Tech News 2026, week 12 – 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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Updates for editors
The
Improved Syntax Highlighting
beta feature, also known as
CodeMirror 6
, has been used for wikitext syntax highlighting since November 2024. It will be promoted out of beta by May 2026 in order to bring improvements and new
features
to all editors who use the standard syntax highlighter. If you have any questions or concerns about promoting the feature out of beta,
please share
[1]
Some changes to local user groups are performed by stewards on Meta-Wiki and logged there only. Now, interwiki rights changes will be logged both on Meta-Wiki and the wiki of the target user to make it easier to access a full record of user’s rights changes on a local wiki. Past log entries for such changes will be backfilled in the coming weeks.
[2]
On wikis using
Flagged Revisions
, the number of pending changes shown on
Special:PendingChanges
previously counted pages which were no longer pending review, because they have been removed from the system without being reviewed, e.g. due to being deleted, moved to a different namespace, or due to wiki configuration changes. The count will be correct now. On some wikis the number shown will be much smaller than before. There should be no change to the list of pages itself.
[3]
Wikifunctions composition language has been rewritten, resulting in a new version of the language. This change aims to increase service stability by reducing the orchestrator’s memory consumption. This rewrite also enables substantial latency reduction, code simplification, and better abstractions, which will open the door to later feature additions. Read more about
the changes
Users can now sort search results alphabetically by page title. The update gives an additional option to finding pages more easily and quickly. Previously, results could be sorted by Edit date, Creation date, or Relevance. To use the new option, open ‘Advanced Search’ on the search results page and select ‘Alphabetically’ under ‘Sorting Order’.
[4]
View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, the bug that prevented UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons from importing files from Flickr has now been fixed.
[5]
Updates for technical contributors
A new special page,
Special:LintTemplateErrors
, has been created to list transcluded pages that are flagged as containing lint errors to help users discover them easily. The list is sorted by the number of transclusions with errors. For example:
Special:LintTemplateErrors/night-mode-unaware-background-color
[6]
Users of the
Improved Syntax Highlighting
beta feature have been using
CodeMirror
instead of
CodeEditor
for syntax highlighting when editing JavaScript, CSS, JSON, Vue and Lua content pages, for some time now. Along with promoting CodeMirror 6 out of beta, the plan is to replace CodeEditor as the standard editor for these content models by May 2026.
Feedback or concerns are welcome
[7]
The
CodeMirror
JavaScript modules will soon be upgraded to CodeMirror 6. Leading up to the upgrade, loading the
ext.CodeMirror
or
ext.CodeMirror.lib
modules from gadgets and user scripts was deprecated in July 2025. The use of the
ext.CodeMirror.switch
hook was also deprecated in March 2025. Contributors can now make their scripts or gadgets compatible with CodeMirror 6. See the
migration guide
for more information.
[8]
The MediaWiki Interfaces team is expanding coverage of REST API module definitions to include
extension APIs
. REST API modules are groups of related endpoints that can be independently managed and versioned. Modules now exist for
GrowthExperiments
and
Wikifunctions
APIs. As we migrate extension APIs to this structure, documentation will move out of the main MediaWiki OpenAPI spec and REST Sandbox view, and will instead be accessible via module-specific options in the dropdown on the
REST Sandbox
(i.e.,
Special:RestSandbox
, available on all wiki projects).
The
Scribunto
extension provides different pieces of information about the wiki where the module is being used via the
mw.site
library. Starting last week, the library also provides a
way
of accessing the
wiki ID
that can be used to facilitate cross-wiki module maintenance.
[9]
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
In depth
The
2026 Coolest Tool Award
celebrating outstanding community tools, is now open for nominations! Nominate your favorite tool using the
nomination survey
form by 23 March 2026. For more information on privacy and data handling, please see the
survey privacy statement
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