User talk:Ocaasi - Wikipedia

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 CampaignEvents extension now includes a new group goal-setting feature, enabling organizers to set and track event goals such as the number of articles created and participating contributors in real time. Similarly, participants can work toward shared targets and see their collective impact as the event unfolds. The feature is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. Learn more in the documentation.
• The new watchlist labels feature (announced in Tech News 2026-07) is now available via VisualEditor, the source editor, and the 'watchstar' (or watch link, for skins that don't have a star icon). Previously it was only possible to assign labels via EditWatchlist. In all three places it is a new field following the expiry field.
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where talk pages on mobile with Parsoid are unusable after empty section headers, has now been fixed. [1]

Updates for technical contributors

• The sub-referencing feature, which lets editors add details to an existing reference without duplicating it, will be gradually rolled out to more wikis later this year. Wikis using the Reference Tooltips gadget are encouraged to update their version (typically at MediaWiki:Gadget-ReferenceTooltips.js as shown here) to ensure compatibility. Other reference-related gadgets may also be affected. [2]
• All Wikinews editions will be closed and switched to read-only mode on 4 May 2026. Content will remain accessible, but no new edits or articles can be added. This closure was approved by the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation following extended discussions. Read more.
• The Action API has had several formats for requested output. One of them, format=php, is being removed soon. Please ensure your scripts or bots use the JSON format. This removal should affect very few scripts and bots. [3]
• The Special:NamespaceInfo page now includes namespace aliases. For example "WP" for the "Project" ("Wikipedia") namespace on the German Wikipedia. [4]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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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.

Weekly highlight

• Experienced editors are invited to test the Article guidance feature, designed to help less-experienced editors create well-structured, policy-compliant Wikipedia articles. Testing instructions are available. Also, after reviewing the outlines, please provide feedback on the project talk page. Based on your input, the feature will be refined and transferred to the pilot Wikipedias to translate and adapt. Check out the video explaining the feature.

Updates for editors

• On most wikis, all autoconfirmed users can now use Special:ChangeContentModel page to create new pages with custom content models, such as mass message lists, making custom page formats more accessible. Check Special:ListGroupRights for the status of your wiki. [5]
• The Growth team has launched an account creation experiment to evaluate whether adding an account creation button to the mobile web header increases new account registrations and encourages more mobile users to contribute to the wikis. The experiment is currently live on Hindi, Indonesian, Bengali, Thai, and Hebrew Wikipedia, and targets 10% of logged-out mobile web users.
• View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where VisualEditor could get stuck loading on Windows devices with animations turned off, has now been fixed. [6]

Updates for technical contributors

• Starting later this week, Edit filter managers who have the ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽ beta feature enabled will have CodeMirror instead of CodeEditor as the editor at Special:AbuseFilter. This is part of the broader effort to make the user experience more consistent across all editors. [7][8]
• Tools and bots that access the Notifications API (action=query&meta=notifications) will need to update their OAuth or BotPassword grants to also include access to private notifications. [9]
• Due to a library upgrade, listings on category pages may be displayed out of order starting on Monday, 20th April. A migration script will be run to correct this, and will take hours to days depending on the size of the wiki (up to a week for English Wikipedia). [10]
• 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.

Highlights

• Community Wishlist update: This monthly update covers how 44 wishes were fulfilled, 17 are in progress, and 15 more will start work soon. It includes completion of work on Watchlist labels, which allow users to add labels to items in their watchlist to help with managing and filtering; fixing a bug with preview page feature; indexing of Commons on Google & DuckDuckGo search; and a wish simplifying the insertion of maths formulas in articles. You can submit, vote on, and subscribe to wishes here.
• Goal setting for edit-a-thons: The CampaignEvents extension now includes a new group goal-setting feature, enabling organizers to set and track event goals such as the number of articles created and participating contributors in real time. This feature is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. Join the Connection Learning Session on April 14 at 16:00 UTC to learn more about this feature and new ways to promote events and campaigns to editors.
• Collaboration with the United Nations: Learn how the Foundation engages with the United Nations to secure our collective voice and protect free knowledge.

Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org

• Navigating articles on mobile: The Foundation is launching an experiment to test how to make it easier and more intuitive for readers to navigate through articles on mobile. To do this, we want to test Mobile Page Previews. This experiment will go live the week of April 20 and will run for four weeks.
• Editing tools for new editors: Tone Check was deployed on French, Japanese, and Portuguese Wikipedia as a default-on feature for editors who have published 100 or fewer edits locally. When promotional or subjective language is added, users are prompted to consider "neutralizing" the tone of the edit.
• Managing watchlist labels: The new watchlist labels feature is now available via VisualEditor, the source editor, and the "watchstar" (or watch link, for skins that don’t have a star icon). Previously it was only possible to assign labels via EditWatchlist.
• Latest experiments: See all upcoming, live, in-analysis, and completed experiments in Product & Technology. A new experiment that just went live is one which aims to establish a baseline retention rate for logged-in readers.
• Latest Wikifunctions: Check out the partial list of the 102 new functions created last week – likely the first week we have exceeded 100.
• Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News weeks 14 and 15 include an ongoing A/B test running on 10 Wikipedias to evaluate a clearer, more user-friendly message that promotes account creation on wikis. See also the 68 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
• Community discussions on Semantic Search: The Wikimedia Foundation, in collaboration with the CEE Hub, hosted a discussion session on Semantic Search for members of the CEE Youth Group.

Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · The Wikipedia Library · list of movement events

• Don't Blink!: This month's highlights from the Global Advocacy team include how the Wikimedia Foundation co-presented alongside the Internet Archive at the State of the Net conference.
• Digital rights and inclusion: Take a look at the sessions that Wikimedians and allied partners will lead during Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum (DRIF) 2026.
• Manuscript preservation: The Wikimedia Foundation supported volunteer-lead workshops to write Balinese Wikipedia articles about palm-leaf manuscripts (lontar) from the Leiden University Library collection.
• Youth content creators: Wikimedia Indonesia, together with the Wikimedia Foundation, delivered an introductory session on Wikipedia for young content creators representing all 11 ASEAN member states.
• Legal and Safety Contacts: The Wikimedia Foundation has created a single "Legal and Safety Contacts" page, to be linked in the footer of each wiki page. This will ensure that everyone has access to accurate and up to date Legal contact information. Insertion of the new links on different wikis will be done in stages, based on assessment of legal risk and necessity.
• Building shared principals for the internet as a public good: The Global Advocacy team published a blog with the Center for Studies on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information (CELE) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) summarizing a workshop that brought together digital rights advocates from Latin America to dream of a "digital utopia."

Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness
See also: Progress on the annual plan

• Wikidata API: Wikidata’s structured knowledge is now available through Wikimedia Enterprise.
• Annual Planning and global trends: Join the America APP call on April 21 at 18:00 UTC. This meeting is an opportunity for the Latin American community to ensure that the region's voice helps shape the Wikimedia Foundation's work and priorities for the next fiscal year. The call will be in Spanish with interpretation into Portuguese and English. The last meeting between Wikimedia EDs and Foundation staff was dedicated to discuss global trends too. More discussions are happening on-wiki and in community spaces around different regions and projects.
• Futures Lab: The world is changing around us. As the Wikimedia movement navigates this moment over a hundred Wikimedians from different Wikimedia projects came together to deepen our understanding of how these trends are impacting our people and projects at the Wikimedia Futures Lab.
• Fundraising Hub: The Wikimedia Foundation has launched Fundraising Hub on English Wikipedia. The first discussion you can participate in is about distributing fundraising banner on English Wikipedia throughout the year.

Board and Board committee updates
See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter

• Ombuds Commission: Announcement of the 2026 Ombuds Commission, the small group of volunteers who investigate complaints about violations of the Privacy Policy, the Access to Nonpublic Personal Data Policy, the CheckUser Policy and the Oversight Policy.
• Wikinews closure: All Wikinews editions will be closed and switched to read-only mode on May 4. Content will remain accessible, but no new edits or articles will be able to be added. This closure was approved by the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation following extended discussions.

Other Movement-curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters

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

• After two years of development, ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽, also known as CodeMirror 6, is to be promoted out of beta on Tuesday, April 21. It brings better code and wikitext readability, reduction in typing errors, and other benefits to all users of the standard syntax highlighter. A huge thank you to volunteer Bhsd who developed many of the new features, including code folding, autocompletion, and linting. [11]
• A major update to the Wikipedia app for iOS is now rolling out, redesigning the interface to align with Apple's latest "Liquid Glass" visual design. Download the latest version and explore the update.

Updates for editors

• Reading lists is a feature which allows readers to save articles to a list for reading later. This feature is now in beta on Arabic, French, Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Chinese Wikipedias and by default for all new accounts on all Wikipedias.
• An experiment which explores extending Page Previews to mobile web will be launched in the week of April 20 on Arabic, English, French, Italian, Polish, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. Page Previews are pop-ups that display a thumbnail, lead paragraph, and a link to open the full article of a blue link, thereby improving content discovery. The feature is already available on desktop and in the apps. Read more about this experiment and others.
• On several wikis, logged-in editors who haven't confirmed their email addresses can now see a banner encouraging them to do so. Having the email address confirmed allows a user to restore access to the account if they lose it. Learn more. [12]
• View all 15 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where editing very large wiki pages in the 2017 wikitext editor caused slow loading, preview and scrolling lag, and performance issues when selecting, cutting, or pasting content, has now been fixed. [13]

Updates for technical contributors

• As part of the promotion of CodeMirror from a beta feature, all users will use CodeMirror instead of CodeEditor for syntax highlighting when editing JavaScript, CSS, JSON, Vue and Lua content pages. [14]
• The mirrors.wikimedia.org service for Debian and Ubuntu users will sunset and stop working on May 15. The resources for the service will be replaced with new and better options. Some users may need to switch to a different server which should take about a minute. You can read more. [15]
• The image and oldimage table will be removed from wikireplicas. If your tools or queries access image or oldimage directly, please update them to use the file and filerevision table before 28 May. [16]
• Following the recent implementation of global API rate limits on unidentified traffic, the Wikimedia Foundation will continue efforts to ensure fair use of infrastructure by applying global limits to identified API traffic beginning the last week of April. 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 and Frequently Asked Questions.
• The Attribution API is now available as a beta. The API fetches information for crediting Wikimedia articles and media files wherever they are used. Reference documentation is available through the REST Sandbox special page available on all Wikimedia wikis (such as the REST sandbox on English Wikipedia). Share your feedback on the project talk page.
• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

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