Tech News 2026, week 14 – Diff
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Weekly highlight
The Beta version of
Abstract Wikipedia
a new Wikimedia project which is language-independent, was launched last week. The project allows communities to build Wikipedia articles in their native language, which can be readily accessed by other users in their own languages. The wiki is powered by instructions from Wikifunctions and also based on structured content from Wikidata.
Updates for editors
The Growth team is running an A/B test to evaluate a clearer, more user-friendly message that promotes account creation on wikis. Currently when logged-out mobile users begin editing, they see a jarring warning message that can feel abrupt and discouraging. This also presents temporary account editing as the default rather than encouraging account creation. The test is running on ten Wikipedias, including Arabic, French, Spanish and German.
The Wikimedia Apps team is inviting feedback on
how editing should work on the Wikipedia mobile apps
. The discussion focuses on improving how users access editing tools when they tap “Edit”. This is part of a broader effort to convert readers who develop an interest in editing, to access a more user-friendly pathway to start contributing.
View all 45 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, an issue where citation fetching from the large newspaper archive
Newspapers.com
was no longer working, due to a block in
Citoid
requests, has now been fixed.
[1]
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
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