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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 Worklist feature for the Event Registration tool is now live on all Wikimedia wikis. With Worklist, event organizers can add the articles their event will focus on directly to the event page. The Worklist also powers Event Pathways which notifies other editors of the upcoming or ongoing event when they edit an article featured in the event's Worklist. This is the minimum viable version (MVP), and feedback is welcome. Organizers are encouraged to try the feature. A hands-on Worklist Setup Workshop will take place on 18 August at 16:00 UTC and 19 August at 11:00 UTC.

Updates for editors

• Special:ShortPages displays short pages by their size, but in many cases it gets filled with disambiguations and soft redirects, making it harder to find the short articles themselves. Starting this weekend, you will be able to choose not to include an article in the special page by adding the magic word __EXPECTSHORTPAGE__.
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Bole (w:bol:)
• Starting the week of August 17, the page toolbar will wrap onto two lines when there is not enough horizontal space for all the buttons. This is a fully merged patch from the Reader Experience team which aims to reduce crowding in the Vector 2022 toolbar, that may occur on some language Wikipedias at certain screen widths.
• View all 16 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, uploading large files to Wikimedia Commons has become more stable and less prone to failure following some fixes related to the “Could not acquire lock” upload error.

Updates for technical contributors

• Debian Bullseye will reach the end of its Long Term Support on 31 August 2026. Some Cloud VPS projects still have instances running Debian Bullseye. Maintainers of those projects are encouraged to migrate to Debian Bookworm or Debian Trixie. A migration guide is available to help with the process, and users may also want to consider whether their workload is better suited to Toolforge. If you need help or cannot complete the migration by 31 August, please contact the Cloud VPS admins as soon as possible. Read more.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

Highlights

• Improving Account Creation process: As part of Account Creation Experiments an improved account creation form has been released. The form now provides live username validation, a clearer username policy popover, and a reveal password button. We also removed redundant elements and jarring warning messages, improved the form's information hierarchy, and aligned the design with Codex design system guidelines.
• Create charts from your own data: The new ChartWizard makes the Chart extension more beginner-friendly by allowing editors to create charts, such as bar and pie charts, without needing to use JSON. The ChartWizard is now available on Wikimedia Commons. Feedback on the new tool is welcome on the wish talk page.

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

• Worklist Feature Setup Workshop: Are you organizing or planning a Wikimedia editing event soon? Join one of these workshops (Aug 18 at 16:00 UTC and Aug 19 at 11:00 UTC) to set up the new worklist feature for your event. With this feature, organizers can list the specific articles their event will focus on, directly on the event page.
• Reading Lists to launch as full feature: The Reading Lists, a Community Wishlist item, will be launched in September as a full feature. Volunteer translator help is needed for string translations into a number of languages before the launch.
• Improving Commons' section headings: The table of contents on Wikimedia Commons file pages was improved to make it easier to understand a file page’s structure, navigate to specific sections, and share links to individual sections.
• From Abstract Wikipedia: An apple is a fruit and new experimental type: anonymous functions.
• Latest experiments: An upcoming experiment would test methods for email confirmation enforcement for new accounts to determine which approach is the most effective at driving email confirmation. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
• Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News week 32 and 33 include that Category pages will soon support sorting entries by the time they are added to a category to make it easier to find recently or long-standing categorized pages. See also the 43 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.

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

• Don't blink: Representing Wikimedia at the United Nations’ Open Source Week and other latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
• Online Identity Verification: Anonymity is Important for Democracy and It’s Also at Risk.

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

• Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees: Reflections on Wikimania 2026.

Other updates

• Leadership: Wikimedia Foundation will welcome Rena Kokalari as new Chief People Officer from 1 September.

Other Movement-curated newsletters & news
Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (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

• The Special:CreateAccount page has been simplified as part of ongoing work to modernize the account creation experience. The panel showing project statistics no longer appears next to the form on desktop and mobile web. Multiple account creation experiments show that a simpler form helps newcomers complete registration.
• In order to improve page performance, images now load when they are viewed. This means images lower down an article will not load if a reader never scrolls to that part of the page, which may affect some image-related metrics.

• View all 42 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where image thumbnails in Abstract Wikipedia could fail to display after the corresponding file was moved on Wikimedia Commons, has now been fixed. Thumbnails will now update correctly when files are moved.

Updates for technical contributors

• User Info card is a feature that helps patrollers see information about user accounts. So far, it has been available only in places such as page history, logs and recent changes. Now, it's possible to place it in the page content as well, using the {{#uic:}} parser function. It can be particularly useful in templates like {{Userlinks}} (or their specialized variants), as it will make it easier to see the context about a user on various noticeboard pages. The card will be displayed only to users who have it enabled in their preferences.
• Due to user security and privacy risks, we have disabled access to Special:MyPage URLs when specifically using action=raw. If you are impacted by this, consider whether you can use an alternative approach. Special:MyPage URLs can still be accessed and used without action=raw. Specified user page URLs (e.g. User:Myusername) can still be used with action=raw.
• Due to an update, the thumbnailing software has been improved. This includes upgrading librsvg to 2.60 and ImageMagick to 7, as well as resolving a number of long-standing thumbnailing bugs like rendering errors.

• 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

• A new format for the Community Wishlist is open for feedback. You can read the proposed ideas on Meta. This new process plans to improve how wishes are triaged, voted on, and prioritized in a way that is transparent and balanced across project families and language editions. This consultation is open for two weeks.

Updates for editors

• The latest release of the Wikipedia Android app includes updates to the Saved feature, bringing the app’s saving experience closer to iOS and Web. The update redesigns the Saved tab with an “All articles” view, removes the default “Saved” reading list, renames reading lists to “Collections,” and modernizes the article-saving experience.
• The Reading Lists feature was enabled for all logged-in users on Bengali, Chinese, Czech and Vietnamese Wikipedias on August 25, after several months as a beta feature. Reading Lists will be available to all logged-in users on Arabic, French and Indonesian Wikipedias on September 1, followed by English Wikipedia on September 14, and all other Wikipedia wikis on September 28.
• At the end of the month, some logged-out readers on Bengali, Czech, Persian, English, and Polish Wikipedias using the Minerva skin on mobile will see an updated navigation bar in an A/B test. The test will compare the current navigation bar with a new version designed to make it easier to find information more quickly. The goal is to determine whether these changes encourage readers to return more often. This experiment will not change the experience for logged-in readers and/or editors.
• Editors who maintain redirects, templates, and categories used on redirect pages now have improved ways for finding and curating redirects. Previously, redirects pages could not be searched. Two new search keywords, onlyredirects: and withredirects:, now allow redirects to be searched directly and can be combined with existing keywords such as incategory:, intitle:, and insource:.
• The ISBN lookup tools for generating citations were recently not working because of external service problems. Developers are working on solutions.
• View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where searching for pages by category using deepcat could return no results or unrelated results has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The domain of URLs for thumbnails is changing from upload.wikimedia.org to thumb.wikimedia.org. The old URLs will continue to work for the foreseeable future but MediaWiki will advertise the new domain instead. URLs to other types of media such as original files, videos and transcodes will still be served from upload.wikimedia.org.
• The Wikimedia Math API is now deprecated. These endpoints will be fully sunset by the end of September 2026. Developers who call these endpoints should transition to alternative math rendering solutions, such as the native MathML or MathJax. Third-party MediaWiki installations that utilize the Math extension for formula rendering are required to upgrade to v1.43+ to avoid disruption of service.

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• Read more about TextMatch in a Diff post titled, Custom edit suggestions for every wiki: How communities are shaping Suggestion Mode with TextMatch.

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

Highlights

• Simplifying account creation: The Special:CreateAccount page has been simplified as part of ongoing work to modernize the account creation experience. Multiple account creation experiments show that a simpler form helps newcomers complete registration.
• Movement Ecosystem strategy: Deadline to provide feedback on the first version of the proposal are extended until Sep 30 to allow more time for community feedback and discussion.
• New format for the Community Wishlist: You can read the proposed ideas on Meta. This new process plans to improve how wishes are triaged, voted on, and prioritized in a way that is transparent and balanced across project families and language editions. Please let us know what you think will work well or if there are ways to make this proposal stronger. This consultation is open for two weeks.

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

• Improving page performance: In order to improve page performance, images now load when they are viewed. This means images that are lower down within an article will not load if a reader never scrolls to that part of the page, which may affect some image-related metrics.
• Android Reading list updates: Some of the recent Android releases include updates to the Saved feature. This first round of changes on the Android app include redesigning the "Saved" tab to include an "All articles" view, and remove the user-facing default "Saved" reading list.
• Reading list on desktop: Reading lists has been released on Chinese, Bengali, Czech, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. The feature is now available for logged-in users on those wikis.
• Event Registration tool: The Worklist feature for the Event Registration tool is now live on all Wikimedia wikis. With Worklist, event organizers can add the articles their event will focus on directly to the event page. The Worklist also powers Event Pathways which notifies other editors of the upcoming or ongoing event when they edit an article featured in the event’s Worklist.
• Call for Projects and Mentors for Outreachy: Wikimedia is participating in Round 33 of the Outreachy program that runs from December 2026 through March 2027. The deadline to submit projects on Phabricator is Sept 4 at 4pm UTC and the project list will be finalized by Sep 11.
• Latest experiments: A current experiment is testing to introduce a new content type in Apps home. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
• Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News week 34 and 35 include that a new Wikipedia in Bole has been created. See also the 58 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
• UwER Conference: In December, the Wikimedia Portugal and Wikimedia Foundation will be hosting a first-of-its-kind convening for users with extended rights. Applications to attend opened August 13 and will close on September 4.

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

• Wikimedia Endowment: Updates from the July 2026 Wikimedia Endowment Board Meeting.

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.
• Legal footer update: The Foundation had updated the Legal and Safety Contact Information on 300+ content wikis. The project adds a link to a Foundation-managed central page where people can find contact information to report illegal issues and serve official legal notices. This helps to resolve gaps if community-managed contact pages are missing or incomplete.

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

• Collaboration: UNESCO and Wikimedia Movement deepen their partnership at Wikimania 2026.
• Digitization: Bringing Balinese Manuscripts to Wikimania 2026.
• Language related projects: Read some key highlights from the latest edition of the Language and internationalization newsletter.

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

• AffCom: The Affiliations Committee is extending the pause on new affiliate recognition until the affiliate recognition and funding model is further clarified.

Other Movement-curated newsletters & news
Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (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

• Add a Link has been upgraded for English Wikipedia users with improved detection of links that have different capitalization. This will help reduce ambiguous suggestions caused by differences in capitalization in article titles, including articles about cultural goods. A second phase of improvements is planned, which will also prepare the feature for release in other languages.
• The Article guidance feature will be enabled by default for junior editors on Simple English and Turkish Wikipedia starting 10 September 2026 following an experiment. Junior editors with 0 to 99 edits will automatically see the feature when they click a red link or use the "Madde oluşturto" option on Turkish Wikipedia to create a new article. The change is intended to help junior editors create higher-quality articles that meet each Wikipedia’s standards. Additional improvements will continue based on the experiment results and community feedback.
• The Pageviews Analysis tool which allows users to compare pageviews across multiple pages, turns 10 years old this year and several new features have been added. They include WikiNav which provides insights into how readers of Wikipedia explore the content, editing stats in Siteviews, the ability to lookup articles belonging to a WikiProject, and support for dark mode.
• A visually simplified Minerva navigation bar is being tested for logged-out readers using mobile web on the Bengali, Czech, English, Farsi, and Polish Wikipedias. The experiment aims to determine whether simplifying the navigation improves reader retention. The test will run from August 31 to September 28, and no action is required from users.
• WMDE Technical Wishes is working on improving auto-generated reference names in VisualEditor. Editors will only notice a slight change starting this week. When adding automatic reference names the numbering will start at :1 instead of :0. Read more on the project page.
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 23. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
• View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where Parsoid could mishandle nested nowiki tags, causing content to be lost and displaying unwanted text has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• Interface administrators can configure gadgets from MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition. The definition format has been updated and no longer requires the ResourceLoader option, as gadgets are always loaded through ResourceLoader. This simplifies gadget configuration by removing an option that is no longer necessary, making gadget definitions easier for administrators.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

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 Future Audiences team has started a discussion on English Wikipedia about a proposed new experiment to show a temporary notice about the new Google Preferred Sources feature to Wikipedia readers coming from Google. The experiment is to test whether this notice makes visitors come back to Wikipedia more often. Preferred Sources feature lets users choose websites they trust so Google can highlight content from those sources more prominently in Search and AI experiences. We are interested in testing this on other languages that Google supports and would welcome assistance with starting conversations on other wikis. If interested, please reach out to Future Audiences on the talk page.

Updates for editors

• The chat platform Discord is releasing a new self-service framework that websites can use to specify how their links should look when shared on Discord. The Future Audiences team is planning to start using this new framework to improve how Wikipedia links look when shared on Discord, giving better attribution and credit to contributors. The link appearance and behavior won't change in the first phase of this project as we want to first collect some baseline data to assess the impact of future changes. However, if community members who are active on Discord spot any issues, they can reach out on Phabricator or Metawiki.
• The Reader Growth team will be running an experiment to test whether compacting article lead sections on mobiles with the addition of a "read more" button improves reader retention. The test will begin on September 17 on Arabic, Spanish, French, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Vietnamese, and Chinese Wikipedias and will run for four weeks.
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 23. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming week.
• View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where Wikistats for Wikipedias was returning an HTTP 500 error and could not be reached, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• Developers who maintain a tool that queries the Wikimedia Commons links tables need to update their code to connect to the new x4 database cluster. The links tables have been moved from the s4 cluster to x4, and will no longer receive updates on s4. The page and redirect tables remain available on both clusters. A wiki replica for the x4 cluster will be set up afterwards. The change is being made because the s4 cluster has grown too large to operate efficiently. You can read more.
• 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.

Highlights

• Data center switch: All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 23 at 14:00 UTC as part of a scheduled switchover to allow for essential maintenance and improvements. A banner will be displayed on all wikis 30 minutes in advance.
• Baseline NPOV Policy: The public conversation regarding the proposed baseline NPOV policy for Wikipedias that do not yet have one has been concluded. Read the summary report and the updated baseline NPOV policy text and enforcement guidance here.
• Save the date. Wikimania 2027 will be taking place in Santiago, Chile, and online from August 18 to 21, with the theme "The Internet we want". See the Wikimania 2026 coverage highlights and a brief update on what's ahead.
• Chart extension is now beginner-friendly: Creating graphs and charts previously required manual JSON editing. In response to a Community wish to make the Charts extension more user-friendly, a new Visual mode for adding values has been introduced.

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

• Introducing TextMatch: Communities are shaping Suggestion Mode with TextMatch to create custom suggestions that are tailored to their own policies and writing conventions. Share your feedback.
• Visual editor becoming default: Design work on the user experience for visual editing for newcomers is underway. This follows visual editor becoming default on English Wikipedia following a community discussion.
• Community Wishlist 2027 consultation: The consultation on the proposed new Wishlist process is closing this week. This year's cycle plans for wish submissions in late October/early November, triage completed by late November, and voting in early to mid January. Share feedback in any language on the talk page.
• Improved Add a Link feature: Add a Link has been upgraded for English Wikipedia users with improved detection of links that have different capitalization. This will help reduce ambiguous suggestions caused by differences in capitalization in article titles, including articles about cultural goods.
• Wikipedia Android app: Latest release includes updates to the Saved feature, bringing the app’s saving experience closer to iOS and Web. The update redesigns the Saved tab with an “All articles” view, removes the default “Saved” reading list, renames reading lists to “Collections,” and modernizes the article-saving experience.
• Domain change for thumbnails: The domain of URLs for thumbnails is changing from upload.wikimedia.org to thumb.wikimedia.org. The old URLs will continue to work but MediaWiki will advertise the new domain instead. Original files, videos, and transcodes will still be served from upload.wikimedia.org.
• Reading lists rollout continues on desktop: Following the initial deployment to Bengali, Chinese, Czech, and Vietnamese Wikipedias, reading lists went live on Arabic, French, and Indonesian Wikipedias and will go live on English Wikipedia on Sep 14, with all remaining wikis following on Sep 28.
• New features of Pageviews Analysis: Several new features have been added to the Pageviews Analysis tool which allows users to compare pageviews across multiple pages. They include WikiNav which provides insights into how readers of Wikipedia explore the content, editing stats in Siteviews, the ability to lookup articles belonging to a WikiProject, and support for dark mode.
• Article guidance: As part of an A/B experiment, Article guidance is now available in Turkish and Simple English.
• Latest experiments: A current experiment for logged-out mobile readers on Bengali, Czech, English, Farsi, and Polish Wikipedias is testing whether simplifying the Minerva navigation bar improves reader retention. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
• Wikifunctions status updates: Thanks to all contributors, Wikifunctions has now reached 5,000 functions.
• Latest highlights from Tech News: Weeks 36 and 37 of Tech News include the Article guidance feature is now enabled by default for editors with less than 100 edits on Simple English and Turkish Wikipedia.

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

• Affiliates and grant funding: Have your say on proposals establishing (1) a new model and set of expectations for movement affiliates; (2) new, connected requirements to determine eligibility for receiving Community Fund grants from the Wikimedia Foundation; and (3) updated criteria for affiliate recognition processes.
• Community Fund reflections: Read the reflections on the fiscal year 2025–2026 of the Rapid Fund and General Support Fund, covering $17.73 million across 427 grants in 90 countries, with 56.2% distributed outside North America and Northern & Western Europe.

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

• World of Wikipedia launches: The World of Wikipedia game has been released. It is an online collectible card game where players sort fact from fiction across Wikipedia articles to build their card library. The game is the latest experiment in reaching younger audiences through familiar formats, following Wikispeedia on Roblox and Which Came First? on the Wikipedia app.

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

• Celebrate Women 2026: Read the impact of Celebrate Women 2026 as the campaign concluded with 112 events, 238,222 unreverted content edits and 2,499,773,577 bytes added.
• US staff union vote: On Sep 3, eligible Wikimedia Foundation staff in the United States voted in favor of union representation in a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election.

Other Movement-curated newsletters & news
Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (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

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday, 23 September 2026 at 14:00 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.

Updates for editors

• The Growth team tested a new post-edit notice designed to encourage Temporary Account holders to register for a permanent account. The new notice replaced multiple dialogs and a simultaneous welcome notification with a single message highlighting the benefits of creating an account. The experiment increased permanent account creation from 1.94% to 3.66%, an 87% relative increase. The change will now be released to all wikis.
• For Wikipedia editors using the "Suggestion mode" Beta Feature, there is a new opt-in user preference for showing "experimental" edit checks and suggestions. These types are listed at Special:EditChecks, and are intended for early developer-testing and for gathering feedback from experienced users. Administrators can change the configuration details for each suggestion as usual. Administrators can also use this feature to help test their community's ideas for locally created checks and suggestions. Experimental types will have a more distinct visual style later this week. Feedback is welcome.
• The CEE Technical Village Pump has been launched as a space for technical discussions and collaboration among Wikimedia communities in Central and Eastern Europe.
• A new tool, Starter Kit, is now available for new and small language Wikipedia communities. It brings together guided tasks, tools, and resources to help communities get started, monitor their progress, and collaborate with the broader Wikimedia community. Starter Kit is hosted on Wikimedia Toolforge and is designed for Wikipedias with fewer than 50,000 articles. Learn more about how Starter Kit works and how communities have been using it in this Diff blog post.
• The Reader Growth team is launching a retest of the image carousel experiment. The retest will use three new versions of the design, updated based on community feedback. The team will assess results and determine with communities whether or not to proceed with the feature. The experiment will begin the week of September 28 and will run on Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Czech, English, Farsi, French, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
• After successful rollouts to Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Czech, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias, the Reading Lists feature from the Reader Experience team will be available to all logged-in users on all Wikipedia wikis starting September 28.
• View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the mentor status script repeatedly updated mentors’ status even when nothing had changed, creating unnecessary Recent Changes entries, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The abusefilters list query API, used to retrieve specific details about active or historical abuse filters configured on a wiki, has been updated to support the formatversion=2 configuration parameter, thereby leading to breaking changes to the API response. All users who maintain user-scripts or other code need to check if they use the abusefilters list query API, and respond to any breaking changes.
• 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.

Updates for editors

• Users of default skins on desktop and mobile web (Vector 2022 and Minerva respectively) will now be informed if the search suggestions displayed as they type into Search come from page redirects. Previously, users could get confused when the top search suggestions did not match exactly what they had typed. The new redirect notice clarifies that these suggestions are not random, but related to the search. The suggested pages may be redirects to the most relevant destination articles being searched for.
• 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. An earlier experiment found that the bookmark icon was four times more likely than the Watchstar button to encourage logged-out users to create an account. This change is part of efforts to encourage more readers to become account holders and use features that help them save and return to content.
• An experiment will begin on September 29 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. The experiment will run through the end of October.

• The Product and Technology Advisory Council has put out a call for the community to suggest topics that it should consider and discuss with the Wikimedia Foundation. Editors and technical contributors are invited to add topics to the council's talk page.
• Later this week, it will be 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.
• A bug in the Global Watchlist is causing the page to fail to load for users that have unseen changes on Wikimedia Commons. Developers are working on a fix. Until then, affected users can follow the workarounds described in the relevant help section.
• New magic words {{CATEGORYSORT:TIMESTAMP}} and {{CATEGORYSORT:RTIMESTAMP}} are now available for use. They are able to change the default sorting of categories to be based on timestamp of categorization.
• View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where Wikistats for Wikipedias was not reachable has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The datacenter switchover, scheduled on September 23, has been postponed. The equinox exercise revealed capacity issues, preventing the switch of all services to the other datacenter. The process has been paused, prioritizing investigating that issue, to ensure that we continue to be able to serve our users reliably. A new exercise will be scheduled. Meanwhile, all traffic and edits continue to work as usual.
• On September 23, a power loss briefly affected all wikis, creating intermittent issues on both reading and editing modes. This also affected Gerrit. This is unrelated to the datacenter switchover postponement.
• Produnto has been deployed to mediawiki.org and some Indic language wikis. We want to hear your feedback on this experimental product. Produnto allows users to use Lua modules hosted in Wikimedia's GitLab. It simplifies the sharing of Lua code between wikis. Instead of copying each individual Lua module from one wiki to another, users will be able to easily share packages across all wikis.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• A Cross-wiki code collaboration workshop will be held online on October 2 at 12:30 UTC, bringing together South Asian technical contributors to learn about Produnto and begin piloting it on Hindi, Punjabi, Odia, Telugu, and Malayalam Wikipedias. Produnto is a package manager for deploying Lua modules hosted on GitLab to Wikimedia wikis, and was recently deployed on some pilot wikis.

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

Highlights

• Introducing the Wikipedia Starter Kit: The Foundation has launched a new Toolforge-hosted tool giving new and small language Wikipedia communities a guided pathway through essential onboarding tasks, activity indicators, and connections to the wider movement.
• Apply for a scholarship to Wikimania 2027: Scholarship applications are now open to attend Wikimania 2027 in Santiago. To help with preparing submissions, orientation sessions in Spanish, Portuguese, and English will be held starting the week of October 5. The final deadline is October 31.
• Reading Lists rolling out to all Wikipedias: Starting September 28, logged-in users on every Wikipedia will be able to save articles to a "read later" list using the bookmark icon, following successful rollouts on Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Czech, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
• WikiCelebrate: WikiCelebrating Juan "BugWarp" Kulichevsky, who has contributed to Wikimedia projects since childhood and is passionate about sports photography and community building in Argentina and beyond.
• The 2026 appointment cycle is open now through 31 October 2026 for the Ombuds Commission (OC) and the Case Review Committee (CRC). You can learn more about the committees, the roles, and how to apply on the Committee Appointments page on Meta-wiki.

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

• Community Wishlist 2027: The Community Wishlist Process is now updated, taking into account the feedback received. Look out for the call for wish submissions towards the end of October.
• Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2026: From Sep 18-20, Wikimedians, open-knowledge researchers, and free-culture advocates from Central and Eastern Europe gathered for the first time in Romania. Take a look at the novelties and history behind CEE Meeting.
• Increasing account creation: To convert more casual users into logged-in daily users, the evergreen account creation prompt is released into Beta / TestFlight for iOS and Android. Also, a new post-edit notice designed to encourage Temporary Account holders to register for a permanent account will now be released to all wikis. The new notice has proven to increase permanent account creation from 1.94% to 3.66%.
• VisualEditor is now the default at English Wikipedia: this wiki has now adopted VisualEditor as the default editor on both desktop and mobile web, following a sitewide discussion that found overwhelming consensus to make the change.
• Retesting image carousel: The image carousel experiment will be retested using three new versions of the design, updated based on community feedback. The team will assess results and determine with communities whether or not to proceed with the feature.
• Wikifunctions: Your code can now call back to the Wikidata fetch functions. Wikifunctions have deployed an initial capability by which a code Implementation (in JavaScript or Python) can call certain other Wikifunctions Functions, get back the result, and have it available for further processing.
• Latest experiments: A current experiment is testing whether offering a "generic guidance" path for Article Guidance that does not depend on a Wikidata match would increase the chances of more article creation attempts. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
• Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News weeks 38 and 39 include a Reader Growth experiment testing whether showing only part of an article at first on mobile, with a “Read more” button to reveal the rest, encourages people to keep reading. See also the 56 community-submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
• Suggestions for Transliterated Search: If you regularly use two different writing systems (such as Hindi and Latin alphabet), sometimes you accidentally type with the wrong one and need to switch to the right keyboard. Now, this gadget will be able to suggest query based on what you typed.
• Peer-to-peer learning program: Let’s Connect, a peer-to-peer learning program is shifting to a community-organized model.
• LLM Paste Check rolling out to Wikipedia: A new Edit Check will prompt editors who paste text likely copied from an external AI chatbot to consider whether it aligns with movement AI-use policies and decide whether to keep or remove it. It goes live as a default-on feature at English Wikipedia on Sep 24 and at all Wikipedias on Oct 8.

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

• Wikidata bulk downloads now free via Wikimedia Enterprise: New beta API endpoints let anyone download full Wikidata snapshots and pull hourly batch diffs at no cost, opening up bulk access that previously required a paid tier.
• Accountability for Wikimedia production services: To ensure clear accountability for responding to incidents in Wikimedia production services, Wikimedia Foundation published the Service Catalog page. The page is the canonical source of service ownership for code deployed to the Wikimedia Foundation cluster. See also FAQ pages which contain more background details.
• Datacenter switchover has been postponed: The equinox exercise revealed capacity issues, preventing the switch of all services to the other datacenter. The process has been paused, prioritizing investigating that issue, to ensure that we continue to be able to serve our users reliably. A new exercise will be scheduled. Meanwhile, all traffic and edits continue to work as usual.
• Affiliates and grant funding: The conversations on the new proposed model, requirements and criteria continues until the end of next week with public calls on 1) Tuesday, September 29, 16:00-17:00 UTC on affiliate growth paths and Friday, October 2nd, 17:00-18:00 UTC on affiliate overlaps.

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

• AI literacy program: A new regional initiative in ASEAN was launched to support training and conversations around AI literacy, accountability, and Indigenous self-determination.
• Testing Google preferred sources: An experiment is proposed on English Wikipedia to run a temporary (2-week) notice asking readers who come from Google to set Wikipedia as a “preferred source” in Google. We would see if this causes people who use Google to visit Wikipedia more. If your language wiki is interested, please reach out on the project's talk page.

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

• The process for this year’s Community Wishlist has been published, incorporating community feedback. The wish submission process will end on November 8. This year, a working group (open for volunteering) that includes community members familiar with the technical aspect of our wikis alongside Wikimedia Foundation staff, will take care of the triage process. The triage is expected to be completed by late November. Votes for wishes will start in January.

Updates for editors

• Editors using the visual editor will now see a warning when they paste text that is likely to have initially been copied from one of five external generative AI chatbots into Wikipedia. This feature is known as LLM Paste Check. It is a type of Edit Check that is community configurable. The check looks for markers in the copied HTML and is not using content watermark detection. Edits will also be tagged so that patrollers can review them more closely. The feature helps newcomers add content that respects Wikipedia’s policies and makes it easier for experienced editors to identify problematic edits. Communities with local policies about LLM usage can adjust the wording and policy that is linked. The team apologizes that this was rolled out without a delay for translations.
• Editors can now easily access the web visual editor directly from the iOS and Android apps. When opening the editor, users will be given a choice between visual editing and source editing. If they choose visual editing, they will be sent to a mobile web window in their phone's browser. After completing their edit, a banner will give them the option to return to the app. This enables readers to make quick contributions while casually reading.
• Users of the Wikipedia Android and iOS apps will now see a one-time account creation prompt after they have used the app for two consecutive weeks. This prompt explains the benefits of having an account. It is intended to help more casual readers become logged-in users who return to the apps regularly.
• Editors on group1 wikis, including Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikivoyage, and Wikisource, will no longer see notifications on Recent Changes and Watchlist when a link to another language version of a page is added, removed, or changed in its Wikidata item. This change will begin on October 5 at 07:00 UTC as a two-week trial to reduce high-volume, low-value notifications and make important changes easier to identify. Editors who rely on these notifications can read more on the project page and share feedback or concerns on the talk page.
• View all 36 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where mentors who removed themselves from the mentorship program could still have mentees assigned to them and receive questions, has now been fixed. Mentees will now be reassigned when a mentor leaves the program.

Updates for technical contributors

• Wikimedia Brasil has published its Development Best Practices Framework (ABPD). It is a guide for staff, contractors and volunteers building technical tools and projects. It covers the project lifecycle, security, accessibility, personal data protection and responsible AI use, and explains how movement-wide guidelines were adapted to a local context. They encourage other affiliates to reuse it and adapt it. Read more in the Diff post.
• A new, canonical base URL for Wikimedia APIs will soon be introduced. The new canonical route follows a {projectName}/api/ pattern and will act as an alternative path for current REST APIs (for example: {projectName}/w/rest.php/). Both versions will be callable for all existing APIs, but the new structure will be the preferred path for newly created API modules. This change will be non-breaking for most users. The existing pathways will remain available for all existing endpoint requests. However, some endpoints may return URLs following the new pattern in response bodies. Changes will be available on test wiki first, with the rollout expected to cover all wikis by the end of October.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki.

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