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Hello and welcome to the September newsletter, a quarterly digest of Guild activities since June.
Election news: Project coordinators play an important role in our WikiProject. Following the mid-year Election of Coordinators, we welcomed GoldRomean to the coordinator team. Dhtwiki remains as lead coordinator, and Miniapolis and Mox Eden return as coordinators. If you'd like to help out behind the scenes, please consider taking part in our December election – watchlist our ombox for updates. Information about the role of coordinators can be found here.
June 2025 blitz: 10 of the 12 editors who signed up for the June 2025 Copy Editing Blitz copy edited a total of 26,652 words comprising 13 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
July 2025 drive: 30 of the 54 editors who signed up for the July 2025 Backlog Elimination Drive copy edited a total of 379,557 words comprising 151 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
August 2025 Blitz: 11 of the 17 editors who signed up for the August 2025 Copy Editing Blitz copy edited a total of 65,601 words comprising 25 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
September 2025 Drive:Sign up here to earn barnstars in our month-long, in-progress September Backlog Elimination Drive.
Progress report: As of 06:43, 20 September 2025 (UTC), GOCE copyeditors have processed 222 requests since 1 January, and the backlog of tagged articles stands at 2,010 articles.
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we do without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators.
To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
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. [1]
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. [2]
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. [3]
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. [4]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikiquote in Malay (q:ms:) [5]
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the User Info Card now displays currently active global lock/blocks. [6]
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. [7]
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. [8]
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. [9]
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. [10]
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. [11]
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. [12]
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. [13]
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.
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. [14]
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. [15]
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. [16][17]
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. [18]
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.
In this edition, we’ll walk you through the major updates, experiments, and improvements that took place in the Wikipedia mobile apps during July, August, and September.
In July, we released the first iteration of Tabbed Browsing to all users.
Our 30-day A/B test showed mixed but promising results: while logged-out user retention gains were modest compared to Android, survey feedback was overwhelmingly positive (93% rated the feature “Neutral to Very Satisfactory”).
We continued improvements throughout August and September, including a design review for “More Dynamic Tabs,” a new tab controller, and bug fixes such as inconsistent tab sizing on iPad mini and tooltip issues.
Work continued on Year in Review upgrades, with spikes exploring features such as sharing entire reviews, custom app icons, and showing which geographies users read about the most.
We also began preparing overall app data to share richer collective insights.
Released several app versions (7.8.1 through 7.8.3), with smoke tests completed.
Resolved numerous bugs including crashes (tooltips, gestures, search), iPad layout issues, and visual problems with captions, Quick Facts, and images in Dark Mode.
Added a new REST endpoint for remote configuration and upgraded fundraising configurations to support A/B testing.
Verified continued compatibility with multi-factor authentication (MFA).
In August, we launched the Customizable Donation Reminder experiment in Italy. The reminder will allow users to decide if they want to be reminded to donate, and how often.
By September, we finalized core modules, onboarding, instrumentation, and validation tasks needed for the A/B test of the new Activity Tab against the Edit Tab.
This marks a major step toward testing whether an Activity space can improve multi-day engagement and retention.
This quarter marked a big step forward on Tabbed Browsing, Activity Tab, and Year in Review — three projects aimed at making Wikipedia more personal, navigable, and engaging. We also advanced donation experiments and backend improvements to support future flexibility.
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. [19]
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. [20]
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. [21]
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. [22]
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. [23]
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. [24]
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!
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). [25]
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. [26]
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. [27]
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. [28]
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! [29]
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. [30]
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. [31]
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. [32]
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. [34]
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. [35][36][37]
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. [38]
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. [39]
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. [40]
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example the inability to lock accounts on mobile sites has been fixed. [41]
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. [43]
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. [45]
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. [46][47]
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.
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. [49]
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. [50]
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. [51]
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. [52]
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). [53]
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.
You're receiving this message because you signed up for the mailing list. To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself from the list.
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. [54]
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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