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Tech News: 2026-31
[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.
Updates for editors
Content Translation now supports dark mode, fulfilling a Community Wishlist request. This brings the tool in line with the accessibility features available in the Vector 2022 and Minerva skins, helping reduce visual fatigue for users translating content. - DiscussionTools' source mode and the 2017 wikitext editor will now offer autocomplete for links (
[[), templates ({{), HTML and parser tags (<), and magic words (__), making it quicker and easier to insert links, templates, and other wiki markup while editing. - The Readers Growth team has concluded its experiment with mobile page previews and will not roll out the feature. Page Previews are a pop-up bottom sheet that appears when readers tap a blue link, showing a thumbnail, lead paragraph, and an option to open the article. The experiment showed flat retention and negative indicator metrics, suggesting that mobile web readers preferred navigating directly to linked articles rather than using page previews.
- The Reader Experience team has seen encouraging early results from the Reading Lists feature, with 93% of participating users reporting that it was useful. Reading Lists help active readers save articles for future reading and support their learning goals on Wikimedia projects. The team plans further improvements before expanding the feature to more users.
- The Explore Feed Refresh initiative was tested with new and casual Wikipedia app readers. The refreshed feed helps readers discover new and relevant content. After a 10.5% increase in engagement with the feed, Wikimedia Apps team has decided to scale the Home Feed redesign to iOS with the learnings from the Android release applied.
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where subject names in the Article Guidance feature were displayed with incorrect capitalization on French Wikipedia, has now been fixed. Subject names will now follow the correct capitalization rules for the language.
Updates for technical contributors
- After running several Account Creation Experiments to improve registration completion rates, a new version of the username field on Create Account has been rolled out. It includes a popover summarizing the username policy to provide clearer guidance during account creation. As part of this change, the messages
createacct-helpusernameandcreateacct-username-helpthat several communities have configured will no longer be used. If communities want to customize the guidance shown in the new popover, they can instead edit the following messages:createacct-username-policy-popover-bullet1,createacct-username-policy-popover-bullet2, andcreateacct-username-policy-popover-bullet3. - Later this week, the CodeMirror syntax highlighter will offer themes. The themes can be picked from a dropdown menu in the full CodeMirror preferences dialog. For wikitext, available themes are default, colorblind-friendly (previously the colorblind preference option on Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing) and no-highlighting. For code languages (i.e., CSS/JavaScript/JSON/Vue/Lua), there are several themes available. These same themes will eventually be available for wikitext, too.
- From now on, wikis can restrict editing in the "User" namespace to only the page owner and certain user groups. Read the configuration documentation to learn more.
- 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.
Tech News: 2026-32
[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.
Updates for editors
- The Reader Experience team has developed a patch demo that wraps the page toolbar onto two lines when there is not enough horizontal space for all the buttons. This aims to reduce crowding in the Vector 2022 toolbar, which can occur on some language Wikipedias at certain screen widths.
- The Reader Experience team is planning to launch Reading Lists, a Community Wishlist item, which is currently available to try in beta, as a full feature in September. Before then, volunteer translator help is needed for string translations into a number of languages. The feature supports reading and learning goals on Wikipedia.
- Next week, the table of contents on Wikimedia Commons file pages will be improved by consolidating the file page table of contents with the page table of contents. This will make it easier to understand a file page’s structure, navigate to specific sections, and share links to individual sections.
- View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where some TIFF images failed to load after clicking their thumbnail, causing a broken image to be displayed instead of the full-size image, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- The variable and function selector in AbuseFilter has been updated to support search and autocomplete. It will allow filter maintainers to find the desired variable or function more quickly.
- The MJPEG and VP8 formats are removed from the video player. The MP4 format (MPEG-4 Part 2) is added instead, which provides higher quality videos to older iPhone devices. It may take a few weeks to retroactively update all existing videos. The default format for modern devices stays the same (VP9/WebM).
- 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.
Administrators' newsletter – August 2026
[edit]News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2026).
Administrator changes
CheckUser changes
Guideline and policy news
- Following an RfC, the 30-day requirement for extended-confirmed status now begins after an account's first edit instead of its registration (T431060).
Technical news
- Inactive editors can now be removed as mentors at Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship automatically.
- The Suggested Edits' Revise Tone feature is now enabled. It encourages editors to identify and revise non-neutral language in articles.
Miscellaneous
- The Unreferenced articles August 2026 backlog drive is underway. Help to add references to 47,000 articles.
- The Articles for creation August 2026 backlog drive is under way. Help to review 4,500+ drafts.
Tech News: 2026-33
[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.
Updates for editors
- A new ChartWizard is now available on Wikimedia Commons for users interested in creating charts from their own data. The wizard makes the Chart extension more beginner-friendly by allowing editors to create charts, such as bar and pie charts, without needing to use JSON. Users can still switch to the JSON editor if they prefer. Feedback on the new tool is welcome on the wish talk page.
- View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the Wikipedia iOS app’s Picture of the Day widget displayed the same image every day instead of updating daily, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- Math formula SVG images will soon be generated in the browser instead of on the server. MathML continues to be generated on the server and renders in the browser without JavaScript. Wikibooks will see this change on 12 August, Wikisource on 19 August and Wikipedia from 20-27 August. You can try this by selecting "MathML with SVG image (client side MathJax rendering)" in your preferences. This change is part of deprecating RESTBase and deprecating Mathoid.
- Category pages will soon support sorting entries by the time they are added to a category. This will make it easier to find recently or long-standing categorized pages. It will also improve workflows for maintenance categories such as deletion backlogs and other time-based review tasks. You can use
cldsort=timestampURL argument in category view to sort the entries. - Gadgets and user scripts on Wikimedia wikis may now use ES2018 features and ES2019 features in JavaScript code. Previously, the platform only allowed up to ES2017. MediaWiki validates the source code to protect functionality from syntax errors and to ensure scripts are valid in all supported browsers.
- 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.