Tech News 2026, week 10 – Diff
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from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
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Weekly highlight
Wikipedia 25
Birthday mode
is now live on Betawi, Breton, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, Gorontalo, Indonesian, Italian, Luxembourgish, Madurese, Sicilian, Spanish, Thai, and Vietnamese Wikipedias! This limited-time campaign feature celebrates 25 years of Wikipedia with a birthday mascot, Baby Globe. When turned on, Baby Globe is shown on
~2,500 articles
, waiting to be discovered by readers. Communities can choose to turn Birthday mode on by getting consensus from their community and asking an admin to enable the feature and customize it via
community configuration
on the local wiki.
Updates for editors
Sub-referencing
, a new feature to re-use references with different details has been released to Swedish Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia and
a couple of other wikis
. You can
try the feature
on these projects or on testwiki and
betawiki
. Learnings from the first pilot wiki German Wikipedia have been
published in a report
. Reach out to the Wikimedia Deutschland team if you are
interested in becoming a pilot wiki
Paste Check
will become available at all Wikipedias this week. The feature prompts newcomers who are pasting text they are not likely to have written into VisualEditor to consider whether doing so risks a copyright violation. Paste Check
tags
all edits where it is shown for potential review. Local administrators can configure various aspects of the feature via
Special:EditChecks
Research
across 22 wikis found that Paste Check resulted in an 18% decrease in relative reverted-edits compared to the control group. Translators can
help to localize
this and related features.
The
Reader Experience team
will be standardizing the user menu in the top right for all mobile users so that it is closer to the desktop experience. Currently this user menu is only visible to users with Advanced Mobile Controls (AMC) turned on. The only change is that a couple buttons previously in the left-side menu will move to the top right for users who do not have AMC turned on. This change is expected to go out March 9 and seeks to improve the user interface.
[1]
Starting in the week of March 2, the emails sent out when an email address was added, removed, or changed for an account will switch to a substantially nicer and clearer HTML email from the prior plaintext one.
[2]
Notifications are currently limited to 2,000 historic entries per user, and extend back to 2013 when the feature was released. This is going to be changed to only store Notifications from the last 5 years, but up to 10,000 of them. This will help with long-term infrastructure health and help to prevent more recent notifications from disappearing too soon.
[3]
The
Global Watchlist
which lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on a single page continues to see improvements. The latest update improves label usage experience. The
extension
now allows activating the
language fallback system
for Wikidata items without labels in the viewed language, and showing those labels in the user’s preferred Wikidata language if no
uselang=
URL parameter is provided.
[4]
[5]
The Wikipedia Android team has started a beta test of
hybrid search
on Greek Wikipedia. Hybrid search capabilities can handle both semantic and keyword queries enabling readers to find what they’re looking for directly on Wikipedia more easily.
For security reasons, members of certain user groups are
required to have two-factor authentication
(2FA) enabled. Currently, 2FA is required to use the group, but not to be a member of it. Given that this model still has some vulnerabilities, the situation will
gradually change in March
. Members of these groups will be unable to disable last 2FA method on their account, and it will be impossible to add users without 2FA to these groups. Users will still be able to add new authentication methods or remove them, as long as at least one method is continuously enabled. In the second half of March, users without 2FA will be removed from these groups. This applies to: CentralNotice administrators, checkusers, interface administrators, suppressors, Wikidata staff, Wikifunctions staff, WMF Office IT and WMF Trust & Safety. Nothing will change for other users. See the linked task for deployment schedule.
[6]
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, the issue preventing users from creating an instance in
Wikibase.cloud
has now been fixed.
[7]
Updates for technical contributors
To help ensure
fair use of infrastructure
, over the next month the Wikimedia Foundation will implement global API rate limits across our APIs. In early March, stricter limits will be applied to unidentified requests from outside Toolforge/WMCS and API requests that are made from web browsers. In April, higher limits will be applied to identified traffic. These limits are intentionally set as high as possible to minimise impact on the community. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, see
Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits
The Wikidata Query Service Linked Data Fragment (LDF) endpoint will be decommissioned in February. This endpoint served limited traffic, which was successfully migrated to other data access methods that were better suited to support existing use cases. The hardware used to support the LDF endpoint will be reallocated to support the ongoing backend migration efforts.
[8]
The new Parsoid parser
continues to be deployed to additional wikis
, improving platform sustainability and making it easier to introduce new reading and editing features. Parsoid is now the default parser on 488 WMF wikis (268 Wikipedias), now covering more than 10% of all Wikipedia page views.
The process and criteria for
requesting exceptional access
to the high volume feed of the
Wikimedia Enterprise
APIs (at no cost for mission-aligned usecases),
have now been published
. This is to provide more thorough and clearer documentation for users.
Tech Blog
, the blog dedicated to the Wikimedia technical community
will be migrating
to
Diff
, the community news and event blog. The migration should be complete in April 2026, after which new posts will be accepted for publishing. Readers will be able to access posts – old and new – on the landing page at
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
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