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Tech News: 2026-26
[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
- Growth features are now available at Wikidata. This update enables access to Mentorship (if configured), Impact module, the Help Panel, and a simplified Newcomer Homepage (without Suggested Edits). Wikidata administrators are still configuring the features through Community Configuration.
Updates for editors
- The special page Special:RangeCalculator has been created. It allows users to find an IP range without needing to rely on external tools. Until now, this tool was only available to CheckUsers.
- Sub-referencing is a new MediaWiki feature that allows editors to reuse references with different details. It will be deployed to most small and medium-sized Wikipedia language versions on June 23. The FAQ lists possible actions to take on your wiki to support the deployment. Check the rollout plan for the next deployment steps.
- Starting next week, users will get a notification when they are blocked or unblocked from editing, or if this block changes.
View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Starting next week, abuse filters that are set to "require CAPTCHA verification" will begin to also affect users with the
skipcaptcharight, which includes most autoconfirmed users. Bots are exempted. This change only affects edits that trigger an abuse filter. Theskipcaptcharight will continue to exempt users from having to solve CAPTCHAs in the ordinary course of using the wikis. - Reference documentation for the Lift Wing API has moved from the API Portal to the interactive REST Sandbox.
- The API Portal wiki is now closed. For API documentation, see Wikimedia APIs on mediawiki.org. All API Portal wiki URLs (https://api.wikimedia.org/wiki/) will redirect to the mediawiki.org page starting June 22.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- Join an online call on 25 June at 2:30pm UTC to meet the current Wikimedia interns for Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. Interns will provide an overview of their projects and a brief demo of their work so far. Attendees are encouraged to share ideas and connections in their community.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Tech News: 2026-27
[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
- As part of the Account Creation Experiments, the Growth team tested adding a user account icon in the mobile web header for logged-out users, providing direct access to "Create account" and "Log in" actions. The experiment increased account creation by about 20% without negatively affecting edit quality or constructive edit rates. The feature will now be rolled out to all Wikimedia Foundation wikis on mobile web in the first week of July.
- After a successful experiment, logged-in users who did not confirm their email address when their account was created see a new banner asking them to complete that process. This helps reduce the risk that users get locked out of their account, and makes account email addresses overall more reliable. This is part of the Account Security project.
- An update to Search is refining how the
-prefix:behaves when used to exclude results. Previously, using-prefix:with negation could unintentionally broaden search results by adding the namespaces included in the search scope, leading to confusing behavior for users expecting a straightforward exclusion filter. With the update,-prefix:will now strictly exclude matching page titles as intended and may display a warning if the relevant namespace has not been explicitly selected. The behavior ofprefix:without negation however remains unchanged. - View all 33 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where reviewers using the Page Curation toolbar were not automatically subscribed to talk page discussions they started has now been fixed. Reviewers will now receive notifications when someone replies to those discussions.
Updates for technical contributors
- Starting June 29th, automated downloads from the dumps.wikimedia.org website will be subject to the user-agent policy. Automated requests that provide a generic or empty user-agent will be blocked. Access to dumps through Wikimedia Cloud Services remains unaffected. This is a follow up to the announcement made in the 2026/25 issue of Tech News.
- 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: 2026-28
[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
- View all 34 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the search bar results on Wikidata, showed English results instead of using the correct language fallback for users of language variants, has now been fixed. Search suggestions will now follow the expected language fallback chain.
Updates for technical contributors
- In preparation for Celebrate Women campaign planned for March 2027, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Content Enablement team has launched a 22-question survey to better understand technical contributions by women+ (anyone who identifies as a woman) across Wikimedia projects. The survey takes approximately 15–20 minutes to complete and will remain open until 20 July 2026. The questions are also available on-wiki for review in advance.
- The Score extension now supports rendering music scores as SVG images in addition to PNG, addressing a long-standing feature request and resolving historical image quality issues. Both formats are now provided to clients, with PNG in the
srcattribute and SVG in thesrcsetattribute. - The new Parsoid parser continues to be deployed to additional wikis, making it easier to introduce new reading and editing features. It was enabled on French Wikipedia, bringing total progress to covering 78.9% of Wikipedia page views. Rollout to English Wikipedia desktop will progress through this week.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The Wikimedia Hackathon 2026 recap blog post is now live. It highlights the projects, sessions, and social activities from this year’s event, and shares initial plans for the 2027 Wikimedia Hackathon.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Tech News: 2026-29
[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
- Revise Tone helps newcomers identify passages in Wikipedia articles that may contain non-encyclopedic language and encourages them to consider revising the tone. The feature was A/B tested on the Arabic, English, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias, where newcomer task completion rates increased by 38.7% compared to the default Copyedit task, with no decrease in edit quality. The test ended on July 9, and the feature is now available for everyone on these wikis, configurable via Community Configuration. The plan is to release Revise Tone to more wikis.
- The community configuration that allows automatic removal of inactive mentors based on configurable criteria will be enabled on Thursday 16, on some wikis to keep mentor lists up to date. Mentors are experienced contributors who opt in to help new users on-wiki through the Growth Features. Administrators can now prepare the settings via Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship; they will take effect starting Thursday.
- View all 38 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where some users of the Wikipedia Android app were logged out immediately after signing in, preventing them from staying logged in and editing pages, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- Editing a page via user scripts or gadgets was causing watchlist labels that the user had assigned to that page to reset. This has now been fixed.
- To work around a Safari bug (see phab:T425211), on Parsoid-enabled wikis, wikilink hrefs now use absolute urls instead of protocol-relative urls. REST API output remains unchanged and continue to use protocol-relative urls. Gadgets, user scripts, bots, and CSS might need to be adapted if they relied on the presence of protocol-relative urls in wikilink hrefs.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The Wikimedia Foundation’s Experiment Platform Team has published a blog post reflecting on its first year of structured experimentation. It highlights successful experiments such as Paste Check, Reference Check, and Tone Check, which improved editing outcomes and have been rolled out to more users, as well as experiments that did not lead to product changes. Read more.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Tech News: 2026-30
[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 incorporated community feedback around the placement of watchstar and watchlist buttons for the Reading Lists beta feature, which would allow for saving articles for later reading – a wishlist item to bring the functionality to web. Editors are invited to enable the beta feature to test it out and share their thoughts.
- Suggestion Mode offers edit suggestions within the VisualEditor for improving Wikipedia articles. All suggestions are community-configurable. The TextMatch feature is a way for volunteers to create custom local suggestions. The feature searches in articles for strings of text, and now includes support for regular expressions. This gives volunteers greater precision and flexibility over the kinds of local suggestions they can create. Note: Suggestions can be targeted based on the edit count of the person editing as well as other aspects of the page. You can find examples from other communities for inspiration, including TextMatches that detect: typos, grammar-errors, potential advertisements, clichés, incorrect dash or hyphen usage, non-specific time keywords, outdated names, and more. Any feedback is appreciated.
- View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the SVG Translate tool could use an outdated version of a file, causing existing translations to be overwritten when new ones were uploaded, has now been fixed. Overall, in the last quarter from April – June 2026 about 337 community tasks were resolved by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Updates for technical contributors
- On Parsoid-enabled wikis, Parsoid now renders a maximum of 1,250 images per page. A new tracking category, "media-limit-reached", will be soon made available to identify pages where this limit is reached, making it easier to find content whose media output may have been restricted during rendering. See phab:T430854 for more information and to provide feedback.
- 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: 2026-31
[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.
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 "Client side MathJax rendering (for browsers with limited MathML support)" 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.