User talk:robertsky

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

• Many Wikimedia tools were taken offline last week because of a security vulnerability in PHP. This affected many websites worldwide. Toolforge and Cloud VPS have been back up since October 22. Many important tools have been gradually restored. Some tools need the respective volunteer maintainers to restart them. Others still need to upgrade to a patched PHP version. Some tools were using older versions of PHP which are not supported by the recent security patches. They will require maintainers to upgrade to a more recent version. This might require additional effort. You can follow the work on Wikitech.

Updates for editors

• A new optional search experiment is running in the Wikipedia Android and iOS apps for Arabic, French, and Japanese Wikipedias. Participating readers can search inside articles and open quoted passages directly in their source articles, no answers or summaries are generated. This is the first of four experiments in Phase 2 of Semantic Search. It began on October 22 and runs for 20 days. Feedback is welcome on the project’s discussion page.
• The Future Audiences team is planning to bring Share Cards to Wikipedia on mobile. This feature gives users the option to share a visually appealing card with friends, based on the article they are reading. The card contains the article’s title, image, opening text, and related attribution, and links back to the article for full reading. Editors are invited to try out this feature by adding ?useformat=mobile&sharecard=1 to any article URL from October 29 to November 8. Share any thoughts on the project talk page and report any bugs on Phabricator.
• The default renderer for math formulas will change on November 2. After the change, the server sends the formula as MathML, and your browser uses MathJax to show it. This is the last step towards the Mathoid/RESTBase deprecation process, for sustainability and security reasons. You can ask questions or report problems.
• Do you have an idea for a new feature, or a bug that needs fixing? Submit your suggestion for the community wish list by November 8!
• View all 41 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

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 Wikipedia Apps team is preparing to launch Year in Review in early December. Year in Review gives app users a personalized recap of how they read and engaged with Wikipedia throughout the year. The team is looking for volunteers to help make it available in as many languages as possible. Translators can contribute through translatewiki.net. For Android, search for yir under the "Untranslated" tab, and for iOS, search for year-in-review under the "Untranslated" tab.
• The Article guidance feature that helps editors create articles that follow a Wikipedia’s policies, is now available on all Wikipedias. Administrators and interface admins can configure and expose it for editors to use via Special:CommunityConfiguration/ArticleGuidance. A configuration guide is available. Visit the project talk page to ask any questions.

Updates for editors

• Following the release of Reading Lists to all Wikipedias in September, logged-in users will soon be able to organize articles saved in their lists into customizable categories. This will enable readers to create collections and revisit saved articles based on their interests, potentially encouraging frequent visits to Wikipedia. The update will roll out to all Wikipedia users between November 9 and 16.
• The Wikipedia Apps team is preparing to launch the first of two notification experiments for English Wikipedia readers on Android who have opted in to notifications. The three-week experiment will send notifications suggesting personalized Discover reading lists which are collections of Wikipedia articles recommended based on articles the reader has previously viewed. The goal is to understand whether these recommendations help readers discover relevant content and encourage them to return to the app. No action is required, and users can manage their notification preferences in the app settings. Learn more and share feedback.
• A bug in the Global Watchlist was causing the page to fail to load for users who have unseen changes on Wikimedia Commons. The bug has now been fixed. If you temporarily removed commons.wikimedia.org from your personal Global Watchlist settings due to the bug, you can restore it there.
• A new Beta feature called "Home" will be deployed to 10 Wikipedias for a limited test. This new feature aims to replace Special:Homepage for newcomers, with additional modules planned for the future to improve upon the current experience. If you want to participate in the test, please sign up. "Home" will be released to all users later this month.
• On English and Russian Wikipedias, Source Verification is now available as an experimental Suggestion for experienced editors within Suggestion Mode. It uses an LLM hosted on LiftWing to try to check whether a cited source supports the claim it’s attached to. To try it out, please see these testing instructions. If you are at another language Wikipedia and your community is interested in trying it out, please express your interest.
• View all 35 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where dates passed as blank parameters to functions in wikitext were incorrectly interpreted using the month-day-year format instead of the day-month-year format, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• Starting on 1 December 2026, hCaptcha will be required for edits made via the API by non-autoconfirmed users. If your tool, gadget, or user script makes edits on behalf of newcomer users, see how to update it.
• Nominations are open on Wikitech for new Toolforge standards committee members. The committee oversees the Toolforge Right to fork policy and Abandoned tool policy among other duties. Nominations close on 22 November 2026.
• Toolforge has introduced two new beta features. "Toolforge alerts" send email notifications when a tool becomes unavailable, returns errors, or restarts frequently. "Extended logging" makes it easier to investigate problems by providing logs for events such as job creation, deletion, and deployment failures through the toolforge logs command. Both features are opt-in and help tool maintainers become aware of and resolve problems with their tools more quickly. Maintainers can enable alerts and learn how to access extended logs. They are also encouraged to try the features and provide feedback.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• A proposal to change how we currently organize the Wikimedia Hackathon has been shared. It explores making the event more accessible to technical communities in different regions. Share your feedback on the proposal’s talk page; the deadline has been extended to November 13th.

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