User talk:The Grid

Highlights

• Community Wishlist: Community Wishlist is looking for volunteers to join their working group. You can find details on the goal of the group, roles and expectations, norms we'll follow, and how to sign up on this Meta-Wiki page.
• Human knowledge at stake: Wikimedia Foundation makes the case for human knowledge at the UN General Assembly and how scrapers are straining our infrastructure and the larger human knowledge ecosystem online.
• Joy of contributing: How a simple thanks fuelled one of our Wikimedians of the Year as they connect the community.
• PTAC technical topics: The Product and Technology Advisory Council calls for the community to suggest topics that it should consider and discuss with the Wikimedia Foundation. Submit your topic on the council’s talk page.
• Wikimania scholarship deadline extended: The deadline for Wikimania 2027 scholarship applications has been extended through the end of day on November 4, 2026 (Anywhere on Earth). This is to compensate for a pause in the application window on October 15, 2026 from 1pm to 6pm UTC, to allow for an upgrade to the LimeSurvey platform.

Annual Goals Progress on Engage
See also: Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · The Wikipedia Library · list of movement events · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia

• OpenAI agent activities on Wikimedia projects: The Wikimedia Foundation have discovered some activity by “rogue” OpenAI agents on Wikimedia platforms. These unauthorized bot activities included edits to our wikis, some unsuccessful attempts to exploit a public note-taking tool we host, and heavy traffic.
• Listening to Wikipedia: The Phase 1 experiment for Listening to Article intros within the Android app’s “For you” feed has been released into the Wikipedia Beta App. This experiment tests whether adding a listening format into the "For you" feed has the potential to deliver improvements in reader retention.
• Wikimedia Hackathon: The 2027 Wikimedia Hackathon will be taking place in person April 9-11, 2027 in Tirana, Albania. Scholarship applications are open until October 30.
• Bookmark button on mobile web: Logged-out Wikipedia users on mobile web will begin to see a bookmark button for saving articles to their reading lists instead of the current Watchstar button. When clicked, the bookmark button prompts users to log in or create an account to save an article for later, to encourage more readers to become account holders.
• Abstract Wikipedia piloting showing articles to readers: Three initial pilot communities are currently working with the team to explore using abstract articles on their Wikipedias: Malayalam, Dagbani, and Igbo.
• Simplifying account creation: An experiment has begun on Spanish, Arabic, English, and French Wikipedias to simplify the experience users encounter immediately after account creation. The test will explore whether removing friction from the current Welcome Survey helps new users understand what to do next more easily.
• Suggestions mode: It is now possible for communities to configure Edit Checks and Suggestions so that they are shown within additional namespaces, such as a Draft: namespace. Feedback is welcome.
• Latest experiments: An upcoming experiment is testing a personalised module, called 'Review Changes', for Home which aims to introduce newer editors to the concept of reviewing the edits that other users are making. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
• Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News weeks 40 and 41 include users of default skins on desktop and mobile web will now be informed if the search results displayed come from page redirects. See also the 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.

Annual Goals Progress on Enable
See also: Research newsletter · WikiLearn News · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org

• Wikimedia Enterprise: Mantic Uses Wikimedia Enterprise to Power AI Forecasting.
• Improving developers experience: Two new features has been shipped to improve developer experience: Spiderpig (deployment web interface) which allows developers to leave notes for each other about errors they see in the logs and Patchdemo, which now supports in-browser code editing, so developers can make quick changes without needing to push a new patch and recreate the demo.
• Strengthening infrastructure: To reduce the workload from non-pageview requests, the overall number of database queries per logged-out pageview has been reduced by 52%, from a baseline of 23 queries/pageview in August, to 11 queries/pageview today. Read more.
• Increasing test reliability: To reduce friction in post-merge validation and ultimately improve confidence in release decisions: Catalyst was proven to be a much more reliable environment to run daily Selenium tests (95.7% eventually green) compared with the beta cluster (79.1% over the same 10 suites). This gives confidence to automatically catch issues before they reach production.

Annual Goals Progress on Protect
See also: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog

• Transparency Report: The latest Transparency Report has been published. Out of 953 requests for content alteration and takedown, only 2 requests were granted. The Foundation continues to prioritize the public interest and is guided by the content moderation policies the volunteer community has shaped over the past 25 years.

Annual Goals Progress on Reach
See also: Wikimedia Apps · Readers

• Grantmaking: Two reflections on transferring ownership of Rapid Funds to Wikimedia organizations.

Board and Board committee updates
See also: Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter

• Affiliations Committee: Wikimedia Affiliations Committee Has New Officers and Advisors. Read also the latest issue of the AffCom News to learn more about their work.
• Governance committees looking for volunteers: Ombuds Commission (OC) and Case Review Committee (CRC) welcome new volunteers to contribute to important work across the Wikimedia ecosystem. Applications will open until October 31. Learn more about the committees, the roles, and how to apply on the Metapage.
• Board of Trustees Elections Process: The Board has reviewed the feedback received since July on its elections process proposal, and thanks everyone who shared input on Wiki, in person, or directly with Trustees. Based on that feedback, the Governance Committee has moved away from the eligibility criteria approach and developed two new options for the 2027 selection process and beyond. We'd like your feedback again before deciding. Please read the proposal and share your feedback on the Meta-Wiki talk page by October 27.

Other Movement-curated newsletters & news
Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · The Headword (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l'actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters

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 measure the impact of incorporating some community-requested features on logged-out reader retention, a test for Image Carousel will be pushed to logged-out readers. With the Image Carousel feature, readers browse community-uploaded images, selected by editors as relevant to specific articles. The test starts on November 20.
• An experimental notice will be pushed to 0.5% of logged-out mobile readers who come to English Wikipedia from Google, asking them to add Wikipedia as a Google Preferred Source. The test is to see if this notice increases reader retention and encourages people who use Google Search to visit Wikipedia more often. It will run from October 15–29 and will be assessed for its impact on retention and referrals.
• View all 26 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where Quarry returned an “Access denied” error when users tried to run SQL queries, preventing queries from running normally, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• Due to a long-standing bug, applications that use the OAuth 2 client credentials flow to act on their owners’ behalf are treated as if they are logged out. This will be fixed for new applications registered on or after Monday, October 19. Some affected applications need to re-register.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• A proposal to hold the Wikimedia Hackathon every three years, with regional hackathons in between, 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 before November 6.

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

• An experiment launched on September 29 is testing article recommendations for new account holders who also identify as readers. By suggesting articles to read, similar to recommendations in the Wikipedia app for logged-in readers, the experiment aims to encourage new account holders to read and return to the website regularly, with the goal of increasing internal referrals by 1%. See the related Community Wishlist proposal.
• Several Wikimedia services were taken offline last week because of a security vulnerability in PHP. This is because they need to be updated before they are safe to put back online. This is not a problem just for the Wikimedia movement but affects a lot of websites. You can follow updates on Wikitech. Cloud VPS and Toolforge will take longer to bring back online. This is to make sure that applications which run on Cloud VPS or Toolforge are not affected. Tool developers can see updates and more information on the Cloud-announce mailing list.
• Last week we shared that to measure the impact of incorporating some community-requested features on logged-out reader retention, a test for the Image Carousel feature would be pushed to logged-out readers. Due to an issue, we will be restarting the test, but it will be live on October 26, not November 20 as initially announced.

Updates for editors

• A new bot detection system to better identify automated traffic that disguises itself as human visitors, is coming to the Wikimedia wikis. This might cause sudden changes to visitor statistics starting from 26 October, going back to 20 June 2026.
• The Score extension which renders musical notation inside wiki pages, has been temporarily disabled on all wikis due to a security issue. Affected pages will display a notice instead of musical scores, but the underlying code remains intact. No action is needed from editors, and a fix is in progress. A separate announcement will follow when the extension is re-enabled. Read more on Phabricator.
• View all 18 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where CodeMirror syntax highlighter appears to have been enabled in error for existing editors has been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday, October 28 2026 at 15:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests, which happen twice a year. During the switchover, all Wikimedia website traffic is shifted from one primary data center to the backup data center to test availability and prevent service disruption even in emergencies.

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• Scholarship and sponsorship applications for the 2027 Wikimedia Hackathon will close on Friday, October 30th. Submit your application through Pretix before the deadline!

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

Highlights

• Community Wishlist: The process for this year’s Community Wishlist has been published, incorporating community feedback. The wish submission process will end on November 8. The triage is expected to be completed by late November. Votes for wishes will start in January.
• Visual editor now on mobile: Editors can now easily access visual editor directly from the iOS and Android apps. This enables readers to make quick contributions while casually reading.
• Mobile editing for Wikidata: New and existing editors can now edit Wikidata statements on mobile devices. Please share your feedback and report bugs.
• Behind the scenes: What happened on 25 August as hundreds of edits were made to Dolly Parton's article on English and German Wikipedia – and why code stewardship and the Service Catalog matter.
• Security update: Due to a critical security advisory about the PHP language, many Wikimedia services are going to be affected. Events are developing rapidly. See this page for list of affected services and the most updated information.

Annual Goals Progress on Engage
See also: Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · The Wikipedia Library · list of movement events · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia

• Identifying LLM edits easily: LLM Paste Check is now available on all Wikipedias. The feature will notify editors using the visual editor when they paste text that is likely to have initially been copied from one of five external generative AI chatbots. Edits will also be tagged so that patrollers can review them more closely.
• The Future of Wikimedia Hackathon: A proposal to hold the Wikimedia Hackathon every three years, with regional hackathons in between 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 before November 6.
• Re-testing Image Carousel on readers: Starting November 20, a test for Image Carousel will run for logged-out readers. Readers will browse community-uploaded images, selected by editors as relevant to specific articles. It will measure the impact of incorporating some community-requested features on logged-out reader retention.
• Changes to Watchlist view: Moderator Tools will be removing the list view of the Watchlist and defaulting everyone to the changelog view. By defaulting to the changelog view, we are simplifying the codebase and avoiding the likelihood of missing bugs.
• Wikifunctions quarterly planning: For October–December 2026, Wikifunctions will focus on two main areas: working with pilot communities towards bringing abstract articles into their Wikipedias, and making it easier to create and edit articles on Abstract Wikipedia.
• Suggestion Mode: To encourage newcomers to publish their first suggestion when using Suggestion Mode, implementation of the publish prompt on mobile has been completed.
• Onboarding newcomers: To encourage new editors to make their first edit, the early onboarding A/B test went live.
• Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News weeks 42 and 43 include CodeMirror syntax highlighting was enabled by default for all logged out and newly registered users on the English Wikipedia. See also the 54 community-submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.

Annual Goals Progress on Enable
See also: Research newsletter · WikiLearn News · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org

• Open geospatial dataset now released: Wikimedia Enterprise has released an open geospatial dataset containing 17 million OpenStreetMap elements linked to Wikidata, Wikipedia, and Wikivoyage, as Parquet and GeoParquet files on Hugging Face and Kaggle.
• Wikimedia Enterprise partnership: How CoMaps Uses Wikimedia Enterprise to Bring Wikipedia to Their Offline Maps.

Annual Goals Progress on Protect
See also: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog

• Better bot detection: There is a new bot detection system for traffic to the Wikimedia wikis. There might be sudden changes to visitor statistics starting on 26 October and going back to 20 June. This is because we will now be better at finding automated traffic which is trying to hide that it is coming from bots.

Annual Goals Progress on Reach
See also: Wikimedia Apps · Readers

• The Wikipedia Library: Datawrapper is now available in The Wikipedia Library. This is a data visualisation platform to create and publish responsive charts, maps, and tables. If you're a contributor who qualifies for TWL, please feel free to apply for access and make use of this tool.

Other Movement-curated newsletters & news
Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · The Headword (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l'actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters

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.

Highlights

• Joy of contributing: The different ways in which joy shows up across Wikimedia movement: from music, sweets and weddings to Baby Globe.
• Protecting open knowledge: The Wikimedia Foundation has filed an amicus brief to protect open knowledge in a major copyright case involving OpenAI and Microsoft.
• Security update: Many Wikimedia tools were taken offline 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. Follow the work on Wikitech.
• Wikipedia Year in Review 2026: This year's Wikipedia Apps Year in Review is in progress and you can help make it available in more languages to readers around the world by helping with translations. Here's how:
  • Android: Open Android translations. Under the Untranslated tab, search for yir.
  • iOS: Open iOS translations. Under the Untranslated tab, search for year-in-review.

Annual Goals Progress on Engage
See also: Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · The Wikipedia Library · list of movement events · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia

• Around the Globe in ESEAP: Connecting 32 geographic areas and 64 language editions of Wikipedia across East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific. See how the region is creating spaces for active editors to build relationships.
• Notifications Experiment: In the coming weeks, the first of two notifications experiments on Android will be launched. The experiment will test whether personalized Discover reading list notifications will encourage them to return to the app. The three-week experiment will include English Wikipedia readers who have opted in to notifications. Learn more and share your feedback on the project page.
• Reading recommendations: An ongoing experiment is testing article recommendations for new account holders who also identify as readers. This aims to encourage new account holders to read and return to the website regularly, with the goal of increasing internal referrals by 1%. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
• New search experiment: The first of four experiments in Phase 2 of Semantic Search 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. Feedback is welcome on the project’s discussion page.
• Share Cards: 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.
• Wikifunctions: Exploring how Abstract Wikipedia serve both contributors and readers well.
• Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News weeks 44 and 45 include the default renderer for math formulas has changed. See also the 59 community-submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.

Annual Goals Progress on Enable
See also: Research newsletter · WikiLearn News · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org

• New Toolforge features: As part of Tools Platform's work to improve the reliability of Toolforge-hosted tools, two new platform features are launched: (1) Toolforge alerts let tool maintainers receive email notifications when any of their tools is encountering a common error condition; (2) Toolforge extended logging capabilities let tool maintainers retrieve logs for events like job creation, deletion or deployment failure, with a new CLI toolforge logs, at the same time that they retrieve their job logs.
• Release of Foundation and Endowment annual audit reports: The Foundation has released its annual audit reports (audited financial statements) covering July 2025 - June 2026 for both the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia Endowment. The annual financial report for Wikimedia Enterprise for the same period has also been released. Read key takeaways from the reports on Diff and FAQs for both the Foundation and the Endowment on Meta-Wiki.

Annual Goals Progress on Protect
See also: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog

• Don’t Blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.

Annual Goals Progress on Reach
See also: Wikimedia Apps · Readers

• GLAM: Collaboration with Tunisia’s Cultural Heritage Institutions through GLAM Wiki Days Tunisia 2026.
• The Wikipedia Library: Discover new and continuing partnerships in The Wikipedia Library including
  • The Chronicle of Higher Education, a leading resource for independent journalism, career development, and academic analysis.
  • Datawrapper for editors to create charts, maps, and tables for Wikimedia projects.
  • Adam Matthew Digital, Springer Nature and E-Yearbook.
  • Work also continues to make sure Citoid does not get blocked by publishers who are starting to block bot traffic to manage the impact of scraping. In September, we worked with Reuters and the Library of Congress to allowlist Citoid. You can track our progress with other publishers on Phabricator.

Other Movement-curated newsletters & news
Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · The Headword (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l'actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters