User talk:Gatoclass

Friday

13

November

02:36 UTC

RfA candidate S O N S% Ending (UTC) Time left Dups? Report Lynch44 153 0 0 100 22:46, 13 November 2026 0 days, 20 hours no report RfB candidate S O N S% Ending (UTC) Time left Dups? Report Last updated by cyberbot ITalk to my owner:Online at 02:21, 13 November 2026 (UTC)

Welcome to the 2025 WikiCup!

Happy New Year and Happy New WikiCup! The 2025 competition has just begun and all article creators, expanders, improvers and reviewers are welcome to take part. Even if you are a novice editor, we hope the WikiCup will give you a chance to improve your editing skills as you go. If you have already signed up, your submissions page can be found here. If you have not yet signed up, you can add your name here and the judges will set up your submissions page ready for you to take part. Any questions on the scoring, rules or anything else should be directed to one of the judges, or posted to the WikiCup talk page.

For the 2025 WikiCup, we've implemented several changes to the scoring system. The highest-ranking contestants will now receive tournament points at the end of each round, and final rankings are decided by the number of tournament points each contestant has. If you're busy and can't sign up in January, don't worry: Signups are now open throughout the year. To make things fairer for latecomers, the lowest-scoring contestants will no longer be eliminated at the end of each round.

The first round will end on 26 February. The judges for the WikiCup this year are: Cwmhiraeth (talk · contribs · email), Epicgenius (talk · contribs · email), Frostly (talk · contribs · email), Guerillero (talk · contribs · email) and Lee Vilenski (talk · contribs · email). Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:13, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

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Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Palestine-Israel articles 5 closed

The arbitration case Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Palestine-Israel articles 5 has now closed and the final decision is viewable at the link above. The following remedies have been enacted:

• All articles whose topic is strictly within the Arab-Israeli conflict topic area shall be extended confirmed protected by default, without requiring prior disruption on the article.
• AndreJustAndre, BilledMammal, Iskandar323, Levivich, Makeandtoss, Nableezy, Nishidani, and Selfstudier are indefinitely topic banned from the Palestine-Israel conflict, broadly construed. These restrictions may be appealed twelve months after the enactment of this remedy, and every twelve months thereafter.
• Zero0000 is warned for their behavior in the Palestine-Israel topic area, which falls short of the conduct expected of an administrator.
• Should the Arbitration Committee receive a complaint at WP:ARCA about AndreJustAndre, within 12 months of the conclusion of this case, AndreJustAndre may be banned from the English Wikipedia by motion.
• WP:Contentious topics/Arab–Israeli conflict#Word limits (discretionary) and WP:Contentious topics/Arab–Israeli conflict#Word limits (1,000 words) are both modified to add as a new second sentence to each: Citations and quotations (whether from sources, Wikipedia articles, Wikipedia discussions, or elsewhere) do not count toward the word limit.
• Any AE report is limited to a max of two parties: the party being reported, and the filer. If additional editors are to be reported, separate AE reports must be opened for each. AE admins may waive this rule if the particular issue warrants doing so.
• The community is encouraged to run a Request for Comment aimed at better addressing or preventing POV forks, after appropriate workshopping.
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Details of the balanced editing restriction

• In a given 30-day period, a user under this restriction is limited to making no more than one-third of their edits in the Article, Talk, Draft, and Draft talk namespaces to pages that are subject to the extended-confirmed restriction under Arab–Israeli conflict contentious topic procedures.
  • This will be determined by an edit filter that tracks edits to pages in these namespaces that are extended confirmed protected, or are talk pages of such pages, and are tagged with templates to be designated by the arbitration clerks. Admins are encouraged to apply these templates when protecting a page, and the clerks may use scripts or bots to add these templates to pages where the protection has been correctly logged, and may make any necessary changes in the technical implementation of this remedy in the future.
  • Making an edit in excess of this restriction, as determined at the time the edit is made, should be treated as if it were a topic ban violation. Admins should note that a restricted user effectively cannot violate the terms of this and above clauses until at least 30 days after the sanction has been imposed.
• They are topic banned from the Arab–Israeli conflict, broadly construed, in all namespaces other than these four (except for their own userspace and user talkspace).
• This sanction is not subject to the normal standards of evidence for disruptive editing; it simply requires a finding that it would be a net positive for the project were the user to lower their activity in the topic area, particularly where an editor has repeatedly engaged in conflict but is not being intentionally or egregiously disruptive.
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• If a sockpuppet investigations clerk or member of the CheckUser team feels that third-party input is not helpful at an investigation, they are encouraged to use their existing authority to ask users to stop posting to that investigation or to SPI as a whole. In addition to clerks and members of the CheckUser team, patrolling administrators may remove or collapse contributions that impede the efficient resolution of investigations without warning.

For the Arbitration Committee, SilverLocust 💬 23:58, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

Discuss this at: Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard § Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Palestine-Israel articles 5 closed

"T:DYK/PE" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect T:DYK/PE has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Anyone, including you, is welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 January 24 § T:DYK/PE until a consensus is reached. RoySmith (talk) 21:07, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

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Guantanamo Migrant Operations Center

Saw you pulled the DYK nom in order to think about it more. That works for me. I am not in a rush. I'd rather get it right than rush it. I think the article itself is well-cited and is new so it should generally qualify for DYK but happy to make revisions to make it worthy of DYK status. Thank you for all your help! I really appreciate it! Cheers! Remember (talk) 14:06, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

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WikiCup 2025 March newsletter

The first round of the 2025 WikiCup ended on 26 February. As a reminder, we are no longer disqualifying the lowest-scoring contestants; everyone who competed in round 1 will advance to round 2 unless they have withdrawn or been banned from Wikipedia. Instead, the contestants with the highest round-point totals now receive tournament points at the end of each round. Unlike the round points in the main WikiCup table, which are reset at the end of each round, tournament points are carried over between rounds and can only be earned if a competitor is among the top 16 round-point scorers. This table shows all competitors who have received tournament points so far.

Round 1 was very competitive compared with previous years; two contestants scored more than 1,000 round points, and the top 16 contestants all scored more than 500 round points. The following competitors scored more than 800 round points:

• Gog the Mild (submissions) with 1,168 round points, mainly from 4 featured articles and 4 good articles on old military history, in addition to an assortment of GA and FA reviews.
• Generalissima (submissions) with 1,095 round points, mainly from 2 FAs, 2 featured lists, 8 GAs, and 16 Did You Know articles mainly on historical topics.
• BeanieFan11 (submissions), with 866 round points from 20 GAs, 23 DYKs, and 2 In the News articles primarily about athletes.
• Sammi Brie (submissions), with 846 round points from 16 GAs about radio and TV stations, 45 GA reviews, and 3 DYKs.
• Hey man im josh (submissions), with 816 round points from 5 FLs about sports and Olympic topics, 46 FL reviews, 3 ITN articles, and a large number of bonus points.
• MaranoFan (submissions), with 815 round points primarily from 3 FAs and 1 GA about music, in addition to 9 article reviews.

The full scores for round 1 can be seen here. During this round, contestants have claimed 18 featured articles, 26 featured lists, 1 featured-topic article, 197 good articles, 38 good-topic articles and more than 100 Did You Know articles. In addition, competitors have worked on 23 In the News articles, and they have conducted nearly 550 reviews.

Remember that any content promoted after 26 February but before the start of Round 2 can be claimed in Round 2, which begins on 1 March. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. If you want to help out with the WikiCup, feel free to review one of the nominations listed on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:12, 27 February 2025 (UTC)

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The Signpost: 9 April 2025

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Happy First Edit Day!

Hey, Gatoclass. I'd like to wish you a wonderful First Edit Day on behalf of the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! Have a great day! DaniloDaysOfOurLives (talk) 01:41, 11 April 2025 (UTC)

Happy First Edit Day!

Hey, Gatoclass. I'd like to wish you a wonderful First Edit Day on behalf of the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! Have a great day! Randompersonediting (✍️•📚) 03:29, 11 April 2025 (UTC)

USS New London image

Hi Gatoclass. Noticed your edits of USS New London and wondered if you wanted to add the only image I could find that shows the New London. The image should be free to use as it is the Naval History and Heritage Command's photo # NH 59009. Here is the image: https://www.navsource.org/archives/09/86/098639001.jpg It is hard to read the inscription, but if used, the image description could note the New London is second from the left after the partially shown steamer (the ships from left to right are USS Winona, USS New London, USS Niagara, USS Sagamore, USS Wissahickon, and USS Massachusetts). Kind regards, Quaerens-veritatem (talk) 07:56, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

Oh, that is a good find, Quaerens-veritatem! I did spend a couple of hours looking for an image of the ship yesterday, and did find an old 1870s stereogram of the ship from its postwar service, but it doesn't include the entire ship and there is a slight question mark over its copyright status, so I've been debating with myself over whether or not to upload it. But that engraving you found shows the entire ship, and during its naval service, so will be a very useful addition. Instead of using that particular reproduction though, which is very small, I think I will try to track down the original as one can usually find these engravings someplace once one knows they exist. Thanks once again! Gatoclass (talk) 14:50, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

You're most welcome Gatoclass. 😊 Good hunting. Best regards, Quaerens-veritatem (talk) 20:39, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

You provided a great image – thank you! 😊 Quaerens-veritatem (talk) 06:22, 25 April 2025 (UTC)

On the contrary, thank you :) Gatoclass (talk) 06:25, 25 April 2025 (UTC)

WikiCup 2025 May newsletter

The second round of the 2025 WikiCup ended on 28 April at 23:59 UTC. To reiterate what we said in the previous newsletter, we are no longer disqualifying contestants based on how many points (now known as round points) they received. Instead, the contestants with the highest round-point totals now receive tournament points at the end of each round. These tournament points are carried over between rounds, and can only be earned if a competitor is among the top 16 round-point scorers at the end of each round. This table shows all competitors who have received tournament points so far. Everyone who competed in round 2 will advance to round 3 unless they have withdrawn or been banned.

Round 2 was quite competitive. Four contestants scored more than 1,000 round points, and eight scored more than 500 points (including one who has withdrawn). The following competitors scored at least 800 points:

• BeanieFan11 (submissions) with 1,233 round points from 24 good articles, 28 Did you know articles, and one In the news nomination, mainly about athletes and politicians
• Thebiguglyalien (submissions) with 1,127 round points, almost entirely from two high-multiplier featured articles on Black Widow (Natasha Romanova) and Grace Coolidge, in addition to two GAs and two reviews
• History6042 (submissions) with 1,088 round points from four featured lists about Michelin-starred restaurants, nine good articles and a good topic mostly on Olympic-related subjects, seven ITN articles, and dozens of reviews
• Gog the Mild (submissions) with 1,085 round points from three FAs, one GA, and four DYKs on military history, as well as 18 reviews
• Arconning (submissions) with 887 round points, mostly from four FLs, six GAs, and seven DYKs on Olympic topics, along with more than two dozen reviews

In addition, we would like to recognize Generalissima (submissions) for her efforts; she scored 801 round points but withdrew before the end of the round.

The full scores for round 2 can be seen here. During this round, contestants have claimed 13 featured articles, 20 featured lists, 4 featured-topic articles, 138 good articles, 7 good-topic articles, and more than 100 Did You Know articles. In addition, competitors have worked on 19 In the News articles, and they have conducted nearly 300 reviews.

Remember that any content promoted after 28 April but before the start of Round 3 can be claimed in Round 3. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. If you want to help out with the WikiCup, feel free to review one of the nominations listed on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:02, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

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The Signpost: 14 May 2025

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DYK hook copyedit

Regarding the hook for Hannah Fry in Template:Did you know/Queue/5, I think it should be "compared (...) with" instead of "compared (...) to". I was the DYK reviewer. Could you look at this? – Editør (talk) 12:21, 22 May 2025 (UTC)

 Done. I'm not a grammarian, so hopefully you are right about this! Gatoclass (talk) 13:46, 22 May 2025 (UTC)

Thank you! – Editør (talk) 14:11, 22 May 2025 (UTC)

Please don't silently pull hooks

I happened to be looking at WP:DYKQ and noticed that the hook I nominated, which was previously there, was not there anymore. It took some digging, but I eventually found that you pulled the hook because the article needs to be copyedited. Please make sure to mark the DYK nomination page as no longer promoted when you do this, and ideally ping the nominator as well. jlwoodwa (talk) 03:23, 17 June 2025 (UTC)

Thanks Jlwoodwa, but I brought up the issue at WT:DYK instead, here, so your nom wasn't lost. It appears though that I inadvertently missed bumping you as I did for the other two nominators, my apologies for that. Gatoclass (talk) 03:37, 17 June 2025 (UTC)

Copyvio images in Joanna Schaffhausen?

Re this edit: What copyvio images are you talking about, please? I admit I don't know where to discuss this other than your talk page, if there is a better place, please say. --GRuban (talk) 04:26, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

I see further edits indicating lead image. You mean File:Joanna Schaffhausen publicity photo for All the Way Gone (cropped).jpg? You will notice it says right on it that was mailed to me by Garrett Rooney, the photographer, and the subject's husband, and has been reviewed by OTRS/VRT. Or do you mean something else? --GRuban (talk) 04:33, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for the prompt response, GRuban. The file above was extracted from another one, that has been deleted on Commons for copyvio. There is at least one other image in the article that appears to be from the same source and may also be a copyvio. Gatoclass (talk) 04:40, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

No, it wasn't, as the VRT reviewer clearly stated. "The source file was deleted for reasons that do not affect this image, like a derivative work which is not a part of this cropped image." That's literally what he put there, specifically to avoid this. The original had more books in it and more of the crocodile painting behind her, and he didn't accept they were De Minimis, so I cropped it until he was happy. He literally put that in his note accepting the image. --GRuban (talk) 11:00, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

Here, let me quote our email conversation, removing only his signature; you can see his user id from the file edit history.

Extended content

Permissions - Wikimedia Commons <permissions-commons@wikimedia.org>
May 17, 2025, 3:25 AM
to me, Garrett

Dear George Ruban,

I thinks that's acceptable.

Your permission has been added to the file page. Please check that the file description contains the correct author attribution you desire. If you have any concerns, please respond to this email.

Thank you for your contribution to Wikimedia Commons.

Yours sincerely,
--------

--
Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/
---
Disclaimer: all mail to this address is answered by volunteers, and responses are not to be considered an official statement of the Wikimedia Foundation. For official correspondence, please contact the Wikimedia Foundation by certified mail at the address listed on https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/contact/

05/15/2025 19:21 - George Ruban wrote:

> Here, is File:Joanna Schaffhausen publicity photo for All the Way Gone
> (cropped).jpg - Wikimedia Commons
> <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joanna_Schaffhausen_publicity_photo_for_All_the_Way_Gone_(cropped).jpg>
> acceptably
> cropped?
> The book covers are basically invisible, and the ichthyosaur (crocodile?)
> in the painting might as well be corn-on-the-cob.
>
> On Thu, May 15, 2025 at 3:08 PM George Ruban wrote:
>
> > -----, the images in the photo backgrounds are Commons:De minimis -
> > Wikimedia Commons <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:De_minimis>;
> > please compare the photo of the copyrighted movie poster in that first
> > example on that page.
> >
> > The book images in the first one,  File:Joanna Schaffhausen book signing
> > for Dead and Gone.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
> > <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joanna_Schaffhausen_book_signing_for_Dead_and_Gone.jpg> are
> > small/low resolution/tilted, and otherwise not usable for any reasonable
> > copyright infringement, any photo taken in a library will have dozens of
> > images like that.
> >
> > I would argue the book and painting images in File:Joanna Schaffhausen
> > publicity photo for All the Way Gone.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
> > <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joanna_Schaffhausen_publicity_photo_for_All_the_Way_Gone.jpg> are
> > too, but if you insist, can you VRT stamp the first one, and I can try to
> > crop out most of the second one and focus only on the subject herself?
> >
> > For what it's worth, the photographer and the person you're emailing with
> > here is the husband of the photo subject, Joanna Schaffhausen, the author
> > of the books, and whom I'm trying to write the article about.
> > Garrett Rooney 
> > Grammar Counts…or How I Met My Husband - Joanna Schaffhausen
> > <https://www.joannaschaffhausen.com/grammar-countsor-met-husband/>


> >
> > On Thu, May 15, 2025 at 10:53 AM Permissions - Wikimedia Commons <
> > permissions-commons@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> >
> >> Dear Garrett Rooney,
> >>
> >> the two photos besides the person depict the cover design of two books,
> >> and a painting in the background, which all are copyright protected
> >> themselves.
> >> Is permission from the respective copyright holders achievable?
> >>
> >> Yours sincerely,
> >> ------
> >>
> >> --
> >> Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/
> >> ---
> >> Disclaimer: all mail to this address is answered by volunteers, and
> >> responses are not to be considered an official statement of the Wikimedia
> >> Foundation. For official correspondence, please contact the Wikimedia
> >> Foundation by certified mail at the address listed on
> >> https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/contact/
> >>
> >> 05/14/2025 15:23 - Garrett Rooney wrote:
> >>
> >> > Hi ------,
> >> >
> >> > I am the creator, I took both of the photographs in question.
> >> >
> >> > -garrett
> >> >
> >> > On Wed, May 14, 2025 at 12:11 AM Permissions - Wikimedia Commons <
> >> > permissions-commons@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> >> >
> >> > > Dear Garrett Rooney,
> >> > >
> >> > > Please advise who is the creator (photographer) of the image(s), and
> >> by
> >> > > which reason you became holder of the full and exclusive copyright.
> >> > >
> >> > > Yours sincerely,
> >> > >
> >> > > --
> >> > > Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/
> >> > > ---
> >> > > Disclaimer: all mail to this address is answered by volunteers, and
> >> > > responses are not to be considered an official statement of the
> >> Wikimedia
> >> > > Foundation. For official correspondence, please contact the Wikimedia
> >> > > Foundation by certified mail at the address listed on
> >> > > https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/contact/
> >> > >
> >> > > 05/13/2025 12:59 - Garrett Rooney wrote:
> >> > >
> >> > > > I hereby affirm that I, Garrett Rooney, am the creator and/or sole
> >> owner
> >> > > of
> >> > > > the exclusive copyright of the following media work:
> >> > > > content attached to this email
> >> > > > I agree to publish the above-mentioned work under the Creative
> >> Commons
> >> > > > Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
> >> > > > I acknowledge that by doing so I grant anyone the right to use the
> >> work,
> >> > > > even in a commercial product or otherwise, and to modify it
> >> according to
> >> > > > their needs, provided that they abide by the terms of the license
> >> and any
> >> > > > other applicable laws.
> >> > > > I am aware that this agreement is not limited to Wikipedia or
> >> related
> >> > > sites.
> >> > > > I am aware that the copyright holder always retains ownership of the
> >> > > > copyright as well as the right to be attributed in accordance with
> >> the
> >> > > > license chosen. Modifications others make to the work will not be
> >> claimed
> >> > > > to have been made by the copyright holder.
> >> > > > I acknowledge that I cannot withdraw this agreement, and that the
> >> content
> >> > > > may or may not be kept permanently on a Wikimedia project.
> >> > > >
> >> > > > Garrett Rooney
> >> > > > 2025-05-13
> >> > > >
> >> > > > [generated using relgen.js]
> >> > > >
> >> >
> >
> >
>

What could the VRT reviewer have put in his note to make this clear other than what he did put? --GRuban (talk) 11:25, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

Ok, looks like I missed the caveat in the "other versions" section GRuban, my apologies. I ran into a whole bunch of problematic noms this morning, which wasted a great deal of time and caused a lot of frustration, so by the time I got to yours I was losing focus. I will restore your article to the lead where it was originally - and apologies once again for causing you unnecessary anxiety. Gatoclass (talk) 12:15, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

Thank you. S'arright. We all make mistakes. I certainly do. Thank you for what is often a thankless task. --GRuban (talk) 12:36, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

Ooh, and the image slot, that's so nice! Could I ask - I've had a number of DYKs but still don't quite understand the queue number system - when it will appear on the main page? Is it "for 12 hours sometime in the next week" or is there a more definitive time estimate? I mean, I check the main page daily, but the photographer and article subject might be interested to know, and it would be neat if I could tell them. --GRuban (talk) 13:07, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

GRuban, if you go to Template:Did you know/Queue you will find a table called "Local update times" near the top which lists the times all the sets are due for display on the main page. Your nom is currently in Queue 6, so if you find the "Queue 6" row in the table, you just need to look for the time it will appear in your part of the world - cheers. Gatoclass (talk) 13:16, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

Thank you again. --GRuban (talk) 13:30, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

A small token of my appreciation

Australian composer and pianist Roy Agnew, in The Sun (Sydney) 1928

I think you wrote this article? --GRuban (talk) 02:25, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

Legal commentary

Hey, do you mind elaborating on the specific issue with Attempt (German penal code)? It has happened before, and I would really like to avoid running into this issue again. Could it be the citation format, or that the equivalent doesn’t really exist in English? FortunateSons (talk) 10:02, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

Can you point me to one or two of these earlier discussions? Thanks, Gatoclass (talk) 10:10, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

There really weren’t any; in this case, the first AfC-reviewer had an issue with it, and it got accepted by another reviewer after I wrote this, though without response by the original reviewer. Another mention (though uncorrected) was in the DYK. I have used legal commentary in a prior dyk, but also had news reporting and other literature, and therefore - maybe wrongly - assumed it wasn’t an issue then. Would it help if got some more eyes from WP:RSN? FortunateSons (talk) 10:19, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

Yes, that would be very helpful! Thanks, Gatoclass (talk) 10:41, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

I have updated Fn 7 as an example. It's not really optimal (for example, I have used the chapter author as the author), but are you fine with the type of citation? FortunateSons (talk) 08:53, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

Sure, that looks fine. Gatoclass (talk) 08:55, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

Great! Are there any other issues, or are you willing to add it to a prep area once I'm done? :) FortunateSons (talk) 09:11, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

I can't really say until I've looked at the article, and I don't have time to do that right now. Gatoclass (talk) 09:15, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

Of course. I'm done now. I think this clearly passes the DYK criteria now, but am happy to add a few additional citations from other sources if you're concerned about that? FortunateSons (talk) 09:35, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

Hey, did you have the opportunity to take a look yet? FortunateSons (talk) 09:04, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

Re: DYK tweak

... that an iconic 1937 photograph taken in coverage of the Louisville flood identifiably depicts neither Louisville nor the flood?

Those changes are really odd and sound incredibly unusual to my ear. Please see the DYK discussion where it is explained by the reviewer that we are trying to preserve the title of the work in the hook. Also the wording of "identifiably depicts" is extremely weird and will turn people off more than just "in coverage of", which removes the title. I guess if you decide to keep that new wording, it's fine, but it's not something that I recognize. Perhaps others will make sense of it? Maybe this is a case of English usage differences, I don't know. I don't particularly object, but if you think that's best, I understand. I'm experiencing a bit of uncanny valley just looking at it so maybe it is best if I log out for now. Viriditas (talk) 04:40, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

Viriditas, the issue I had with the phrase "at the time of the Louisville flood" is that a photograph fitting that description could have been taken anywhere, so why wouldn't such a photograph not feature either Louisville or the flood? The wording was, in short, ambiguous and confusing for readers not already familiar with the photograph.

As for the "identifiably", the previous hook said the photo does not "directly" depict Louisville, but that is plain incorrect, it is most definitely a direct photograph of Louisville, just not one that is identifiably of the city, so I think the word "identifiably" has to be there. Removing it could lead to the possibility of the hook being pulled from the main page for inaccuracy, which neither of us would want to happen. But quite frankly I'm a little confused about your objection now because you thanked me for adding the word only a day or two ago.

BTW, I did also add the word "iconic" as I think it's important to convey that this is a famous photograph, not just any old one. The original hook included the word "famous" which was removed by somebody else per PEACOCK and which surely would not have survived on the main page for five minutes anyhow. "Iconic", however, is a more neutral term that says the same thing in a way that should not raise the same objection as it is demonstrably true. So hopefully we can at least agree on that.

If you are still unhappy with the hook though, by all means take it up at WT:DYK as I am far from infallible and will always welcome further input. Cheers, Gatoclass (talk) 05:16, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

BTW, I changed "in coverage" to "during coverage" as I agree that the former expression is a little unclear and could use the clarification. Hope that helps - Gatoclass (talk) 05:24, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

But on reflection, if you want to retain the title of the photo in the hook, we could go with:

• ALT2: * ... that the iconic 1937 photograph "At the Time of the Louisville Flood" identifiably depicts neither Louisville nor the flood? Gatoclass (talk) 05:38, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

Let's go with whatever you think is best. Viriditas (talk) 09:12, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

MiLinguall Party

Hi. I saw that you pulled the hook for MiLinguall Party from prep 3... was there a problem with it? Thanks. [​[User:CanonNi]​] (💬 • ✍️) 12:23, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

Oh, thanks for reminding me. The article says the party urged voters to vote for other parties in certain constituencies, but the two sources both mention only one candidate who did that. So that would need to be fixed, along with the hook. Gatoclass (talk) 12:29, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

Ah, thanks for the explanation. What about the other approved hook then? It's mentioned in the article and supported by sources. [​[User:CanonNi]​] (💬 • ✍️) 12:49, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

The error in the article has to be fixed first. The hook could then be refactored appropriately. Gatoclass (talk) 12:56, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

I've fixed the error here. [​[User:CanonNi]​] (💬 • ✍️) 13:02, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

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Irve Tunick

Can you help me with a DYK issue? Irve Tunick was supposed to run on June 27 and was in the holding area for that date? I'm not sure why it wasn't prepped. I had prepared for over a month to get it on the DYK for June 27. Remember (talk) 00:27, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

Nevermind. It’s been fixed! Remember (talk) 01:30, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

WikiCup 2025 July newsletter

The third round of the 2025 WikiCup ended on 28 June. This round was again competitive, with three contestants scoring more than 1,000 round points:

• BeanieFan11 (submissions) with 1,314 round points, mostly from articles about athletes and politicians, including 20 good articles and 48 did you know articles
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Remember that any content promoted after 28 June but before the start of Round 4 can be claimed in Round 4. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. If you want to help out with the WikiCup, feel free to review one of the nominations listed on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:49, 29 June 2025 (UTC)

New message from Narutolovehinata5

Hello, Gatoclass. You have new messages at Template:Did you know nominations/Arthur Loveless.
Message added 23:09, 2 July 2025 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Narutolovehinata5 (talk · contributions) 23:09, 2 July 2025 (UTC)

Template:Did you know nominations/Skraban–Deardorff syndrome

Hi Gatoclass. I noticed the hook was promoted on June 24 but hasn't appeared on the main page yet. I checked the prep areas and queues, but couldn't find it there either. I saw that you removed the hook with this edit but I'm not sure if it was reintroduced elsewhere — could it have gotten lost in the process? Would you mind taking a look? — Strange Orange 23:37, 6 July 2025 (UTC)

Strange Orange, I moved that nom back to Prep 2. It looks like another user may have inadvertently deleted it from that set. So it looks like the nom may have to be re-queued. Gatoclass (talk) 11:20, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

DYK Peace discourse

Hi Gatoclass, a week ago you pulled Template:Did you know nominations/Peace discourse in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict against the consensus of multiple other editors. The explanation given was your subjective and personal assessment that the scholarly-sourced word “oppressive” was inappropriate.

I have learned over time that the DYK process does not work on the basis of consensus – in practice it requires just one person, even if on the fringes, to take a different view.

Even though you can, as a lone voice, skewer the nomination, I would appreciate if out of courtesy you could respond to my comment from five days ago.

Whether not we proceed with the DYK, I am keen to be challenged. If there is an even better word to accurately and adequately communicate the point, that would be great.

Onceinawhile (talk) 08:36, 9 July 2025 (UTC)

New message from Narutolovehinata5

Hello, Gatoclass. You have new messages at Template:Did you know nominations/Big Stone County Museum.
Message added 23:38, 9 July 2025 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

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Thanks for the positive comment about the Jilly Cooper articles at DYK Lajmmoore (talk) 09:15, 2 August 2025 (UTC)

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The fourth round of the 2025 WikiCup ended on 29 August. The penultimate round saw three contestants score more than 800 points:

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Canto

story · music · places

Thank you for your help to get the nom for Canto General back on track, my story! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:43, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

I enjoy a DYK that pictures a person together with achievements in art. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:13, 7 September 2025 (UTC)

As you will know, Arvo Pärt is 90 today. Did you know that it tool me some trouble to get him to the main page? Listen! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:47, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

Today is the birthday of the 16th Thomaskantor after Bach, remembered. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:51, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

My 100th biography to the Main page in 2025 is Siegmund Nimsgern. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:02, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

John Rutter 80 today! I sang his major choral works with four choirs, and many of his uplifting anthems, 13 DYK? I watched him explain his Magnificat in person in 1998, and now see it on Youtube: he wore the same outfit. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:34, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

Today it's time for Tríptico elegíaco para un percusionista and its composer. Thank you for promoting the DYK set. I originally had nominated both separately, and probably missed moving the "make" credit to the final double nom. Any chance to get credit for the piece as well? No problem if that's difficult. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:57, 29 September 2025 (UTC)

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"Dying wish"

Hi. You're right about the wording being different in the article -- I have amended it to include "dying wish"; quote from the source, as rendered on the nom page: Se spune ca lăsă un testament, prin care recomanda tuturor ca urmaș pe fiul său mai mic, Scarlat, care fu recunoscut de boieri, și afurisia cu cele nai strașnice blesteme pe cine n'ar ținea samă de aceasta ultimă voință a lui ("Story goes that he left a last will, upholding as his successor his younger son, Scarlat, who came to be recognized as such by the boyars, and casting the most horrific curses on anyone who would have ignored this final wish of his"). If you agree, please change the hook back to "last wish", which is quite punchier; it's also okay if you disagree and leave it as "preference", but I have a slight preference for the original form. I'm absolutely fine with "ignoring" and "late". Dahn (talk) 04:53, 21 September 2025 (UTC)

Dahn, "last wish" sounds a bit melodramatic to me, as well as being a bit imprecise (it wasn't his last wish that Matei not be ruler, but rather that his brother should get the job). How about "last will"? Gatoclass (talk) 12:19, 23 September 2025 (UTC)

That works. Sure. Dahn (talk) 13:58, 23 September 2025 (UTC)

Lou Jing

Currently, the hook being promoted is

• ... that a lowly garrison soldier was responsible for relocating the capital of the Western Han dynasty?

which has nothing whatsoever to do with the sentence you took issue with. It's not part of Wiki generally (let alone DYK) to have cites after every single sentence of a new article, especially something clearly true from the immediately linked and sourced articles.

Now, I didn't write the promoted hook, don't especially like it, don't especially like the user who did write it, and find it much worse for our wp:readers. Everyone who studies Chinese history knows the Western Han is called that because the capital moved to Luoyang. The surprising fact is that it moved from Luoyang first. Hell, that's the entire reason I wrote the article and adjusted the other Han articles to talk about it more prominently. The actual hook (with the pic tag removed) was

• ... that a lowly garrison soldier was responsible for relocating the Western Han capital from Luoyang to Chang'an?

That would involve Chang'an in the hook and, sure, I'd go fetch the necessary cite to make up for the thing you're right that the reviewer didn't catch, although they claimed to have approved this hook and the alt hooks as meeting DYK criteria.

Of course, you're an admin and can just pull rank (and the entire hook) for spite, but I think everyone—particularly the readers—would benefit from going back to the original ALT0 hook, the cite actually becoming necessary for DYK, and my getting it to finish the nom. — LlywelynII 01:07, 28 September 2025 (UTC)

It's not part of Wiki generally (let alone DYK) to have cites after every single sentence of a new article

LlywelynII, you are correct that it isn't a DYK requirement that every sentence be cited, but the guideline states: All content that could reasonably be challenged, except for plot summaries and that which summarizes cited content elsewhere in the article, must be cited no later than the end of the paragraph. So, leaving aside the clause could reasonably be challenged, every paragraph that isn't a plot summary or which summarizes other cited content must be fully cited. In short, a paragraph that ends with an uncited sentence is clearly not fully cited.

Now, with regard to the clause that could reasonably challenged, I see that that was added by theleekycauldron when she rewrote and moved the guidelines to a new page in July 2023; prior to that, there was no such caveat. Now, whether or not leeky discussed this change before making it I am not aware, so perhaps she could enlighten us on that question. Personally, I think it's a problematic inclusion, because queue promoters do not have time to debate whether or not this or that uncited fact in an article is one that "could reasonably be challenged" - as in this very exchange.

Regardless, I think the sentence at issue in your article could reasonably be challenged, because only people who have a lot of familiarity with Chinese history would know whether or not the statement is factual, while others will have to hunt around to verify it - as I had to do when verifying your article, which took a considerable amount of my time.

With regard to the hook, I am not going to unilaterally revert a change that some other user has seen fit to make unless I think it's obviously suboptimal, which is not the case here. If you feel strongly about it, you are free to bring it up at WT:DYK where you can get wider input. Regards, Gatoclass (talk) 05:30, 28 September 2025 (UTC)

Fixt. — LlywelynII 05:34, 28 September 2025 (UTC)

Thank you - though I would have preferred that you added the cite rather than just delete the sentence - but it's your call - cheers. Gatoclass (talk) 05:44, 28 September 2025 (UTC)

@Gatoclass: see wp:content that could reasonably be challenged; it's basically everything that's not SKYBLUE context in an otherwise-cited sentence, if memory serves. for what it's worth, GA uses the same standard. theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 06:27, 28 September 2025 (UTC)

October thanks

story · music · places

Thank you for what you do for DYK and take a good recovery break! - My story today is about a woman and her husband who played Bach's Sonatina for us (Rheingau Musik Festival, long ago) on an upright piano, and it made me cry, and I still remember. -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:27, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

Carl Nielsen (FA by four colleagues, not me) is remembered on the main page! My story on the Germany National holiday is a song calling to trust the new ways, written shortly before the events leading to reunification. I saw a lovely Mozart opera production yesterday, in case of interest. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 18:59, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

My latest: Roberta Alexander, - listen. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:40, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

The Signpost: 2 October 2025

• News and notes: Larry Sanger returns with "Nine Theses on Wikipedia"; WMF publishes transparency report
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  Wickedpedia wrangles post-truth politics.

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USS Isaac Smith

I know it's a long shot since it's been 15 years, but do you happen to remember where the source for this edit was? I've removed the claim for now as the capture and albeit brief subsequent use of the tinclad USS Undine (1863) by Forrest's cavalry during the Battle of Johnsonville seems to be an exception to the statement. Is the idea that Forrest's use of the Undine before scuttling it was minimal compared to the Confederat reuse of Isaac Smith? If so, I wonder if the wording at the Isaac Smith article should be adjusted. Hog Farm _Talk 20:25, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

No Hog Farm, I don't recall (was it really 15 years? sheesh), but I'm pretty sure it came from a solid source. I will have a look through my library to see if I can track it down - but it could be just plain wrong, as a lot of "only", "first" claims etc. turn out to be, even from supposed reliable sources. Gatoclass (talk) 03:03, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

The Signpost: 20 October 2025

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Guide to temporary accounts

Hello, Gatoclass. This message is being sent to remind you of significant upcoming changes regarding logged-out editing.

Starting 4 November, logged-out editors will no longer have their IP address publicly displayed. Instead, they will have a temporary account (TA) associated with their edits. Users with some extended rights like administrators and CheckUsers, as well as users with the temporary account IP viewer (TAIV) user right will still be able to reveal temporary users' IP addresses and all contributions made by temporary accounts from a specific IP address or range.

How do temporary accounts work?

Editing from a temporary account

• When a logged-out user completes an edit or a logged action for the first time, a cookie will be set in this user's browser and a temporary account tied with this cookie will be automatically created for them. This account's name will follow the pattern: ~2025-12345-67 (a tilde, year of creation, a number split into units of 5).
• All subsequent actions by the temporary account user will be attributed to this username. The cookie will expire 90 days after its creation. As long as it exists, all edits made from this device will be attributed to this temporary account. It will be the same account even if the IP address changes, unless the user clears their cookies or uses a different device or web browser.
• A record of the IP address used at the time of each edit will be stored for 90 days after the edit. Users with the temporary account IP viewer (TAIV) user right will be able to see the underlying IP addresses.
• As a measure against vandalism, there are two limitations on the creation of temporary accounts:
  • There has to be a minimum of 10 minutes between subsequent temporary account creations from the same IP (or /64 range in case of IPv6).
  • There can be a maximum of 6 temporary accounts created from an IP (or /64 range) within a period of 24 hours.

Temporary account IP viewer user right

How to enable IP Reveal

• Administrators may grant the temporary account IP viewer (TAIV) user right to non-administrators who meet the criteria for granting. Importantly, an editor must make an explicit request for the permission (e.g. at WP:PERM/TAIV)—administrators are not permitted to assign the right without a request.
• Administrators will automatically be able to see temporary account IP information once they have accepted the Access to Temporary Account IP Addresses Policy via Special:Preferences or via the onboarding dialog which comes up after temporary accounts are deployed.

Impact for administrators

• It will be possible to block many abusers by just blocking their temporary accounts. A blocked person won't be able to create new temporary accounts quickly if the admin selects the autoblock option.
• It will still be possible to block an IP address or IP range.
• Temporary accounts will not be retroactively applied to contributions made before the deployment. On Special:Contributions, you will be able to see existing IP user contributions, but not new contributions made by temporary accounts on that IP address. Instead, you should use Special:IPContributions for this (see a video about IPContributions in a gallery below).

Rules about IP information disclosure

• Publicizing an IP address gained through TAIV access is generally not allowed (e.g. ~2025-12345-67 previously edited as 192.0.2.1 or ~2025-12345-67's IP address is 192.0.2.1).
• Publicly linking a TA to another TA is allowed if "reasonably believed to be necessary". (e.g. ~2025-12345-67 and ~2025-12345-68 are likely the same person, so I am counting their reverts together toward 3RR, but not Hey ~2025-12345-68, you did some good editing as ~2025-12345-67)
• See Wikipedia:Temporary account IP viewer § What can and can't be said for more detailed guidelines.

Useful tools for patrollers

• It is possible to view if a user has opted-in to view temporary account IPs via the User Info card, available in Preferences → Appearance → Advanced options → Enable the user info card
  • This feature also makes it possible for anyone to see the approximate count of temporary accounts active on the same IP address range.
• Special:IPContributions allows viewing all edits and temporary accounts connected to a specific IP address or IP range.
• Similarly, Special:GlobalContributions supports global search for a given temporary account's activity.
• The auto-reveal feature (see video below) allows users with the right permissions to automatically reveal all IP addresses for a limited time window.

Videos

• How to use Special:IPContributions
• How automatic IP reveal works
• How to use IP Info
• How to use User Info

Further information and discussion

• For more information and discussion regarding this change, please see the announcement from the Wikimedia Foundation at Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF) § Temporary accounts rollout.

Most of this message was written by Mz7 (source). Thanks, 🎃 SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 02:48, 31 October 2025 (UTC)

WikiCup 2025 November newsletter

The 2025 WikiCup has come to an end. Our top scorers, based on the tournament point rankings (which can be seen here), are:

1. BeanieFan11 (submissions) with 1,604 tournament points, will receive the 1st place award.
2. Gog the Mild (submissions) with 1,075 tournament points, will receive the 2nd place award.
3. Arconning (submissions) with 860 tournament points, will receive the 3rd place award.
4. History6042 (submissions) with 804 tournament points
5. Sammi Brie (submissions) with 635 tournament points
6. TheDoctorWho (submissions) with 386 tournament points
7. AirshipJungleman29 (submissions) with 373 tournament points
8. Thebiguglyalien (submissions) with 362 tournament points

Our high scorers in the final round were:

• BeanieFan11 (submissions) with 1,035 round points, mostly from 19 good articles and 21 did you know articles about athletes
• vigilantcosmicpenguin (submissions) with 819 round points, mostly from 13 good articles and 11 did you know articles about a wide range of topics from abortion topics to African cities
• TheNuggeteer (submissions) with 508 round points from 9 good articles, 4 good topic articles and 6 did you know articles mainly about Philippines topics, along with 19 good article reviews

The final round was very productive, and contestants had 2 featured articles, 4 featured lists, 106 good articles, 5 good topic articles, 178 article reviews, 76 did you know articles, and 9 in the news articles. Altogether, Wikipedia has benefited greatly from the activities of WikiCup competitors all through the contest. Well done everyone!

The top eight scorers will receive awards shortly. The following special awards will be made, based on high performance in particular areas of content creation. These prizes are awarded to the competitor who scored the highest in any particular field during the competition.

• Gog the Mild (submissions) wins the featured article prize, with 12 featured articles total, and the featured topic prize, with 9 featured topic articles in total
• Hey man im josh (submissions) wins the featured list prize, with 10 featured lists total
• AirshipJungleman29 (submissions) wins the featured picture prize, submitting the only featured picture in the entire contest during round 3
• History6042 (submissions) wins the featured content reviewer prize, with 127 featured content reviews. He will also share the ITN prize, with 20 in the news articles in total.
• BeanieFan11 (submissions) wins the good article prize, with 100 good articles total, and the DYK prize, with 147 did you know articles in total. He will also share the ITN prize, with 20 in the news articles in total.
• TheDoctorWho (submissions) wins the good topic prize, with 16 good topic entries in total
• Arconning (submissions) wins the good article reviewer prize, with 68 good article reviews in total

A special mention also goes to these users who scored the highest in a particular category in a single round:

• Sammi Brie (submissions), with 27 good articles in round 3, and 45 good article reviews in round 1
• Tails Wx (submissions), with 10 in the news articles in round 3

Next year's competition will begin on 1 January. You are invited to sign up to participate. The WikiCup is open to all Wikipedians, both novices and experienced editors, and we hope to see you all in the 2026 competition. Until then, it only remains to once again congratulate our worthy winners, and thank all participants for their involvement!

On behalf of the judges, Cwmhiraeth (talk · contribs · email), Epicgenius (talk · contribs · email), Frostly (talk · contribs · email), Guerillero (talk · contribs · email) and Lee Vilenski (talk · contribs · email):

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:24, 1 November 2025 (UTC)

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The Signpost: 10 November 2025

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The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

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The Signpost: 1 December 2025

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Category:Ships built by Donald McKay has been nominated for merging

Category:Ships built by Donald McKay has been nominated for merging. A discussion is taking place to decide whether it complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. ^SMason_Garrison 13:41, 7 December 2025 (UTC)

Please populate the categories you make with multiple pages. Please also add all the relevant parent categories, instead of just one of them. It makes it really difficult to populate categories if people can't find them.^SMason_Garrison 14:14, 7 December 2025 (UTC)

Żagiew retransclusion

Hey Gatoclass! just wanted to let you know that this edit broke transfem by setting the date header as "14 November" instead of "November 14"; the good news is that transfem also retranscludes pulled nominations automatically, so you don't have to bother with that anymore :) just reopen the nomination page and the bot will work out where it goes. theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 20:44, 14 December 2025 (UTC)

Well, that's very handy leeky! Thanks for letting me know.

You've done so much great work in improving the DYK infrastructure, I really appreciate that.

Speaking of which, one of these days I really must ask you how to install PSHAW as I could surely use more timesavers :) Gatoclass (talk) 00:48, 15 December 2025 (UTC)

You're too sweet, thanks! PSHAW's easy: go to your common.js page and drop in this text on a new line:

importScript('User:Theleekycauldron/Scripts/PSHAW/main.js'); // Backlink: [[User:Theleekycauldron/DYK promoter.js]]

And that's all you need! You can promote hooks by opening up nompages, and swap or pull them by opening up prep and queue pages. It'll be under the "More"/"Tools" menu in the top right. I notice you don't have any other userscripts, so let me know if you're interested in any others, there's a few that make life a lot easier! theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 01:17, 15 December 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, will do :) Gatoclass (talk) 01:23, 15 December 2025 (UTC)

The Signpost: 17 December 2025

• Interview: Part 1: Bernadette Meehan
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Seasons greetings!

	Wishing you and yours a fantastic Christmas (or holiday season for those who don’t celebrate) and all the best for 2026. 🎄 ❄️☃️ Here’s to a collaborative, constructive year ahead — with good faith, good edits, and just enough discussion to get things done! (and here's Sir Nils Olav inspecting his troops... one of my favourite POTDs) Cheers  — Amakuru (talk) 15:12, 21 December 2025 (UTC)

 — Amakuru (talk) 15:12, 21 December 2025 (UTC)

Thank you Amakuru, and seasons greetings to you too :) Gatoclass (talk) 15:16, 21 December 2025 (UTC)

Seasons Greetings

Merry Christmas, Gatoclass! Wishing you Season's Greetings and a Happy Winter Solstice! As the year comes to a close, I want to express my appreciation for your dedicated efforts on Wikipedia and extend heartfelt thanks for your assistance throughout the years. May the holiday season bring you and your loved ones abundant joy, good health, and prosperity.

4meter4 (talk) 16:41, 23 December 2025 (UTC)

Thank you 4meter4, and a happy Christmas to you too :) Gatoclass (talk) 11:23, 24 December 2025 (UTC)

Holiday wishes and a happy new year!

	Infinite Possibilities
	Is this real life? Yes! Is this going to be forever? No! Elvis is getting ready to leave the building and 2026 is about to be born, kicking and screaming. They say nothing gold can stay, but I say, don't listen to them, stay golden all the same. Here's to a new year of infinite diversity and beautiful combinations! Viriditas (talk) 21:52, 23 December 2025 (UTC)

Thank you Viriditas, and seasons greetings to you too :) Gatoclass (talk) 11:35, 24 December 2025 (UTC)

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2026!

Hello Gatoclass, may you be surrounded by peace, success and happiness on this seasonal occasion. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Sending you heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2026. Happy editing, Dclemens1971 (talk) 15:31, 24 December 2025 (UTC) Spread the love by adding {{subst:Seasonal Greetings}} to other user talk pages.

Dclemens1971 (talk) 15:31, 24 December 2025 (UTC)

Season's Greetings

Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2026!

Hello Gatoclass, may you be surrounded by peace, success and happiness on this seasonal occasion. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Sending you heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2026. Happy editing, Abishe (talk) 08:14, 25 December 2025 (UTC) Spread the love by adding {{subst:Seasonal Greetings}} to other user talk pages.

Abishe (talk) 08:14, 25 December 2025 (UTC)

Welcome to the 2026 WikiCup!

Happy New Year and Happy New WikiCup! The 2026 competition has just begun and all article creators, expanders, improvers and reviewers are welcome to take part. Even if you are a novice editor, we hope the WikiCup will give you a chance to improve your editing skills as you go. If you have already signed up, your submissions page can be found here. If you have not yet signed up, you can add your name here, and a bot will set up your submissions page within one day, ready for you to take part. Any questions on the scoring, rules or anything else should be directed to one of the judges, or posted to the WikiCup talk page.

For the 2026 WikiCup, the highest-ranking contestants will receive tournament points at the end of each round, and final rankings are decided by the number of tournament points each contestant has. This is the same scoring system that we had last year. If you're busy and can't sign up in January, don't worry: Signups are open throughout the year. To make things fairer for latecomers, the lowest-scoring contestants are no longer eliminated at the end of each round.

The first round will end on 26 February. The judges for the WikiCup this year are: Cwmhiraeth (talk · contribs · email), Epicgenius (talk · contribs · email), Frostly (talk · contribs · email), Guerillero (talk · contribs · email) and Lee Vilenski (talk · contribs · email). Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:38, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

Happy New Year, Gatoclass!

Happy New Year!

Gatoclass,
Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia.
Volten001 ^☎ 11:00, 2 January 2026 (UTC)

   Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year fireworks}} to user talk pages.

Volten001 ^☎ 11:00, 2 January 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 15 January 2026

• News and notes: Wikipedia's 25th anniversary is here!
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• Serendipity: The WMF wants to buy you books!
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The Signpost: 29 January 2026

• Traffic report: The most viewed articles of 2025
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The Signpost: 17 February 2026

• In the media: Global powers see Wikipedia as fundamental target for manipulation
  Attempted Wikipedia shenanigans apparent from Epstein, AI, various governments.

• News and notes: Discussions open for the next WMF Annual Plan
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Advice for a New Wikipedia Editor Regarding Disrespect

Hello Gatoclass, I am a relatively new editor here. A user reversed an edit on the ChatGPT page with a dismissive comment (stating non-substantial information). I reversed the edit but made some alterations that addressed the edits of both previous editors. I engaged in a discussion on their talk page, in which they brought up some valid points for consideration. However, the other editor was extremely hostile, condescending, and overall disrespectful. I know this violates the fourth (and possibly fifth) pillar of Wikipedia ethics. I think that this editor's behavior is toxic and non-welcoming to new editors such as myself. This editor is much more experienced than I, but I feel the hostile conversation is worth some sort of administrative action. I have read the incident pages and such, but I am a bit worried that my ordeal may not be substantial enough to be taken seriously. Any advice on the manner would be greatly appreciated! ROASTED SHARK (talk) 09:04, 18 February 2026 (UTC)

Grayfell's responses were blunt but did not amount to personal attacks in my view. Characterizing an edit as "AI-like slop" is criticism of somebody's writing style but not a personal attack, though it might be characterized as uncivil. However, as Grayfell himself pointed out, the edit in question was not actually yours, you basically just restored somebody else's edit, with very minor changes.

In short, I think you are overreacting, especially with this. So if you are considering an WP:ANI report over this, I would counsel against it. ANI itself can get pretty hostile and you are unlikely to find any satisfaction there, so best if you just drop this IMO. Gatoclass (talk) 09:44, 18 February 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-09

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.

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.
• 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.
• 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.

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.
• 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 19:01, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

WikiCup 2026 March newsletter

The first round of the 2026 WikiCup ended on 26 February. As some of you may have noticed, good article nomination reviews now receive 10 points, an increase from 5 points in the previous year, as per a consensus at WT:CUP. This point increase has been retroactively applied to all good article reviews for which competitors have claimed points in this round. Peer reviews, which continue to be worth 5 points, are now listed in the same section as featured article candidate reviews, rather than with good article reviews. Everyone who competed in round 1 will advance to round 2 unless they have withdrawn or been banned. No other changes to the round-point system have been made for this year.

Round 1 was competitive. Three contestants scored more than 1,000 round points, and the top 16 contestants all scored more than 300 round points. The following competitors scored more than 800 round points:

• Bgsu98 (submissions) with 1,467 round points, largely gained from 1 featured article, 5 featured lists, 15 good articles, and 42 FAC and GAN reviews;
• Olliefant (submissions) with 1,246 round points, largely from 4 featured lists, 9 good articles, 2 featured topic articles, 4 did you know articles, and 75 FAC and GAN reviews;
• Generalissima (submissions) with 1,095 round points, largely from 3 featured articles, 6 good articles, and 5 did you know articles;
• MCE89 (submissions) with 848 round points, largely from 1 featured article, 8 good articles, 1 did you know article, and 32 FAC and GAN reviews; and
• Rollinginhisgrave (submissions) with 838 round points, largely from 1 featured article, 8 good articles, 1 did you know article, and 14 FAC, GAN, and peer reviews.

The full scores for round 1 can be seen here. During this round, contestants have claimed 7 featured articles, 16 featured lists, 2 featured-topic articles, 168 good articles, 13 good-topic articles and more than 50 Did You Know articles. In addition, competitors have worked on 14 In the News articles, and they have conducted nearly 700 reviews. The tournament points table will be updated within the next few days.

Remember that any content promoted after 26 February but before the start of Round 2 can be claimed in Round 2. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. If you want to help out with the WikiCup, feel free to review one of the nominations listed on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:56, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-10

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

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.
• 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 https://diff.wikimedia.org/techblog.
• 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 17:49, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-11

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.
• 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.
• 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.

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 English, 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.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 18:51, 9 March 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 10 March 2026

• Interview: Bernadette Meehan, new Wikimedia Foundation CEO
  Part 2.

• News and notes: Security testing unleashes computer worm on Meta-wiki
  Dormant worm awakes; a sketchy archiving site struck; ether burns.

• Special report: What actually happened during the Wikimedia security incident?
  A horrifying exploit took place, which could have had catastrophic and far-reaching consequences if used maliciously; instead, it seems to have happened by accident and was used for childish vandalism. How did this happen, and what did the script actually do?

• In the media: Indonesian government blocks Wikimedia logins; archive site scoured from Wikipedia after owner runs malware
  As well as controversy over LLM translations.

• Recent research: To wiki, perchance to groki
  Comparisons continue.

• Obituary: Madhav Gadgil, Fredrick Brennan, Mark Miller, Chip Berlet
  Rest in peace.

• Opinion: Interface administrators and trusting trust
  Potential attacks are the logical consequence of giving a group of users unlimited control over JavaScript.

• Technology report: English Wikipedia deprecates archive.today after DDoS against blog, altered content
  After the archive site launched a DDoS campaign against a small blog in January 2026, a request for comment was started, with consensus to deprecate the site used almost 700 thousand times.

• Op-ed: Why is "Trypsin-sensitive photosynthetic activities in chloroplast membranes" cited in "List of tallest buildings in Chicago"?
  The answer is slop.

• Essay: The pursuit of a button click
  Volunteering for Wikipedia has its rewards. The thank-button, for example.

• In focus: Short descriptions: One year later
  A discussion of the challenge set forth to the Wikipedia community one year ago!

• WikiProject report: Unreferenced articles backlog drive
  Unreferenced articles in English Wikipedia - help us in the backlog drive!

• Community view: Speaking of planning ...
  The WMF planning process is underway.

• Traffic report: Over the mountain, kissing silver inlaid clouds
  Death and the Winter Olympics.

• Crossword: "It will never happen"
  Want to take a break?

• Comix: BRIEn't
  Or is it.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:11, 10 March 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-12

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 ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽ 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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'.
• 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.

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.
• Users of the ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽ 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 19:34, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-13

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

• 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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MediaWiki message delivery 16:49, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

		The Original Barnstar
		Thank you for being such great admins for this site! (Talk) PHLOGISTON ENTHUSIAST 17:42, 26 March 2026 (UTC)

Very kind of you Phlogiston! Thank you 😊 Gatoclass (talk) 03:18, 27 March 2026 (UTC)

Nuts

Hi, I was going to respond to your DYKT thread, but left it too late. My somewhat obvious advice is, if you want to have a good choice of articles to review, do a review or two in advance. Alternatively, if you don't want to do that, you could create potential DYK articles as drafts, then you could delay publication until you found an article you wanted to review. TSventon (talk) 18:19, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-14

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. Read more.

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. Read more.
• 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.

Updates for technical contributors

• 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 19:23, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 March 2026

• News and notes: Entirety of Wikinews to be shut down
  All languages to be shut down in May; first AI agent blocked; new name for AfD?

• In the media: AI ban, newspapers disrupt archiving; and antisemitism complaints
  Perennial challenges with AI, demographic representation, and attacks from people buying media influence.

• Community view: Videos from WikiConference North America 2025 in NYC
  In attendees' own words.

• Disinformation report: Cleaning up after Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Nygard, and Mohamed Al-Fayed
  Countering the edits of the rich and dangerous.

• WikiConference report: WikiConference North America 2025 in NYC review
  About the conference series, and this conference particularly.

• Obituary: Dr. Subas Chandra Rout
  Rest in peace.

• Traffic report: Call in the dogs of war, soldier of fortune
  Though of course the picture needs to be Chuck Norris...

• Gallery: Canadian Rangers participate in Operation Enduring Encyclopedia
  Analogies between how Wikipedia works and how Canada works.

• Comix: n00bsitting
  ...!

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:04, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-15

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.

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.
• 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.
• The Special:NamespaceInfo page now includes namespace aliases. For example "WP" for the "Project" ("Wikipedia") namespace on the German Wikipedia.
• 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 16:17, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

DYK for American Society of Marine Engineers

On 9 April 2026, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article American Society of Marine Engineers, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that the American Society of Marine Engineers was a company union established to supplant its labor union counterpart? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/American Society of Marine Engineers. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, American Society of Marine Engineers), and the hook may be added to the statistics page after its run on the Main Page has completed. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to nominate it.

Dclemens1971 (talk) 00:03, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

Happy First Edit Day!

Happy First Edit Day, Gatoclass, from the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! Have a great day! ☘︎☘︎☘︎ALEXHammeke (talk | guestbook | sandbox) 18:19, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-16

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.
• 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.

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.
• 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.
• 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).
• 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 15:17, 13 April 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-17

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.
• 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.
• 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.

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 14:58, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 21 April 2026

• News and notes: Six Serbian Wikipedia editors banned following controversy about political bias
  Plus, new bans for AI-generated content in place, a new drop in active admins, pranks on pranks, May admin election, and other news from the Wikimedia world.

• In the media: Could Wikipedia be involved in Massachusetts' proposed social media ban for minors?
  Another regulate-the-internet attempt casts a wide net.

• Gallery: March equinox
  The progression of seasons in March.

• Traffic report: Time to change my galaxy in case, we outta space!
  What catches the reader's eye? Death and film, per usual, and a loop around the moon per unusual.

• Comix: Of skirts and articles
  When significant coverage is only skin deep.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:47, 21 April 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-18

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

• There is a change in how new users are autoconfirmed that will improve anti-vandalism protection. Currently, users who have had an account for a few days and made a few edits are automatically added to the Autoconfirmed users group. This configuration tends to be exploited by some vandals, who create accounts and start to use them only after some time. To mitigate this, the configuration will be updated next week so that – for the purpose of becoming autoconfirmed – the account age will be counted from their first edit, instead of registration date. The numeric value of the age threshold will remain the same. This change will be deployed only to wikis which require at least one edit as part of the autoconfirmation conditions.
• All Wikipedia users with new accounts and those who activated the "automatically enable most beta features" option in their preference can now use the reading lists beta feature to save articles for later reading. This helps organize reading interests in one place for convenient access.
• View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where infobox images have huge padding in Firefox, has been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• As a reminder, the global API rate limits will be applied this week to identified API traffic. This is to help ensure fair use of infrastructure. 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, including the actual rate limits, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits and Frequently Asked Questions.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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MediaWiki message delivery 18:04, 27 April 2026 (UTC)

WikiCup 2026 May newsletter

The second round of the 2026 WikiCup ended on 28 April. As a reminder for contestants who just joined or are unaware of recent changes to our round-points system, good article nomination reviews now receive 10 points, an increase from 5 points in the previous year, as per a consensus at WT:CUP. Peer reviews, which continue to be worth 5 points, are now listed in the same section as featured article candidate reviews, rather than with good article reviews. Everyone who competed in round 2 will advance to round 3 unless they have withdrawn or been banned. No other changes to the round-point system have been made for this year.

Round 2 was competitive. Three contestants scored more than 1,000 round points; nine scored over 500; and fourteen scored over 300. The top seven contestants had at least one featured article (two of them with two apiece). The following competitors scored more than 800 round points:

• MCE89 (submissions) with 1,333 points, mainly from good and featured articles about Australian people and geography
• Generalissima (submissions) with 1,169 points, mainly from good and featured articles related to shipping ethics controversy in fanfiction, waterways, and Gu Yanwu
• Bgsu98 (submissions) with 1,149 points, mainly from good articles, featured articles, and featured lists about figure skating, along with many article reviews and two good topics
• Olliefant (submissions) with 830 points, mainly from good and featured articles about television shows, episodes and media, along with nearly four dozen good and featured article reviews
• Gommeh (submissions) with 827 points, mainly from good and featured articles related to Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail

The full scores for round 2 can be seen here. During this round, contestants have claimed 12 featured articles, 13 featured lists, 2 featured-topic articles, 106 good articles, 22 good-topic articles and more than 40 Did You Know articles. In addition, competitors have worked on 3 In the News articles, and they have conducted over 200 reviews. The tournament points table has been updated.

Remember that any content promoted after 28 April but before the start of Round 3 can be claimed in Round 3. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. If you want to help out with the WikiCup, feel free to review one of the nominations listed on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:49, 29 April 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-19

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 Article guidance team invites experienced editors of pilot Wikipedias—Arabic, Bangla, Japanese, Portuguese, Persian, Turkish, Simple English, Spanish, and French—to help translate and adapt sample outlines. These outlines will guide editors in creating clear, well-structured, and policy-compliant articles when using the feature once it is launched in May 2026. Simple instructions on how to translate and adapt the outlines are available.

Updates for editors

• The Product and Technology Advisory Council has published draft recommendations on a model that affiliates can follow when contributing to the technical space. Community members are invited to provide feedback on the recommendation until May 8th on the talk page.
• The number of available thumbnail size preferences in MediaWiki is being reduced to three standardized options—Small (180px), Regular (250px), and Large (400px), as part of ongoing efforts to improve performance and reduce strain on thumbnail services. As a result, existing preferences will be mapped to the nearest new size (for example, smaller selections like 120px or 150px will render at 180px, while larger ones like 300px or 360px will render at 400px). The preferences interface will soon be updated to reflect these changes, and users who wish to opt out or provide feedback can do so.
• From now on, even when a permission expires automatically, users will receive an Echo notification similar to the standard notification for permission changes. There is a difference between this and Global reminder bot in that the latter reminds users a week before the rights are due to expire, so that they can renew the rights.
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the problem where the ULS language selector in Special:Translate would scroll vertically when it shouldn't, has been resolved. Previously, when users opened the "Translate to English" dropdown and typed certain inputs, the dialog would scroll vertically by a few pixels even when there was enough space to display all results. The dropdown no longer shifts unnecessarily when filtering languages.
• The Global Watchlist, which lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on a single page, continues to improve. For example, watchlists for Wikibase sites such as Wikidata now support EntitySchema elements for better tracking. The Live Updates mode now refreshes the special page every 60 seconds to comply with the updated global API rate limits for improved real-time responsiveness. Additionally, a directionality bug that displayed links as "changes 3" instead of "3 changes" in mixed-direction lists has been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The second phase of global API rate limits has been rolled out to reduce the impact of AI crawlers and ensure fair, sustainable access to Wikimedia resources, prioritising human and mission-aligned traffic. Limits have been shifted from per-hour to per-minute, producing smoother traffic patterns and more predictable API load. Community users are not expected to be affected, and no action is required. Early indications show some User-Agent-based requestors are adjusting behaviour, and around 64% of automated API traffic has been identified. Monitoring continues, and Wikimedia Enterprise remains available for commercial support.
• 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 20:41, 4 May 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-20

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

• Community Tech has published new guidance explaining how wishes on Community Wishlist are triaged and prioritized. The documentation is intended to help contributors write stronger proposals by clarifying the factors that influence prioritization decisions. Beyond vote counts, the guidance highlights considerations such as potential impact on the community when determining which wishes move forward.

Updates for editors

• The Reader Growth team is launching an experiment to test a new Share Card feature that allows readers to create visually engaging cards from Wikipedia articles or selected article sections and share them online, with each card linking back to the original article to help expand readership and article discovery. The mobile-only A/B test will be available to a portion of readers on Arabic, Chinese, French, Vietnamese, and English Wikipedia to better understand reading and sharing habits, and is scheduled to begin the week of May 18 and run for four weeks.
• The Android and iOS Wikipedia apps recently released the 25-day reading challenge into Beta, as part of efforts to drive reader engagement by encouraging users to complete reading milestones. To track their reading streak during the challenge, App users can add a widget featuring Baby Globe to their home screen. The challenge officially begins May 11.
• View all 17 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the global preference for enabling syntax highlighting in wikitext could unexpectedly disable itself after being turned on, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The ResourceLoader module mediawiki.ui.input, deprecated since September 2023, will be removed this week. There is a guide for migrating from MediaWiki UI to Codex for any tools that use it.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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MediaWiki message delivery 19:19, 11 May 2026 (UTC)

Happy Adminship Anniversary!

Wishing Gatoclass a very happy adminship anniversary on behalf of the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! ☘︎☘︎☘︎ALEXHammeke (talk | guestbook | sandbox) 18:58, 16 May 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-21

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 Abstract Wikipedia team has identified five potential pilot wikis to assess their interest in adopting abstract articles on their wikis. The pilots are Malayalam, Bengali, Dagbani, Arabic, and Indonesian Wikipedia. The feedback period will be open until May 22. If your community is interested in becoming a pilot, let us know on Meta.

Updates for editors

• An experiment to show Reading Lists to logged-out readers on mobile web will launch on May 18 across German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, and Urdu Wikipedias, and will run for one month. The effort supports broader goals of helping readers save and organize articles for later reading, while encouraging habits that could lead to future Wikipedia contributions.
• To support a bookmark button in the Reading List beta feature, the "Tools > Action" menu has been updated to display icons, including the watch star indicator that helps editors identify temporarily watched articles. The icons now also match those used on mobile, improving consistency across platforms. The change is currently limited to the actions menu and mainly affects editors with privileged user rights.
• Suggestion Mode was released as an A/B test for newcomer editors on the mobile website at ~15 Wikipedias. The experiment will measure the impact that Suggestion Mode has on the proportion of newcomer mobile web edit sessions that result in constructive (un-reverted) article edits. The experiment will also evaluate the feature's impact on editor retention, and monitor changes in revert and block rates.
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue in the Wikipedia Android app where images could sometimes fail to load after opening a recommended reading list notification, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The Wikidata Platform team has published its backend replacement recommendation and accompanying technical architecture for the migration of the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) away from Blazegraph. Feedback is invited until May 25th 2026, especially on potential gaps and impacts on advanced use cases. Wikidata community members and WDQS users are also encouraged to help identify high-impact tools and workflows that may need attention on this page. Feedback can be shared on the Migration talk page or during the next office hour. See the WDP team newsletter for more details.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• On English, French, Japanese, and a few other Wikipedias, there was a trial of hCaptcha, a third-party bot detection service. The trial showed that hCaptcha effectively detects and deters some bad-faith automated activity, on its own and by giving checkusers and stewards signals to look into. Because the results were positive, hCaptcha will be rolled out across all wikis over the next few weeks. See the hCaptcha project page for technical information about the implementation and privacy protections. Learn more.
• The latest Community Tech update is now available, with progress across several Community Wishlist initiatives, including Reading Lists expansion from the mobile app to the website, new language support for "Who Wrote That" and the Personal Dashboard, improvements to 3D rendering and Charts, and upcoming work on talk page sorting, audio playback, and editing workflows. The update also shares current priorities, wishlist status trends, and opportunities for community feedback on future focus areas and the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2026–2027 Annual Plan. Read the full newsletter for details.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 20:20, 18 May 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 22 May 2026

• News and notes: Offline: Osama Khalid still in prison
  He has been imprisoned since 2020 for his Wikipedia edits. A fresh campaign is calling for his release.

• In the media: Indonesian editors, you shall return!
  And lawspam, may you be away.

• Disinformation report: Who is a typical paid editor? Who are their typical clients?
  Remember the golden rule!

• Recent research: WikiLambda the Ultimate
  Does Abstract Wikipedia help fight "One ring to rule them all" solutions for knowledge access - or does it implement one itself?

• Traffic report: This is where I'll be, so heavenly, so come and dance with me Michael!
  A real off the wall thriller, invincible, can't beat it, or is it dangerous and just bad?

• Forum: WikiAnnotate: help us build a dataset of article quality evaluations
  A research project to build better automated article assessment tools.

• In focus: Demystifying the 2026-27 Annual Plan
  A guide to WMF's Tech Annual Plan for the next year.

• Opinion: Wikipedia isn't a battleground. So why does it feel like one?
  Do we really have to fight?

• Serendipity: Wikinews: Into the Wikiverse
  The early suggestions for what the wiki could have been.

• Special report: Wikimedia Foundation closes Wikinews after 21 years
  Displaces 700 active editors among 31 language editions.

• Community view: Wikipedia's traffic drop: more on languages and freshness
  Which topics are dropping, and is the pattern the same everywhere?

• Gallery: Earth Day and Mother's Day
  Earth Day was on 22 April, and Mother's Day was on 10 May (in the US and many other countries).

• Comix: Brother, can you spare a page?
  What would you say?

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:16, 22 May 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-22

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

• Following a successful account creation experiment, an improved logged-out edit warning message will be deployed to all Wikimedia wikis in the first week of June. The change will only affect logged-out users on mobile web who open an editing session. The updated experience is designed to encourage account creation more clearly, while still allowing users to edit with temporary accounts. Results from the experiment showed a significant increase in account creation, with a 27% relative lift among users shown the updated message. As expected, as more people funnel into account creation, temporary accounts decreased by a relative 16%. The experiment did not show any significant changes in constructive edit rates or other monitored contributor metrics.

Updates for editors

• For security reasons, members of certain user groups are required to have two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled. Members of these groups will be unable to disable the 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 next few weeks, users without 2FA will be removed from these groups. Notably, this applies to bureaucrats. See the linked tasks for deployment schedules.
• WMDE Technical Wishes will run an A/B test on 10 wikis, testing potential improvements for Reference Previews. The experiment will run for ~2 weeks at the end of May / beginning of June and will affect 10% of desktop readers on the participating wikis.
• After two successful experiments, the Reader Growth team is rolling out an Image Browsing beta feature for all Wikipedias on mobile on May 25. This means that anyone who has all beta features on by default will start to see this feature, and others can check the box to turn it on in their preferences. The beta feature will include a carousel of all an article's images at the top of the article, with controls for editors to exclude images from the article's carousel or to exclude an article from the feature entirely.
• View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, three dimensional STL files were being rendered incorrectly by the media viewer 3D extension which is now fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The legacy CSS classes tleft and tright have been replaced with floatleft and floatright as the former do not work consistently across all MediaWiki platforms, notably mobile web and mobile apps. Projects relying on these classes are encouraged to review related usage and plan for migration. Please note that floatleft and floatright may also be deprecated in future, although there are currently no plans to do so. Read 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 21:50, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

Your nomination of CSS Appomattox is under review

Your good article nomination of the article CSS Appomattox is under review. See the review page for more information. This may take up to 7 days; feel free to contact the reviewer with any questions you might have. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of Hog Farm -- Hog Farm (talk) 00:21, 31 May 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-23

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 is conducting an experiment to show the reading lists feature, which is still in development, to logged-out mobile readers to test whether it encourages account creation at a higher rate compared to the watchstar button. The experiment was launched on May 18th on German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, and Urdu wikis, and it will run for a month.
• The Wikimedia Apps team released Phase 1 of the redesigned Home Feed to the Android Beta app. The new Home Feed includes a refreshed "Community" tab and a personalized "For You" tab featuring daily updated reading recommendations. The redesign is part of a broader effort to improve content discovery and create more engaging learning experiences in the Wikipedia apps.
• View all 18 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where images could fail to load for some suggested edits on Special:Homepage, leaving the thumbnail stuck in a loading state, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 21:06, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-24

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 Enterprise has increased the free usage limits for its API offerings. The monthly request limit for the On-demand API has increased from 5,000 to 50,000 requests, while the Snapshot API limit has increased from 15 to 30 requests per month. In addition, Structured Contents snapshots are now available for free accounts. These changes expand access to Wikimedia Enterprise data for developers, researchers, and organizations using Wikimedia content.

Updates for editors

• The refreshed Explore Feed, now called the Home Feed, is rolling out to 50% of users of the Wikipedia Android app. The Home Feed helps readers discover relevant content through two new tabs: Community and For You. The Community tab provides a scrollable feed of curated content and updates from the broader Wikimedia community and movement, while the For You tab offers a full-screen, swipeable experience that shows content tailored to a user's interests. The redesign is part of a broader effort to improve discovery and enhance the learning experience in the Wikipedia app.
• The Which came first? daily trivia game is now available in the beta version of the Wikipedia iOS app in English, German, French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Turkish. The game uses historical events from Wikipedia's "On This Day" content and challenges readers to guess which of two events happened first. The game was previously released on Android. Communities interested in making the game available in their languages can read the instructions and requirements.
• Sub-referencing, a new MediaWiki feature that allows editors to reuse references with different details, will begin rolling out to Wikimedia wikis following a successful pilot phase. Deployment will start on 8 June for most Group 1 wikis and French Wikipedia, with additional Wikipedia language editions receiving the feature over the coming months. Communities are encouraged to prepare by checking for untranslated Cite extension messages in their language and reviewing any use of Reference Tooltips, which may require updates to support the new functionality. Wikis using Reference Previews do not need to take any action. Communities may also wish to create the cite-tracking-category-ref-details tracking category as a hidden category using __HIDDENCAT__ (or a dedicated template), and connect it to the corresponding Wikidata item d:Q129764848.
• The Page Previews experiment on mobile web has concluded. The team decided not to roll out the feature after the results showed no statistically significant impact on reader retention, as the primary success metric was retention improvement. Page Previews, which are already available on desktop and in the apps, display a thumbnail, lead paragraph, and link to the full article when readers tap a blue link. The experiment tested this experience on mobile web across six Wikipedias.
• The user interface icon library will be updated later this week or next week. Most of the ~300 icons have been slightly refined and ~30 new icons have been added. These changes improve the icons to make them more consistent and comprehensible, and provide more visual balance when they are used in groups.
• The Universal Language Selector (ULS) interface in MediaWiki, which helps users select content in other languages, has been updated. The new version improves speed and accessibility, and users of Wikimedia projects can now pin languages for quicker language switching. The deployment to Wikimedia sites will happen gradually in the coming weeks. You can test it now as a beta feature by selecting beta features in your profile preferences and share your feedback on the project page.
• View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the Pageviews Analysis dashboard on pageviews.wmcloud.org stopped updating graph data in May 2026, affecting all users, has been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The function signature for mw.util.addPortletLink() has been simplified. Developers can now pass a configuration object instead of a list of positional parameters when creating portlet links. The previous function signature remains supported for backwards compatibility. For example, instead of: mw.util.addPortletLink('p-cactions', '#', 'Stub', 'ca-stubtag', 'Add a stub tag to this page'); use mw.util.addPortletLink('p-cactions', { href: '#', text: 'Stub', id: 'ca-stubtag', tooltip: 'Add a stub tag to this page' });. Script maintainers are encouraged to review existing uses of addPortletLink() and update them where appropriate. This change will be available on all wikis from 11 June. Thanks to community volunteer Gerges for contributing this improvement.
• Community Wishlist discussion: Product & Technology introduced changes meant to increase the number and complexity of wishes fulfilled, including the disbanding of the Community Tech team. They are engaging in discussions about a proposed direction for the wishlist from community members. Includes ways to structure annual voting, better tracking of wishes, removing focus areas, and staffing updates.
• 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 21:28, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-25

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 Reader Growth team has launched an Image Browsing beta feature on the mobile web version of all Wikipedias. The feature shows an image carousel at the top of articles with 3 or more images. Editors can configure this feature with the following controls: to hide a specific image from a page, either use class=notpageimage excluding it from thumbnail previews, or class=noviewer excluding it from MediaViewer. The carousel can also be disabled from a page entirely, with the magic word __NOMEDIAVIEWERCAROUSEL__. To submit feedback or flag bugs, please visit the project page.
• Wikitables can now be sorted in descending order on the first click by adding data-sort-order="desc" to the header cell. Previously, by default, clicking a column header for the first time sorts it in ascending order. This addition to a Wikitable gives it more control and flexibility, while the default behavior for subsequent clicks remains unchanged.

Updates for editors

• The Article guidance feature is currently being tested with some editors creating new articles on the Simple English, French, and Turkish Wikipedias. The experiment will soon begin on the Arabic and Bangla Wikipedias as well. This feature gives editors community-curated guidance to help them create articles that follow community standards. Experienced editors can continue creating or adapting outlines for specific article types that are commonly created by less experienced contributors. The outlines guide less experienced editors in creating high-quality articles. A quick guide to markups used in outlines can be found on this page. Example outlines that can be adapted and instructions for how to adapt them are on this section of the project page.
• Wikis that wish to replace the "indefinitely" button in Special:Block for temporary accounts (for example, wikis that block temporary users only until account expiration) will be able to do so by creating MediaWiki:ipb-indefinite-expiry-temporary-account with the block duration they want.
• View all 41 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• By the end of June, a valid user-agent string will be required for automated dumps downloads from the dumps.wikimedia.org website. Automated requests that provide a generic or empty user-agent will be blocked. This extends enforcement of the long standing user-agent policy. Access to dumps through Wikimedia Cloud Services will not change.
• The roll out of global API rate limits is now complete, with limits enforced across all APIs and at the documented levels for all groups. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki remain exempt. All bots should continue to follow the documented best practices to avoid being rate limited.
• The API Portal wiki will be read only starting this week (June 15-18). The following week (June 22-25), all API Portal wiki URLs will redirect to Wikimedia APIs on mediawiki.org. Learn more on the project page.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• On June 17th at 6pm UTC the WMF will be holding Discord call focused on a code review. We've heard through the Developer Satisfaction Survey that volunteers are struggling with code review and we'd like to discuss these experiences with the goal of surfacing workable solutions. You can join the call via the Wikimedia Community Discord server.
• The Latin American Wikimedia Conference will host a regional hackathon that will bring together the Wikimedia movement’s technical community including developers, system administrators, data scientists, and users with extended rights. Interested technical contributors can apply for a scholarship to participate until June 21 at midnight (Bolivia time, UTC-4).
• Sign up for Wikimania Team Challenges to join this special event. The Team challenges will take place online and in person from July 21 to 22, before Wikimania conference. Everyone is welcome, regardless of skills or Wikimania registration. Teams will work on 10 important challenges supporting the Wikimedia community. For details, visit the Team Challenges page and register there. Registration closes on June 20th at 11pm UTC.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 16:46, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 21 June 2026

• From the editors: Ways for beginners to support The Signpost community journalism
  Pointing the way to your contribution to The Signpost!

• News and notes: Community Tech development team disbanded
  And English Wikipedia reaches a milestone in number of highly active editors.

• Disinformation report: PR for the people?
  Or, "PR using PR for PR"?

• Recent research: Proposed tagging system for AI involvement; successful and unsuccessful AI tools for contributors
  And other new research publications.

• In the media: Who won a 14th century battle and who won the 2026 Iran war?
  Media take issue with portrayals of recent and medieval history on Wikipedia. Plus a team supporting Wikipedians gets dissolved, and a few other things.

• Community view: Putting the Wish into the Wishlist
  A history of the Wikimedia community's request process to Foundation developers.

• In focus: A global standard for Neutral Point of View
  Wikipedians are commenting on a proposed global standard for neutral point of view.

• On the bright side: Flowers, blue helmets, reefs, pride, and Juneteenth
  Nice things around the world.

• Op-ed: Breathe, Don’t Panic, there is a different story about Wikimedia + AI futures
  We can build a strategy about AI that doesn't just center on readers; there are still plenty of humans to write the encyclopedia and work on diverse global knowledge.

• Opinion: Wikimedia Foundation staff develop union and Wikimedia user community reacts
  Why should editors support the Wiki Workers United union drive? Lessons the Wikimedia movement can learn from other labor struggles.

• Technology report: Community Tech team is disbanded, controversy erupts
  WMF disbands Community Tech, sparking community backlash over the future of the Wishlist and concerns about unionization.

• Traffic report: 'Cause this is thriller, thriller night
  Horror movies and Michael Jackson dominate theaters in the lead-up to the World Cup.

• WikiConference report: Report of Volunteer Supporters Network Annual Meeting 2026
  Outreach staff of Wikimedia chapters host a global discussion.

• Comix: Take your turn
  In a maze of twisty little edits, all alike.

• Humour: Group of banned T-shirt makers comes out of hiding to sell new Wikipedia-themed merchandise
  It ain't WikiProject United Nations, but you will find some PUNs.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:17, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-26

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 skipcaptcha right, which includes most autoconfirmed users. Bots are exempted. This change only affects edits that trigger an abuse filter. The skipcaptcha right 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 13:03, 23 June 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-27

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 of prefix: 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 11:46, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

WikiCup 2026 July newsletter

The third round of the 2026 WikiCup ended on 28 June at 23:59 (UTC). As a reminder, good article nomination reviews now receive 10 points, while peer reviews, which continue to be worth 5 points, are now listed in the same section as featured article candidate reviews, rather than with good article reviews. Everyone who competed in round 3 will advance to round 4 unless they have withdrawn or been banned. No other changes to the round-point system have been made for this year.

Round 3 was competitive. Three contestants scored more than 1,000 round points; eight scored over 500; and thirteen scored over 300. The top three contestants had at least one featured article (two of them with two apiece). The following competitors scored more than 800 round points:

• MCE89 (submissions) with 1567 points, mainly from good and featured articles about Australian people and geography, as well as some article reviews
• Bgsu98 (submissions) with 1547 points, mainly from good articles, featured articles, featured lists, and a good topic about figure skating, along with 20 article reviews
• Reconrabbit (submissions) with 1004 points, mainly from a high-multiplier featured article on European rabbit and several good articles, DYKs, and reviews
• A.Cython (submissions) with 1004 points, mainly from good articles about warfare, along with 22 article reviews
• Generalissima (submissions) with 859 points, mainly from good and featured articles about rivers and East Asian topics

The full scores for round 3 can be seen here. During this round, contestants have claimed 12 featured articles, 12 featured lists, 7 featured-topic articles, 117 good articles, 74 good-topic articles and more than 30 Did You Know articles. In addition, competitors have worked on 13 In the News articles, and they have conducted nearly 180 reviews. The tournament points table has been updated.

Remember that any content promoted after 28 June but before the start of Round 4 can be claimed in Round 4. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. If you want to help out with the WikiCup, feel free to review one of the nominations listed on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:49, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

Tech News

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 src attribute and SVG in the srcset attribute.
• 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 13:54, 6 July 2026 (UTC)

Your nomination of CSS Appomattox has passed

Your good article nomination of the article CSS Appomattox has passed; congratulations! See the review page for more information. If the article is eligible to appear in the "Did you know" section of the Main Page, you can nominate it within the next seven days. Please also consider reviewing somebody else's nomination to help keep the backlog down. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of Hog Farm -- Hog Farm (talk) 19:02, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 13 July 2026

• News and notes: An exclusive club
  Wikipedia Co-Founder Larry Sanger gets a community ban for canvassing.

• In the media: Battle for a soul – who won?
  Commissars, winners and losers, blocks or bans, a Wiki red card, social engineering on wikis, and Swift action!

• Opinion: We need to innovate with Wikimedia decision-making
  Rules we can actually read, trust and change!

• Recent research: LLMs and NPOV, 20 years of user blocks, Esperanto and Volapük Wikipedias
  And other research findings.

• News from Diff: How to host Wikicurious in your own community
  The Wikicurious team shares their approach to Wiki-event organizing.

• Community view: CUNY Newmark Wikimedian-in-Residence Quarterly Brief – April to June 2026
  Quarterly update on the activities of the City University of New York's Wikimedian-in-Residence, Richard Knipel.

• Special report: Wikipedia escapes Category 1 designation under the UK Online Safety Act – for now
  A possible future recategorization by the UK Government remains an existential threat to Wikipedia.

• On the bright side: Fatherhood, weather, and diplomacy
  Father's Day, Canada Day, and the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence.

• Op-ed: A Layup Easy Proposal for Wikimedia at 25: Spend 25% of Donations on the Community
  If strategy priority 1.1 is supporting the community, can we not increase the support to the community? Increasing grantmaking to 25% of the budget would be a move toward equality in the movement.

• Traffic report: The grass was greener, the light was brighter
  We reached the dizzy heights of that dreamed of World Cup.

• Comix: schnozzed
  on lollerskates.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:22, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-29

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.

MediaWiki message delivery 16:09, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

DYK for CSS Appomattox

On 15 July 2026, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article CSS Appomattox, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that two inches of excess beam doomed the Confederate gunboat Appomattox? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/CSS Appomattox. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (CSS Appomattox), and the hook may be added to the statistics page after its run on the Main Page has completed. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to nominate it.

Dclemens1971 (talk) 00:02, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

		Hook update
		Your hook reached 19,550 views (814.6 per hour), making it one of the most viewed hooks of July 2026 – nice work!

GalliumBot (talk • contribs) (he/it) 03:28, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-30

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.

MediaWiki message delivery 05:44, 21 July 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-31

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-helpusername and createacct-username-help that 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, and createacct-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.

MediaWiki message delivery 18:47, 27 July 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 2 August 2026

• In the media: Union drive, most prolific editor make headlines
  AI's impact on Wikipedia, World Cup editing, and encyclopedia's place in public life.

• News and notes: Foundation rejects voluntary recognition of union, proposed board eligibility rules sharply restrict candidates
  Further: harassment allegations at Wikimania, and new RfC for Abstract Wikipedia.

• WikiConference: "Kurier, Signpost, wikipress: You can be a Wikimedia journalist" - Wikimania presentation by User:Noé Recap
  A recap of Noé Gasparini's Wikimania 2026 presentation on the variety of wikipress outlets.

• In focus: Is Larry Sanger the co-founder of Wikipedia?
  A look over the years.

• Arbitration report: Think, and not just about content
  ArbCom continues business.

• News from Diff: Meet the Wikimedians of the Year 2026!
  Wikimedians of the Year 2026 announced at Wikimania 2026 - Paris.

• On the bright side: The beautiful game
  2026 Men's FIFA World Cup, Wikimania music, and wikipress.

• Traffic report: Odyssey and Oyarzabal
  To take you in the sun to (Ithaca), to show you the World Cup, it's the time of the season for editing!

• Comix: Well-spotted
  You dasherdly—dash–dash−dash-dash!

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:13, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-32

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.

MediaWiki message delivery 19:44, 3 August 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-33

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=timestamp URL 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 20:43, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-34

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 Worklist feature for the Event Registration tool is now live on all Wikimedia wikis. With Worklist, event organizers can add the articles their event will focus on directly to the event page. The Worklist also powers Event Pathways which notifies other editors of the upcoming or ongoing event when they edit an article featured in the event's Worklist. This is the minimum viable version (MVP), and feedback is welcome. Organizers are encouraged to try the feature. A hands-on Worklist Setup Workshop will take place on 18 August at 16:00 UTC and 19 August at 11:00 UTC.

Updates for editors

• Special:ShortPages displays short pages by their size, but in many cases it gets filled with disambiguations and soft redirects, making it harder to find the short articles themselves. Starting this weekend, you will be able to choose not to include an article in the special page by adding the magic word __EXPECTSHORTPAGE__.
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Bole (w:bol:)
• Starting the week of August 17, the page toolbar will wrap onto two lines when there is not enough horizontal space for all the buttons. This is a fully merged patch from the Reader Experience team which aims to reduce crowding in the Vector 2022 toolbar, that may occur on some language Wikipedias at certain screen widths.
• View all 16 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, uploading large files to Wikimedia Commons has become more stable and less prone to failure following some fixes related to the “Could not acquire lock” upload error.

Updates for technical contributors

• Debian Bullseye will reach the end of its Long Term Support on 31 August 2026. Some Cloud VPS projects still have instances running Debian Bullseye. Maintainers of those projects are encouraged to migrate to Debian Bookworm or Debian Trixie. A migration guide is available to help with the process, and users may also want to consider whether their workload is better suited to Toolforge. If you need help or cannot complete the migration by 31 August, please contact the Cloud VPS admins as soon as possible. Read more.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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MediaWiki message delivery 21:01, 17 August 2026 (UTC)

Missed DYK credit

Hi Gatoclass, just pointing out regarding these two edits ( and ) that I noticed you forgot to move the {{DYKnom}} credit line for the Faecalibacterium prausnitzii hook. I would make the change myself if I had the requisite permissions! — RAVENPVFF · talk · 17:51, 22 August 2026 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I'm not seeing the problem? Gatoclass (talk) 18:06, 22 August 2026 (UTC)

Oh wait, I see the problem - sorry, forgot about those pesky extra credits, I'm a tad rusty :) Gatoclass (talk) 18:10, 22 August 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 24 August 2026

• News and notes: Union process progresses, unanswered questions about Littler Mendelson remain
  And Raju Narisetti leaves WMF board after nine years.

• In the media: Wikipedia editors save Sam Altman's life
  Can AI do that? Meanwhile, Ruwiki gives porn the shaft, and has Grokipedia ghosted?

• Recent research: Women in blue? Wikipedia's gender gap reverses in some areas
  And other new research findings.

• Discussion report: Again and Again
  The community comes to consensus.

• Traffic report: Look out, here comes the Spider-Man!
  Plus The Odyssey and varied topics caught in his web.

• Humour: Her tastes, her Wikimania, her upcoming tour... Baby Globe reveals everything
  A short (parody) interview with Baby Globe via the French wikipress outlet, Regards sur l’Actualité du mouvement Wikimédia (RAW).

• On the bright side: The great outdoors
  Blue Angels, Indigenous Peoples' Day, and the Perseids meteor shower.

• Opinion: Are we embarrassed yet?
  One editor wants to find out more about a Department of Justice investigation of Wikipedia and its editors.

• Special report: Paris Syndrome: Labor Strife, AI Anxiety, and a Leadership Test at Wikimania 2026
  Notes from a delightful Wikimania and the ugly week that followed.

• Comix: WP:FAOWN
  "Explaining civilly" probably should go both ways...

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:20, 24 August 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-35

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 Special:CreateAccount page has been simplified as part of ongoing work to modernize the account creation experience. The panel showing project statistics no longer appears next to the form on desktop and mobile web. Multiple account creation experiments show that a simpler form helps newcomers complete registration.
• In order to improve page performance, images now load when they are viewed. This means images lower down an article will not load if a reader never scrolls to that part of the page, which may affect some image-related metrics.

• View all 42 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where image thumbnails in Abstract Wikipedia could fail to display after the corresponding file was moved on Wikimedia Commons, has now been fixed. Thumbnails will now update correctly when files are moved.

Updates for technical contributors

• User Info card is a feature that helps patrollers see information about user accounts. So far, it has been available only in places such as page history, logs and recent changes. Now, it's possible to place it in the page content as well, using the {{#uic:}} parser function. It can be particularly useful in templates like {{Userlinks}} (or their specialized variants), as it will make it easier to see the context about a user on various noticeboard pages. The card will be displayed only to users who have it enabled in their preferences.
• Due to user security and privacy risks, we have disabled access to Special:MyPage URLs when specifically using action=raw. If you are impacted by this, consider whether you can use an alternative approach. Special:MyPage URLs can still be accessed and used without action=raw. Specified user page URLs (e.g. User:Myusername) can still be used with action=raw.
• Due to an update, the thumbnailing software has been improved. This includes upgrading librsvg to 2.60 and ImageMagick to 7, as well as resolving a number of long-standing thumbnailing bugs like rendering errors.

• 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 20:43, 24 August 2026 (UTC)

WikiCup 2026 September newsletter

The fourth round of the 2026 WikiCup ended on 29 August at 23:59 (UTC). Everyone who competed in round 4 will advance to round 5 unless they have withdrawn or been removed. Round 4 was competitive, though slightly less so than round 3. Three contestants scored more than 1,000 round points; six scored over 500; and nine scored over 300. Each of the top five competitors had hundreds of points accumulated from multiple GAs. The following competitors scored more than 800 round points:

• Generalissima (submissions) with 1,318 points, mostly from 13 good articles and 3 featured articles about creeks and Chinese and Japanese subjects
• Vanderwaalforces (submissions) with 1,208 points from 2 featured articles, 2 featured lists, and 12 good articles about African leaders, along with over two dozen reviews
• A.Cython (submissions) with 1,084 points from 16 good articles and a small good topic about warfare and Greek elections, along with over two dozen reviews
• Vestrian24Bio (submissions) with 955 points, mostly from 2 FLs, 2 featured topics, and 16 GAs about cricket, and almost two dozen reviews
• Bgsu98 (submissions) with 837 points from 4 FLs and 8 GAs about figure skating, along with two dozen reviews

The full scores for round 4 can be seen here. During this round, contestants have claimed 10 featured articles, 11 featured lists, 8 featured-topic articles, 103 good articles, 6 good-topic articles and more than 30 Did You Know articles. In addition, competitors have worked on 11 In the News articles, and they have conducted 170 peer reviews, FA and GA reviews. The tournament points table has been updated.

Remember that any content promoted after 29 August but before the start of Round 5 can be claimed in Round 5. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. If you want to help out with the WikiCup, feel free to review one of the nominations listed on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:43, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-36

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

• A new format for the Community Wishlist is open for feedback. You can read the proposed ideas on Meta. This new process plans to improve how wishes are triaged, voted on, and prioritized in a way that is transparent and balanced across project families and language editions. This consultation is open for two weeks.

Updates for editors

• The latest release of the Wikipedia Android app includes updates to the Saved feature, bringing the app’s saving experience closer to iOS and Web. The update redesigns the Saved tab with an “All articles” view, removes the default “Saved” reading list, renames reading lists to “Collections,” and modernizes the article-saving experience.
• The Reading Lists feature was enabled for all logged-in users on Bengali, Chinese, Czech and Vietnamese Wikipedias on August 25, after several months as a beta feature. Reading Lists will be available to all logged-in users on Arabic, French and Indonesian Wikipedias on September 1, followed by English Wikipedia on September 14, and all other Wikipedia wikis on September 28.
• At the end of the month, some logged-out readers on Bengali, Czech, Persian, English, and Polish Wikipedias using the Minerva skin on mobile will see an updated navigation bar in an A/B test. The test will compare the current navigation bar with a new version designed to make it easier to find information more quickly. The goal is to determine whether these changes encourage readers to return more often. This experiment will not change the experience for logged-in readers and/or editors.
• Editors who maintain redirects, templates, and categories used on redirect pages now have improved ways for finding and curating redirects. Previously, redirects pages could not be searched. Two new search keywords, onlyredirects: and withredirects:, now allow redirects to be searched directly and can be combined with existing keywords such as incategory:, intitle:, and insource:.
• The ISBN lookup tools for generating citations were recently not working because of external service problems. Developers are working on solutions.
• View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where searching for pages by category using deepcat could return no results or unrelated results has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The domain of URLs for thumbnails is changing from upload.wikimedia.org to thumb.wikimedia.org. The old URLs will continue to work for the foreseeable future but MediaWiki will advertise the new domain instead. URLs to other types of media such as original files, videos and transcodes will still be served from upload.wikimedia.org.
• The Wikimedia Math API is now deprecated. These endpoints will be fully sunset by the end of September 2026. Developers who call these endpoints should transition to alternative math rendering solutions, such as the native MathML or MathJax. Third-party MediaWiki installations that utilize the Math extension for formula rendering are required to upgrade to v1.43+ to avoid disruption of service.

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• Read more about TextMatch in a Diff post titled, Custom edit suggestions for every wiki: How communities are shaping Suggestion Mode with TextMatch.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 20:51, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-37

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

• Add a Link has been upgraded for English Wikipedia users with improved detection of links that have different capitalization. This will help reduce ambiguous suggestions caused by differences in capitalization in article titles, including articles about cultural goods. A second phase of improvements is planned, which will also prepare the feature for release in other languages.
• The Article guidance feature will be enabled by default for junior editors on Simple English and Turkish Wikipedia starting 10 September 2026 following an experiment. Junior editors with 0 to 99 edits will automatically see the feature when they click a red link or use the "Madde oluşturto" option on Turkish Wikipedia to create a new article. The change is intended to help junior editors create higher-quality articles that meet each Wikipedia’s standards. Additional improvements will continue based on the experiment results and community feedback.
• The Pageviews Analysis tool which allows users to compare pageviews across multiple pages, turns 10 years old this year and several new features have been added. They include WikiNav which provides insights into how readers of Wikipedia explore the content, editing stats in Siteviews, the ability to lookup articles belonging to a WikiProject, and support for dark mode.
• A visually simplified Minerva navigation bar is being tested for logged-out readers using mobile web on the Bengali, Czech, English, Farsi, and Polish Wikipedias. The experiment aims to determine whether simplifying the navigation improves reader retention. The test will run from August 31 to September 28, and no action is required from users.
• WMDE Technical Wishes is working on improving auto-generated reference names in VisualEditor. Editors will only notice a slight change starting this week. When adding automatic reference names the numbering will start at :1 instead of :0. Read more on the project page.
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 23. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
• View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where Parsoid could mishandle nested nowiki tags, causing content to be lost and displaying unwanted text has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• Interface administrators can configure gadgets from MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition. The definition format has been updated and no longer requires the ResourceLoader option, as gadgets are always loaded through ResourceLoader. This simplifies gadget configuration by removing an option that is no longer necessary, making gadget definitions easier for administrators.
• 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 18:42, 7 September 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-38

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 Future Audiences team has started a discussion on English Wikipedia about a proposed new experiment to show a temporary notice about the new Google Preferred Sources feature to Wikipedia readers coming from Google. The experiment is to test whether this notice makes visitors come back to Wikipedia more often. Preferred Sources feature lets users choose websites they trust so Google can highlight content from those sources more prominently in Search and AI experiences. We are interested in testing this on other languages that Google supports and would welcome assistance with starting conversations on other wikis. If interested, please reach out to Future Audiences on the talk page.

Updates for editors

• The chat platform Discord is releasing a new self-service framework that websites can use to specify how their links should look when shared on Discord. The Future Audiences team is planning to start using this new framework to improve how Wikipedia links look when shared on Discord, giving better attribution and credit to contributors. The link appearance and behavior won't change in the first phase of this project as we want to first collect some baseline data to assess the impact of future changes. However, if community members who are active on Discord spot any issues, they can reach out on Phabricator or Metawiki.
• The Reader Growth team will be running an experiment to test whether compacting article lead sections on mobiles with the addition of a "read more" button improves reader retention. The test will begin on September 17 on Arabic, Spanish, French, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Vietnamese, and Chinese Wikipedias and will run for four weeks.
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 23. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming week.
• View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where Wikistats for Wikipedias was returning an HTTP 500 error and could not be reached, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• Developers who maintain a tool that queries the Wikimedia Commons links tables need to update their code to connect to the new x4 database cluster. The links tables have been moved from the s4 cluster to x4, and will no longer receive updates on s4. The page and redirect tables remain available on both clusters. A wiki replica for the x4 cluster will be set up afterwards. The change is being made because the s4 cluster has grown too large to operate efficiently. You can read 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 15:28, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 16 September 2026

• News and notes: The Balance of Power
  Wikimedia employees unionize, officer departs, The Signpost gains sister on Wiktionary

• In the media: Shocking photos may be changed on Wikipedia
  The image gallery anyone can edit.

• Disinformation report: Have UN Secretary-General candidates manipulated Wikipedia?
  Speaking diplomatically, not all of them.

• Recent research: Google's AI overviews may have reduced search engine referrals to English Wikipedia by 5%
  And other research findings.

• WikiConference report: The backwater symbiosis – reflections from Wiki Conference India 2026
  The fourth iteration of Wiki Conference India.

• Traffic report: Heaven let your light shine down
  The recently deceased dominate while still leaving room for some entertainment.

• Serendipity: Wikipedia Family Mosh Pit
  A poem by Mollystarkdean.

• Obituary: Passing of Gobonobo, community leader advocating for women and minorities
  Promoter of cultural knowledge and organizer of global cooperation.

• On the bright side: Fantasy video games, hopeful science fiction, and the change of seasons
  The Legend of Zelda, Star Trek, and Vivaldi's The Four Seasons.

• Comix: The Adventure of the Unknown Corpse
  An elementary case for fiction's greatest detective.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:07, 16 September 2026 (UTC)

Orphaned non-free image File:Fairsky.jpg

⚠

Thanks for uploading File:Fairsky.jpg. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of non-free use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).

Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in section F5 of the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. --B-bot (talk) 17:18, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

Orphaned non-free image File:Fairsky.jpg

⚠

Thanks for uploading File:Fairsky.jpg. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of non-free use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).

Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in section F5 of the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. --B-bot (talk) 17:15, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-39

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, 23 September 2026 at 14:00 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

• The Growth team tested a new post-edit notice designed to encourage Temporary Account holders to register for a permanent account. The new notice replaced multiple dialogs and a simultaneous welcome notification with a single message highlighting the benefits of creating an account. The experiment increased permanent account creation from 1.94% to 3.66%, an 87% relative increase. The change will now be released to all wikis.
• For Wikipedia editors using the "Suggestion mode" Beta Feature, there is a new opt-in user preference for showing "experimental" edit checks and suggestions. These types are listed at Special:EditChecks, and are intended for early developer-testing and for gathering feedback from experienced users. Administrators can change the configuration details for each suggestion as usual. Administrators can also use this feature to help test their community's ideas for locally created checks and suggestions. Experimental types will have a more distinct visual style later this week. Feedback is welcome.
• The CEE Technical Village Pump has been launched as a space for technical discussions and collaboration among Wikimedia communities in Central and Eastern Europe.
• A new tool, Starter Kit, is now available for new and small language Wikipedia communities. It brings together guided tasks, tools, and resources to help communities get started, monitor their progress, and collaborate with the broader Wikimedia community. Starter Kit is hosted on Wikimedia Toolforge and is designed for Wikipedias with fewer than 50,000 articles. Learn more about how Starter Kit works and how communities have been using it in this Diff blog post.
• The Reader Growth team is launching a retest of the image carousel experiment. The retest will use three new versions of the design, updated based on community feedback. The team will assess results and determine with communities whether or not to proceed with the feature. The experiment will begin the week of September 28 and will run on Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Czech, English, Farsi, French, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
• After successful rollouts to Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Czech, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias, the Reading Lists feature from the Reader Experience team will be available to all logged-in users on all Wikipedia wikis starting September 28.
• View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the mentor status script repeatedly updated mentors’ status even when nothing had changed, creating unnecessary Recent Changes entries, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The abusefilters list query API, used to retrieve specific details about active or historical abuse filters configured on a wiki, has been updated to support the formatversion=2 configuration parameter, thereby leading to breaking changes to the API response. All users who maintain user-scripts or other code need to check if they use the abusefilters list query API, and respond to any breaking changes.
• 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 11:54, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-40

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

• Users of default skins on desktop and mobile web (Vector 2022 and Minerva respectively) will now be informed if the search suggestions displayed as they type into Search come from page redirects. Previously, users could get confused when the top search suggestions did not match exactly what they had typed. The new redirect notice clarifies that these suggestions are not random, but related to the search. The suggested pages may be redirects to the most relevant destination articles being searched for.
• Logged-out Wikipedia users on mobile web will begin to see a bookmark button for saving articles to their reading lists instead of the current Watchstar button. When clicked, the bookmark button prompts users to log in or create an account to save an article for later. An earlier experiment found that the bookmark icon was four times more likely than the Watchstar button to encourage logged-out users to create an account. This change is part of efforts to encourage more readers to become account holders and use features that help them save and return to content.
• An experiment will begin on September 29 on Spanish, Arabic, English, and French Wikipedias to simplify the experience users encounter immediately after account creation. The test will explore whether removing friction from the current Welcome Survey helps new users understand what to do next more easily. The experiment will run through the end of October.

• The Product and Technology Advisory Council has put out a call for the community to suggest topics that it should consider and discuss with the Wikimedia Foundation. Editors and technical contributors are invited to add topics to the council's talk page.
• Later this week, it will be possible for communities to configure Edit Checks and Suggestions so that they are shown within additional namespaces, such as a Draft: namespace. Feedback is welcome.
• A bug in the Global Watchlist is causing the page to fail to load for users that have unseen changes on Wikimedia Commons. Developers are working on a fix. Until then, affected users can follow the workarounds described in the relevant help section.
• New magic words {{CATEGORYSORT:TIMESTAMP}} and {{CATEGORYSORT:RTIMESTAMP}} are now available for use. They are able to change the default sorting of categories to be based on timestamp of categorization.
• View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where Wikistats for Wikipedias was not reachable has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The datacenter switchover, scheduled on September 23, has been postponed. The equinox exercise revealed capacity issues, preventing the switch of all services to the other datacenter. The process has been paused, prioritizing investigating that issue, to ensure that we continue to be able to serve our users reliably. A new exercise will be scheduled. Meanwhile, all traffic and edits continue to work as usual.
• On September 23, a power loss briefly affected all wikis, creating intermittent issues on both reading and editing modes. This also affected Gerrit. This is unrelated to the datacenter switchover postponement.
• Produnto has been deployed to mediawiki.org and some Indic language wikis. We want to hear your feedback on this experimental product. Produnto allows users to use Lua modules hosted in Wikimedia's GitLab. It simplifies the sharing of Lua code between wikis. Instead of copying each individual Lua module from one wiki to another, users will be able to easily share packages across all wikis.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• A Cross-wiki code collaboration workshop will be held online on October 2 at 12:30 UTC, bringing together South Asian technical contributors to learn about Produnto and begin piloting it on Hindi, Punjabi, Odia, Telugu, and Malayalam Wikipedias. Produnto is a package manager for deploying Lua modules hosted on GitLab to Wikimedia wikis, and was recently deployed on some pilot wikis.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 10:47, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-41

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 process for this year’s Community Wishlist has been published, incorporating community feedback. The wish submission process will end on November 8. This year, a working group (open for volunteering) that includes community members familiar with the technical aspect of our wikis alongside Wikimedia Foundation staff, will take care of the triage process. The triage is expected to be completed by late November. Votes for wishes will start in January.

Updates for editors

• Editors using the visual editor will now see a warning when they paste text that is likely to have initially been copied from one of five external generative AI chatbots into Wikipedia. This feature is known as LLM Paste Check. It is a type of Edit Check that is community configurable. The check looks for markers in the copied HTML and is not using content watermark detection. Edits will also be tagged so that patrollers can review them more closely. The feature helps newcomers add content that respects Wikipedia’s policies and makes it easier for experienced editors to identify problematic edits. Communities with local policies about LLM usage can adjust the wording and policy that is linked. The team apologizes that this was rolled out without a delay for translations.
• Editors can now easily access the web visual editor directly from the iOS and Android apps. When opening the editor, users will be given a choice between visual editing and source editing. If they choose visual editing, they will be sent to a mobile web window in their phone's browser. After completing their edit, a banner will give them the option to return to the app. This enables readers to make quick contributions while casually reading.
• Users of the Wikipedia Android and iOS apps will now see a one-time account creation prompt after they have used the app for two consecutive weeks. This prompt explains the benefits of having an account. It is intended to help more casual readers become logged-in users who return to the apps regularly.
• Editors on group1 wikis, including Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikivoyage, and Wikisource, will no longer see notifications on Recent Changes and Watchlist when a link to another language version of a page is added, removed, or changed in its Wikidata item. This change will begin on October 5 at 07:00 UTC as a two-week trial to reduce high-volume, low-value notifications and make important changes easier to identify. Editors who rely on these notifications can read more on the project page and share feedback or concerns on the talk page.
• View all 36 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where mentors who removed themselves from the mentorship program could still have mentees assigned to them and receive questions, has now been fixed. Mentees will now be reassigned when a mentor leaves the program.

Updates for technical contributors

• Wikimedia Brasil has published its Development Best Practices Framework (ABPD). It is a guide for staff, contractors and volunteers building technical tools and projects. It covers the project lifecycle, security, accessibility, personal data protection and responsible AI use, and explains how movement-wide guidelines were adapted to a local context. They encourage other affiliates to reuse it and adapt it. Read more in the Diff post.
• A new, canonical base URL for Wikimedia APIs will soon be introduced. The new canonical route follows a {projectName}/api/ pattern and will act as an alternative path for current REST APIs (for example: {projectName}/w/rest.php/). Both versions will be callable for all existing APIs, but the new structure will be the preferred path for newly created API modules. This change will be non-breaking for most users. The existing pathways will remain available for all existing endpoint requests. However, some endpoints may return URLs following the new pattern in response bodies. Changes will be available on test wiki first, with the rollout expected to cover all wikis by the end of October.
• 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.

18:49, 5 October 2026 (UTC)

New cross-language page link: Maryland Drydock Company

A new page Maryland Drydock Company on the French Wikipedia has been linked to the page Maryland Drydock Company, which you created, via Wikidata (Q16981756).

You will not be notified about future links to pages you created. To opt in to these notifications, follow the opt-in instructions.

NervousBot (talk) 18:40, 11 October 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-42

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

• Starting October 13, wikis can change the default pattern for auto-generated reference names in VisualEditor (currently <ref name=":1" />). They will be able to use human-readable, content-based reference names that are more helpful to contributors using the source editor (e.g. <ref name="Miller2026-1" />). VisualEditor reference name patterns can be defined using MediaWiki system messages, JSON, templates and modules (more information). Admins can enable these changes via community configuration. This is a community wish implemented by WMDE Technical Wishes.
• Sub-referencing is a new MediaWiki feature that allows editors to reuse references with different details. It will be deployed to English Wikipedia on October 14 and to remaining Wikimedia Foundation wikis by end of October (likely October 21). The FAQ lists possible actions to take on your wiki to support the deployment. This is a long-standing community wish implemented by WMDE Technical Wishes.

Updates for editors

• Moderator Tools will be removing the list view of the Watchlist and defaulting everyone to the changelog view. Previously, there were two versions of how the Watchlist is shown to mobile web users: the list view, where editors could see watched articles in a list format, and the changelog view, where editors could see changes to watched articles in a log format, controlled by a user's Advanced Mobile Control settings. This has created issues for code-base maintenance: two different displays means two sets of code to manage. By defaulting to the changelog view, we are simplifying the codebase and avoiding the likelihood of missing bugs.
• The Wikipedia Android app is testing a way to listen to article introductions in the “For you” feed. A text-to-speech model reads the existing article text aloud without rewriting it or adding any content. The 30-day experiment will begin in the Wikipedia Beta app during the third week of September, then move to the regular Wikipedia Android app in October for a limited group of eligible users. A small portion of app users (those with English feeds and at least one topic interest) will have access to the feature. This experiment is part of broader efforts to give app readers options in how they consume content in order to deepen engagement and user retention. Learn more and share feedback.
• CodeMirror syntax highlighting was enabled by default for all logged out and newly registered users on the English Wikipedia on September 14. With no signs of adverse effects, the same change is being proposed to be made globally across all wikis in a few weeks. If you have concerns or feedback, or if your wiki would like to opt out, please see the help page.
• Wikidata mobile statement editing of all datatypes will be officially launched on October 13, when it will be removed from Wikidata beta features and become available to all editors. Users can report bugs and share feedback.
• Last week, language link changes were removed from Recent Changes and Watchlist feeds on Wikivoyage, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikiquote and Wiktionary. As no adverse effects have been observed, the Wikidata For Wikimedia Projects plans to roll out this change globally to all Wikipedias. This is scheduled for October 13 at 07:00 UTC, after which editors will no longer see when a link to another language version of a page is added, removed, or changed in its Wikidata item. Editors who rely on these notifications can read more on the project page and share feedback or ask to opt out their wiki on the talk page.
• View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where accidentally touching the graph while scrolling on the Pageviews tool on mobile could unintentionally zoom in has now been fixed. Click-and-drag zoom is now disabled on touch devices.

Updates for technical contributors

• There are three major changes coming to dumps: the legacy content dumps deprecated in January 2026 will now be sunset, the replacement MediaWiki Content File Exports will be delayed to implement a “safety buffer”, and they are now also available as 7zip-compressed files. Users will need to switch the URL they download their dump from. For more information, timeline and migration instructions, see Legacy content dumps sunset.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The Wikimedia Foundation discovered unauthorized activity by OpenAI agents on Wikimedia projects, including edits to wikis, attempts to exploit a public note-taking tool, and heavy automated traffic. Read the blog post on Diff for more details about the activity and the Foundation’s response.

Meetings and events

• Save the date for the next Wikimedia Hackathon! We’ll be meeting in lovely Tirana, Albania for the 2027 Wikimedia Hackathon from April 9–11, 2027. Scholarship and staff sponsorship applications are currently being accepted through Pretix and will close on October 30, 2026. General registration will open in January 2027.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 07:37, 13 October 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 13 October 2026

• News and notes: AELECT returns, Jimbo gives a union update, VisualEditor is now default
  Plus a survey for North Americans, proposed changes to BoT elections, and developments in the Puerto Rican editing community.

• Serendipity: From a rare portrait of a female millionaire in Nancy to a Japanese painter in Lyon
  Images from Leuven Libraries popular on Wiki.

• Obituary: Doug Weller
  Twenty-year editor, long-term admin, dearly missed.

• In the media: A(I)pocalypses afoot
  Cannibals, freeloaders, rogue agents, scams ... the usual.

• WikiConference Report: WikiConference 2026 & the importance of in-person community
  Celebrating 12 years of WikiConference North America.

• By the numbers: Does the country of birth affect the likelihood of having a Wikipedia biography?
  A cross-country and cross-wikipedia comparison of the likelihood of having a biography in Wikipedia.

• News from Diff: OpenAI "rogue" agent activities found on Wikimedia projects
  CPO/CTO Selena Deckelmann explains the recent detection of AI agent activities on Wikimedia projects.

• On the bright side: Good people
  Nice comments and real-life rescuers.

• Op-ed: Who are our readers?
  The movement makes progress when we know what our scope is.

• Traffic report: This world is big and wild and half insane
  Criminals, 9/11 25 years later, artists expelled for politics... we lived in troubled times.

• Comix: Fudging the numbers
  Take 'em away, officers!

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:43, 13 October 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-43

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

• To measure the impact of incorporating some community-requested features on logged-out reader retention, a test for Image Carousel will be pushed to logged-out readers. With the Image Carousel feature, readers browse community-uploaded images, selected by editors as relevant to specific articles. The test starts on November 20.
• An experimental notice will be pushed to 0.5% of logged-out mobile readers who come to English Wikipedia from Google, asking them to add Wikipedia as a Google Preferred Source. The test is to see if this notice increases reader retention and encourages people who use Google Search to visit Wikipedia more often. It will run from October 15–29 and will be assessed for its impact on retention and referrals.
• View all 26 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where Quarry returned an “Access denied” error when users tried to run SQL queries, preventing queries from running normally, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• Due to a long-standing bug, applications that use the OAuth 2 client credentials flow to act on their owners’ behalf are treated as if they are logged out. This will be fixed for new applications registered on or after Monday, October 19. Some affected applications need to re-register.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• A proposal to hold the Wikimedia Hackathon every three years, with regional hackathons in between, has been shared. It explores making the event more accessible to technical communities in different regions. Share your feedback on the proposal’s talk page before November 6.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 14:35, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-44

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

• An experiment launched on September 29 is testing article recommendations for new account holders who also identify as readers. By suggesting articles to read, similar to recommendations in the Wikipedia app for logged-in readers, the experiment aims to encourage new account holders to read and return to the website regularly, with the goal of increasing internal referrals by 1%. See the related Community Wishlist proposal.
• Several Wikimedia services were taken offline last week because of a security vulnerability in PHP. This is because they need to be updated before they are safe to put back online. This is not a problem just for the Wikimedia movement but affects a lot of websites. You can follow updates on Wikitech. Cloud VPS and Toolforge will take longer to bring back online. This is to make sure that applications which run on Cloud VPS or Toolforge are not affected. Tool developers can see updates and more information on the Cloud-announce mailing list.
• Last week we shared that to measure the impact of incorporating some community-requested features on logged-out reader retention, a test for the Image Carousel feature would be pushed to logged-out readers. Due to an issue, we will be restarting the test, but it will be live on October 26, not November 20 as initially announced.

Updates for editors

• A new bot detection system to better identify automated traffic that disguises itself as human visitors, is coming to the Wikimedia wikis. This might cause sudden changes to visitor statistics starting from 26 October, going back to 20 June 2026.
• The Score extension which renders musical notation inside wiki pages, has been temporarily disabled on all wikis due to a security issue. Affected pages will display a notice instead of musical scores, but the underlying code remains intact. No action is needed from editors, and a fix is in progress. A separate announcement will follow when the extension is re-enabled. Read more on Phabricator.
• View all 18 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where CodeMirror syntax highlighter appears to have been enabled in error for existing editors has been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday, October 28 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.

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• Scholarship and sponsorship applications for the 2027 Wikimedia Hackathon will close on Friday, October 30th. Submit your application through Pretix before the deadline!

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 18:54, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

WikiCup 2026 November newsletter

The 2026 WikiCup has come to an end. Our top scorers, based on the tournament point rankings (which can be seen here), are:

1. Generalissima (submissions) with 1077 tournament points, will receive the 1st place award.
2. Bgsu98 (submissions) with 1046 tournament points, will receive the 2nd place award.
3. MCE89 (submissions) with 762 tournament points, will receive the 3rd place award.
4. A.Cython (submissions) with 606' tournament points
5. Vestrian24Bio (submissions) with 537 tournament points
6. Reconrabbit (submissions) with 349 tournament points
7. BeanieFan11 (submissions) with 297 tournament points
8. Arconning (submissions) with 183 tournament points

Our three high scorers in the final round, who each got over 1,000 points, happen to all be among the top 8 as well:

1. Generalissima (submissions) with 2846 round points from 40 good articles, 4 pieces of featured content (including 2 featured articles), 11 DYK articles, and various reviews.
2. Bgsu98 (submissions) with 2603 round points from 43 good articles, 5 pieces of featured content (1 featured article and 4 featuyred lists), and various reviews.
3. Vestrian24Bio (submissions) with 1141 round points from 20 good articles, a good topic, a featured list, and 30 good article reviews.

The final round was very productive, and contestants had 29 featured articles, 8 featured lists, 1 featured picture, 150 good articles, 43 good topic articles, 189 article reviews, 28 did you know articles, and 4 in the news articles. Altogether, Wikipedia has benefited greatly from the activities of WikiCup competitors all through the contest. Well done everyone!

The top eight scorers will receive awards shortly. The following special awards will be made, based on high performance in particular areas of content creation. These prizes are awarded to the competitor who scored the highest in any particular field over the course of the competition.

• Generalissima (submissions) wins the following prizes:
  • The featured article prize, for 12 featured articles.
  • The featured picture prize, for submitting the only featured picture for the second year in a row.
  • The good article prize, for 82 good articles.
• Bgsu98 (submissions) wins the following prizes:
  • The featured list prize, for 21 featured lists.
  • The featured content reviewer prize, for 72 featured article reviews.
• Vestrian24Bio (submissions) wins the following prizes:
  • The featured topic prize, for 8 pages in featured topics.
  • The good topic prize, for 26 pages in good topics.
  • The good article reviewer prize, for 84 good article reviews.
• BabbaQ (submissions) wins the ITN prize, for 9 ITN pages.
• BeanieFan11 (submissions) wins the DYK prize, for 47 DYK pages.

A special mention also goes to these users who scored the highest in a particular category in a single round:

• A.Cython (submissions), for 20 good-topic articles in round 5.
• Olliefant (submissions), who withdrew during the competition but who had 38 featured-content reviews in round 2. Olliefant also had 43 good article reviews in round 1.
• The Robot Parade (submissions), for 5 ITN pages in round 1.

Next year's competition will begin on 1 January. You are invited to sign up to participate. We are also looking for an experienced editor to help write the bimonthly newsletter. If you would like to help write next year's newsletters, please contact Epicgenius at his talk page.

The WikiCup is open to all Wikipedians, both novices and experienced editors, and we hope to see you all in the 2027 competition. Until then, it only remains to once again congratulate our worthy winners, and thank all participants for their involvement!

On behalf of the judges, Cwmhiraeth (talk · contribs · email), Epicgenius (talk · contribs · email), Frostly (talk · contribs · email), Guerillero (talk · contribs · email) and Lee Vilenski (talk · contribs · email):

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:12, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

WikiCup 2026 November newsletter (update)

In our November 2026 newsletter, there was a mistake in calculating the final tournament point rankings (which have been updated here). We regret the error.

1. Generalissima (submissions) with 1461 tournament points, will receive the 1st place award.
2. Bgsu98 (submissions) with 1302 tournament points, will receive the 2nd place award.
3. Vestrian24Bio (submissions) with 793 tournament points, will receive the 3rd place award.
4. MCE89 (submissions) with 762 tournament points
5. A.Cython (submissions) with 606 tournament points
6. BeanieFan11 (submissions) with 425 tournament points
7. Reconrabbit (submissions) with 349 tournament points
8. Arconning (submissions) with 183 tournament points

On behalf of the judges, Cwmhiraeth (talk · contribs · email), Epicgenius (talk · contribs · email), Frostly (talk · contribs · email), Guerillero (talk · contribs · email) and Lee Vilenski (talk · contribs · email):

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:42, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 1 November 2026

• News and notes: AELECT5 concludes, a Wikimedian arrested for treason, and updates to GANs and FARs
  Nine new admins, three arrests, and a lot of GAN RFCs.

• Recent research: How Wikipedians use (or don't use) LLMs; experienced editors contribute more to "underproduced" articles than newbies
  And other new research findings.

• Disinformation report: Better bots or bothersome baby borgs?
  Have the Borg landed on Wikipedia?

• In the media: Stop the internet, I was deleted
  Can toeing the line stop the apocalypse?

• News from Diff: Why Wikimedia Is Speaking Up in a Major AI Copyright Case
  When AI companies use copyrighted information, does it qualify as fair use?

• By the numbers: Wikipedian Nobel Prize 2026
  Which language versions of Wikipedia had biographies of laureates before Nobel announcements?

• On the bright side: Gone fishing
  Touring Thailand, exploring iridescence, and translating prairie dog.

• Traffic report: October, and the articles are stripped bare
  Lots of deaths, Indian movies, and monsters. Happy Halloween!

• In focus: Two Roles, One Wikimedia Education Ecosystem
  What happens when different approaches to Wikimedia education connect?

• Comix: Inactivity
  Zounds!

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:48, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-45

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

• Many Wikimedia tools were taken offline last week because of a security vulnerability in PHP. This affected many websites worldwide. Toolforge and Cloud VPS have been back up since October 22. Many important tools have been gradually restored. Some tools need the respective volunteer maintainers to restart them. Others still need to upgrade to a patched PHP version. Some tools were using older versions of PHP which are not supported by the recent security patches. They will require maintainers to upgrade to a more recent version. This might require additional effort. You can follow the work on Wikitech.

Updates for editors

• A new optional search experiment is running in the Wikipedia Android and iOS apps for Arabic, French, and Japanese Wikipedias. Participating readers can search inside articles and open quoted passages directly in their source articles, no answers or summaries are generated. This is the first of four experiments in Phase 2 of Semantic Search. It began on October 22 and runs for 20 days. Feedback is welcome on the project’s discussion page.
• The Future Audiences team is planning to bring Share Cards to Wikipedia on mobile. This feature gives users the option to share a visually appealing card with friends, based on the article they are reading. The card contains the article’s title, image, opening text, and related attribution, and links back to the article for full reading. Editors are invited to try out this feature by adding ?useformat=mobile&sharecard=1 to any article URL from October 29 to November 8. Share any thoughts on the project talk page and report any bugs on Phabricator.
• The default renderer for math formulas will change on November 2. After the change, the server sends the formula as MathML, and your browser uses MathJax to show it. This is the last step towards the Mathoid/RESTBase deprecation process, for sustainability and security reasons. You can ask questions or report problems.
• Do you have an idea for a new feature, or a bug that needs fixing? Submit your suggestion for the community wish list by November 8!
• View all 41 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• 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.

MediaWiki message delivery 14:20, 3 November 2026 (UTC)

USS Baltimore

With ships that don't have a pennant number, isn't it usual to disambiguate by year of commission, not build? Mjroots (talk) 17:59, 6 November 2026 (UTC)

That would be news to me Mj. So far as I am aware, disambig pages have to have links that exactly reflect the article titles. But if you have doubts, please start a discussion at WP:SHIPS and we can discuss it there. Cheers, Gatoclass (talk) 18:54, 6 November 2026 (UTC)

USRC Reliance moved to draftspace

Thanks for your contributions to USRC Reliance. Unfortunately, I do not think it is ready for publishing as a live article at this time because it has no sources. I have converted it to a draft which you can improve, undisturbed for a while.

Please see more information at Help:Unreviewed new page. When the article is ready for publication, please click on the "Submit the draft for review!" button at the top of the page OR move the page back. Mariamnei ✦ ^{reach out 🕊️} 09:29, 9 November 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-46

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 Wikipedia Apps team is preparing to launch Year in Review in early December. Year in Review gives app users a personalized recap of how they read and engaged with Wikipedia throughout the year. The team is looking for volunteers to help make it available in as many languages as possible. Translators can contribute through translatewiki.net. For Android, search for yir under the "Untranslated" tab, and for iOS, search for year-in-review under the "Untranslated" tab.
• The Article guidance feature that helps editors create articles that follow a Wikipedia’s policies, is now available on all Wikipedias. Administrators and interface admins can configure and expose it for editors to use via Special:CommunityConfiguration/ArticleGuidance. A configuration guide is available. Visit the project talk page to ask any questions.

Updates for editors

• Following the release of Reading Lists to all Wikipedias in September, logged-in users will soon be able to organize articles saved in their lists into customizable categories. This will enable readers to create collections and revisit saved articles based on their interests, potentially encouraging frequent visits to Wikipedia. The update will roll out to all Wikipedia users between November 9 and 16.
• The Wikipedia Apps team is preparing to launch the first of two notification experiments for English Wikipedia readers on Android who have opted in to notifications. The three-week experiment will send notifications suggesting personalized Discover reading lists which are collections of Wikipedia articles recommended based on articles the reader has previously viewed. The goal is to understand whether these recommendations help readers discover relevant content and encourage them to return to the app. No action is required, and users can manage their notification preferences in the app settings. Learn more and share feedback.
• A bug in the Global Watchlist was causing the page to fail to load for users who have unseen changes on Wikimedia Commons. The bug has now been fixed. If you temporarily removed commons.wikimedia.org from your personal Global Watchlist settings due to the bug, you can restore it there.
• A new Beta feature called "Home" will be deployed to 10 Wikipedias for a limited test. This new feature aims to replace Special:Homepage for newcomers, with additional modules planned for the future to improve upon the current experience. If you want to participate in the test, please sign up. "Home" will be released to all users later this month.
• On English and Russian Wikipedias, Source Verification is now available as an experimental Suggestion for experienced editors within Suggestion Mode. It uses an LLM hosted on LiftWing to try to check whether a cited source supports the claim it’s attached to. To try it out, please see these testing instructions. If you are at another language Wikipedia and your community is interested in trying it out, please express your interest.
• View all 35 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where dates passed as blank parameters to functions in wikitext were incorrectly interpreted using the month-day-year format instead of the day-month-year format, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• Starting on 1 December 2026, hCaptcha will be required for edits made via the API by non-autoconfirmed users. If your tool, gadget, or user script makes edits on behalf of newcomer users, see how to update it.
• Nominations are open on Wikitech for new Toolforge standards committee members. The committee oversees the Toolforge Right to fork policy and Abandoned tool policy among other duties. Nominations close on 22 November 2026.
• Toolforge has introduced two new beta features. "Toolforge alerts" send email notifications when a tool becomes unavailable, returns errors, or restarts frequently. "Extended logging" makes it easier to investigate problems by providing logs for events such as job creation, deletion, and deployment failures through the toolforge logs command. Both features are opt-in and help tool maintainers become aware of and resolve problems with their tools more quickly. Maintainers can enable alerts and learn how to access extended logs. They are also encouraged to try the features and provide feedback.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• A proposal to change how we currently organize the Wikimedia Hackathon has been shared. It explores making the event more accessible to technical communities in different regions. Share your feedback on the proposal’s talk page; the deadline has been extended to November 13th.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 10:32, 9 November 2026 (UTC)

USRC Reliance draft article

I don't know if you noticed my comment that there was more than one USRC Reliance. USRC Reliance (1861) AND USRC Reliance (1867). Reference: Canney, p 38. This will require a change in the name of the article and I am not sure how to do this. I have done it in the past but that was several years ago. Could you look into this? I am certain that someone in the future will want to write an article on the 1867 Reliance and changing the name of the 1861 Reliance version now could avoid problems in the future. Neither ship had a very distinguished career and probably won't get much past a Stub Class article. Good catch on the Lytle source; I missed that one. Cuprum17 (talk) 13:15, 9 November 2026 (UTC)

Apologies for the delay in responding to this. My modem ceased to function last night and I only noticed this post when I logged back on today (the problem turned out to be not the modem itself, but its PSU, which I was able to cheaply replace a few hours ago with a generic one from a local electronics store).

With regard to the issue you raised - I am not quite sure how to handle a draft page, but I think the simplest way forward would be for me to copy my own draft when completed to the public draft page in order to preserve the article history, then get it moved back into mainspace, at which point it can be moved to the correct title. Cheers, Gatoclass (talk) 15:17, 10 November 2026 (UTC)

Sounds like a good plan. I agree. Thank you for your interest in Revenue Cutter Service articles. Cuprum17 (talk) 15:30, 10 November 2026 (UTC)

You've got mail

Hello, Gatoclass. Please check your email; you've got mail!
It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.

Akaza ^[talk] 14:02, 9 November 2026 (UTC)

Yes, I received your email, but don't have time to respond to it ATM - I will reply to it tomorrow. Gatoclass (talk) 14:08, 9 November 2026 (UTC)