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SuperHamster's local time is 20:09, November 4, 2026 EST[refresh]
Following an RFC, the policy on restoration of adminship has been updated. All former administrators may now only regain the tools following a request at the Wikipedia:Bureaucrats' noticeboard within 5 years of their most recent admin action. Previously this applied only to administrators deysopped for inactivity.
Following a request for comment, a new speedy deletion criterion, T5, has been enacted. This applies to template subpages that are no longer used.
Traffic report: Something Wicked for almost everybody Fighting and killing – on screen, in politics, and in the ring – competes for attention with Disney.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our second November issue. This will be the final bulletin for 2024 and we'll be back in late January 2025 with the next issue. Please help translate.
Upcoming and current events and conversations Talking: 2024 continues
Celebrating Chabota and his contributions to the movement.
Tech News: Chart extension is now available on Commons and Testwiki; a new version of the standard wikitext editor-mode syntax highlighter will be available as a beta feature; Edit Check will be relocated to a sidebar on desktop. More updates from tech news 50, 49, and 48.
Wikipedia 2024 Year in Review:Wikipedia 2024 Year in Review launched, showcasing the collective impact of Wikipedia and Wikipedia contributors in the last calendar year. The iOS App also released a personalized Year in Review to Italy and Mexico, with insights based on reading, editing, and donation history.
Wikipedia Android App: The Android team has launched the Rabbit Holes feature in the final release of the year as part of Wiki Experiences 3.1. Currently being tested in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, this feature suggests a search term and a reading list based on the user's last two visited articles. For more details or to share feedback, visit the project page.
Annual Goals Progress on Equity See also a list of all movement events: on Meta-Wiki
WikiCelebrate: From Challenges to Change-Making: We Wikicelebrate Chabota Isaac Kanguya, a passionate contributor from Zambia, whose journey through the Wikimedia movement embodies resilience, collaboration, and a commitment to representing underrepresented voices.
Conference: Announcing Central Asian WikiCon 2025 which will be hosted at Diplomat International School on April 19–20, 2025, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Latest comment: 1 year ago2 comments1 person in discussion
Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2025!
Hello SuperHamster, 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 2025. Happy editing, Abishe (talk) 23:41, 24 December 2024 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
News and notes: Responsibilities and liabilities as a "Very Large Online Platform" What the VLOP – findings of an outside auditor for "responsibilization" of Wikipedia. Plus, new EU Commissioners for tech policy, WLE 2024 winners, and a few other bits of news from the Wikipedia world.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 26th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 1 August 2024. At press time, over 94% of the world has legally fallen prey to the merry celebrations of "Christmas", and so shall you soon. It's been a quiet 4 months, and we hope to see you with way more new scripts next year. Happy holidays! Aaron Liu (talk) 05:06, 25 December 2024 (UTC)Reply
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
Very useful for changelist patrollers, DiffUndo, by Nardog, is this edition's featured script. Taking inspiration from WP:AutoWikiBrowser's double-click-to-undo feature, it adds an undo button to every line of every diff from "show changes", optimizing partial reverts with your favorite magic spell and nearly fulfilling m:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Partial revert undo.
Doğu/Adiutor, a recent WP:Twinkle/WP:RedWarn-like userscript that follows modern WMF UI design, is now an extension. However, its sole maintainer has left the project, which still awaits WMF mw:code stewardship (among some audits) to be installed on your favorite WMF wikis.
DannyS712, our former chief editor, has ascended to MediaWiki and the greener purpley pastures of PHP with commits creating Special:NamespaceInfo and the __EXPECTUNUSEDTEMPLATE__ magic word to exclude a template from Special:UnusedTemplates! I wonder if Wikipedia has a templaters' newsletter...
BilledMammal/Move+ needs updating to order list of pages handle lists of pages to move correctly regardless of the discussion's page, so that we may avoid repeating fiasco history.
Andrybak/Unsigned helper forks Anomie/unsignedhelper to add support for binary search, automatic edit summaries after generating the {{unsigned}} template, support for {{undated}}, and support for generating while syntax highlighting is on.
Polygnotus/Move+ updates BilledMammal's classic Move+ to add automattic watchlisting of all pages—except the target page(s)—changed while processing a move.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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.
A request for comment is open to discuss whether admins should be advised to warn users rather than issue no-warning blocks to those who have posted promotional content outside of article space.
Technical news
The Nuke feature also now provides links to the userpage of the user whose pages were deleted, and to the pages which were not selected for deletion, after page deletions are queued. This enables easier follow-up admin-actions.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue in December 2024. Please help translate.
Upcoming and current events and conversations Let's Talk continues
Ideas for Wikipedia @ 25 needed
Conversation with the trustees: Speak directly with the Wikimedia Foundation trustees about their work at the next Conversation with the Trustees on January 30 at 14:30 UTC.
Community Resilience and Sustainability: Join the conversation hour which will discuss Trust and Safety, the Universal Code of Conduct, Committee Support, and Human Rights on January 30 at 20:00 UTC.
Wikipedia is turning 25: We just celebrated Wikipedia's 24th birthday, and are already planning for next year's big milestone! Share your thoughts on what you have in mind to mark the silver jubilee of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia App: iOS App users worldwide can now access a personalized Year in Review feature, providing insights based on their reading and editing history on Wikipedia.
Tech News: The CampaignEvents extension offers organizers features like event registration management directly on-wiki; The Single User Login system is being updated over the next few months; Administrators can mass-delete multiple pages created by a user or IP address using Extension:Nuke. More updates from tech news Dec 16, Jan 13, and Jan 21.
Resource Support Pilot: Join the discussion about shaping a pilot project on the English Wikipedia that would fund small resource requests (like books) to support editors in improving content.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Administrators can now nuke pages created by a user or IP address from the last 90 days, up from the initial 30 days. T380846
A 'Recreated' tag will now be added to pages that were created with the same title as a page which was previously deleted and it can be used as a filter in Special:RecentChanges and Special:NewPages. T56145
News and notes: Let's talk! The WMF executive team delivers a new update; plus, the latest EU policy report, good-bye to the German Wikipedia's Café, and other news from the Wikimedia world.
Community view: 24th Wikipedia Day in New York City Wikimedians and newbies celebrate 24 years of Wikipedia in the Brooklyn Central Library. Special guests Stephen Harrison and Clay Shirky joined in conversation.
Traffic report: A wild drive The start of the year was filled with a few unfortunate losses, tragic disasters, emerging tech forces and A LOT of politics.
Future Audiences: Watch the recording for lessons from the short video experiments. A new Discord bot experiment as a way to interact with Wikipedia, the Future Audiences Discord server and future plans for experiments around how to use gamification.
Tech News: Editors who use the “Special characters” editing-toolbar menu can now see the 32 special characters you have used most recently, across editing sessions on that wiki; The Data Platform Engineering team has added a couple of new fields to MediaWiki History dumps to support the Temporary Accounts initiative. More updates from tech news week 05 and 06.
Product & Tech Advisory Council: The council looked at data, needs and trends to make a recommendation for the Foundation's annual plan. They recommended that improving mobile contribution experiences has the greatest potential to bring in new and unheard voices onto Wikipedia and sister projects, and improve the experience of readers and contributors most widely. They are requesting feedback and discussion.
Structured Tasks: The "Add an Image" structured task is being tested on a representative sample of Wikipedias which allows users to add an image and an appropriate caption to a Wikipedia article.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) Connect: The first edition of this regional community call for 2025 will be held on February 22.
Wikimedia Research Showcase: The next showcase will be about "Wikipedia Administrator Recruitment, Retention, and Attrition" and will take place on February 26 at 17:30 UTC.
Celebrate Women 2025: The Gender Organizing community in the Wikimedia Movement hosts an annual campaign every March called Celebrate Women. Conversation hours to learn about some exciting tools that can support your efforts at closing the gender gap will be held on February 25 at 14:00–16:00 UTC.
Outreachy: Wikimedia Foundation is participating in Round 30 of the Outreachy program that runs from June – August 2025. The deadline to submit projects is March 4 at 16:00 UTC .
Growth features: The new Community Updates module is a new feature to facilitate the connection between wiki editing initiatives and newcomers.
Simple article summaries: The Web team at the Wikimedia Foundation has introduced Simple Article Summaries project on select Wikipedias. It aims to display article summaries that would be easy to digest for readers.
Language and internationalization: Five new languages added to Wikipedia as part of the future of language incubation initiative. Read more on the latest edition of the Language and internationalization newsletter.
Tech News: Communities using growth tools can now showcase one event on the Special:Homepage for newcomers. More updates from tech news week 07 and 08.
Community Insights: The Community Insights 2024 report captures new insights on newcomers (who are more likely to be younger), their motivations (97% liked that their contributions help others), and how for the first time, more than half of respondents (51%) agreed that the Wikimedia Foundation communicates well about its projects and initiatives.
Let’s Connect Learning Clinic: Watch the recording of WikiLearn Essentials for Course Creators: Building Community Skills Online session 1.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Technology report: Hear that? The wikis go silent twice a year From patrolling new edits to uploading photos or joining a campaign, you can count on the Wikimedia platform to be up and running — in your language, anywhere in the world. That is, except for a couple of minutes during the equinoctes.
Opinion: Sennecaster's RfA debriefing User Sennecaster shares her thoughts on her recent RfA and the aspects that might have played a role in making it successful.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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:
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) 14:13, 27 February 2025 (UTC)Reply
A request for comment is open to discuss whether AI-generated images (meaning those wholly created by generative AI, not human-created images modified with AI tools) should be banned from use in articles.
A new filter has been added to the Special:Nuke tool, which allows administrators to filter for pages in a range of page sizes (in bytes). This allows, for example, deleting pages only of a certain size or below. T378488
Non-administrators can now check which pages are able to be deleted using the Special:Nuke tool. T376378
Global Trends 2025: As part of annual planning, we identify a list of global trends that will impact the Wikimedia movement, such as changes in how and where people search for and contribute information online, the rise of misinformation and disinformation in online spaces, and evolving regulation of online information providers.
Wikimania 2025: Apply now to speak at Wikimania 2025 whether to lead a workshop, host a panel, present a poster, or showcase a tool demonstration. Submit your session by March 31 anywhere on earth. If you're interested reviewing proposals for Wikimania 2025 and helping shape the program, you can fill out a short form to apply to be a program reviewer by 17 March.
WikiConference North America 2025: Scholarship applications are now open until April 4. This conference will take place in New York City from October 16–19, 2025, under the theme “Wiki’s World Fair".
Wikimedia Enterprise and Global Advocacy at SXSW 2025: Wikimedia Enterprise is coming together with Creative Commons on March 9 for a day of conversations and panel discussions at SXSW 2025 that tackles the challenges of AI and the preservation and ethical development of open data. Global Advocacy is participating on a panel on March 8, diving into conversations about the future of the internet.
WikiCauserie: The online bi-monthly meeting aimed at bringing together the French-speaking member communities of WikiFranca will be held next on March 21 at 18:00 UTC.
Tech News: The wikimedia.org portal has been updated – and is receiving some ongoing improvements – to modernize and improve the accessibility of our portal pages. It now has better support for mobile layouts, updated wording and links, and better language support. More updates from tech news week 09 and 10.
Wikifunctions: We deployed and tested one of our main milestones for this quarter: the ability to get the right Lexeme given a Wikidata Item, or, put simpler, to get the right word from a thing.
Women’s History Month: Wikimedia Foundation is running a campaign to spotlight some of the Wikimedians working to close the gender gap on Wikimedia projects. The campaign, Knowledge is human. Knowledge is her., is aimed at reaching external audiences in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Legal Victory: The Wikimedia Foundation has won a legal victory in Germany’s courts that sets a legal precedent defending the Wikimedia projects and volunteers against "forum shopping", choosing a court in a jurisdiction whose laws might be more favorable to them.
Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees: The Board met virtually on 11 December to hold its quarterly business. See the most recent corporate actions taken on the Board Noticeboard.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
@Error: Thanks for letting me know! There was a bug in the script when reading the full custom ruleset you have. Should be fixed now! You might have to purge your cache to get the latest code. Please let me know if you still have any issues. ~SuperHamsterTalkContribs23:15, 12 March 2025 (UTC)Reply
P&T Annual Planning: The Product & Technology department publishes its plans early in the annual planning process, which is on Meta-Wiki and open for feedback. These objectives and key results are not a list of projects, but instead, a set of directions for problems to solve and impacts to achieve over the course of the year. We look forward to engaging with the community on this plan.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
⚠
Thanks for uploading File:Digitalmindsoft logo.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).
Tech News: The CampaignEvents extension will be released to multiple wikis (see deployment plan for details) in April 2025; The Editing team is working on a new Edit check: Peacock check. This check’s goal is to identify non-neutral terms while a user is editing a wikipage. More updates from tech news week 13 and 14.
Wikipedia Library: What’s new from January to March 2025.
Let's Connect Learning Clinic: Missed the last Learning Clinic on "Safe Spaces, Strong Voices: Advancing Inclusion through the UCoC"? Recording is now available.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Wiki Workshop 2025: Register for the 12th annual Wiki Workshop taking place on May 21–22. It brings together researchers and scholars from around the globe who are interested in or actively engaged in research and development on Wikimedia projects.
Learning Clinic: The upcoming Let’s Connect Learning Clinic is focusing on "Understanding and Navigating Conflict in Wikimedia Projects (Part 1)" and will take place on April 29 at 14:30 UTC.
Community Resilience and Sustainability: Quarterly Conversation hour taking place on April 24 at 18:00 UTC to discuss Trust and Safety, the Universal Code of Conduct, Committee Support, and Human Rights.
Edge Uniques: Introducing Edge Uniques, a technical approach which consists of privacy-preserving first-party cookies that will enable usability testing of features through A/B testing, more accurate counting of site visits, and a way to stop distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) with better precision.
Tech News: The Design System Team is preparing to release the next major version of Codex (v2.0.0) on April 29; Last week, the default thumbnail size was increased from 220px to 250px. This changes how pages are shown in all wikis and has been requested by some communities for many years, but wasn’t previously possible due to technical limitations. More updates from Tech News week 15 and 16.
Developer Satisfaction Survey: The results of the Developer Satisfaction Survey (2025) are available. Thank you to all participants. These results help the Foundation decide what to work on next and to review what they recently worked on.
Community Resilience: To better support community members when they are facing challenges while contributing to Wikimedia projects, the Trust and Safety team worked with the Arbitration Committees to create Project Maps of communities.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material, the draft has been deleted. When you plan on working on it further and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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:
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) 01:03, 29 April 2025 (UTC)Reply
News from the WMF: Product & Tech Progress on the Annual Plan A look at some product and tech highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation's Annual Plan (July–December 2024).
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello,
I hope you're doing well! As an event coordinator on English Wikipedia, I’m happy to share some news with you. You now have the event-organizer right! This gives you access to the CampaignEvents extension, a powerful set of tools to help you organize and promote events and WikiProjects more easily.
With the CampaignEvents extension, you can:
Manage event registration directly on English Wikipedia.
Use the Invitation List tool to find potential participants for your events/WikiProjects
Now that I have your attention, I’d also like to share some updates to the extension:
The Collaboration List can now be transcluded, meaning you can easily embed it on other wiki pages to share event details with more people by adding {{Special:AllEvents}}. Learn more.
Admins can now determine which namespaces are permitted for Event Registration on English Wikipedia, via Special:CommunityConfiguration. Right now, the Event namespace is permitted by default for Event Registration. However, other namespaces (such as Wikipedia, WikiProject, etc) can now be added as permitted namespaces by admins too. This can help other types of organized activities, such as WikiProjects, use Event Registration.For details, please visit: Permitted_namespaces
If you need help using these new tools, I’m here to support you. Feel free to reach out for guidance. You can also find some useful video guides on Commons.
We’re excited to see how you use these tools for WikiProjects or events! If you have any questions, please let me know.
An RfC was closed with consensus to allow editors to opt-out of seeing "sticky decorative elements". Such elements should now be wrapped in {{sticky decoration wrapper}}. Editors who wish to opt out can follow the instructions at WP:STICKYDECO.
An RfC has resulted in a broad prohibition on the use of AI-generated images in articles. A few common-sense exceptions are recognized.
Tech News: Event organizers who host collaborative activities on multiple wikis, including Bengali, Japanese, and Korean Wikipedias, now have access to the CampaignEvents extension. Also, admins in the Wikipedia where the extension is enabled will automatically be granted the event organizer right soon. More updates from Tech News week 17 and 18.
Learning Clinic: The recent Let's Connect Learning Clinic was about "Exploring Diff Blog: Sharing your story, & understanding Technical Implementation" and took place on May 6 at 12:00 UTC.
World Press Freedom Day: We will be advocating for Wikimedia's model and speaking about "Information as a Public Good in the Age of AI" for UNESCO's World Press Freedom Day event in Brussels.
Annual Report: The Foundation published the Annual Reports for both the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia Endowment. These reports highlight the impact of work done by our global community of volunteers, staff, and donors over the past year.
Board and Board committee updates: The Board met in in March to hold its quarterly business meeting and joined other meetings as part of the Wikimedia Foundation's annual strategic planning. See the most recent actions and updates on the Board Noticeboard.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Hello, SuperHamster. 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 remove this notice at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.
Content Translation: A decade of consistent improvements to the Content Translation tool yields over two million Wikipedia articles.
Charts Extension: After successfully deploying the extension on Italian, Swedish, and Hebrew Wikipedia, we are moving forward with the next phase of deployment. Please consult our page to discover when the new Charts extension will be deployed on your wiki.
Tech News: The “Get shortened URL” link on the sidebar now includes a QR code. Wikimedia site users can now use it by scanning or downloading it to quickly share and access shared content from Wikimedia sites, conveniently. More updates from Tech News week 19 and 20.
Topical Lists: Read about the important role of topical lists in supporting campaigns and editing, as well as strategies for the future development, implementation, and sustainment of list-building support.
Two-factor Authentication: From May 20, 2025, oversighters and checkusers will need to have their accounts secured with two-factor authentication (2FA) to be able to use their advanced rights. In the future, this requirement may be extended to other users with advanced rights. Read the announcement.
Mobile Apps: The iOS app team is experimenting with an "Activity Tab" on Turkish, Spanish, French, and Chinese Wikipedias to see if inviting new editors to add images through Suggested Edits increases engagement. This insight will guide future improvements to the app experience.
Learning Clinic: The next Let's Connect Learning Clinic will be about "Communication and Cultural Sensitivity in Conflict Resolution - Best practices (Part 2)" and will take place on May 27 at 13:00 UTC.
UCoC Updates: The Universal Code of Conduct 2025 annual review concluded, with community voting approving the proposed changes to the UCoC Enforcement Guidelines and U4C Charter.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on 16 May. Please help translate.
Upcoming and current events and conversations Let's Talk continues
Wikimania: Register now to attend Wikimania Nairobi! Registration for the in-person event will be open until July 13 or while places remain. For joining virtually, you will be able to register at any time.
Let's Connect: The next Let's Connect Learning Clinic will focus on "1Lib1Ref: Tools, Tactics and Innovation". The session will take place on June 5 at 15:00 UTC.
Tech News: The Wikimedia Foundation will publish a hub for experiments to showcase and get user feedback on product experiments; The Moderator Tools team will launch a new filter to Recent Changes, starting at Indonesian Wikipedia. The goal is to help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic edits. More updates from Tech News week 21 and 22.
Abstract Wikipedia: A community-wide discussion for the development of Abstract Wikipedia is now open on Meta: where to store the abstract content that will be developed through functions from Wikifunctions and data from Wikidata. The discussion is open until June 12 at Abstract Wikipedia/Location of Abstract Content, and every opinion is welcomed.
Temporary accounts: Admins, bureaucrats, or stewards will be manually granting access to temporary account IP addresses to users without certain extended rights. Previously, these users were gaining this right automatically. The decision to change this was made by the Trust and Safety Product team after discussing with almost 20 large Wikipedia communities and Meta-Wiki. See the full message about the change. In addition, the team is finishing work which unblocks rollouts on large wikis. A series of deployments will be happening in June. See the latest project update to learn about the satisfaction survey, related changes to features and tools, and more.
Wikifunctions: Wikifunctions is deployed on five Wiktionaries: Hausa, Igbo, Bengali, Malayalam, and Dhivehi/Maldivian. Users of the five projects are now allowed to call on Wikifunctions' functions freely from their user interface.
WikiGames: A daily trivia game called WikiGames is coming to the Wikipedia Android app. It invites users to test their knowledge by guessing which historical event happened first based on real events from Wikipedia's "On this day" content. The game's goal is to help new audiences discover a preferred destination for discovering, engaging, and building encyclopedic content. It has been gradually rolled out as an A/B test to 50% of users in English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Turkish.
CampaignEvents extension: Two new features Invitation Lists and Collaboration List that allow organizers to promote events and WikiProjects on the wikis are now available.
WikiLearn: Discover how online learning is helping develop Wikidata skills and the new courses coming up this quarter on WikiLearn News May 2025 edition.
Youth Conference: Young Wikimedians gathered in Prague for the first-ever Youth Conference, created for young people and by young people.
Accessibility: In celebration of Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2025, we would like to look back together and highlight recent improvements and progress to ensure that the Wikimedia projects are more accessible for everyone.
Mandatory 2FA: Checkusers and oversighters will need to have two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled, otherwise they won't be able to use their tools. In the future, this requirement may apply to more user right groups. This is to increase the security of user accounts. See the full message.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
An Articles for Creation backlog drive is happening in June 2025, with over 1,600 drafts awaiting review from the past two months. In addition to AfC participants, all administrators and new page patrollers can help review using the Yet Another AFC Helper Script, which can be enabled in the Gadgets settings. Sign up here to participate!
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I recently rebuilt Cite Unseen with updated, community-maintainable domain lists (now supporting additional parameters such as date ranges, authors, and publishers) that caters to the use on Chinese Wikipedia. I also made a few tweaks to make the dashboard more useful. You can see the project page at zh:User:SuperGrey/gadgets/CiteUnseen (and the prefix list). It currently offers i18n support for English, Chinese, and Japanese, and can be imported globally across all Wikimedia projects.
That being said, the version hosted on Chinese Wikipedia prioritizes source evaluations by the Chinese Wikipedia community. For English-Wikipedia users, it might be helpful to migrate this renovated version back to User:SuperHamster/CiteUnseen, with reordered domain lists to reflect the English-Wikipedia consensus. If you'd like, we can collaborate on updating User:SuperHamster/CiteUnseen together. Alternatively, I can migrate it to my English-Wikipedia user page and we can continue development there.
@SuperGrey: Oh, this is fantastic, thank you for sharing! I've been slowly working on some similar changes in the background (dashboard improvements, on-wiki lists) so it's great to see you're one step ahead of me. I'm happy to update my script here with these changes and continue to collaborate.
Couple of questions for you:
What do you think of collaborating on the codebase over at gitlab.wikimedia.org? This could potentially serve as the central repository for us to collaborate, instead of having to maintain scripts separately across language versions of Wikipedia. I've copied my existing code over to https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/kevinpayravi/cite-unseen. If this sounds all right to you, I can add you as a maintainer to the repo and you can update the repo with your updated code (so you're properly credited for your work)? I see your Phabricator account but don't see an LDAP account attached, so I believe you'll need to make a developer account if you haven't done so yet. Once you're set up on GitLab I can add you to the repo. Once your code is in, I can see if I can add in some of the changes I have been working on (e.g. I have a "settings" modal I've been working on, and made the dashboard a filter so users can select a source type and only see sources that match that categorization).
What do you think of hosting centralized lists over at meta.wikimedia.org? This way, we can have a central set of lists that all language versions of CiteUnseen can refer to and pull from by default, instead of each language version of Wikipedia maintaining their own separately. There is, however, the challenge of when language versions of Wikipedia might disagree on how sources should be classified (e.g. for reliability categorizations, or what "government controlled" might mean). Perhaps we host central lists on meta.wikimedia.org that the script would pull from by default, but language wikis can also have their own separate local lists if they want?
Thanks for the suggestion! I just registered for a developer account with the name SuperGrey. It seems that I still need a manual approval on the Phabricator before I can get access to the GitLab services, but other than that, alll seems good.
For the centralized hosting, I agree it is a good way. As for the local differences, I think we don't actually need separate local lists -- just different "orders" would work. My current solution on Chinese Wikipedia puts Chinese source lists (e.g. zh:WP:RS/P) at the top; while in English Wikipedia, it can be en:WP:RS/P at the top. And I believe at least for now, only English Wikipedia and Chinese Wikipedia have dedicated and rigorously-curated source lists, so there wouldn't be too many lists to handle. 😂 SuperGrey (talk) 07:20, 13 June 2025 (UTC)Reply
Tech News: The Chart extension is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. Editors can use this new extension to create interactive data visualizations like bar, line, area, and pie charts. The Trust and Safety Product team is finalizing work needed to roll out temporary accounts on large Wikipedias. More updates from Tech News week 23 and 24.
New Engagement Experiments: We're testing out WikiRun, a fun game that lets you race through Wikipedia by clicking from one article to another, aiming to reach a target page in as few steps and in as little time as possible! It's an experiment to explore new ways of engaging readers. Give it a try and let us know what you think on the talk page!
WikiCelebrate: How one librarian brought Wikipedia into the classroom and beyond: this month we celebrate Loretta.
Wikimedia Research Showcase: The next showcase will center around the theme of "Ensuring Content Integrity on Wikipedia" and will take place on June 18 at 16:30 UTC.
Resource Support: Resource Support pilot project is now open to requests. This is a pilot project which aims to support Wikipedia content editors in obtaining resources that they need to improve content on Wikipedia.
Global Advocacy: The Global Advocacy team will be representing the Wikimedia Foundation at several events in June and July – including hosting an edit-a-thon during UN Open Source week and running a booth at the Internet Governance Forum.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Sammi Brie(submissions) with 1,055 round points, mostly from television station articles, including 27 good articles and 9 good topic articles
Everyone who competed in round 3 will advance to round 4 unless they have withdrawn. This table shows all competitors who have received tournament points so far, while the full scores for round 3 can be seen here. During this round, contestants have claimed 4 featured articles, 16 featured lists, 1 featured picture, 9 featured-topic articles, 149 good articles, 27 good-topic articles, and more than 90 Did You Know articles. In addition, competitors have worked on 18 In the News articles, and they have conducted more than 200 reviews.
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) 14:50, 29 June 2025 (UTC)Reply
Wikimedia API: The MediaWiki Interfaces team will be investing in Wikimedia web (HTTP) APIs to better serve technical volunteer needs and protect Wikimedia infrastructure from potential abuse.
Tech News: The Editing team will release Multi Check to most Wikipedias. This feature shows multiple Reference checks within the editing experience. This encourages users to add citations when they add multiple new paragraphs to a Wikipedia article. More updates from Tech News week 25 and 26.
Temporary Accounts: Temporary accounts were rolled out on ten large and medium-size Wikipedias, including Arabic, Chinese, French, Polish, Indonesian and more. Deployments on more Wikipedias will follow this week. Share your thoughts about the project.
Mobile Apps: Mobile Apps team launched A/B test of Tabbed Browsing on the iOS Wikipedia App. Users in Arabic, English, and Japanese in select regions will see the test.
WikiGames: The Android team launched Which Came First? — a fun, multilingual trivia game now available to all Android users in nine languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish). It's a new step in making Wikipedia more interactive and engaging for mobile users.
Community Wishlist: Read results of the recently closed "Wishathon", our internal hackathon organized by Community Tech to help fulfil more wishes from Community Wishlist.
CampaignEvents Extension: CampaignEvents extension has now been deployed to all Wikipedia, meaning that organizers on any language Wikipedia can now gain access to the extension features directly on that Wikipedia through the Wikipedia local admins.
A Wiki Minute Videos: We published three new 'A Wiki Minute' videos about what it takes to run Wikipedia and more topics. All videos are recorded and captioned in Arabic, German, English, French, Brazilian-Portuguese, Spanish.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Administrator elections will take place this month. Administrator elections are an alternative to RFA that is a gentler process for candidates due to secret voting and multiple people running together. The call for candidates is July 9–15, the discussion phase is July 18–22, and the voting phase is July 23–29. Get ready to submit your candidacy, or (with their consent) to nominate a talented candidate!
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on June 27. Please help translate.
The Wikimania Hackathon 2025 inviting project ideas.
Upcoming and current events and conversations Let's Talk continues
Wikimania Hackathon 2025: The Wikimania Hackathon 2025 is inviting you to submit your project idea.
WikiWomen* Summit 2025: The WikiWomen* Summit 2025 will take place in a hybrid format on 5th August, the pre-conference day of Wikimania 2025. Register now.
Tech News: Temporary accounts have been rolled out on 18 large and medium-sized Wikipedias, including German, Japanese, French, and Chinese; The CampaignEvents extension has been enabled on all Wikipedias. More updates from Tech News week 27 and 28.
AbuseFilter: AbuseFilter maintainers can now match against IP reputation data in AbuseFilters. IP reputation data is information about the proxies and VPNs associated with the user’s IP address. This data is not shown publicly and is not generated for actions performed by registered accounts.
Favorite Templates: A new feature related to Template Recall and Discovery will be deployed to all Wikimedia projects: a template category browser will be introduced to assist users in finding templates to put in their “favourite” list. The browser will allow users to browse a list of templates which have been organised into a given category tree. The feature has been requested by the community through the Community Wishlist.
Wikipedia App: We have launched an A/B test of tabbed browsing in the Wikipedia iOS app. This feature allows users to open multiple articles in separate tabs, making it easier to switch between topics, explore, and return to previous reading spots. The test is currently running in Arabic, English, and Japanese in selected regions. We’re collecting feedback and plan to make the feature more widely available soon.
MediaWiki: The MediaWiki Platform team has introduced a unified Built-in Notifications system, as part of MediaWiki 1.44, that makes it easier for developers to send, manage, and customize notifications across the platform.
Advocacy: We have created The Wikipedia Test: a public policy tool and a call to action to help ensure regulators consider how new laws can negatively affect online communities and platforms that provide services and information in the public interest.
Wikimedia Research Showcase: The next showcase will center around the theme of "Examining the Impact of LLMs on Knowledge Production Communities" and will take place on July 16 at 16:30 UTC.
Administrative Update to Our Privacy Policies: Following personnel changes, we are removing the name of our former point of contact serving the European Economic Area and the UK for questions and requests related to personal data in the privacy policy and donor privacy policy.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on July 11. Please help translate. The bulletin will be back after Wikimania with a special issue on the 19th August.
Get Ready for Wikimania 2025!
Upcoming and current events and conversations Let's Talk continues
Strengthening a neutral point of view: An overview of NPOV policies across Wikipedia projects, shows that 153 Wikipedias out of 342 (45%) don’t have easily accessible guidance on neutrality. The research was conducted to help understand how neutrality is ensured in our projects. and to provide an opportunity for peer learning across project communities. Read the full research and join the conversation.
Tech News: See all the 60 community-submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks in Tech News week 29 and 30. For example, the request to add Malayalam fonts in the Wikisource Book Export Tool was resolved and now, the rendering of Malayalam letters in exported Wikisource books are accurate.
Temporary Accounts: After the rollout of temporary accounts on 18 large and medium-sized Wikipedias, we are monitoring the impact of this change, and preparing for the next deployments. See the full project update.
Add a link: Administrators can now limit "Add a Link" to newcomers, as opposed to keeping it open to more experienced editors as well. "Add a link" helps newcomers to start editing, so restricting the feature to them enables Administrators to cater the feature to that specific group, which they can do via the Community Configuration feature.
Equity Fund: As it closes, the Equity Fund has announced its final round of grants to six past grantees. It will also be providing four "Connected Grants" to movement organizations who will pair closely with one of the grantees to collaborate together.
Don't blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
Content Translation: Translators who use the Suggestions feature in the Content Translation tool can now select and receive article suggestions that are customized to geographical locations of their interest using the new "Regions" filter.
Board selection: The Elections Committee shared a list of the all eligible candidates. As there are more than 10 eligible candidates, a shortlisting process is currently taking place. Representatives of Wikimedia movement affiliates that are currently compliant with their reporting obligations can participate in the shortlisting process. Learn more about this process and next steps on Meta.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 27th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 2025! Boy, does it feel good to kick off the year with an issue. Yep, it's been a year since we cleared out the 2022-2024 backlog with issues 23 and 24! Good times. Though in this case "a year" just means... 6 months? 😯 The salience of whatever joke I was planning to make here has vanished speedily. Aaron Liu (talk) 21:00, 31 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
WikiTextExpander by Polygnotus, is this edition's featured script. At the click of a configurable hotkey, this script will find and replace or link a configurable list of phrases within the selected text in all source editors (even in the comment/reply field!). Besides allowing the quick insertion of templated messages, this script greatly mitigates the WP:WTF? problem by providing both the legibility of familiar words and the convenience of shortcuts. And to those asking, the capitalization of "Wikitext" as "WikiText" was a necessary sacrifice for far-more-memorable acronymy.
CanonNi: AlertAssistant has been fixed and rewritten using OOUI instead of Twinkle's Morebits. Such modern, very tool. (Do note that the maintainer has since become inactive.)
NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh/AjaxLoader has been updated to use modern JS APIs that replace the browser's URL bar with the link you clicked on to load in place. The "back" (and "forward") buttons also work now. Cool, innit?
andrybak: Unsigned helper no longer shows an error when the message to sign was added in the earliest 50 revisions of a page's history. This is especially relevant to pages with short histories.
BilledMammal/Move+ needs updating to order list of pages handle lists of pages to move correctly regardless of the discussion's page, so that we may avoid repeating fiasco history.
In breaking m:Tech/News, Gadgets can now include .vue files. This makes it easier to develop modern user interfaces using Vue.js, in particular using Codex, the official design system of Wikimedia. Codex icons are now also available. The documentation has examples.
Appo/Globstory integrates OpenHistoryMap, updating the map whenever hovering/clicking on a location or year, the latter of which changes the map to be (hopefully) accurate to the year selected. It's pretty interesting.
linkinfo Somewhat similar to WP:NavPops, Awesome Aasim/linkinfo(pictured) provides a collection of links to replace the right-click context menu, presented beautifully.
PreviousDiscussions provides a link to search for your username on subpages of another user's userpage and talkpage conveniently.
Twineeea/noRedLinks brings you to the "read" instead of the "create" tab when you visit a red link. Contemplate life's mysteries as you stare into the blank! Deeply.
No, this is not going to be the enduring tradition of S++ for the future. This was meant to be a joke for the special occasion on the first day of the fourth month but was delayed by four months because I'm lazy.
Following a request for comment, there is a new policy outlining the granting of permissions to view the IP addresses of temporary accounts. Temporary account deployment on the English Wikipedia is currently scheduled for September 2025, and editors can request access to the permission ahead of time. Admins are encouraged to keep an eye on the request page; there will likely be a flood of editors requesting the permission when they realize they can no longer see IP addresses.
South Asia (WP:CT/SA) is designated a contentious topic. The topic area is specifically defined as All pages related to the region of South Asia (India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal), broadly construed, including but not limited to history, politics, ethnicity, and social groups.
Wikimania 2025 is happening in Nairobi, Kenya, and online from August 6 to August 9. This year marks 20 years of Wikimania. Interested users can join the online event. Registration for the virtual event is free and will remain open throughout Wikimania. You can register here now.
Special Wikimania issueThis is a special Wikimania issue of the Bulletin. We'll be back to our regular format in the next issue
Wikimania Nairobi: Catch up on missed sessions of Wikimania 2025 by checking session pages in the program. These links will be replaced by Commons links when the uploads are finished.
Meet the Wikimedians of the Year 2025: The Wikimedian of the Year awards give us an opportunity to pause, taking a moment to recognize people who make our mission possible. Learn about all of this year's winners.
Tech News: Some of the latest update from Tech News week 31, 32, and 33: The Wikimedia Commons community has decided to block cross-wiki uploads to Wikimedia Commons, for all users without autoconfirmed rights on that wiki, starting on August 16; The WikiEditor toolbar now includes its keyboard shortcuts in the tooltips for its buttons. This will help to improve the discoverability of this feature.
Collaborative Contributions: Share your comments on Collaborative Contributions. This project aims to create a new way to display the impact of collaborative editing activities (such as edit-a-thons, backlog drives, and WikiProjects) on the wikis.
Watchlists and Recent Changes: The Foundation will be focusing on wishes related to Watchlists and Recent Changes pages over the next few months. Please read the latest update, and if you have ideas, please submit a wish on the topic.
Wikimedia Futures Lab: The Wikimedia Futures Lab is a process and convening co-designed by the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Deutschland that will help us all learn more about global trends and discuss potential movement-wide responses. You can apply now to join the in-person convening hosted on January 30 – February 1, 2026 in Frankfurt, Germany with participants from affiliates, contributors and external experts.
Don't Blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
The fourth round of the 2025 WikiCup ended on 29 August. The penultimate round saw three contestants score more than 800 points:
BeanieFan11(submissions) with 1,175 round points, mainly from sports-related articles, including 17 good articles, 27 did you know articles, and 9 in the news articles
AirshipJungleman29(submissions) with 854 round points, mostly from a high-scoring featured article on the Indian leader Rani of Jhansi and two good articles, in addition to 13 featured and good article reviews
Everyone who competed in Round 4 will advance to Round 5 unless they have withdrawn. This table shows all competitors who have received tournament points so far, while the full scores for Round 4 can be seen here. During this round, contestants have claimed 9 featured articles, 12 featured lists, 98 good articles, 9 good topic articles, more than 150 reviews, nearly 100 did you know articles, and 18 in the news articles.
In advance of the fifth and final round, the judges would like to thank every contestant for their hard work. As a reminder, any content promoted after 29 August but before the start of Round 5 can be claimed in Round 5. In addition, note that Round 5 will end on 31 October at 23:59 UTC. Awards at the end of Round 5 will be distributed based on who has the most tournament points over all five rounds, and special awards will be distributed based on high performance in particular areas of content creation (e.g., most featured articles in a single round).
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 – Cwmhiraeth(talk·contribs), Epicgenius(talk·contribs), Frostly(talk·contribs), Guerillero(talk·contribs) and LeeVilenski(talk·contribs) – are reachable on their talk pages. Good luck!
Upcoming and current events and conversations Let's Talk continues
Wikimedia Futures Lab: Apply before Sep 4 to join The Wikimedia Futures Lab, the in-person convening hosted on January 30 – February 1, 2026 in Frankfurt, Germany with participants from affiliates, contributors and external experts, to learn more about global trends and discuss potential movement-wide responses.
Wikimania 2026: The theme and date for Wikimania 2026 have been decided: Liberté, Équité, Fiabilité (Freedom, Equity, Reliability). This edition will take place in Paris, from July 21 to July 25, 2026.
Tech News: Some of the latest updates from Tech News week 34 and 35: An A/B test comparing two versions of the desktop donate link launched on testwiki and English Wikipedia for 0.1% of logged out users on the desktop site. The experiment will run for three weeks, ending on 12 September; Administrators can now access the Special:BlockedExternalDomains page from the Special:CommunityConfiguration list page. This makes it easier to find.
Community Wishlist: Template authors can now use additional CSS properties, since the CSS sanitizer used by TemplateStyles was updated. These improvements are a Community Wishlist wish.
Wikipedia Mobile Apps: The Android app team has launched a new experiment in Italy that lets logged-out readers of Italian and English Wikipedia set their own donation reminders based on how often they read. This new approach responds to feedback from donors who say their motivation to give is tied to their reading habits. Instead of one-size-fits-all banners, readers can now choose reminders that fit their own usage, all while keeping their privacy intact.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
An RfC is open on whether use of emojis with no encyclopedic value in mainspace and draftspace (e.g., at the start of paragraphs or in place of bullet points) should be added as a criterion under G15.
An RfC is in progress to amend the structure, rules, and procedures of the Arbitration Committee election and resolve any issues not covered by existing rules.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello! Thank you for using Cite Unseen. We are excited to share details about a big update we just deployed. With grant support from Wikimedia CH, we've added several new features, including a citation filtering dashboard, settings dialog, support for localization, and the ability to easily suggest domain categorizations. Cite Unseen now also lives on Meta Wiki, as part of our effort to serve all Wikimedia projects. Our source lists are now also on Meta-Wiki, where they can be collaboratively edited by the community.
Please see our newsletter on Meta-Wiki for full details. If you have feature ideas, notice any issues with our new updates, or have any questions, please get in touch via our project talk page. Thank you!
This message was sent via global message delivery. You received this message as you've been identified as a user of Cite Unseen. If you are not a Cite Unseen user, or otherwise don't want to receive updates in the future, you can remove yourself from our mailing list here.
Wikimedia Research Showcase: "Readers and Readership Research" will be the featured theme for the next research showcase taking place on September 24 at 16:30 UTC.
Update to banner and logo policies: Feedback is requested on proposed policy and documentation updates regarding the use of banners and logos for advocacy purposes.
Temporary Accounts: Temporary accounts are now deployed to almost all wikis except the last 11.
User Info: This new feature displays data related to a user account when you tap or click on the "user avatar" icon button next to a username. It's meant to be useful for different users with extended rights as well as newcomers.
Newsletter highlights: The latest Readers Newsletter is now available. It includes considerations about Wikipedia's declining pageviews in the recent years, how the Foundation and communities may work on addressing this together, and the formation of two new teams — Reader Growth and Reader Experience.
Activity Tab Experiment: The Foundation launched an experiment testing a new Activity tab in the Wikipedia Android app to our beta testers. Instead of only showing editing activity, this tab also surfaces insights about reading and donation behavior.
Search Suggestions: To make it easier for users to find articles, logged-out users on both desktop and mobile will see suggestions of articles for further reading on English Wikipedia beginning the week of September 22. All non-English wikis received this update in June and July.
Paste Check: The Foundation is working on a new check: Paste check. This check informs newcomers who paste text into Wikipedia that the content might not be accepted to ensure it is aligned with the Movement's values. This check will soon be tested at a few wikis.
CampaignEvents extension: The CampaignEvents extension has been enabled for all Wikisources. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. To request the extension for your wiki, visit the information page.
Structured Task: The Add a Link Structured Task has been fully released at English Wikipedia. This release is an important step in making editing more accessible for new contributors, especially on mobile.
Tech News: Read more updates from Tech News week 36 and 37.
Multilingual Contributors: The Language and Product Localisation team is launching a CentralNotice campaign to attract multilingual contributors to specific Wikipedias. The campaign will feature regionally targeted banners to reach potential native speakers.
Open Indonesia: Reflections on Open Indonesia, an event in Bandung gathering communities dedicated to advancing open knowledge to build the country's Open Knowledge Roadmap.
UK Online Safety Act: The Wikimedia Foundation will not appeal the UK High Court’s decision to dismiss our challenge to the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) Categorisation Regulations.
August board meeting: Updates on board appointments and selection, CEO search, work to strengthen Wikipedia's approach to neutral point of view and updates on three pilots around more shared decision-making and shared accountability across the movement.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Learning Clinic: The next Let's Connect Learning Clinic will talk about "Mastering the Capacity Exchange (CapX) Tool" and will take place on September 30 at 13:00 UTC.
Big Fat Brussels Meeting: The tenth in-person gathering of Wikimedians enthusiastic in free knowledge advocacy, Big Fat Brussels Meeting, will take place on October 3-4.
Wikimedia Research Showcase: "Celebrating 13 Years: Wikidata’s Role in Learning and Culture" will be the featured theme for the next research showcase taking place on October 15 at 16:30 UTC.
Search Suggestions: Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users now see suggestions of articles for further reading on all Wikipedias, in order to make it easier for users to find articles.
Activity Tab now on Android: Beta users of the Wikipedia Android app can now try the redesigned Activity tab, which replaces the Edits tab. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging.
Wikipedia 25: Wikimedia Foundation is creating playful, celebratory interventions on the Wikipedia portal page, the Wikipedia app, and potentially any interested Wikipedias to celebrate Wikipedia’s 25th birthday. Please share your inputs and add your username on the Talk page if you think your community would be interested in participating.
National award: Wikipedian and current chair of Wikimedia Deutschland, Alice Wiegand, receives the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for her voluntary commitment to Wikipedia and the global Wikimedia movement.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hi Kevin:) My name is Sophie and I'm pretty new to Wiki. While I've largely been relying on the newcomer recommendations for navigating how to edit here, I feel kinda lost with building out my personal user profile. If you know of any templates I could use to personalize my page, I would love to hear your recs! I really like how you've made yours look Spindella000 (talk) 17:40, 2 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
@Spindella000: Hey there! Welcome to Wikipedia, and thanks for reaching out. I'm not sure of any particular templates unfortunately. I set up my page a very very long time ago. It's all HTML and CSS styling; you can find many guides online. There is the user page design guide (and in particular, the style page) that may be helpful or provide some inspiration (though it may also be a bit dated). If you have any ideas in mind or if I can help with anything, please let me know! ~SuperHamsterTalkContribs00:40, 20 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
No problemo! This is actually super helpful and I thank you TO THE HIGHEST ORDER:) I'll take everything I can lol happy editing xoxo spindella Spindella000 (talk) 21:01, 20 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Feedback request: Wikipedia style and naming request for comment
After a motion, arbitration enforcement page protections no longer need to be logged in the AELOG. A bot now automatically posts protections at WP:AELOG/P. To facilitate this bot, protection summaries must include a link to the relevant CT page (e.g. [[WP:CT/BLP]]), and you will receive talk page reminders if you forget to specify the contentious topic but otherwise indicate it is an AE action.
Veggiegalaxy has given you a WikiTrout! Trouts promote WikiFun and hopefully this one has made your day more fun. Spread the WikiFun by giving someone else a trout, especially when they are doing something silly. Happy slapping!
Spread the fun of trouts by adding {{subst:Troutalt}} to someone's talk page with a friendly message!
Wikipedia 25: Are you planning to organize events to celebrate Wikipedia's 25th birthday? The Wikimedia Foundation offers grants to support active Wikimedia groups in organizing short-term, low-cost projects to celebrate this milestone. Applications are open until November 1.
WikiConference North America 2025: WikiConference North America will take place from October 16–19 in New York City, USA.
Dark Mode will soon be available on all Wikimedia sites.
Mobile Editing: Insights on mobile web editing on Wikipedia in 2025 are now available. This report highlights that ~95% of IP mobile users editing via wikitext open the editor but make no changes at all, a vast untapped potential. It also pinpoints where contributors most often drop off.
Dark Mode: Dark Mode user interface will be rolled out on all Wikimedia sites on October 29. All anonymous users of Wikimedia sites will have the option to activate a color scheme that features light-colored text on a dark background. This is designed to provide a more comfortable reading experience, especially in low-light situations.
Community wishlist extension:The new Community Wishlist extension has been released. This will allow users to add tags to their wishes to better categorise them, and (in a future iteration) to filter them by status, tags and focus areas. It will also be possible to support individual wishes again, as requested by the community in many instances.
Paste Check: 22 Wikis are now testing a new Edit Check feature, Paste Check, to help avoid and fight copyright violations. When editors paste text into an article, Paste Check prompts them to confirm the origin and licensing of the content.
Tone Check: The Wikimedia Foundation is working on a new check for newcomers: Tone check. Using a prediction model, this check will encourage editors to improve the tone of their edits.
Search Suggestions: Search Suggestions was deployed on English Wikipedia. Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users see suggestions of articles for further reading. The feature is available on both desktop and mobile.
Unsupported Tools Working Group: A new Unsupported Tools Working Group has been formed to help prioritize and review requests for support of unmaintained extensions, gadgets, bots, and tools. The group has chosen Video2Commons as the first tool for its pilot cycle. The group will explore ways to improve and sustain the tool over the coming months.
Tech News: Read updates from Tech News week 40 and 41 including about Sub-referencing – a new feature to re-use references with different details.
Wikimedia Research Showcase: Don't miss the next Wikimedia Research Showcase, "Celebrating 13 Years: Wikidata's Role in Learning and Culture" taking place on October 15 at 16:30 UTC.
Human Rights: Making sure AI serves people and knowledge stays human: Wikimedia Foundation publishes a Human Rights Impact Assessment on the interaction of AI and machine learning with Wikimedia projects.
Don't blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
Learning Clinic: Join the next Let's Connect Learning Clinic on the topic of "Mastering the Capacity Exchange (CapX) Tool (Part 2)" taking place on October 20 at 17:00 UTC.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Traffic report: One click after another Serial-killer miniseries, deceased scientist, government shutdowns and Sandalwood hit "Kantara" crowd the tubes.
Global trends: We are seeing 8% declines in human page views on Wikipedia as some users don't directly visit Wikipedia to get information. Learn about this new user trend, how the Wikimedia Foundation anticipate these changes, and how you can help.
The naming contest for the new Wikimedia project, known until now as Abstract Wikipedia, is ongoing.
Making it easier to say thanks: Users on most wikis will now have the ability to thank a comment directly from the talk page it appears on. Before this change, thanking could only be done by visiting the revision history of the talk page.
Account security: Improvements to account security and two-factor authentication (2FA) features were enabled across all wikis. Another part of the project is making 2FA generally available to all users. Along with editors with advanced privileges, such as administrators and bureaucrats, 40% of editors now have access to 2FA. You can check if you have access at Special:AccountSecurity.
Tech News: Read updates from Tech News week 42 and 43 including the community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Wikimedia apps: The Wikipedia iOS App launched an A/B/C test of improvements to the Tabbed browsing feature into Beta for select regions & languages. Called “More dynamic tabs”, the experiment adds user-requested improvements and introduces article recommendations within the tabs overview, showing “Did you know” or “Because you read” content depending on how many tabs are open.
CampaignEvents extension:Campaignevents extension will be deployed to all remaining wikis during the week of 17 November 2025. The extension currently includes three features: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List. For this rollout, Invitation List will not be enabled on Wikifunctions and MediaWiki unless requested by those communities.
Event registration tool: Autoconfirmed users on small and medium wikis with the extension can now use Event Registration without the Event Organizer right. This feature lets organizers enable registration, manage participants, and lets users register with one click instead of signing event pages.
Digital safety: Explore how you can help make Wikimedia safer by taking our new self-paced course, Safety for Young Wikimedians.
Wikimedia Core Curriculum: The Wikimedia Foundation has developed seven online video learning modules covering the core English Wikipedia policies. You are invited to use, adapt, and translate the course.
Advocacy: The Wikimedia Foundation has signed onto a statement that calls on governments and UN bodies to keep discussions about the future of internet governance accessible to non-government actors like industry and civil society. This statement is part of ongoing joint advocacy with affiliates to influence UN discussions about the future of internet governance such as the Global Digital Compact campaign and WSIS+20 deliberations.
GLAM: The Wikimedia Foundation and several affiliates have signed onto the Open Heritage Statement, which supports galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM institutions) to have the legal rights they need to collect, preserve, and provide access to cultural heritage.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Your wiki anniversary is just around the corner, in 2 days! What a wonderful milestone of 17 years on Wiki (as per SUL). Your incredible contributions, with over 39,658 edits, have truly made a difference. Here's to another amazing year of collaboration and knowledge sharing!
Use this Tool to send wiki anniversary wishes to other amazing Wikimedians.
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
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.
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!
Latest comment: 11 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on October 24. Please help translate.
Upcoming and current events and conversations Let's Talk continuesWikimania Santiago will happen in 2027.
Wikimania 2027: Santiago, Chile is announced as the location for Wikimania 2027. The annual conference returns to Latin America after more than 10 years, following previous editions in Buenos Aires (2009) and Mexico City (2015).
Tech News: Read updates from Tech News week 44 and 45 including the community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Activity Tab: The Wikipedia Android app expands the new Activity tab to all users. It offers a complete view of your Wikipedia activity: reading time, saved articles, edits, and donation history (for known donors). This change aims to make Wikipedia a more engaging experience for readers and contributors alike, while keeping all personal data private and stored locally on your device.
Tabbed browsing: Tabbed browsing is now available on the Wikipedia App for iOS. Tabs will let you keep more than one article open at a time, making it easier to explore complex topics, follow links without losing your place, and pick up where you left off.
CampaignEvents extension: Autoconfirmed users on small and medium wikis with the CampaignEvents extension can now use Event Registration without the Event Organizer right. This feature lets organizers enable registration, manage participants, and lets users register with one click instead of signing event pages.
Image browsing: The Wikimedia Foundation launched image browsing, an experiment that puts images on top of your Wikipedia article reading journey, on Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
Temporary accounts: Temporary Accounts are now enabled on 1,000+ projects including English Wikipedia.
Digital Safety: The Wikimedia Foundation is launching Digital Safety Office Hours to explore how to stay safe digitally, what does digital safety mean, what extra precautions can Wikimedians take. The first session will take place on November 28 at 9 AM and 7 PM UTC. Check out also our Digital Safety Resources Center to learn practical tips and tools you can use immediately.
Volunteer roles for movement governance: The Movement governance committees are seeking new volunteers to support essential and high-impact work across the Wikimedia ecosystem. The current appointment cycle is open for the AffCom, Ombuds Commission, and Case Review Committee. Applications for these committees will remain open until December 11. The team will host a community conversation on November 26, at 3 AM UTC.
Don't Blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Latest comment: 11 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello! Voting in the 2025 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 1 December 2025. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
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.
Tech News: Some of the latest updates from Tech News week 46 and 47: Wikimedia Foundation is experimentating with reading lists on mobile web, allowing logged-in readers with no edits to save private lists of articles for later; One new wiki has been created: a Wikisource in Minangkabau.
Wikifunctions: The second round of voting for naming the wiki with abstract content is kicking off with six name proposals to vote for.
Reference check: The A/B test for reference check has begun on English Wikipedia and will run until December 17. This is a feature which prompts new editors to add citations before they publish an edit adding content to an article.
Image browsing: Wikimedia Foundation is launching an experiment called "Image browsing" to test how to make it easier for readers to browse and discover images on Wikipedia articles. This experiment, a mobile-only A/B test, is taking place on on Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese wikis, affecting a small number of users.
CampaignEvents extension: Campaign events extension is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. The extension offers tools for running and coordinating events and other on-wiki collaborations. These features include Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List, plus a new feature, Collaborative contribution, which helps organizers and participants see the impact of their collaborative activities. Join the upcoming learning session to see the new feature in action and share your feedback.
Dark Mode: Dark mode is now available on all Wikimedia projects for all anonymous users! This enhancement aims to deliver a more enjoyable reading experience, especially in dimly lit environments. Learn how to activate this feature.
Wikimedia Apps: The Activity tab in the Wikipedia Android app is now available for all users. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging.
Wikipedia 25 Press toolkit: Wikimedia Foundation is providing press toolkit as guidance and resources to Wikimedia volunteers and affiliates to spread the word about Wikipedia’s 25th birthday to local and regional media.
Understanding movement organizers: Wikimedia Foundation concluded a literature review on organizers in the Wikimedia movement focused on capturing their personas, motivations, and impact in order to highlight best practices and opportunities for further support.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Starting on November 4, the IP addresses of logged-out editors are no longer being publicly displayed. Instead, they will have a temporary account associated with their edits.
Administrators will now find that Special:MergeHistory is now significantly more flexible about what it can merge. It can now merge sections taken from the middle of the history of the source (rather than only the start) and insert revisions anywhere in the history of the destination page (rather than only the start). T382958
An Articles for Creation backlog drive is happening in December 2025, with over 1,000 drafts awaiting review from the past two months. In addition to AfC participants, all administrators and new page patrollers can help review using the Yet Another AFC Helper Script, which can be enabled in the Gadgets settings. Sign up here to participate!
Latest comment: 10 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on November 21. This will be the final bulletin for 2025 and we'll be back in late January 2026 with the next issue. Please help translate.
Upcoming and current events and conversations Let's Talk continues
CEO appointment: The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees has appointed Bernadette Meehan as the new CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. She will be meeting communities around the puzzle globe when she officially joins on January 20, 2026.
Wikipedia's 25th birthday party: Join the virtual celebration for games, prizes, musical performances, volunteer spotlights, data visualization, surprise guests and more. January 15 at 16:00 UTC. Register on Meta.
Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees: Join the next Conversation with the Trustees on December 11 at 17:30 UTC.
Activity Tab on Mobile App: The Wikipedia iOS app is running an experiment that replaces the History tab with a redesigned Activity tab. This new tab surfaces personalized insights about reading, editing, and donations — all stored locally on your device for privacy. The goal is to see whether the new experience increases engagement and retention among logged-in readers.
Wikipedia Year in Review in Apps: The Wikipedia Year in Review 2025 is now available for the iOS and Android apps. This year introduces new personalized insights, updated reading highlights, and refreshed designs.
Add a Link: A feature that suggests links to be added to articles based on a prediction model, Add a link, has been deployed at Japanese, Urdu and Chinese Wikipedias. While this feature has already been available on most Wikipedias, the prediction model could not support certain languages. A new model has now been developed to handle these languages, and it will be gradually rolled out to other Wikipedias over time.
Abstract Wikipedia: The second round of voting on the name of Abstract Wikipedia concluded with Abstract Wikipedia as the top-voted name with 100 votes, followed by Wikigenerator with 91 votes. The name for the wiki project will now remain Abstract Wikipedia.
Anti-vandalism tool:Automoderator, now has the option to choose between two machine learning models to power the software on wikis using the tool.
Tools to support newcomers: Newcomers failing to add a citation to support added content has been one of the most common mistakes on Wikipedia. Reference Check, a tool that prompts them to add a citation before publishing an edit, has gone live for an A/B test on English Wikipedia.
Wikimedia Research Showcase: The next research showcase will feature a special panel on "Experimentation on Wikipedia" and will take place on December 10 at 17:30 UTC.
Annual Plan Progress: A look back at progress made against the plan during the second half of our fiscal year. Up to date regular updates are included in the Foundation Bulletin.
Sister Projects Task Force: Results of the consultation about Wikispore and Wikinews: No immediate changes should be made to Wikispore's current technical setup and archive all editions of Wikinews, preserving their content.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
New Pages Patrol is hosting a one-time, two-month experimental backlog drive aimed at reducing the backlog. This will be a combo drive: both articles and redirects will earn points.
The drive will run from 1 January to 28 February 2026.
The drive is divided into two phases. Participants may take part in either phase or across both phases, depending on availability.
Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles and redirects patrolled during the drive.
Two-month drive-exclusive barnstars will be awarded to eligible participants.
Each article review earns 1 point, while each redirect review earns 0.2 points.
Streak awards will be granted based on consistently meeting weekly point thresholds.
Barnstars will also be awarded for re-reviewing articles previously reviewed by other patrollers during the drive.
Latest comment: 10 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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.
Changes to the Access to Temporary Account IP Addresses Policy's disclosure rules include broadening the consecutive-blocks exception to cover all admin actions and removing the requirement to revision-delete permissible disclosures once they become unnecessary (instead requiring only their removal). See WP:TAIVDISCLOSE for more information.
Latest comment: 9 months ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hi, Kevin. I enjoyed your presentation more than half a day ago on these closely related topics for the Philadelphia Wikisalon and it whetted my appetite. However, I am left with a terribly elementary question about each. First, is there a way to sign into Wikiportraits? Not that I am greatly interested in portrait photos, nor urgently desire a press pass; just itching with frustrated curiosity. Second, what's the URL for the galleries site? It seems obvious I wasn't paying proper attention, but still, has anything been done to make these things more findable? Jim.henderson (talk) 07:45, 11 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Hey @Jim.henderson: thanks for reaching out and listening to my ramblings!
Thank you. How nice; there's a photo of a Wikimedia NYC meetup and there I am, 'way in back under orange cap. Anyway I think these links ought to appear in more places in Commons, such as in the Wikiportraits category headers. I'm in for a busy few days but will look more closely when I get more leisure. Jim.henderson (talk) 02:42, 13 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Feedback request: Wikipedia policies and guidelines request for comment
Latest comment: 9 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello! I came across your name on a previous Wikimedia hackathon participant page, so I thought you might be interested in this.
We're organizing the Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026, taking place on 13–14 March 2026 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. It's a two-day, in-person hackathon for technical Wikimedians from the region.
Since you've attended a hackathon before, you already know how valuable these events can be for collaboration, learning, and getting things done together. We'd love to have you join us!
Apply here – registration closes mid-January or when full.
Latest comment: 9 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on December 5. Please help translate.
Highlights
Wikipedia turns 25: Time to start the party! Join the virtual celebration featuring musical performances, games, and more on January 15 at 16:00 UTC. and The party will be live interpreted into Arabic, Chinese, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.
General Registration for the 2026 Wikimedia Hackathon is now open! The hackathon will take place in Milan, Italy from May 1 - 3, 2026. Event details can be found here and registration will remain open until March 30th or until event capacity is reached.
Tech News: Latest updates from Tech News week 50, week 51, and week 52 include that now edit filters can be set to automatically suppress their details which will help oversighters to prevent doxxing.
Blazegraph Migration: To support the migration away from Blazegraph as the backend of Wikidata Query Service (WDQS), we are hosting regular calls starting on January 27. Wikidata users and tool maintainers are are invited to join, ask questions, and share migration-related concerns.
Wikimedia Research Report: The Wikimedia Foundation has published its 13th bi-annual Research Report, highlighting the work completed during the first six months of this fiscal year.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletinwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
@Doug Weller: Ah yes, thank you. WP:NPPSG has it as "no consensus" as of October. I've updated our data (though it might take a while to reflect on your end due to cache).
Annual planning: The Annual Plan is the Wikimedia Foundation’s description of what we hope to achieve in the coming year. This is a time of urgency and focus for the Wikimedia projects and we invite you to shape this plan together with us.
Account security: All users with registered accounts can now use passkeys for two-factor authentication (2FA), providing a simple and secure way to log in.
Tech News: Latest updates from Tech News week 03, 04 and 05 include unregistered contributors on blocked IPs can now interact on-wiki to appeal a block by creating a temporary account.
Structured task: The Revise Tone Structured Task is now live in A/B testing on pilot wikis: English, Arabic, Portuguese, and French Wikipedia. It helps new editors improve promotional language in existing articles through a quiz style onboarding experience and a guided in article suggestion.
"The Birthday Cake Song" is an original song created for Wikipedia's 25th Birthday, performed by the WikiChoir, featuring Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons content.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletinwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Due to the result of a recent motion, a rough consensus of administrators at the arbitration enforcement noticeboard may impose an expanded topic ban on Israel, Israelis, Jews, Judaism, Palestine, Palestinians, Islam, and/or Arabs, if an editor's Arab-Israeli conflict topic ban is determined to be insufficient to prevent disruption. At least one diff per area expanded into should be cited.
Latest comment: 8 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on January 30. Please help translate.
Highlights
Wikipedia Library: Wikipedia Library gained new content partnerships, restored access to the British Newspaper Archive, and added an Arabic language academic resource with more than 7 million records.
Gender gap: The Celebrate Women 2026 campaign will run from March 1–31 to advance the achievements of the women’s rights and gender equity movement globally.
Annual Planning: The Annual Plan is the Wikimedia Foundation’s description of what we hope to achieve in the coming year. We invite you to shape this plan together with us. Between now and the end of June 2026, we will have continuous conversations about how global trends may shape our future, how we can experiment, adapt and respond together.
Patrolling improvements: A new feature available on Special:Contributions shows temporary accounts that are likely operated by the same person, and so makes patrolling less time-consuming.
Suggestion Mode: A new Beta Feature for the VisualEditor, Suggestion Mode, is now available on English Wikipedia for experienced editors. This features proactively suggests actions that people can consider taking to improve Wikipedia articles, such as "add citation", "improve tone", or "fix an ambiguous link".
WDQS Blazegraph Migration: As part of the migration away from Blazegraph (the current backend of the Wikidata Query Service), an initial evaluation of open-source triple store candidates has been completed. Using the published evaluation methodology, performance, stability, and compatibility was assessed.
Tech News: Latest updates from Tech News week 06 and 07 include the new Watchlist labels feature that allows logged-in contributors to organise and filter watched pages in ways that improve their workflows. They also link to the 44 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
Open Knowledge: Why the Open Knowledge Movement and Public Interest Journalism must unite forces. Shared principles and interdependence, points of convergence and the path forward.
Journalism Awards: Applications for the Open the Knowledge Journalism Awards are now open until March 1. Presented by the International Center for Journalists in partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation, the awards seek to recognize African journalists whose reporting helps close knowledge gaps about Africa on Wikipedia.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletinwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Latest comment: 8 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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:
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) 14:57, 27 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
A request for comment is open to discuss retiring CSD criterion R3 in favour of handling such redirects through RfD.
Arbitration
Following a motion, remedy 9.1 of the Conduct in deletion-related editing case has been amended to limit TenPoundHammer to one XfD nomination or PROD per 24-hour period.
Following a motion, the Iskandar323 further POV pushing motion has been rescinded.
The Arbitration Committee has passed a housekeeping motion rescinding a number of outdated remedies and enforcement provisions across multiple legacy cases. In most instances, existing sanctions remain in force and continue to be appealable through the usual processes, while some case-specific remedies were amended or clarified.
Birthday mode: 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. The feature is available for all Wikipedias to customise through Community Configuration until 6 April 2026. So far 17 Wikipedias have joined in the fun.
Wikipedia's 25th birthday party celebrated on Commons: Content from the January 15th global birthday party selected as Media of the day.
Etherpad cleanup: For security and performance reasons, all current pads on Wikimedia’s Etherpad instance, the web-based "ephemeral" editor for real-time collaborative document editing, will be permanently deleted after 30 April. We will continue running this Etherpad instance to support events and other short-term collaboration, but will be periodically deleting data going forward. If you have content in Etherpad you want to keep, please create local backups, as data will be permanently deleted and will not be able to be recovered.
Activity tab: Wikipedia iOS app has rolled out the improved Activity tab to all users in version 7.9.0. A/B test results showed increased account creation among users with access to the feature. Updates include enhanced editing impact insights, module customization, and relocation of History into the Search tab.
Reference Check: The feature Reference Check has been deployed to all Wikipedias. 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 (or acknowledge/explain why they did not) and about 17.5 times more likely on mobile web.
Semantic search: The Foundation has launched a limited Android mobile app experiment that tests hybrid search capabilities which can handle both semantic and keyword queries. The Phase 1 beta is now live on Greek Wikipedia. The goal is to understand whether combining meaning-based retrieval with keyword search helps readers find information more effectively. Testing will expand to English, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias in March.
Navigation experience: The Foundation will run an experiment for mobile web users, that adds a table of contents and automatically expands all article sections, to learn more about navigation issues they face. The test will be available on Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
Screenshot of the current prototype of Abstract Wikipedia, showing a two sentence article about Kolkata.
Site notices: Site notices (MediaWiki:Sitenotice and MediaWiki:Anonnotice) now will render on all platforms, not just on the desktop site. Users on mobile web will now see these notices and be informed.
Tech News: Latest updates from Tech News week 08 and 09 include the new “Edit full page” button for people who are editing a page-section using the mobile visual editor. They also link to the 40 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
Wikifunctions: Abstract Wikipedia is going to have its public preview within the next few weeks, here is the preview.
Gender gap: The Celebrate Women 2026 is coming! The Wikimedia Foundation will host a kick-off celebration that will work as a welcome session for both organizers and participants on March 5 at 13:00 UTC.
Let’s Connect Learning Clinic: Watch the recordings of past learning clinics about Wikipedia’s 25th Birthday Tool and Strengthening Local-Language Admin Communities.
Digital Safety: The next edition of Digital Safety Office Hours will be on Mar 27 at 9:00 UTC and 19:00 UTC. The session will explore practical threat modelling: a structured way to think about risks, assess your exposure, and make informed choices.
Human centered AI: Members of the Wikimedia Enterprise team presented on "Wikipedia in the Age of AI and Bots" at the seminar of Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletinwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
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?
Latest comment: 7 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on February 27. Please help translate.
Highlights
Supporting readers: For most of its history, Wikipedia did not have to worry about attracting readers. But with the way people search for information changing, there is a drop in the number of readers which is impacting the number of accounts created and contributions to our sites. Have a look at some of the ongoing and planned work to support reader experience.
Wikipedia 25 Grants: The celebration continues! The Wikimedia Foundation offers Wikipedia 25 Birthday Funds to communities planning Wikipedia’s 25th birthday events with funding between USD 1,000–2,000. Apply before March 31.
Experiments: The Foundation is frequently conducting experiments to help learn what features will be most effective and valuable to the projects. The list of experiments in Product and Technology, tracks upcoming, live, in-analysis, and completed experiments as well as their rationale. For example, the tracker shares that one upcoming experiment, Reader to Contributor Baseline, will measure how many readers create contributor accounts and whether the rate differs depending on how people arrived to the site.
Editing feature: Suggestion Mode is 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.
Paste Check: Paste Check is now available at all Wikipedias. 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.
Mobile experience: The user menu in the top corner for all mobile users is standardized so that it is closer to the desktop experience to improve the user interface for readers.
Two-factor authentication: 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.
Tech News: Latest updates from Tech News week 10 and 11 include the new GraphQL API has been released as a flexible alternative to select features of the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS). They also link to the 50 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
Don't Blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
Wiki Loves Earth 2025: See the winners from the 13th annual edition of the globe-trotting photo contest.
Wikimania 2026: While most Wikimania program submissions are closed, the research track is open until March 31. It accepts proposals from both professional researchers and Wikimedians.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletinwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Latest comment: 7 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on March 13. Please help translate.
Editing on the mobile apps
Highlights
Supporting the mobile experience: The Foundation is starting conversations with communities to explore how editing should work on the Wikipedia mobile apps. The goal is to understand how to better support both new and experienced editors, and how the app can guide users to the right editing tools. Your input is welcome. Join the discussion!
Wikimania 2026: Registration for Wikimania 2026 is opening soon from the end of March to May 1. Like other Wikimedia events this year, we are introducing a "request for invitation" process, with trust and safety checks conducted prior to confirming in-person attendance. Our priority is to create a safe environment for connection, collaboration, and shared learning.
Around the Puzzle Globe in the CEE region: On March 23 almost 60 Wikimedians took part in the CEE-Catch up- a meeting for Wikimedians from Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. As a part of continuous conversations we have with the communities around the Foundation's annual plan, participants discussed the global trends related to Readers and Contributors in their regional context. The meeting was also an opportunity to connect with the new Foundation CEO, Bernadette Meehan, who is meeting communities around the puzzle globe to listen, learn and engage with the communities.
Crawlers: The Foundation is now detecting and blocking billions of bot requests that don’t follow our robot policy, such as aggressive scrapers, to make sure our resources go towards serving human readers. In the coming months we’ll be working on better detection of rapidly changing bot behavior and better API infrastructure.
Moderator tools for newer editors: Wikipedia editors in Indonesian, Thai, Turkish, and Simple English now have access to an early version of Special:PersonalDashboard. It 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.
Account creation on mobile: Mobile editors at several wikis are now presented with a simplified logged-out warning message, which encourages them to create an account or log in. This test is part of our ongoing effort to enhance the account creation experience on mobile and increase participation.
Verification email redesign:The verification email sent to new accounts that add an email address during signup has been redesigned. When tested on English Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata, the same-week email verification rate increased from 41.6% to 45.9%.
Retaining notification history: Wikimedia site users can export their notifications older than 5 years using a new Toolforge tool. This will ensure that users retain important notifications and avoid losing them based on the planned change to delete notifications older than 5 years, as previously announced.
Tech News: Latest highlights from Tech News weeks 12 and 13 include the update that Wikimedia site users can now log in without a password using passkeys as a secure method supported by fingerprint, facial recognition, or PIN. See also the 64 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
Experiments: Check out the list of experiments in Product and Technology to see all upcoming, live, in-analysis, and completed experiments. One new experiment that just went live is the "Improve the logged-out warning message on mobile web," which aims to reduce the sense of friction or alarm when users encounter the logged-out warning upon editing.
Microtask Generator: Learn more about the Microtask Generator, a tool which identifies content quality gaps in Wikipedia articles and suggests tasks for editors to address within a dashboard. Users can input lists of articles for analysis, or get recommendations based on article categories. Ideal for edit-a-thons and other article improvement drives.
WikiLearn: Discover the latest edition of WikiLearn News where you can find the latest online learning opportunities to take your editing skills to new heights.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletinwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Following a motion, the GSCASTE extended-confirmed restriction in the Indian military history case has been narrowed. It now applies to caste-related topics in South Asia, and the preemptive protection remedy has been amended accordingly.
Hey @Alaexis: Thanks for reaching out! What a cool tool, I'll have to give it a try.
Right now our immediate focus for Cite Unseen is mostly continuing to expand our sources lists and ensuring user feedback (bugs, UI, etc.) is taken care of, especially as more users across more languages start using it. I think we also have potential to create a few more source categorizations (e.g. we recently introduced the AI-generated and AI-sourced categories).
I suppose you're reaching out with an AI angle? You may be interested in the alternative-universe AI version of Cite Unseen I worked on at a hackathon in 2024; see slides here. I basically made a new script that would have an LLM take a look at each source and give a short description of the source, publication, reliability, etc. It was just a POC and I never published it, but, that sort of thing is something I'm interested in exploring more in the future.
Thanks for sharing that! That looks cool and some of the scaling challenges are quite familiar. If you ever go back to it or build something new, feel free to add it to Wikipedia:WikiProject AI Tools. One thing that can be immediately useful is Publicai LLM credits. They were so kind as to give us some credits for use in Wikipedia tools which lowers the barrier a lot as users don't have to provide their own LLM API keys. Alaexis¿question?12:01, 10 April 2026 (UTC)Reply
Goal setting for edit-a-thons: The CampaignEvents extension now includes a new group goal-setting feature, enabling organizers to set and track event goals such as the number of articles created and participating contributors in real time. This feature is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. Join the Connection Learning Session on April 14 at 16:00 UTC to learn more about this feature and new ways to promote events and campaigns to editors.
Collaboration with the United Nations: Learn how the Foundation engages with the United Nations to secure our collective voice and protect free knowledge.
Navigating articles on mobile: The Foundation is launching an experiment to test how to make it easier and more intuitive for readers to navigate through articles on mobile. To do this, we want to test Mobile Page Previews. This experiment will go live the week of April 20 and will run for four weeks.
Editing tools for new editors: Tone Check was deployed on French, Japanese, and Portuguese Wikipedia as a default-on feature for editors who have published 100 or fewer edits locally. When promotional or subjective language is added, users are prompted to consider "neutralizing" the tone of the edit.
Managing watchlist labels: The new watchlist labels feature is now available via VisualEditor, the source editor, and the "watchstar" (or watch link, for skins that don’t have a star icon). Previously it was only possible to assign labels via EditWatchlist.
Latest Wikifunctions: Check out the partial list of the 102 new functions created last week – likely the first week we have exceeded 100.
Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News weeks 14 and 15 include an ongoing A/B test running on 10 Wikipedias to evaluate a clearer, more user-friendly message that promotes account creation on wikis. See also the 68 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
Community discussions on Semantic Search: The Wikimedia Foundation, in collaboration with the CEE Hub, hosted a discussion session on Semantic Search for members of the CEE Youth Group.
Don't Blink!: This month's highlights from the Global Advocacy team include how the Wikimedia Foundation co-presented alongside the Internet Archive at the State of the Net conference.
Digital rights and inclusion: Take a look at the sessions that Wikimedians and allied partners will lead during Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum (DRIF) 2026.
Manuscript preservation: The Wikimedia Foundation supported volunteer-lead workshops to write Balinese Wikipedia articles about palm-leaf manuscripts (lontar) from the Leiden University Library collection.
Youth content creators: Wikimedia Indonesia, together with the Wikimedia Foundation, delivered an introductory session on Wikipedia for young content creators representing all 11 ASEAN member states.
Legal and Safety Contacts: The Wikimedia Foundation has created a single "Legal and Safety Contacts" page, to be linked in the footer of each wiki page. This will ensure that everyone has access to accurate and up to date Legal contact information. Insertion of the new links on different wikis will be done in stages, based on assessment of legal risk and necessity.
Building shared principals for the internet as a public good: The Global Advocacy team published a blog with the Center for Studies on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information (CELE) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) summarizing a workshop that brought together digital rights advocates from Latin America to dream of a "digital utopia."
Wikidata API: Wikidata’s structured knowledge is now available through Wikimedia Enterprise.
Annual Planning and global trends: Join the America APP call on April 21 at 18:00 UTC. This meeting is an opportunity for the Latin American community to ensure that the region's voice helps shape the Wikimedia Foundation's work and priorities for the next fiscal year. The call will be in Spanish with interpretation into Portuguese and English. The last meeting between Wikimedia EDs and Foundation staff was dedicated to discuss global trends too. More discussions are happening on-wiki and in community spaces around different regions and projects.
Futures Lab: The world is changing around us. As the Wikimedia movement navigates this moment over a hundred Wikimedians from different Wikimedia projects came together to deepen our understanding of how these trends are impacting our people and projects at the Wikimedia Futures Lab.
Fundraising Hub: The Wikimedia Foundation has launched Fundraising Hub on English Wikipedia. The first discussion you can participate in is about distributing fundraising banner on English Wikipedia throughout the year.
Ombuds Commission: Announcement of the 2026 Ombuds Commission, the small group of volunteers who investigate complaints about violations of the Privacy Policy, the Access to Nonpublic Personal Data Policy, the CheckUser Policy and the Oversight Policy.
Wikinews closure: All Wikinews editions will be closed and switched to read-only mode on May 4. Content will remain accessible, but no new edits or articles will be able to be added. This closure was approved by the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation following extended discussions.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletinwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Latest comment: 6 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on April 10. Please help translate.
Highlights
Annual Planning: The Wikimedia Foundation published the draft Annual Plan for the coming fiscal year (2026–2027) which will focus on four main goals that directly respond to the external trends. The goals include increasing our reach, deepening engagement, protecting our projects and building speed and resilience to enable the change needed to respond to the internet being at an inflection point. Feedback welcome on the talk page and many other places.
Sustainable reuse of Wikimedia content: The Attribution API is now in beta. It makes it easier to credit Wikimedia content fairly wherever it is used. It provides all information required by the Wikimedia Attribution Framework in a single, well-structured and easy-to-use endpoint, simplifying attribution for off-wiki reuse. Share your feedback on the project talk page.
Feedback on Article guidance: Experienced editors are invited to test the Article guidance feature. This tool helps less-experienced editors create structured, policy-compliant Wikipedia articles. Review the outlines and share your feedback on the project talk page. Check out the step-by-step and video instructions.
Games Hub available on Android: The Games Hub is live in the Wikipedia app for Android. This new feature offers a space for users to find all available games in one place, explore archives, and get updates on new games. It currently includes Which Came First?, with more games coming soon.
Update to Wikipedia app for iOS: A major update to the Wikipedia app for iOS has rolled out, redesigning the interface to align with Apple’s latest “Liquid Glass” visual design. Download the latest version and explore the update.
Confirming email addresses: On several wikis, logged-in editors who haven’t confirmed their email addresses now see a banner encouraging them to do so. Confirming the email address helps users restore account access if they lose it and receive messages about their accounts. It also provides an easy option to communicate with other users off-wiki if they choose. As of early 2026, about 62.9% of all registered Wikimedia user accounts that have an email set had not confirmed it.
Testing mobile web page previews: Mobile page previews experiment was launched on Arabic, English, French, Italian, Polish, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. Page previews are pop-ups that show a thumbnail, a lead paragraph, and a link to the full article to improve content discovery. It is already available on desktop and in the apps.
Account creation experiment: Account creation experiment is live on Hindi, Indonesian, Bengali, Thai, and Hebrew Wikipedia targeting 10% of logged-out mobile web users. It looks at whether adding a button to create accounts in the mobile web header boosts new registrations and increases mobile users contributing to the wikis.
Experimenting with Hybrid Search on mobile apps: The Hybrid Search Phase 1 experiment on the Wikipedia Android app has concluded. It tested a combined keyword and meaning-based search methods to meet various information needs. The team is analyzing data and feedback, and will share insights and next steps soon.
Top read element on the current Explore Feed on Android
Latest experiments: See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology. One upcoming experiment is testing a refreshed Explore Feed to make it easier for readers to discover interesting content and visit Wikipedia app more often.
Wikifunctions: Wikifunctions crossed 4,000 functions, with subtracting two complex numbers as the 4,000th function. Also, Abstract Wikipedia reached 1,000 articles. The article about the famous Indian Brahmin Chanakya marked this milestone.
Reading lists now a beta feature: New accounts are now opted into Reading lists by default on all Wikipedia wikis. This brings the "Save pages" feature to the web, which has been popular in mobile apps. For users in the beta, a "Save page" (bookmark) button appears in the toolbar on every page. The watch/unwatch (star) option moves to the tools menu. The "Watchlist" button in the top navigation shifts to the user menu. A new "Saved pages" button takes its place. In June, the feature will be available to all users and a user preference will be added to choose between two sets of buttons: Watch + Watchlist or Save + Saved list. The other set will be in the tool and user menus.
Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News weeks 16 and 17 include CodeMirror 6 being promoted out of beta on Tuesday, April 21. See also the 45 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
Wikimedia Research Fund submissions in review: The submission period for this year's Wikimedia Research Fund is now closed. The technical and internal reviews of the proposals have begun.
Around the puzzle globe in the America region: More than 60 people joined America call to discuss the annual plan and the global trends impacting the movement. Participants came from across the region, and the audience included a mix of affiliates from LATAM, online contributors, and users with extended rights.
Transparency Report: The Wikimedia Foundation published a transparency report covering July to December 2025.
Board selection process: The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees is reviewing and improving how it selects new members. The goal is to ensure that there is the right mix of expertise and community representation on the board. Join the conversation and share your ideas on the talk page.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletinwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Latest comment: 6 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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
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
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)Reply
Changes to user permissions made from Meta are now included in the local user permissions log (T6055).
The autoconfirmed user group will soon be modified such that the four-day account age requirement begins when an account makes its first edit (T418484).
Arbitration
The arbitration case SchroCat has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case closed on 15 April.
Per a recent motion, appeals of blocks from the conflict-of-interest VRT queue are, by default, appealed on-wiki through the normal unblock process. However, they may be heard by the Committee if COIVRTers disagree on the interpretation of the evidence or believe ArbCom would be better suited to hear the appeal. Administrators are also advised that loosening or lifting such blocks without the consent of someone with access to the queue or ArbCom can be grounds for desysopping.
Per a recent motion, restrictions issued directly by the Committee may now be enforced with blocks which work exactly like contentious topic blocks.
Latest comment: 5 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on April 25. Please help translate.
Highlights
Community Protection: Wikimedia Foundation secured Indonesian government’s commitment to user safety, privacy, and content integrity ahead of administrative registration in Indonesia.
Stronger protections against bots: Wikimedia Foundation is replacing our CAPTCHA with a new approach to detect bad-faith activities without making things harder for users.
Transparency Report: The Wikimedia Foundation has published its latest Transparency Report. This provides an overview of the work to protect Wikimedia projects and support the volunteer communities who handle the majority of content requests. Our users trust us to protect their identities against unlawful disclosure, and we take this responsibility seriously, granting only 1 of 30 requests for disclosure we received from July to December 2025.
Reading Challenge: As part of the 25th birthday celebrations, Wikipedia Mobile Apps launched a limited-time feature, the 25-day reading challenge with Baby Globe. This challenge encourages a daily habit of reading one Wikipedia article. The goal is to motivate users to come back to the app regularly.
Latest experiments: One upcoming experiment is introducing the Incident Reporting System (IRS) to help contributors easily find the right place to seek help when facing harassment or other issues. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
Change in how new users are autoconfirmed: The account age for autoconfirmed users will now start from their first edit, not the registration date. This is to avoid exploitation by vandals. This change will only apply to wikis that require at least one edit for autoconfirmation.
Organized Reading lists: All Wikipedia users with new accounts and those who activated the “automatically enable most beta features” option can now use the reading lists beta feature. This lets you save articles for later reading and keep it organized in one place for easy access.
Thumbnail size preferences: Default thumbnail size preference for article content is now limited to three sizes: Small (180px), Regular (250px), and Large (400px). This change aims to improve performance and reduce strain on thumbnail services. Current preferences will shift to the nearest new size.
Wikifunctions: To make the development of Abstract Wikipedia visible, the Foundation is requesting your input: which metrics about Abstract Wikipedia pages do you deem important?
Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News weeks 18 and 19 include improvements on Global Watchlist. See also the 62 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
Wikimania: Wikimania is a joyful event. It is a chance to celebrate our community and projects, share ideas and information, build connections among Wikimedians, and inspire and develop future projects. If you and your community are interested in hosting Wikimania in 2028 and 2029 submit an expressions of interest.
Community Conferences: The Foundation is supporting 15 strategic, diverse, and critical convenings taking place in 2026 and 2027, bringing together approximately 1800 Wikimedians across various regions, themes, and language communities.
Don't blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
Wiki Loves Monuments: The winners of the 2025 Wiki Loves Monuments photo contest are announced.
Wikinews closure: All Wikinews have been closed and switched to read-only mode. Content will remain accessible, but no new edits or articles will be able to be added. This closure was approved by the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation following extended discussions.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletinwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Latest comment: 5 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello SuperHamster,
New Page Review queue November 2025 - May 2026
Backlog update
At the time of this message, there are 15,282 articles and 32,951 redirects awaiting review.
After the January–February drive the article backlog was reduced to 15,179 articles and the redirect backlog to 19,053 respectively. Great job! However, both queues are growing rapidly and any additional reviews are highly appreciated.
2024 and 2025 NPP Awards
JTtheOG was selected as the NPP reviewer of the year for both 2024 and 2025, for reviewing the most articles amongst all reviewers.
Hey man im josh and MPGuy2824 won the Redirect Ninja Master Award for 2024 and 2025 respectively, for reviewing the most redirects.
Overall in 2024, one Platinum, two Gold, eight Silver, 12 Bronze and 45 Iron Barnstars were awarded. Additionally, 66 reviewers got the NPP barnstar for doing more than 100 reviews through the year. In 2025, one Platinum, ten Silver, 13 Bronze and 38 Iron Barnstars were awarded. Additionally, 38 reviewers got the NPP barnstar for doing more than 100 reviews through the year.
The experimental two-month long backlog drive concluded with 183 reviewers patrolling over 27,761 articles and 35,309 redirects, earning over 36,836 points. Congratulations to JTtheOG, who achieved first place with 6,484.6 points in this drive.
An attempt was made to get the New Pages Feed to sort by date marked as reviewed instead of date created. However we had to revert it due to bugs. We may try again in the future. You can subscribe to the Phabricator ticket if you're interested in following along.
Latest comment: 5 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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.
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?
Mandatory 2FA for bureaucrats: Bureaucrats without two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled have already lost access to their advanced rights on 26 May. Those who do not enable 2FA may be automatically removed from the groups in mid-June 2026, and from that point onward, new members must have 2FA enabled before they can be added. (T423119, T423120)
Latest comment: 4 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on May 8. Please help translate.
Highlights
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.
Digital Public Goods: The Wikimedia Foundation has become a member of the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA).
Better bot detection: A trial of hCaptcha on several Wikipedias, including English, French, and Japanese, showed it can effectively detect and deter bad-faith automated activity, on its own and by giving checkusers and stewards signals to look into. Based on these results, hCaptcha will be rolled out across all wikis. See the project page for technical information about the implementation and privacy protections.
Example of the Attribution Framework recommendations.
A better way to give credit: The Wikimedia Attribution Framework and API makes it simple for developers to fairly credit volunteer contribution. When anyone encounters Wikimedia content, we want them to know that it comes from our projects, and they are invited to participate.
Baby Globe joins the Reading Challenge: The Android and iOS Wikipedia apps released the 25-day reading challenge, to drive readers engagement through reading milestones. To track their reading streak during the challenge, users can add a widget featuring Baby Globe to their home screen.
Account security: The Foundation is technically enforcing that all privileges that enable users to take security- or privacy-sensitive actions can only be held by users who have enabled two-factor authentication. Logging in with passkeys is quicker than logging in without two-factor authentication. In addition, logged-in users can see a banner encouraging them to confirm their email address. These changes secure individual accounts as well as communities and the wikis.
Incident reporting form: The Foundation began a trial on English Wikipedia of the incident reporting form. 60% of unblocked logged-in users see a new Report button, allowing them to report conduct issues.
Encouraging account creation: Following a successful account creation experiment, an improved logged-out edit warning message will be deployed to all Wikimedia wikis this week. The change will only affect logged-out users on mobile web who open an editing session.
Wikimedia Android App: The Wikipedia Android App is at the Phase 1 of redesigning its Home Feed. The new feed includes two tabs: Community, featuring refreshed Explore content, and For You, with personalized reading recommendations based on reader interests and activity. The For You feed refreshes daily with updated suggestions.
Reading Lists feature: The Foundation 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 18 on German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, and Urdu wikis, and will run for a month.
A design mockup of what the share card looks like.
Testing Suggestion Mode: Suggestion Mode was released as an A/B test for newcomer editors on the mobile website at ~15 Wikipedias. The experiment will measure its impact on the proportion of newcomer mobile web edit sessions that result in constructive (un-reverted) article edits. It will also evaluate the feature’s impact on editor retention and monitor changes in revert and block rates.
Wikifunctions now supports Wikidata references: References in Wikidata statements are now available on Wikifunctions, and you now can use external links in Wikifunctions-generated citations. This allows the use of more than 1.3 billion references available in Wikidata and adding them as citations to individual statements in Abstract Wikipedia.
Pilot wikis adopting Abstract Wikipedia: 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. If your community is interested in becoming a pilot, let us know on Meta.
Latest experiments: An upcoming experiment is testing whether we can serve readers better when a footnote click in read mode shows the full bibliographic information rather than flying them to the reference list. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News weeks 20, 21, 22, 23 include an experiment to test a new Share Card feature that allows readers to create visually engaging cards from Wikipedia articles and share them online See also the 92 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
Tech blog moved to Diff: The migration of the Techblog to Diff is now complete: 138 posts going back over a decade have been successfully migrated. Diff is now happy to welcome technology-focused blog posts with renewed vigor.
What’s new in the Wikipedia Library: Access to the American Psychological Association was renewed and collections from the Harvard Business Review and Swiss Media Database (Swissdox) are now available to editors who are eligible for The Wikipedia Library.
New course on WikiLearn: A free self-paced online course, designed for researchers who want to make their field more visible on Wikipedia, was launched on WikiLearn. Share "Wikipedia for Researchers” if you work with early-career researchers, teach in an academic institution, or support open knowledge communities.
Wiki Mentor Africa: The first edition of Wiki Mentor Africa - Women Tech Summit brought together over 315 registered participants across Africa to learn, explore, and grow in tech together.
Let's Connect Learning Clinic: If you missed it, you can now watch the recording of the Let's Connect Learning Clinic "How to support up-and-coming groups in the movement as a long-time Wikimedian" with Wikimedistas El Salvador.
Sharing the Form 990s: The Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia Endowment published their Form 990s, covering the fiscal year that ran from July 2024 to June 2025. The Form 990 is an annual form required of all nonprofit organizations in the United States. You can read the highlights on Form 990 for the Foundation and Form 990 for the Endowment on Meta-Wiki.
Wikimedia Enterprise: Wikimedia Enterprise's free API accounts gets a substantial upgrade across the Snapshot and On-demand APIs, including free access to Structured Contents Snapshots.
Board selection process: The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees is reviewing and improving how it selects new members. The goal is to ensure that there is the right mix of expertise and community representation on the board. Join the conversation on 16 June at 17:00 UTC, and share your ideas on the talk page.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. If you have feedback or suggestions about the bulletin, let us know at foundationbulletinwikimedia.org. For questions about the Wikimedia Foundation's work, contact us!
Latest comment: 4 months ago2 comments2 people in discussion
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.
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.
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.
Latest comment: 4 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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.
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.
Simplifying account creation: The Foundation is working on improving the account creation process to reduce potential friction for newcomers to create an account. Improvements include making "Create Account" icon more prominent on mobile, simplifying the registration form, and introducing real-time username validation.
New U4C members elected: The Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) has new members and has two remaining vacancies in Middle East & North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Wikimania conference program: The Wikimania 2026 program is now live! Take a moment to review the program, and, if you are logged in, you can mark your "must see” sessions with a star to start building your personal schedule. Register for a virtual ticket here, if you haven't signed up yet.
Screenshot showing the Explore Feed refresh in the Wikipedia app (from the Community tab entry point)
App Explore feed: The redesigned App Explore feed, now called "Home", has been released to all Android users. The update introduces a refreshed feed experience along with the first set of new content modules, including Did You Know, Places of Interest, Random Article, and a new end-of-feed experience. Additional content and improvements are planned in future releases.
Wikipedia games: 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.
Reusing references: Sub-referencing, a new MediaWiki feature that allows editors to reuse references with different details, has been rolled out to Group 1 wikis and French Wikipedia following a successful pilot phase.
Article guidance: The Article guidance feature is 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. 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.
Mobile Page Previews: The Page Previews experiment on mobile web has concluded with the decision not to roll out the feature. The results showed no statistically significant impact on reader retention – the primary success metric. 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.
Wikifunctions: You can now add images to Abstract Wikipedia and the loading and display of test results when viewing Functions has been improved.
Wikidata: The Foundation is migrating the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) away from the Blazegraph backend since it no longer scales efficiently with Wikidata’s growth. The migration will take place in several phases. Here is the timeline.
Growth features: Growth features are now available at Wikidata! Wikidata administrators are still configuring the features through Community Configuration, but this update enables access to Mentorship (if configured), Impact, the Help Panel, and a simplified Newcomer Homepage (without Suggested Edits).
Mentors' management: The Growth team will soon provide a system to automatically suspend or remove inactive mentors from the list of mentors. Communities can already start configuring the process in the Community Configuration.
CollaborativeContributions: If you need help setting up the Collaborative Contributions and the Goal setting features, check out these video guides. These features allow you to view which edits are made during an event and allows the group to track progress against a goal with a public progress bar. Learn more.
Latest experiments: An upcoming experiment is testing whether we can serve readers better when a footnote click in read mode shows the full bibliographic information rather than flying them to the reference list. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News week 24 and 25 include how the user interface icon library is being updated. Most of the ~300 icons have been slightly refined and ~30 new icons have been added. See also the 62 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
Digital Safety: Join a conversation about Using AI Safely. It'll explore risks & concerns of using AI tools in personal and organisational contexts and practical strategies to reduce those risks. It will take place at 03:30 UTC & 14:30 UTC on June 26. This session is not about using AI to edit Wikipedia. It's focused entirely on safe personal and organisational use.
Don't Blink: Read the latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values. Highlights include exploring the implications that new child safety regulations have on privacy online.
Grantmaking strategy & Affiliate model: Members of the Global Resources Distribution Committee (GRDC) and the Affiliations Committee (AffCom) met to advance two key movement initiatives: the development of a new Grantmaking strategy and a refreshed Affiliate Model. They produced initial proposals and advanced work on both initiatives ahead of broader conversations planned for Wikimania 2026.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. If you have feedback or suggestions about the bulletin, let us know at foundationbulletinwikimedia.org. For questions about the Wikimedia Foundation's work, contact us!
Latest comment: 4 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Runawaymo (talk) has given you a Cheeseburger! Cheeseburgers promote WikiLove and hopefully this one has made your day better. Spread the WikiLove by giving someone else a Cheeseburger, whether it be someone you've had disagreements with in the past or a good friend. Happy eating!
bc I haven't figured out how to make a template for woodear mushroom salad yet lol
Spread the goodness of Cheeseburgers by adding {{subst:Cheeseburger}} to their talk page with a friendly message, or eat this cheeseburger on the giver's talk page with {{subst:burger-munch}}!
Latest comment: 4 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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.
Latest comment: 4 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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)Reply
Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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.
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.
Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on June 19. Please help translate.
This edition uses the new annual plan goals for this fiscal year (July 2026–June 2027).
Highlights
Wikipedia 25: Wikipedia's 25th birthday was celebrated with various projects designed to grow awareness and support for Wikipedia and the people who make it possible. This includes the virtual birthday event on January 15, which garnered 10,000 live viewers and 15,000 reactions. Find more details on all related projects and results in the program report.
Sustainable use of Wikimedia infrastructure: A valid user-agent string will now 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.
Increasing account creation: The experiment providing direct access to “Create account” and “Log in” actions on mobile increased account creation by about 20% without negatively affecting edit quality. The feature will now be rolled out to all wikis on mobile web.
With Sub-referencing editors can reuse and add details to a main reference.
Add A Link: The Foundation deployed Add A Link as a default-on suggestion within Suggestion Mode. It is now launched on all wikis to all editors who have opted in to the Suggestion Beta Feature.
Reusing references: Sub-referencing, the new MediaWiki feature that allows editors to reuse references with different details, was deployed to most small and medium-sized Wikipedia language versions.
Wikifunctions: Check out the 71 new functions with implementations to get a taste of what functions have been created.
Range calculator: 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.
Captcha verification: Abuse filters that are set to “require CAPTCHA verification” now 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.
Latest experiments: An upcoming experiment is testing two variations of a "thank you" badge shown to donors after a recent donation to deepen the relationship between donors and the Wikimedia movement. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
Account security on private wikis: Two-factor authentication will become mandatory for user accounts on private wikis. This will protect private information from being exposed by an account with a compromised password.
Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News week 26 and 27 include users will now get a notification when they are blocked or unblocked from editing, or if this block changes. See also the 65 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
Team Challenges: The core organizing team for Wikimania is introducing Team Challenges, a different approach to Wikimania Hackathon. This year, Wikimedians and professionals from other fields will join forces to undertake one of the 2026 technical challenges.
Wikimedia Hackathon: A look at the 2026 edition of Wikimedia Hackathon which brought together 216 participants from 29 countries building, collaborating, and shaping the future together.
Wikimedia Hubs: The Hub Fund will pause funding for new pilots in fiscal year 2026–2027 to align with the work on the Ecosystem of Movement Organizations and the Global Resource Distribution Committee. Existing pilots in transition will be offered an additional year of funding.
Open Knowledge And Digital Rights: Wikimedians shared their reflections on how Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum reinforced the role of our movement within broader digital rights conversations.
Journalism Award: Wikimedia Foundation announced three journalists from Africa as recipients of the Open the Knowledge Journalism Awards, run in partnership with the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ). The awards celebrate the essential role journalists play in creating well-researched articles that volunteer editors can use as source materials to develop content on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. In total, 320 submissions were received from 40 African countries.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. If you have feedback or suggestions about the bulletin, let us know at foundationbulletin@wikimedia.org. For questions about the Wikimedia Foundation's work, contact us!
Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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!
On the bright side: Fatherhood, weather, and diplomacy Father's Day, Canada Day, and the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence.
Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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.
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.
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.
Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello SuperHamster:
WikiProject Articles for creation is holding a month long Backlog Drive in August!
The goal of this drive is to reduce the backlog of unreviewed drafts to less than a month of outstanding reviews from the current 3+ months. Bonus points will be given for reviewing drafts that have been waiting more than 30 days. The drive is running from 1 August 2026 through 31 August 2026.
Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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.
Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on July 3. Please help translate. The work follows annual plan goals for this fiscal year (July 2026–June 2027).
Wikimania 2026: Wikimania is happening this week! After the event, all streamed sessions will be linked in the program on Eventyay and later uploaded to Commons.
Grantmaking: The Global Resource Distribution Committee has published a Grantmaking Strategy draft that sets out a renewed approach to how the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Fund is distributed across the Wikimedia Movement. The GRDC is requesting feedback from volunteers and affiliates, regardless of whether they are grantees or not.
Movement Ecosystem: A proposal that would update movement affiliate recognition and establish new, connected criteria for eligibility to receive Community Fund grants is now available for community review. You are invited to read the proposal and participate in the discussion until August 7.
Women+ contributions in Wikimedia Tech: A guide based on lived experience on how to address some of the invisible barriers for women+ in more technical Wikimedia spaces and recommendations to become more inclusive. Help further by filling out this survey to better understand technical contributions by women+ across Wikimedia projects until July 20.
Structured Experimentation: A reflection on the first year of structured experimentation 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.
Revise Tone test ended: The A/B test of Revise Tone ended on July 9. It showed that newcomer task completion rates increased by 38.7% compared to the default Copyedit task, with no decrease in edit quality. The feature is now available for everyone on the Arabic, English, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias. The plan is to release Revise Tone to more wikis.
Wikidata: The latest Wikidata Platform newsletter (July edition) shares how to identify and rewrite queries that rely on Blazegraph-specific extensions and affected by the migration off Blazegraph.
Discussion Tools: On English Wikipedia, DiscussionTools' Usability Improvements has now become default for talk pages. You can opt-out of these changes at any time in user preferences. With this, Discussion Tools are now fully available at all wikis.
Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News week 28 and 29 include the new Parsoid parser continues to be deployed to additional wikis, making it easier to introduce new reading and editing features. See also the 72 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks. Overall, from April – June 2026 about 337 community tasks were resolved by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Language inclusivity at Wikimania 2026: New approaches to translation and interpretation will be tested at Wikimania this year.
Call for submissions open for Wikimedia Latin America Conference 2026: The Wikimedia community in Latin America has opened the call for session proposals for the Wikimedia Latin America Conference 2026. Community members are invited to submit proposals for the conference program by August 10.
UK Online Safety Act: Ofcom, the United Kingdom's Office of Communications, announced that Wikipedia is not designated as a Category 1 service under the Online Safety Act (OSA). This is an important and welcomed outcome as a Category 1 designation could have included privacy and safety risks to our global community of volunteers.
UN Open Source Week edit-a-thon: Volunteers created 60 new Wikipedia articles and made nearly 700 updates to improve Wikipedia's coverage of UN and open source topics at the second UN Open Source Week edit-a-thon co-hosted by Wikimedia Foundation.
"Don’t Blink": The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
"A Wiki Minute" videos: New videos are added to the series answering some of the most common questions such as "Do you still need Wikipedia when AI can answer anything?" and "Does Wikipedia push a political agenda?".
Wikipedia 25 brand collaboration in Indonesia: On 4 July, the Jakarta-based street wear company Ageless Galaxy launched a Wikipedia 25 collection, the first ever Wikipedia Brand Collaboration in Asia. The apparel collection featured hats, t-shirts, and a jigsaw puzzle cardigan. Wikimedians in Indonesia joined Ageless Galaxy for a launch party.
Board Elections Eligibility: There are new proposed eligibility criteria for standing as a candidate in Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election now available for feedback. The requirements are more specific and detailed than in years past, to both inform the community of what the Board needs and to create multiple pathways to the Board for Wikimedians.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. If you have feedback or suggestions about the bulletin, let us know at foundationbulletin@wikimedia.org. For questions about the Wikimedia Foundation's work, contact us!
Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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.
Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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).
Meet the Wikimedians of the Year 2026: The beloved Wikimedian of The Year awards shine the light on exceptional individuals, and through them, on the whole Wikimedia community. Learn about all of this year's winners.
Public policy advocacy: Overview of Wikimania 2026 sessions about public policy advocacy. While not all sessions are recorded, you can watch some by clicking the session.
Users with extended rightspre-conference: 190 users with extended rights from all around the world gathered at a Wikimania pre-conference, to exchange experiences, learn from each other and connect.
Media coverage: The event was mentioned in many media outlets as part of wider coverage about the Wikimedia projects including in Le Monde, El Nacional and Radio France.
Improvement to Reading Lists: Community feedback around the placement of watchstar and watchlist buttons for the Reading Lists beta feature has been incorporated. 93% of participating users reported that it was useful. This feature allows saving articles for later reading – a wishlist item to bring the functionality to web.
Creating custom edit suggestions: With the TextMatch feature, volunteers can now create custom local suggestions within the VisualEditor for improving Wikipedia articles. You can find examples from other communities for inspiration. Share your feedback.
Dark mode for Content Translation: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.
Mobile page preview: Based on the conclusion of the experiment, mobile page previews feature will not be rolled out. 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.
Scaling of Explore Feed to iOS: 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, Home Feed redesign will be scaled to iOS by applying the learnings from the Android release.
Improving Account Creation process: 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. Read more.
Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News week 30 and 31 include that now wikis can restrict editing in the “User” namespace to only the page owner and certain user groups. See also the 50 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
New bot detection system for all wikis: After a successful trial, which showed evidence of both deterring bots and being easier to use, hCaptcha (our new bot detection system) has been rolled out to all wikis, for account creation, and for most newcomer edits.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. If you have feedback or suggestions about the bulletin, let us know at foundationbulletin@wikimedia.org. For questions about the Wikimedia Foundation's work, contact us!
Latest comment: 2 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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.
Latest comment: 2 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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.
Latest comment: 2 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on August 1. Please help translate.
Highlights
Improving Account Creation process: As part of Account Creation Experiments an improved account creation form has been released. The form now provides live username validation, a clearer username policy popover, and a reveal password button. We also removed redundant elements and jarring warning messages, improved the form's information hierarchy, and aligned the design with Codex design system guidelines.
Create charts from your own data: The new ChartWizard makes the Chart extension more beginner-friendly by allowing editors to create charts, such as bar and pie charts, without needing to use JSON. The ChartWizard is now available on Wikimedia Commons. Feedback on the new tool is welcome on the wish talk page.
Worklist Feature Setup Workshop: Are you organizing or planning a Wikimedia editing event soon? Join one of these workshops (Aug 18 at 16:00 UTC and Aug 19 at 11:00 UTC) to set up the new worklist feature for your event. With this feature, organizers can list the specific articles their event will focus on, directly on the event page.
Reading Lists to launch as full feature: The Reading Lists, a Community Wishlist item, will be launched in September as a full feature. Volunteer translator help is needed for string translations into a number of languages before the launch.
Latest experiments: An upcoming experiment would test methods for email confirmation enforcement for new accounts to determine which approach is the most effective at driving email confirmation. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News week 32 and 33 include that Category pages will soon support sorting entries by the time they are added to a category to make it easier to find recently or long-standing categorized pages. See also the 43 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
Don't blink: Representing Wikimedia at the United Nations’ Open Source Week and other latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
Online Identity Verification: Anonymity is Important for Democracy and It’s Also at Risk.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. If you have feedback or suggestions about the bulletin, let us know at foundationbulletin@wikimedia.org. For questions about the Wikimedia Foundation's work, contact us!
Latest comment: 2 months ago7 comments3 people in discussion
Hi @SuperHamster. Leaving a comment here as I'm able to link directly and it's relevant to English Wikipedia specifically. Hopefully you'll see this promptly.
Currently WP:RS/PS has hit a PEIS technical limit meaning new entries are unable to be added to the list. From what I've gathered, this was being worked on and now isn't. I am unsure why that is. It may be that the default "new" location for listing is WP:NPPSG, which acted as a supplement to RS/PS anyway.
In regards to the SlashFilm update I made, NPPSG has three options for reliability. These being reliable, no consensus or unreliable. Unseen would show no consensus as the blue question mark. For the new consensus, that would be an inaccurate marker. Unseen has a marginal identifier, which is accurate. The RSP page on Meta allows for that, but the NPPSG page does not. For this reason, I added /Film to the RSP page to reflect the correct consensus, even though it's actually listed at NPPSG.
This is confusing, but I did what I thought was acceptable based on the situation with these two pages currently. I'm going to courtesy ping both @Mathglot as the original filer of the data limit discussion and @SuperGrey who was active in that discussion also. What is the best solution for this moving forward? 11WB💬05:20, 21 August 2026 (UTC)Reply
As a quick follow-up, SlashFilm still shows as reliable on Unseen due to this listing taking priority alphabetically. This is inaccurate also. I've been unsure how to manage sources that are included in multiple lists on Unseen. 11WB💬05:35, 21 August 2026 (UTC)Reply
11WB, yeah, it is being worked on, although I haven't pulled my weight lately (there are still a couple of things I have to do to get it ready), but Audiodude has been on top of things all along and can comment better than I about recent progress. As explained at the RSP page, you can still amend existing entries in the table no problem, and if you need to add new table rows, you can place them for now into the temporary, overflow table, Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources/X. (edit conflict) Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 05:39, 21 August 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for the reply. I completely forgot about the overflow page. Adding SlashFilm to that should resolve the Unseen location confusion that Hamster queried on Gitlab. No doubt they'll see this very soon, so the confusion should clear. 11WB💬05:45, 21 August 2026 (UTC)Reply
The current status is that the source pages (sub pages) have been generated on wiki and agreed upon and largely debugged. We have someone who is going to work on double checking all of the bot work against the original table rows that are also on the pages (eg Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources/all/The Daily Telegraph) and highlight any discrepancies. I am meeting with this person next week.
I just noticed Hamster linked the overflow list on Gitlab. They are almost certainly aware of the technical limit already. I attempted a workaround for something I thought was no longer being worked on. The Meta lists are accurate still now that /Film has been added to the overflow page, but the cause of the confusion lies with me. I take complete responsibility for that. Apologies. 11WB💬06:04, 21 August 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 2 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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.
On 1 September 2026, a one-month backlog drive for new pages patrol will begin at a particularly important time for NPP.
The backlog has now passed 30,000 unreviewed articles, a level that has been described in current NPP discussions as exceptionally high and potentially difficult to overcome through normal reviewing alone. Backlog drives are one of the few measures that have historically produced a noticeable reduction in the backlog, so the participation of as many active patrollers as possible will matter this month.
If you can review during September, please make articles your priority. Every article that is reviewed is a meaningful reduction in the backlog. With the queue at its current size, even a relatively small increase in the number of articles each patroller reviews can add up to a substantial difference over the course of the month.
This is a hybrid drive, so redirect reviewing is still included. Redirects can be a useful way for newer patrollers to get comfortable with NPP and can help people build up to reviewing articles. However, the main goal of this drive is to tackle the article backlog, and experienced patrollers are particularly encouraged to spend as much of their available reviewing time on articles as they can.
Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles and redirects patrolled.
Each article review will earn 1 point, while each redirect review will earn 0.2 points.
Streak awards will be given out based on consistently hitting point thresholds for each week of the drive.
Barnstars will also be granted for re-reviewing articles previously reviewed by other patrollers during the drive.
If you have been thinking about doing more NPP, this is an especially good month to jump in. Whether you can review a few pages or hundreds, every review helps. And if you are already an active patroller, please consider whether you can put in some additional time during September to help bring the backlog back under control.
Latest comment: 2 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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:
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
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)Reply
Latest comment: 2 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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.
Latest comment: 2 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on August 15. Please help translate.
Future of Community Wishlist
Highlights
Simplifying account creation: The Special:CreateAccount page has been simplified as part of ongoing work to modernize the account creation experience. Multiple account creation experiments show that a simpler form helps newcomers complete registration.
Movement Ecosystem strategy: Deadline to provide feedback on the first version of the proposal are extended until Sep 30 to allow more time for community feedback and discussion.
New format for the Community Wishlist: 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. Please let us know what you think will work well or if there are ways to make this proposal stronger. This consultation is open for two weeks.
Improving page performance: In order to improve page performance, images now load when they are viewed. This means images that are lower down within an article will not load if a reader never scrolls to that part of the page, which may affect some image-related metrics.
Android Reading list updates: Some of the recent Android releases include updates to the Saved feature. This first round of changes on the Android app include redesigning the "Saved" tab to include an "All articles" view, and remove the user-facing default "Saved" reading list.
Reading list on desktop: Reading lists has been released on Chinese, Bengali, Czech, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. The feature is now available for logged-in users on those wikis.
Event Registration tool: 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.
Call for Projects and Mentors for Outreachy: Wikimedia is participating in Round 33 of the Outreachy program that runs from December 2026 through March 2027. The deadline to submit projects on Phabricator is Sept 4 at 4pm UTC and the project list will be finalized by Sep 11.
Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News week 34 and 35 include that a new Wikipedia in Bole has been created. See also the 58 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
UwER Conference: In December, the Wikimedia Portugal and Wikimedia Foundation will be hosting a first-of-its-kind convening for users with extended rights. Applications to attend opened August 13 and will close on September 4.
Don't Blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
Legal footer update: The Foundation had updated the Legal and Safety Contact Information on 300+ content wikis. The project adds a link to a Foundation-managed central page where people can find contact information to report illegal issues and serve official legal notices. This helps to resolve gaps if community-managed contact pages are missing or incomplete.
AffCom: The Affiliations Committee is extending the pause on new affiliate recognition until the affiliate recognition and funding model is further clarified.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. If you have feedback or suggestions about the bulletin, let us know at foundationbulletin@wikimedia.org. For questions about the Wikimedia Foundation's work, contact us!
Latest comment: 1 month ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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.
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.
Latest comment: 1 month ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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.
Speedy deletion criteria G15 has been renamed from "LLM-generated pages without human review" to "Unambiguously LLM-generated pages" and has an additional sign of detection added to it following a RfC.
Latest comment: 1 month ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on August 28. Please help translate.
Baseline Neutral Point of View policy is now being introduced.
Highlights
Data center switch: All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 23 at 14:00 UTC as part of a scheduled switchover to allow for essential maintenance and improvements. A banner will be displayed on all wikis 30 minutes in advance.
Chart extension is now beginner-friendly: Creating graphs and charts previously required manual JSON editing. In response to a Community wish to make the Charts extension more user-friendly, a new Visual mode for adding values has been introduced.
TextMatch: A paste from an LLM triggering a Suggestion.
Introducing TextMatch: Communities are shaping Suggestion Mode with TextMatch to create custom suggestions that are tailored to their own policies and writing conventions. Share your feedback.
Visual editor becoming default: Design work on the user experience for visual editing for newcomers is underway. This follows visual editor becoming default on English Wikipedia following a community discussion.
Community Wishlist 2027 consultation: The consultation on the proposed new Wishlist process is closing this week. This year's cycle plans for wish submissions in late October/early November, triage completed by late November, and voting in early to mid January. Share feedback in any language on the talk page.
Improved Add a Link feature: 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.
Wikipedia Android app: Latest release 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.
Domain change for thumbnails: The domain of URLs for thumbnails is changing from upload.wikimedia.org to thumb.wikimedia.org. The old URLs will continue to work but MediaWiki will advertise the new domain instead. Original files, videos, and transcodes will still be served from upload.wikimedia.org.
Reading lists rollout continues on desktop: Following the initial deployment to Bengali, Chinese, Czech, and Vietnamese Wikipedias, reading lists went live on Arabic, French, and Indonesian Wikipedias and will go live on English Wikipedia on Sep 14, with all remaining wikis following on Sep 28.
New features of Pageviews Analysis: Several new features have been added to the Pageviews Analysis tool which allows users to compare pageviews across multiple pages. 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.
Article guidance: As part of an A/B experiment, Article guidance is now available in Turkish and Simple English.
Latest experiments: A current experiment for logged-out mobile readers on Bengali, Czech, English, Farsi, and Polish Wikipedias is testing whether simplifying the Minerva navigation bar improves reader retention. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
Wikifunctions status updates: Thanks to all contributors, Wikifunctions has now reached 5,000 functions.
Latest highlights from Tech News: Weeks 36 and 37 of Tech News include the Article guidance feature is now enabled by default for editors with less than 100 edits on Simple English and Turkish Wikipedia.
Affiliates and grant funding: Have your say on proposals establishing (1) a new model and set of expectations for movement affiliates; (2) new, connected requirements to determine eligibility for receiving Community Fund grants from the Wikimedia Foundation; and (3) updated criteria for affiliate recognition processes.
Community Fund reflections: Read the reflections on the fiscal year 2025–2026 of the Rapid Fund and General Support Fund, covering $17.73 million across 427 grants in 90 countries, with 56.2% distributed outside North America and Northern & Western Europe.
World of Wikipedia launches: The World of Wikipedia game has been released. It is an online collectible card game where players sort fact from fiction across Wikipedia articles to build their card library. The game is the latest experiment in reaching younger audiences through familiar formats, following Wikispeedia on Roblox and Which Came First? on the Wikipedia app.
Celebrate Women 2026:Read the impact of Celebrate Women 2026 as the campaign concluded with 112 events, 238,222 unreverted content edits and 2,499,773,577 bytes added.
US staff union vote: On Sep 3, eligible Wikimedia Foundation staff in the United States voted in favor of union representation in a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. If you have feedback or suggestions about the bulletin, let us know at foundationbulletin@wikimedia.org. For questions about the Wikimedia Foundation's work, contact us!
Latest comment: 1 month ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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.
Latest comment: 1 month ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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.
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.
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.
Latest comment: 1 month ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on 15 September. Please help translate.
Starter Kit dashboard overview.
Highlights
Introducing the Wikipedia Starter Kit: The Foundation has launched a new Toolforge-hosted tool giving new and small language Wikipedia communities a guided pathway through essential onboarding tasks, activity indicators, and connections to the wider movement.
Apply for a scholarship to Wikimania 2027: Scholarship applications are now open to attend Wikimania 2027 in Santiago. To help with preparing submissions, orientation sessions in Spanish, Portuguese, and English will be held starting the week of October 5. The final deadline is October 31.
Reading Lists rolling out to all Wikipedias: Starting September 28, logged-in users on every Wikipedia will be able to save articles to a "read later" list using the bookmark icon, following successful rollouts on Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Czech, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
WikiCelebrate: WikiCelebrating Juan "BugWarp" Kulichevsky, who has contributed to Wikimedia projects since childhood and is passionate about sports photography and community building in Argentina and beyond.
The 2026 appointment cycle is open now through 31 October 2026 for the Ombuds Commission (OC) and the Case Review Committee (CRC). You can learn more about the committees, the roles, and how to apply on the Committee Appointments page on Meta-wiki.
Community Wishlist 2027: The Community Wishlist Process is now updated, taking into account the feedback received. Look out for the call for wish submissions towards the end of October.
Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2026: From Sep 18-20, Wikimedians, open-knowledge researchers, and free-culture advocates from Central and Eastern Europe gathered for the first time in Romania. Take a look at the novelties and history behind CEE Meeting.
Increasing account creation: To convert more casual users into logged-in daily users, the evergreen account creation prompt is released into Beta / TestFlight for iOS and Android. Also, a new post-edit notice designed to encourage Temporary Account holders to register for a permanent account will now be released to all wikis. The new notice has proven to increase permanent account creation from 1.94% to 3.66%.
VisualEditoris now the default at English Wikipedia: this wiki has now adopted VisualEditor as the default editor on both desktop and mobile web, following a sitewide discussion that found overwhelming consensus to make the change.
Retesting image carousel: The image carousel experiment will be retested using 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.
Wikifunctions: Your code can now call back to the Wikidata fetch functions. Wikifunctions have deployed an initial capability by which a code Implementation (in JavaScript or Python) can call certain other Wikifunctions Functions, get back the result, and have it available for further processing.
Latest experiments: A current experiment is testing whether offering a "generic guidance" path for Article Guidance that does not depend on a Wikidata match would increase the chances of more article creation attempts. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News weeks 38 and 39 include a Reader Growth experiment testing whether showing only part of an article at first on mobile, with a “Read more” button to reveal the rest, encourages people to keep reading. See also the 56 community-submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
Suggestions for Transliterated Search: If you regularly use two different writing systems (such as Hindi and Latin alphabet), sometimes you accidentally type with the wrong one and need to switch to the right keyboard. Now, this gadget will be able to suggest query based on what you typed.
LLM Paste Check rolling out to Wikipedia: A new Edit Check will prompt editors who paste text likely copied from an external AI chatbot to consider whether it aligns with movement AI-use policies and decide whether to keep or remove it. It goes live as a default-on feature at English Wikipedia on Sep 24 and at all Wikipedias on Oct 8.
Wikidata bulk downloads now free via Wikimedia Enterprise: New beta API endpoints let anyone download full Wikidata snapshots and pull hourly batch diffs at no cost, opening up bulk access that previously required a paid tier.
Accountability for Wikimedia production services: To ensure clear accountability for responding to incidents in Wikimedia production services, Wikimedia Foundation published the Service Catalog page. The page is the canonical source of service ownership for code deployed to the Wikimedia Foundation cluster. See also FAQ pages which contain more background details.
Datacenter switchover 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.
Affiliates and grant funding: The conversations on the new proposed model, requirements and criteria continues until the end of next week with public calls on 1) Tuesday, September 29, 16:00-17:00 UTC on affiliate growth paths and Friday, October 2nd, 17:00-18:00 UTC on affiliate overlaps.
AI literacy program: A new regional initiative in ASEAN was launched to support training and conversations around AI literacy, accountability, and Indigenous self-determination.
Testing Google preferred sources: An experiment is proposed on English Wikipedia to run a temporary (2-week) notice asking readers who come from Google to set Wikipedia as a “preferred source” in Google. We would see if this causes people who use Google to visit Wikipedia more. If your language wiki is interested, please reach out on the project's talk page.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. If you have feedback or suggestions about the bulletin, let us know at foundationbulletin@wikimedia.org. For questions about the Wikimedia Foundation's work, contact us!
Following an RfC, late signatures added to administrator recall petitions after 720 hours from opening are reverted or struck and do not count towards the threshold, even if the petition has not yet been formally closed.
The post-May 2026 administrator elections RfCs concluded with consensus for election monitors to curate blatantly inappropriate questions after posting, and to remove or merge true duplicates, clearly marking merged questions. Calls for candidates will include advisory guidance that users with less than one year’s experience or 5,000 edits generally lack a realistic chance of success.
Technical news
Interface administrators no longer need to specify the ResourceLoader option in the definitions for gadgets on MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition as gadgets are always loaded through ResourceLoader. (T298199)
The list=abusefilters API module now supports formatversion=2 and includes breaking changes to its responses. In particular, the actions property is now a JSON array rather than a string, regardless of the format version. Maintainers of user scripts and other code using this module should check compatibility and update their code as needed. (T435828)
Doug Weller passed away on 30 September 2026. Doug Weller began editing Wikipedia in 2006 and became an administrator in 2008, making nearly 275,000 edits over two decades. He served on the Arbitration Committee from 2015 through 2018 and was also a longtime CheckUser and Oversighter.
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.
Latest comment: 22 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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 <refname=":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. <refname="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.
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.
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.
Latest comment: 22 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on September 25. Please help translate.
Screenshot of the Thanks feature.
Highlights
Community Wishlist: Community Wishlist is looking for volunteers to join their working group. You can find details on the goal of the group, roles and expectations, norms we'll follow, and how to sign up on this Meta-Wiki page.
Human knowledge at stake: Wikimedia Foundation makes the case for human knowledge at the UN General Assembly and how scrapers are straining our infrastructure and the larger human knowledge ecosystem online.
Joy of contributing:How a simple thanks fuelled one of our Wikimedians of the Year as they connect the community.
Wikimania scholarship deadline extended: The deadline for Wikimania 2027 scholarship applications has been extended through the end of day on November 4, 2026 (Anywhere on Earth). This is to compensate for a pause in the application window on October 15, 2026 from 1pm to 6pm UTC, to allow for an upgrade to the LimeSurvey platform.
OpenAI agent activities on Wikimedia projects: The Wikimedia Foundation have discovered some activity by “rogue” OpenAI agents on Wikimedia platforms. These unauthorized bot activities included edits to our wikis, some unsuccessful attempts to exploit a public note-taking tool we host, and heavy traffic.
Listening to Wikipedia: The Phase 1 experiment for Listening to Article intros within the Android app’s “For you” feed has been released into the Wikipedia Beta App. This experiment tests whether adding a listening format into the "For you" feed has the potential to deliver improvements in reader retention.
Bookmark button on mobile web: 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, to encourage more readers to become account holders.
Abstract Wikipedia piloting showing articles to readers: Three initial pilot communities are currently working with the team to explore using abstract articles on their Wikipedias: Malayalam, Dagbani, and Igbo.
Simplifying account creation: An experiment has begun 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.
Latest experiments: An upcoming experiment is testing a personalised module, called 'Review Changes', for Home which aims to introduce newer editors to the concept of reviewing the edits that other users are making. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News weeks 40 and 41 include users of default skins on desktop and mobile web will now be informed if the search results displayed come from page redirects. See also the 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
Improving developers experience: Two new features has been shipped to improve developer experience: Spiderpig (deployment web interface) which allows developers to leave notes for each other about errors they see in the logs and Patchdemo, which now supports in-browser code editing, so developers can make quick changes without needing to push a new patch and recreate the demo.
Strengthening infrastructure: To reduce the workload from non-pageview requests, the overall number of database queries per logged-out pageview has been reduced by 52%, from a baseline of 23 queries/pageview in August, to 11 queries/pageview today. Read more.
Increasing test reliability: To reduce friction in post-merge validation and ultimately improve confidence in release decisions: Catalyst was proven to be a much more reliable environment to run daily Selenium tests (95.7% eventually green) compared with the beta cluster (79.1% over the same 10 suites). This gives confidence to automatically catch issues before they reach production.
Transparency Report: The latest Transparency Report has been published. Out of 953 requests for content alteration and takedown, only 2 requests were granted. The Foundation continues to prioritize the public interest and is guided by the content moderation policies the volunteer community has shaped over the past 25 years.
Affiliations Committee: Wikimedia Affiliations Committee Has New Officers and Advisors. Read also the latest issue of the AffCom News to learn more about their work.
Board of Trustees Elections Process: The Board has reviewed the feedback received since July on its elections process proposal, and thanks everyone who shared input on Wiki, in person, or directly with Trustees. Based on that feedback, the Governance Committee has moved away from the eligibility criteria approach and developed two new options for the 2027 selection process and beyond. We'd like your feedback again before deciding. Please read the proposal and share your feedback on the Meta-Wiki talk page by October 27.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. If you have feedback or suggestions about the bulletin, let us know at foundationbulletin@wikimedia.org. For questions about the Wikimedia Foundation's work, contact us!
Latest comment: 16 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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.
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.
Latest comment: 9 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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.
Scholarship and sponsorship applications for the 2027 Wikimedia Hackathon will close on Friday, October 30th. Submit your application through Pretix before the deadline!
Latest comment: 6 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on October 9. Please help translate.
Mobile users can now edit with visual editors
Highlights
Community Wishlist: The process for this year’s Community Wishlist has been published, incorporating community feedback. The wish submission process will end on November 8. The triage is expected to be completed by late November. Votes for wishes will start in January.
Behind the scenes: What happened on 25 August as hundreds of edits were made to Dolly Parton's article on English and German Wikipedia – and why code stewardship and the Service Catalog matter.
The new Image Carousel treatment experience that will be tested
Identifying LLM edits easily: LLM Paste Check is now available on all Wikipedias. The feature will notify editors using the visual editor when they paste text that is likely to have initially been copied from one of five external generative AI chatbots. Edits will also be tagged so that patrollers can review them more closely.
The Future of Wikimedia Hackathon: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.
Re-testing Image Carousel on readers: Starting November 20, a test for Image Carousel will run for logged-out readers. Readers will browse community-uploaded images, selected by editors as relevant to specific articles. It will measure the impact of incorporating some community-requested features on logged-out reader retention.
Changes to Watchlist view: Moderator Tools will be removing the list view of the Watchlist and defaulting everyone to the changelog view. By defaulting to the changelog view, we are simplifying the codebase and avoiding the likelihood of missing bugs.
Wikifunctions quarterly planning: For October–December 2026, Wikifunctions will focus on two main areas: working with pilot communities towards bringing abstract articles into their Wikipedias, and making it easier to create and edit articles on Abstract Wikipedia.
Suggestion Mode: To encourage newcomers to publish their first suggestion when using Suggestion Mode, implementation of the publish prompt on mobile has been completed.
Onboarding newcomers: To encourage new editors to make their first edit, the early onboarding A/B test went live.
Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News weeks 42 and 43 include CodeMirror syntax highlighting was enabled by default for all logged out and newly registered users on the English Wikipedia. See also the 54 community-submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
Open geospatial dataset now released: Wikimedia Enterprise has released an open geospatial dataset containing 17 million OpenStreetMap elements linked to Wikidata, Wikipedia, and Wikivoyage, as Parquet and GeoParquet files on Hugging Face and Kaggle.
Better bot detection: There is a new bot detection system for traffic to the Wikimedia wikis. There might be sudden changes to visitor statistics starting on 26 October and going back to 20 June. This is because we will now be better at finding automated traffic which is trying to hide that it is coming from bots.
The Wikipedia Library: Datawrapper is now available in The Wikipedia Library. This is a data visualisation platform to create and publish responsive charts, maps, and tables. If you're a contributor who qualifies for TWL, please feel free to apply for access and make use of this tool.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. If you have feedback or suggestions about the bulletin, let us know at foundationbulletin@wikimedia.org. For questions about the Wikimedia Foundation's work, contact us!
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:
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.
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.
Vestrian24Bio(submissions) with 1141 round points from 20 good articles, a good topic, a featured list, and 30 good article reviews.
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.
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.
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!
Latest comment: 3 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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.
Following an RfC, election to ArbCom now requires at least 60% support. Successful candidates normally serve two-year terms, with one-year terms retained for filling vacancies. Proposals to change the election rules may now be added throughout the year and discussed on the talk page; formal discussion remains in September.
Following an RfC, first-time reviewers’ reviews require an experienced reviewer’s check, and GA requirements now include alt text and accessible tables. Featured articles may receive GA status during removal discussions if they meet GA criteria. Backlog drives will run every five months, with a points leaderboard and awards for the top five participants.
Miscellaneous
Self-nominations for the Arbitration Committee are open until 11 November 2026.
Latest comment: 1 day ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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.
SuperHamster's local time is 20:09, November 4, 2026 EST [refresh] 
Administrator changes
Interface administrator changes
CheckUser changes
Guideline and policy news
Technical news
Arbitration
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wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
Featured script
Miscellaneous
Improve a script
Requested scripts
Updated scripts
Newly maintained scripts
New scripts
Miscellaneous
Oversighter changes
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.
Bureaucrat changes
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
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
![Laptop with Wikipedia "W" illustration](https://freshfappening.pages.dev/bl-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Laptop_with_Wikipedia_"W"_illustration.png)
AirshipJungleman29 (submissions) with 854 round points, mostly from a high-scoring featured article on the Indian leader Rani of Jhansi and two good articles, in addition to 13 featured and good article reviews
TheDoctorWho (submissions) with 386 tournament points
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
Tails Wx (submissions), with 10 in the news articles in round 3
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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.
Gommeh (submissions) with 827 points, mainly from good and featured articles related to Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail
View all 41 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
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
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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. 
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
Vestrian24Bio (submissions) with 955 points, mostly from 2 FLs, 2 featured topics, and 16 GAs about cricket, and almost two dozen reviews
Oversight changes
Obituaries
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. 
Arconning (submissions) with 183 tournament points
BabbaQ (submissions) wins the ITN prize, for 9 ITN pages.
