mostly from 13 good articles and 11 did you know articles about a wide range of topics from abortion topics to African cities
TheNuggeteer (submissions) with 508 round points from 9 good articles, 4 good topic articles and 6 did you know articles mainly about Philippines topics, along with 19 good article reviews
The final round was very productive, and contestants had 2 featured articles, 4 featured lists, 106 good articles, 5 good topic articles, 178 article reviews, 76 did you know articles, and 9 in the news articles. Altogether, Wikipedia has benefited greatly from the activities of WikiCup competitors all through the contest. Well done everyone!
The top eight scorers will receive awards shortly. The following special awards will be made, based on high performance in particular areas of content creation. These prizes are awarded to the competitor who scored the highest in any particular field during the competition.
Gog the Mild (submissions) wins the featured article prize, with 12 featured articles total, and the featured topic prize, with 9 featured topic articles in total
AirshipJungleman29 (submissions) wins the featured picture prize, submitting the only featured picture in the entire contest during round 3
History6042 (submissions) wins the featured content reviewer prize, with 127 featured content reviews. He will also share the ITN prize, with 20 in the news articles in total.
BeanieFan11 (submissions) wins the good article prize, with 100 good articles total, and the DYK prize, with 147 did you know articles in total. He will also share the ITN prize, with 20 in the news articles in total.
Next year's competition will begin on 1 January. You are invited to sign up to participate. The WikiCup is open to all Wikipedians, both novices and experienced editors, and we hope to see you all in the 2026 competition. Until then, it only remains to once again congratulate our worthy winners, and thank all participants for their involvement!
I don't recall when, if ever, that I would have used those features, so no great loss. As to the lists of ballparks articles, anyone who is interested in the subject is free to improve them. I created many of them, but I don't own them. ←Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→ 06:01, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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
Administrators will now find that Special:MergeHistory is now significantly more flexible about what it can merge. It can now merge sections taken from the middle of the history of the source (rather than only the start) and insert revisions anywhere in the history of the destination page (rather than only the start). [94]
For users with "Automatically subscribe to topics" enabled in their preferences, starting a new topic or adding a reply to an existing topic will now subscribe them to replies to that topic. Previously, this would only happen if the DiscussionTools "Add topic" or "Reply" widgets were used. When DiscussionTools was originally launched existing accounts were not opted in to automatic topic subscriptions, so this change should primarily affect newer accounts and users who have deliberately changed their preferences since that time. [95]
Scribunto modules can now be used to generate SVG images. This can be used to build charts, graphics and other visualizations dynamically through Lua, reducing the need to compose them externally and upload them as files. [96]
Wikimedia sites now provide all anonymous users with the option to enable a dark mode color scheme, featuring light-colored text on a dark background. This enhancement aims to deliver a more enjoyable reading experience, especially in dimly lit environments. [97]
Users with large watchlists have long faced timeouts when editing Special:EditWatchlist. The page now loads entries in smaller sections instead of all at once due to a paging update, allowing everyone to edit their watchlists smoothly. As part of the database update, sorting by expiry has been removed because it was over 100× slower than sorting by title. A community wish has been created to explore alternative ways to restore sort-by-expiry. If this feature is important to you, please support the wish! [98]
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the fixing of the persisting highlighting when using VisualEditor find and replace during a query. [99]
Updates for technical contributors
Since 2019 the Wikimedia URL Shortener at https://w.wiki is available for all Wikimedia wikis to create short links to articles, permalinks, diffs, etc. It is available in the sidebar as "Get shortened URL". There are 30 wikis that also install an older "ShortUrl" extension. The old extension will soon be removed. This means /s/ URLs will not be advertised under article titles via HTML class="title-shortlink". The /s/ URLs will keep working. [100]
On Thursday, October 30, the MediaWiki Interfaces and SRE Service Operations teams began rerouting Action API traffic through a common API gateway. Individual wikis will be updated based on the standard release groups, with total traffic increased over time. This change is expected to be non-breaking and non-disruptive. If any issues are observed, please file a Phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board.
MediaWiki Train deployments will pause for the final two weeks of 2025: 22 December and 29 December. Backport windows will also pause between Monday, 22 December 2025 and Thursday, 2 January 2026. A backport window is a scheduled time to add things like bug fixes and configuration changes. There are seven deployment trains remaining for 2025. [101]
In 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation reported that AI systems and search engines increasingly use Wikipedia content without driving users to the site, contributing to an 8% drop in human pageviews compared to 2024. After detecting bots disguised as humans, Wikimedia updated its traffic data to reflect this shift. Read more about current user trends on Wikipedia in a Diff blog post.
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
Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.
MediaWiki can now display a page indicator automatically while a page is protected. This feature is disabled by default. It can be enabled by community request. [103]
Using the "Show preview" or "Show changes" buttons in the wikitext editor will now carry over certain URL parameters like 'useskin', 'uselang' and 'section'. This update also fixes an issue where, if the browser crashed while previewing an edit to a single section, saving this edit could overwrite the entire page with just that section’s content. [104][105][106]
Wikivoyage wikis can use colored map markers in the article text. The text of these markers will now be shown in contrasting black or white color, instead of always being white. Local workarounds for the problem can be removed. [107]
The Activity tab in the Wikipedia Android app is now available for all users. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging. [108]
The Reader Growth team is launching an experiment called "Image browsing" to test how to make it easier for readers to browse and discover images on Wikipedia articles. This experiment, a mobile-only A/B test, will go live on English Wikipedia in the week of November 17 and will run for four weeks, affecting 0.05% of users on English wiki. The test launched on November 3 on Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese wikis, affecting up to 10% of users on those wikis. [109]
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example the inability to lock accounts on mobile sites has been fixed. [110]
The JWT subject field in OAuth 2 access tokens will soon change from <user id> to mw:<identity type>:<user id>, where <identity type> is typically CentralAuth: (for SUL wikis) or local:<wiki id> (for other wikis). This is to avoid conflicts between different user ID types, and to make OAuth 2 access tokens and the sessionJwt cookie more similar. Old access tokens will still work. [112]
A REL1_45 branch for MediaWiki core and each of the extensions and skins in Wikimedia git has been created. This is the first step in the release process for MediaWiki 1.45.0, scheduled for late November 2025. If you are working on a critical bug fix or working on a new feature, you may need to take note of this change. [114]
The process for generating CirrusSearch dumps has been updated due to slowing performance. If you encounter any issues migrating to the replacement dumps, please contact the Search Platform Team for support. [115][116]
Hello! Voting in the 2025 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 1 December 2025. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
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
The Reader Experience team is experimenting with reading lists on mobile web, allowing logged-in readers with no edits to save private lists of articles for later. The experiment is running on Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias since the week of 10 November, and will begin on English Wikipedia the week of 17 November.
Users who can’t receive their email verification code during login can now get help by submitting a form on a new special page. This update is part of the Account Security initiative. If your account has an email address, please make sure you still have access to it. When logging in from a new device or location without 2FA, you may be asked to enter a 6-digit code sent by email to finish logging in. Learn more.
As part of the Parser Unification project, the Content Transform Team rolled out Parsoid as the default parser to many low-traffic Wikipedias and is preparing the next step to high traffic ones. This message is an invitation for you to opt-in to Parsoid, as described in the Extension:ParserMigration documentation, and identify any issues you might encounter with your own workflow using bots, gadgets, or user scripts. Please, let us know through the "Report Visual Bug" link in the Tools sidebar or create a phab ticket and tag the Content Transform Team in Phabricator.
Unsupported Tools: Several issues with Video2Commons have been fixed, including filename-related upload failures, black-video imports, and retry handling. AV1 support has also been added. Ongoing work focuses on backend stability, ffmpeg errors, subtitle imports, metadata handling, and playlist uploads. To track specific tasks, check the Phabricator board.
Save the date for the next Wikimedia Hackathon happening in Milan, Italy from May 1–3, 2026. Registration will open in January 2026. Scholarship applications are currently open, and will close on November 28, 2025. If you have any questions, please email hackathon@wikimedia.org.
Hello! Voting in the 2025 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 1 December 2025. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
WikiProject Articles for creation is holding a month long Backlog Drive in December!
The goal of this drive is to reduce the backlog of unreviewed drafts to less than half a month of outstanding reviews from the current 2+ months. Bonus points will be given for reviewing drafts that have been waiting more than 30 days. The drive is running from 1 December 2025 through 31 December 2025.
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
Last week, the Wikimedia Search Team recreated the "DWIM" (Do What I Mean) gadget functionality server-side, for Russian and Hebrew Wikipedias. This feature adds cross-keyboard suggestions to the standard search-box suggestions. For example, searching for cxfcnmt on Russian Wikipedia will now add suggestions for счастье ("happiness") that the user probably intended. They plan to enable this feature for other Russian and Hebrew wikis this week. [118]
Later this week, users of the "Improved Syntax Highlighting" beta feature will have syntax highlighting available in DiscussionTools. This requires that the "Enable editing tools in source mode" preference be set. [119]
Campaign events extension – the set of tools for coordinating events and other on-wiki collaborations has now been deployed to all Wikimedia wikis. A new feature known as Collaborative contribution to help organizers and participants see the impact of activities has also been added. Join the upcoming learning session to see the new feature in action and share your feedback.
View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the bug which stopped CodeReviewBot from working, has now been fixed. [120]
Updates for technical contributors
Users of Wikimedia API can join a usability study to help validate the new design of Wikimedia REST API sandboxes. Interested participants should fill the recruitment survey. [121]
The MediaWiki Interfaces team is deprecating XSLT stylesheets within the Action API. Support for format=xml&xlst={stylesheet} will be removed from Wikimedia projects by the end of November, 2025. In addition, it will soon be disabled by default in MediaWiki release versions: v1.43 (LTS), v1.44, and v1.45. Support for XSLT stylesheets will be fully removed from MediaWiki v1.46 (expected to release between April and May 2026). [122]
The WDQS legacy endpoint (query-legacy-full.wikidata.org) will be decommissioned at the end of December 2025, and finally closed down on 7th January 2026. After this date, users should expect requests to query.wikidata.org that require the full graph to fail or return invalid results if they are not rewritten to use SPARQL federation. The team encourages users to ensure that tools and workflows use the supported WDQS endpoints (https://query.wikidata.org/ - Main graph or https://query-scholarly.wikidata.org/ - Scholarly graph). For support with migrating use cases, please review the Data Access and Request a Query pages for details and assistance on alternative access methods.
The process will have a seven day call for candidates phase, a two day pause, a five day discussion phase, and a seven day private vote using SecurePoll. Discussion and questions are only allowed on the candidate pages during the discussion phase.
The outcome of this process is identical to making a request for adminship. There is no official difference between an administrator appointed through RFA versus administrator elections.
Ask any questions about the process at the talk page. Later, a user talk message will be sent to official candidates with additional information about the process.
If you are interested in the process, please make sure to watchlist the appropriate pages. A watchlist notice will be added when the discussion phase opens, and again when the voting phase opens.
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Buster7 has given you a turkey! Turkeys promote WikiLove and hopefully this has made your day better. Spread the WikiLove by giving someone else a turkey, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend. Happy Thanksgiving! Buster Seven Talk (UTC) 19:03, 27 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Spread the goodness of turkey by adding {{subst:Thanksgiving Turkey}} to their talk page with a friendly message.
@NGS Arts, It was AI generated (AI generated content is disallowed on Wikipedia) and did not explain why the person has a claim to importance. Note that inclusion into the encyclopedia, requires the person is notable among other things. I'd personally suggest that you try to recreate the article without the use of AI and use the article wizard and article for creation process so that experienced editors can guide you through the process and review your article. Sohom (talk) 18:55, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Ok thanks - I'd written it from notes then put it through ChatGPT to check spelling and yr system took it as Ai so frustrating... won't do that again!! NGS Arts (talk) 18:59, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
WWalter is highly regarded in the Horology world as a leading maker. He's been awarded for his work by several leading institutions along with quite a good amount of published articles so I am surprised at having to look at this. NGS Arts (talk) 19:01, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
NGS Arts has given you a turkey! Turkeys promote WikiLove and hopefully this has made your day better. Spread the WikiLove by giving someone else a turkey, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend. Happy Thanksgiving! NGS Arts (talk) 19:03, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Spread the goodness of turkey by adding {{subst:Thanksgiving Turkey}} to their talk page with a friendly message.
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
The Wikipedia Year in Review 2025 will be available on December 2 for users of iOS and Android Wikipedia apps, featuring new personalized insights, updated reading highlights, and refreshed designs. Learn more on the review's project page.
The Growth team is working on improving the text and presentation of the Verification Email sent to new users to make them more welcoming, useful and informative. Some new text have been drafted for A/B testing and you can help by translating them. See Phabricator.
Add a link will now be deployed at Japanese, Urdu and Chinese Wikipedias on December 2. Add a link is based on a prediction model that suggests links to be added to articles. While this feature has already been available on most Wikipedias, the prediction model could not support certain languages. A new model has now been developed to handle these languages, and it will be gradually rolled out to other Wikipedias over time. If you would like to know more, please contact Trizek (WMF).
View all 34 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where search boxes on some Commons pages showed no results due to switch from SpecialSearch to MediaSearch, has now been fixed. [123]
The Wikimedia Foundation is in the early stages of exploring approaches to Article guidance. The initiative aims to identify interventions that could help new editors easily understand and apply existing Wikipedia practices and policies when creating an article. The project is in the exploration and early experimental design phase. All community members are encouraged to learn more about the project, and share their thoughts on the talk page.
On December 9, we will start the voting phase. The candidate subpages will close to public questions and discussion, and everyone will have a week to use the SecurePoll software to vote, which uses a secret ballot. You can see who voted, but not who they voted for. Please note that the vote totals cannot be made public until after voting has ended and as such, it will not be possible for you to see an individual candidate's totals during the election. You must be extended confirmed to vote.
Once voting concludes, we will begin the scrutineering phase, which typically lasts between a couple days and a week. Once everything is certified, the results will be posted on the results page (you may want to watchlist this page) and transcluded to the main election page. In order to be granted adminship, a candidate who has not been recalled must have received at least 70.0% support, calculated as Support / (Support + Oppose), and must also have received a minimum of 20 support votes. A candidate that has been recalled must have at least 55.0% support. Because this is a vote and not a consensus, there are no bureaucrat discussions ("crat chats").
Any questions or issues can be asked on the election talk page. Thank you for your participation. Happy electing.
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