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Tech News: 2026-03
edit
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
will be updated too, as a part of the work on the
Revamp pagination / page navigation
wish.
[1]
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.
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
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.
[6]
Updates for technical contributors
The
VisualEditor citation tool
and
Reference Previews
now support "map" as a reference type.
[7]
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
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19:33, 12 January 2026 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2026-04
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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
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.
[8]
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.
[9]
[10]
[11]
[12]
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.
[13]
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.:
) 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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20:29, 19 January 2026 (UTC)
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Annual review of the Universal Code of Conduct and Enforcement Guidelines
edit
I am writing to you to let you know the annual review period for the Universal Code of Conduct and Enforcement Guidelines is open now. You can make suggestions for changes through 9 February 2026. This is the first step of several to be taken for the annual review.
Read more information and find a conversation to join on the UCoC page on Meta
The
Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee
(U4C) is a global group dedicated to providing an equitable and consistent implementation of the UCoC. This annual review was planned and implemented by the U4C. For more information and the responsibilities of the U4C,
you may review the U4C Charter
Please share this information with other members in your community wherever else might be appropriate.
-- In cooperation with the U4C,
Keegan (WMF)
talk
21:02, 19 January 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-05
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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
Wikimedia Foundation invites comments on
proposed future
of the
Product and Technology Advisory Council
until 28 February.
All users with registered accounts can now use passkeys for
two-factor authentication
(2FA). Passkeys are a simple way to log in without using a second device. They verify the user's identity using a fingerprint, face scan, or a PIN code. To set up a passkey, first set up a regular 2FA method. Currently, to log in with a passkey, users must also use a password. Later this quarter, passwordless login will allow users to log in with a single click and a passkey. Users with advanced rights will also be required to have 2FA enabled. This is part of the
Account Security
project.
Unregistered contributors on blocked IPs or blocked IP ranges can now interact on-wiki to appeal a block by creating a temporary account to appeal a block on the user talk page, unless the "prevent this user from editing their own talk page" is enabled. This solves the problem of logged-out users unable to use the default unblock process via user talk page.
[14]
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, the Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) methods description on the management page has been updated. It is now clearer and easier for users to understand and make use of.
[15]
Updates for technical contributors
A new AbuseFilter variable,
account_type
, has been added to provide a reliable way to determine the account type being created in the
createaccount
and
autocreateaccount
actions. As part of this change, the variable
accountname
has been renamed to
account_name
, and
accountname
is now deprecated. Edit filter managers should update any filters that use hardcoded account type checks or the deprecated variable.
[16]
Image thumbnails that are requested in non-standard sizes, and using non-standard methods such as direct requests to
upload.wikimedia.org/…
will stop working in the near future. This change is to prevent ongoing external abuse by web-scrapers and bots. Some users with custom CSS/JS, Interface Admins who can fix gadgets and local skins, and Tool-authors, will need to update their code to use standard thumbnail sizes.
Details, search-links, and examples of how to fix them, are available in the task
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
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21:17, 26 January 2026 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2026-06
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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
The "Page information" feature, which gives validating information about a page (
example
), now automatically includes a table of contents. If there is a local
MediaWiki:Pageinfo-header
page created by individual users, it can now be removed.
[17]
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, VisualEditor previously added bold or italic formatting inside link descriptions, making the wikicode complex. This has now been fixed.
[18]
Updates for technical contributors
There was no XML dump on 20 January. Additionally, from now on, dumps will be generated once per month only.
[19]
The MediaWiki Interfaces team removed support for all transform endpoints containing a trailing slash from the
MediaWiki REST API
. All API users currently calling those endpoints are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. If you have questions or encounter any problems, please file a ticket in phabricator to the
#MW-Interfaces-Team board
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
Weekly highlight
Users are reminded that 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
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17:43, 2 February 2026 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2026-07
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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
Logged-in contributors who manage large or complex watchlists can now organise and filter watched pages in ways that improve their workflows with the new
Watchlist labels
feature. By adding custom labels (for example: pages you created, pages being monitored for vandalism, or discussion pages) users can more quickly identify what needs attention, reduce cognitive load, and respond more efficiently. This improves watchlist usability, especially for highly active editors.
A new feature available on
Special:Contributions
shows
temporary accounts
that are likely operated by the same person, and so makes patrolling less time-consuming. Upon checking contributions of a temporary account, users with access to temporary account IP addresses can now see a view of contributions from the related temporary accounts. The feature looks up all the IPs associated with a given temporary account within the data retention period and shows all the contributions of all temporary accounts that have used these IPs.
[20]
When editors preview a wikitext edit, the reminder box that they are only seeing a preview (which is shown at the top), now has a grey/neutral background instead of a yellow/warning background. This makes it easier to distinguish preview notes from actual warnings (for example, edit conflicts or problematic redirect targets), which will now be shown in separate warning or error boxes.
[21]
The
Global Watchlist
lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The
extension
continues to improve — it now properly supports more than one Wikibase site, for example both
Wikidata
and
testwikidata
. In addition, issues regarding text direction have been fixed for users who prefer Wikidata or other Wikibase sites in right-to-left (RTL) languages.
[22]
[23]
The automatic "magic links" for ISBN, RFC, and PMID numbers have been
deprecated in wikitext since 2021
due to inflexibility and difficulties with localization. Several wikis have successfully replaced RFC and PMID magic links with equivalent external links, but a template was often required to replace the functionality of the ISBN magic link. There is now a new
built-in parser function
{{#isbn}}
available to replace the basic functionality of the ISBN magic link. This makes it easier for wikis who wish to migrate off of the deprecated magic link functionality to do so.
[24]
Two new wikis have been created:
a Wikipedia in
Jju
w:kaj:
[25]
a Wikipedia in
Nawat
w:ppl:
[26]
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
Updates for technical contributors
A new global user group has been created:
Local bots
. It will be used internally by the software to allow community bots to bypass rate limits that are applied to abusive
web scrapers
. Accounts that are approved as bots on at least one Wikimedia wiki will be automatically added to this group. It will not change what user permissions the bot has.
[27]
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
Meetings and events
The
MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference, Spring 2026
will be held March 25–27 in Salt Lake City, USA. This event is organized by and for the third-party MediaWiki community. You can propose sessions and register to attend.
[28]
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23:30, 9 February 2026 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2026-08
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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
The
SRE Team
will be performing a cleanup of Wikimedia's
Etherpad
instance, the web-based editor for real-time collaborative document editing. All pads will be permanently deleted after 30 April, 2026 – if there are still migration projects in progress at that point the team can revisit the date on a case by case basis. Please create local backups of any content you wish to keep, as deleted data cannot be recovered. This cleanup helps reduce database size and minimize infrastructure footprint. Etherpad will continue to support real-time collaboration, but long-term storage should not be expected. Additional cleanups may occur in the future without prior notice.
[29]
Updates for editors
The Information Retrieval team will be launching an
Android mobile app experiment
that tests hybrid search capabilities which can handle both semantic and keyword queries. The improvement of on-platform search will enable readers to find what they’re looking for directly on Wikipedia more easily. The experiment will first be launched on Greek Wikipedia in late February, followed by English, French, and Portuguese in March.
on Diff blog.
[30]
The Reader Growth team will run
an experiment
for mobile web users, that adds a table of contents and automatically expands all article sections, to learn more about navigation issues they face. The test will be available on Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
Previously, site notices (
MediaWiki:Sitenotice
and
MediaWiki:Anonnotice
) would only render on the desktop site. Now, they will render on all platforms. Users on mobile web will now see these notices and be informed. Site administrators should be prepared to test and fix notices on mobile devices to avoid interference with articles. To opt out, interface admins can add
#siteNotice { display: none; }
to
MediaWiki:Minerva.css
[31]
[32]
View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, an issue on
Special:RecentChanges
has been fixed. Previously, clicking hide in the active filters caused the "view new changes since…" button to disappear, though it should have remained visible. The button now behaves as expected.
[33]
Updates for technical contributors
New documentation is now available to help editors debug on-site search features. It supports troubleshooting when pages do not appear in results, when ranking seems unexpected, and when you need to inspect what content is being indexed, helping make search behavior easier to understand and analyze.
[34]
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
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19:17, 16 February 2026 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2026-09
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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
Reference Check
has been deployed to English Wikipedia, completing its rollout across all Wikipedias. The feature prompts newcomers to add a citation before publishing new content, helping reduce common citation-related reverts and improve verifiability. In A/B testing, the impact was substantial: newcomers shown Reference Check were approximately 2.2 times more likely to include a reference on desktop and about 17.5 times more likely on mobile web.
[35]
Updates for editors
The
InterwikiSorting extension
, which allowed for the
sorting of interwiki links
, has been undeployed from Wikipedia. As a result, editors who had enabled interwiki link sorting in non-compact mode (full list format) will now see links reordered. The links moving forward will be listed in the alphabetical order of language code.
[36]
Later this week, people who are editing a page-section using the mobile visual editor, will notice a new "Edit full page" button. When tapped, you will be able to edit the entire article. This helps when the change you want to make is outside the section you initially opened.
[37]
[38]
The Reader Experience team
is inviting editors to assess whether dark mode should still be considered "beta" on their wiki, based on their experience of how well it functions on desktop and mobile. If the feature is deemed mature, editors can update the interface messages in
MediaWiki:skin-theme-description
and
MediaWiki:Vector-night-mode-beta-tag
to indicate that dark mode is ready and no longer considered beta.
The improved
Activity tab
which displays user-insights is now available to all users of the Wikipedia iOS app (version 7.9.0 and later). Following earlier A/B testing that showed higher account creation among users with access to the feature, it has been rolled out to 100% of users along with some updates. The Activity tab now shows your edited articles in the timeline, offers editing impact insights like contribution counts and article view trends, and customization options to improve in-app experience for users.
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, a bug that prevented
DiscussionTools
from working on mobile has now been fixed, restoring full functionality.
[39]
Updates for technical contributors
The
Global Watchlist
lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The
extension
that makes this possible continues to improve. The latest upgrade is the inclusion of a
new hook
ext.globalwatchlist.rebuild
, which fires after each watchlist rebuild. This allows you to run gadgets and user scripts for the Special page.
[40]
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
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19:03, 23 February 2026 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2026-10
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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
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.
[41]
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.
[42]
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.
[43]
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.
[44]
[45]
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.
[46]
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.
[47]
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.
[48]
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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17:51, 2 March 2026 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2026-11
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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
All wikis will be read-only
for a few minutes on Wednesday, 25 March 2026 at
15:00 UTC
. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests,
which happen twice a year
. During the switchover, all Wikimedia website traffic is shifted from one primary data center to the backup data center to test availability and prevent service disruption even in emergencies.
Last week, all wikis had 2 hours of read-only time, and extended unavailability for user-scripts and gadgets. This was due to a security incident which has since been resolved. Work is ongoing to prevent re-occurrences. For current information please see the
post on the Stewards' noticeboard
translations
).
Updates for editors
Users facing multiple blocks on mobile will now see the reasons for each block separately, instead of a generic message. This helps them understand why they are blocked and what steps they can take to resolve the issue. For example, users affected for using common VPNs (such as
iCloud Private Relay
) will receive clearer guidance on what they need to do to start editing again.
[49]
Later this week,
Suggestion Mode
will become available as a beta feature within the visual editor at all Wikipedias. This feature proactively suggests various types of actions that people can consider taking to improve Wikipedia articles, and learn about related guidelines. The feature is locally configurable, and can also be locally expanded with custom Suggestions. Current settings can be seen at
Special:EditChecks
and there are
instructions for how administrators can customize
the links to point to local guidelines. The feature is connected to
Edit check
which suggests improvements while someone is writing new content. In the future, the Editing team plans to evaluate the feature's impact with newcomers through a controlled experiment.
[50]
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, the issue where the cursor became misaligned during the use of CodeMirror’s syntax highlighting, which makes wikitext and code easier to read, has now been fixed. This problem specifically affected users who defined a font rule in a custom stylesheet while creating a new topic with DiscussionTools.
[51]
Updates for technical contributors
API rate limiting update: To help ensure
fair use of infrastructure
, global API rate limits will be applied this week to requests without a compliant User-Agent that originate from outside Toolforge/WMCS and to unauthenticated requests made from web browsers. Higher limits will be applied to identified traffic in April. 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 new GraphQL API has been released. The API was developed as a flexible alternative to select features of the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS), to improve developer experience and foster adaptability, and efficient data access. Try it out and
give feedback
. You can also
sign up for usability tests
The
PTAC Unsupported Tools Working Group
continued improvements to
Video2Commons
in February, with fixes addressing authentication errors, large-file handling, task queue visibility, and clearer upload behavior. Work is still ongoing in some areas, including changes related to deprecated server-side uploads. Read
this update
to learn more.
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
In depth
The Article Guidance team invites experienced Wikipedia editors from selected
pilot wikis
and interested contributors from other Wikipedias to fill out this questionnaire which is available in
Arabic
Bengali
Japanese
Portuguese
Persian
, and
Turkish
. Your answers will help the team customize guidance for less experienced editors and help them learn community policies and practices while creating an article. Learn more
on the project page
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18:52, 9 March 2026 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2026-12
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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
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
[52]
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.
[53]
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.
[54]
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'.
[55]
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.
[56]
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
[57]
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
[58]
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.
[59]
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.
[60]
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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19:35, 16 March 2026 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2026-13
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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
Wikimedia site users can now log in without a password using passkeys. This is a secure method supported by fingerprint, facial recognition, or PIN. With this change, all users who opt for passwordless login will find it easier, faster, and more secure to log in to their accounts using any device. The new passkey login option currently appears as an autofill suggestion in the username field. An additional
"Log in with passkey" button
will soon be available for users who have already registered a passkey. This update will improve security and user experience. The
screen recording
demonstrates the passwordless login process step by step.
All wikis will be read-only
for a few minutes on Wednesday, 25 March 2026 at
15:00 UTC
. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests,
which happen twice a year
. During the switchover, all Wikimedia website traffic is shifted from one primary data center to the backup data center to test availability and prevent service disruption even in emergencies.
Updates for editors
Wikimedia site users can now export their notifications older than 5 years using a
new Toolforge tool
. This will ensure that users retain their important notifications and avoid them being lost based on the planned change to delete notifications older than 5 years, as previously announced.
[61]
Wikipedia editors in Indonesian, Thai, Turkish, and Simple English now have access to Special:PersonalDashboard. This is an
early version of an experience
that introduces newer editors to patrolling workflows, making it easier for them to move from making edits to participating in more advanced moderation work on their project.
[62]
The
Special:Block
now has two minor interface changes. Administrators can now easily perform indefinite blocks through a dedicated radio button in the expiry section. Also, choosing an indefinite expiry provides a different set of common reasons to select from, which can be changed at:
MediaWiki:Ipbreason-indef-dropdown
[63]
Mobile editors
at several wikis
can now see an improved logged-out edit warning, thanks to the recent updates from the Growth team. These changes released last week are part of ongoing efforts and tests to enhance
account creation experience on mobile
and then increase participation.
[64]
View all 36 community-submitted tasks that were
resolved last week
. For example, the bug that prevented mobile web users from seeing the block information when affected by multiple blocks has been fixed. They can now see messages of all the blocks currently affecting them when they access Wikipedia.
Updates for technical contributors
Images built using Toolforge will soon get the upgraded buildpacks version, bringing support for newer language versions and other upstream improvements and fixes. If you use Toolforge Build Service, review the recent
cloud-announce email
and update your build configuration as necessary to ensure your tools are compatible.
[65]
[66]
The
API Portal
documentation wiki will shut down in June 2026. API keys created on the API Portal will continue to work normally. api.wikimedia.org endpoints will be deprecated gradually starting in July 2026. Documentation on the API Portal is moving to
mediawiki.org
. Learn more on the
project page
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
In depth
WMDE Technical Wishes
is considering improvements to
automatically generated reference names in VisualEditor
. Please check out the
proposed solutions
and participate in the
request for comment
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16:51, 23 March 2026 (UTC)
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Tech News: 2026-14
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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
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.
[67]
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week:
MediaWiki
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19:25, 30 March 2026 (UTC)
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