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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.

Updates for editors

• Starting November 12, users will see a change in the appearance of talk pages on some Wikipedias. Almost all wikis have received this design change; English Wikipedia will get these changes later. You can read more on Diff. Users can opt out of these changes in their user preferences in "Show discussion activity". [1]
• 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. [2]
• 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. [3][4][5]
• 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. [6]
• 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. [7]
• 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. [8]
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example the inability to lock accounts on mobile sites has been fixed. [9]

Updates for technical contributors

• 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 will remain open through 2025-11-28.
• The JWT issuer field in OAuth 2 access tokens for SUL wikis has been changed to https://meta.wikimedia.org. Old access tokens will still work. [10]
• 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. [11]
• MediaWiki's block messages (blockedtext, blockedtext-partial, autoblockedtext, systemblockedtext, blockedtext-tempuser, autoblockedtext-tempuser) now support additional parameters indicating whether the user is blocked from editing their own user talk page $9 or emailing other users $10. [12]
• 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. [13]
• 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. [14][15]
• 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

• 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.
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikisource in Minangkabau (s:min:) [16]
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• 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.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• 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.

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

• 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. [17]
• 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. [18]
• 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. [19]

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. [20]
• 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). [21]
• 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.
• 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

• 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. [22]
• Two new wikis have been created:
  • a Wikipedia in Toki Pona (w:tok:) [23]
  • a Wikiquote in Nigerian Pidgin (q:pcm:) [24]

Updates for technical contributors

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• 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.

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

• Anybody who wishes to secure their user account can now use two-factor authentication (2FA). This is available to all registered users of all Wikimedia projects. This is part of the Account Security initiative. Later, 2FA will be required for all users who can take security- or privacy-sensitive actions.

Updates for editors

• Following last week's deployments, the Add a link feature, which allows editors to add suggested links during editing, will be available to an additional 33 Wikipedias starting on 9 December. This expansion is possible thanks to the new prediction model that now supports all languages, including those that were previously not covered. While the feature has been available on most Wikipedias for some time, this rollout brings us closer to using the improved model everywhere. If you have any questions or would like more details please contact Trizek (WMF).
• Last week, the Search Platform team added transliterated as-you-type search suggestions to Georgian wikis. If there are only a few regular search suggestions, then queries in Latin or Cyrillic script are now rewritten into Georgian script to look for more matches. For example, searching for either bedniereba or бедниереба will now suggest the existing article about ბედნიერება ("happiness"). You can recommend other languages where transliterated suggestions would be useful on Phabricator for future development.
• Later this week, a controlled experiment will begin for editors on the 100 largest Wikipedias who are editing a section in the mobile web visual editor. 50% of these editors will notice a new "Edit full page" button that will enable them to expand their editing session to the whole page. This feature is intended to make it easier for people on mobile web to edit any article section, regardless of which section-edit icon they tapped to begin. The experiment will last ~4 weeks. You can find more details about the project.
• Later this week, the Reader Growth team will launch a mobile web experiment to expand all article sections by default (currently they are collapsed by default) and pin the section header the user is currently reading to the top of the page. The experiment will affect 10% of users on Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. [25]
• The Wikipedia Year in Review 2025, a feature in the Wikipedia mobile apps (iOS and Android) that provides users with a personalised summary of their engagement with Wikipedia over the year, is now available on the iOS and Android apps. This edition includes expanded personalised insights, improved reading highlights, new donor messaging, and updated designs. Open the app to view your Year in Review and explore your reading journey from 2025.
• A recent software bug caused edits made with VisualEditor to make unintended changes to wikitext, including removing whitespace and replacing spaces with underscores in wikilinks inside citations. This was partially fixed last week, and further fixes are in progress. Editors who used VisualEditor between November 28 and December 2 should review their edits for unexpected modifications. [26]
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the incorrect handling of URLs copied from the address bar of Microsoft Edge users, has been resolved. [27]

Updates for technical contributors

• Starting this week, users of the "Improved Syntax Highlighting" beta feature will have CodeMirror as the editor for Lua, JavaScript, CSS, JSON and Vue content models, instead of CodeEditor. With this, the linters will be upgraded. This is part of a larger effort to eventually replace CodeEditor and provide a consistent code editing experience. [28]
• Developers are encouraged to take the 2025 Developer Satisfaction Survey, which remains open until 5 January 2026. If you build software for the Wikimedia ecosystem and would like to share your experiences or feedback, your participation is greatly appreciated. [29]
• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

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

• View all 18 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, one of the fixes addressed an issue for temporary accounts adding an external URL, which triggered an hCaptcha request in more cases than intended, and did not display the required popup on the first attempt to publish the edit. [30]

Updates for technical contributors

• To improve database and site performance, external links to Wikimedia projects will no longer be stored in the database. This means they will not be searchable in Special:LinkSearch, will not be checked by the Spam Blacklist or AbuseFilter as new links, and will not be in the externallinks table on database replicas. In the future this may be extended to other highly-linked trusted websites on a per-wiki basis, such as Creative Commons links on Wikimedia Commons. [31]
• 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

• From January, edit filters can be set to automatically suppress their details such as rules and list of attempted edits and actions. This will help oversighters use edit filters to prevent doxxing or other suppressible material. [32]
• The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 12 January 2026 because of the end of year holidays. Thank you to all of the translators, and people who submitted content or feedback, this year.
• View all 16 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the crash that occurred when tapping "First Steps" in the Wikipedia Android Year in Review has now been fixed, and the feature opens as expected. [33]

Updates for technical contributors

• Interface elements such as diffs and categories generated by MediaWiki used to have the attribute data-mw="interface" to distinguish from wiki content. The attribute has been replaced with data-mw-interface="", to avoid potential conflicts with other data-mw attributes, which are generated by Parsoid. [34]
• There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.

Meetings and events

• The Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026 will take place on 13-14 March 2026 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Applications just opened mid-December and will close in mid-January or earlier if capacity is reached. With space for approximately 100 participants, early application is encouraged.

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 Wikimedia Foundation has shared some guiding questions for the July 2026–June 2027 Annual Plan on Meta and Diff. These focus on global trends, faster and healthier experimentation, better support for newcomers, strengthening editors and advanced users, improving collaboration across projects, and growing and retaining readership. Feedback and ideas are welcome on the talk page.

Updates for editors

• As part of the current work of Community Tech team on the Multiple watchlists project, the display of EditWatchlist will be updated as a first step towards multiple watchlists. Additionally, the pagination on Search will be updated too, as a part of the work on the Revamp pagination / page navigation wish. [35]
• The Global Watchlist is a MediaWiki extension that lets you see your watchlists from different wikis on the same page. It was recently updated to look more like the regular Watchlist, such as preparing it for temporary accounts in IP masking (including rerouting user links to contributions pages), making page titles bold, and opening links in edit summaries and tags in new browser tabs. [36][37][38][39]
• View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where global blocks did not have the option to disable sending emails, has now been fixed, and will be available for use in the week of January 13. [40]

Updates for technical contributors

• The VisualEditor citation tool and Reference Previews now support "map" as a reference type. [41]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki/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

• The tray shown on Special:Diff in mobile view has been redesigned. It is now collapsed by default, and incorporates a link to undo the edit being viewed, making it easier for mobile editors and reviewers to take action while keeping the interface uncluttered. [42]
• The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension continues to improve — it now automatically determines the text direction (ensuring correct display of sites with unusual domain names) and shows detailed descriptions for log actions. Later this week, a new permanent link for page creations and CSS classes for each entry element will be added. [43][44][45][46]
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the previously observed issue in Vector 2022, where anchor link targets were obscured by the sticky header, has now been addressed. [47]

Updates for technical contributors

• As mentioned in the October 2025 deprecation announcement, MediaWiki Interfaces team will begin sunsetting all transform endpoints containing a trailing slash from the MediaWiki REST API the week of January 26. Changes are expected to roll out to all wikis on or before January 30th. All API users currently calling them are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. Both endpoint variations can be found, compared, and tested using the REST Sandbox. If you have questions or encounter any problems, please file a ticket in Phabricator to the #MW-Interfaces-Team board.
• Interactive reference documentation for the Wikimedia REST API has moved. Requests to API docs previously hosted through RESTBase (e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/) are now redirected to the REST Sandbox.
• The WMF Wikidata Platform team (WDP) has published its January 2026 newsletter. It includes updates on the legacy full-graph endpoint decommissioning, the User-Agent policy change, the monthly Blazegraph migration office hours, and efforts to reduce regressions caused by the legacy endpoint shutdown. As a reminder, you can subscribe to the WDP newsletter!
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• The Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026 will take place on 13-14 March 2026 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Applications opened mid-December and will close soon or when capacity is reached. It's a two-day, technically oriented hackathon bringing together Wikimedians from the region. Hope to see you there!

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