During a conversation with @
WereSpielChequers: and later @
IJBall: the subject of identifying users who might be viable candidates for being granted the autopatrolled privilege came up. There is an
existing database report which is intended to provide this information, but the report as it stands today isn't very useful. The main issues (as far as I am aware) are that it is not filtered to show editors who have created articles recently (say, in the last 30 days) and is does not exclude bots and a few other minor things.
I wrote a quick Perl script which uses the MediaWiki API to create a report which does take into account these factors. I have run it a few times, and have been manually pasting the output into
my userspace page here.
This isn't a long-term solution, because apart from anything else I am both busy and forgetful :)
WereSpielChequers would ideally like the original database report page to be updated with my version of the report, instead of Community Tech Bot's version, but obviously at present the bot and I would be in conflict with each other, and it would be terribly untidy. So there are a few options I can think of for how we might move forward, and I wonder if you might have any suggestions or input.
1. Perhaps the tidiest thing would be if the existing report could be modified to use the same criteria that I use in mine (which are described at the top of the page), and then I would just stop running my report entirely. I don't know how likely that is to happen on a short timescale, but perhaps you would have some insight on this?
2. Alternatively, perhaps Community Tech Bot could be told to stop updating that page, and I could update it manually for now (and probably seek bot approval to have it run automatically each week).
3. I could update some new page elsewhere in the Wikipedia: namespace, and the existing database report page could maybe redirect to it.
4. Some other option? Community Tech Bot running my code maybe?
I'm not very familiar with the database reports service, or Community Tech Bot, so there may be some background I'm missing here which would make everything clearer; but for now we have two things. We have a page where everyone is looking for this information, and we have a report which is regularly being run to provide the information they are looking for. Unfortunately the two things are not connected in any way :)
Hi! Firstly my apologies for this late reply. I've been on vacation. Secondly, that's a fantastic idea, thank you. I'd be very happy to modify the bot to run your script. The only thing that I need is the SQL query you used to generate it. I'll update the bot when I get it. Thanks a lot for helping maintain the reports. :)
NKohli (WMF) (
talk) 17:28, 5 January 2016 (UTC)reply
Thanks for getting back to me, hope you enjoyed your vacation :)
The current code is not SQL-based but rather uses Perl and MediaWiki::API. Hopefully this week or next I will have time to look at a pure SQL version. I'll get back to you on this :)
OK, so I have a pure-SQL version of this now which I have tested and appears to work successfully. Note that it is an expensive and long-running query - it will probably take five to six hours to run. This is similar to the performance of the Perl version. The basic issue is that calculating how many articles a user created (with all the various conditions in place) is quite an expensive operation. It might be possible to optimize it further than I already have, but I have literally spend at least twelve hours refactoring this in various radical ways, and this is the fastest option I could find. Anyway, this code works, and I believe should be ready to go!
/* autopatrolled_eligible.sql Identify users who meet the criteria for being granted "autopatrolled" on the English Wikipedia but who don't already have it. Author: Andrew Crawford (thparkth) <[email protected]> License: Public Domain*/SELECT/* "editor" consisting of user_name, wrapped in HTML tags linking to the sigma "created" tool */CONCAT('<a href="https://tools.wmflabs.org/sigma/created.py?name=',user_name,'&server=enwiki&max=100&startdate=&ns=,,&redirects=none&deleted=undeleted">',user_name,'</a>')ASeditor,/* derived column "created count" returned by this subquery */(SELECTcount(*)FROMrevision_userindexJOINpageONpage_id=rev_pageWHEREpage_namespace=0ANDrev_parent_id=0ANDrev_user_text=user_nameANDrev_deleted=0ANDpage_is_redirect=0)AScreated_countFROM(/* This query returns users who have created pages in the last 30 days and who are not already members of autoreviewed */SELECTDISTINCTuser_nameFROMrecentchangesJOINuserONrc_user=user_idJOINpageONrc_cur_id=page_idWHERE/* User created a page within the last thirty days */rc_timestamp>date_format(date_sub(NOW(),INTERVAL30DAY),'%Y%m%d%H%i%S')AND/* It was an article */rc_namespace=0AND/* The user was human */rc_bot=0AND/* It was a new page */rc_new=1AND/* It's not a redirect */page_is_redirect=0AND/* User doesn't already have autoreviewer */NOTEXISTS(SELECT1FROMuser_groupsWHEREug_user=user_idAND(ug_group='autoreviewer'ORug_group='sysop')))asInnerQueryHAVINGcreated_count>24ORDERBYcreated_countDESCLIMIT500;
This can also be found as /data/project/thparkthsql/autopatrolled_eligible.sql on Tool Labs.
By the way, I enjoy this kind of work, and I am gaining some familiarity with the schema and the Tool Labs environment so please do let me know if there is a backlog I could be helping with.
Hi @
Thparkth: I'm extremely sorry it took me this long to get back to you. I just updated the report. Let's hope this works. I'm a little worried since it's an expensive query and often queries running more than a couple of hours are killed abruptly. Aside, would you like to be a co-maintainer for the database-reports labs tool? There are several other reports lying dead which could use some love. :) It's a simple python-based bot, whose code can be seen at
https://github.com/Niharika29/database-reports Thank you so much! --
NKohli (WMF) (
talk) 09:47, 15 April 2016 (UTC)reply
Thanks NKohli, that's great. Thanks for tolerating my eccentric SQL indentation style ;). Virtually all of the processing time is spent in working out the created count for each user. An index on rev.rev_parent_id would probably help a great deal with that. I will probably go back to this now and try to find away to avoid using that column entirely; finding the lowest rev.rev_id for the page should be logically the same thing and it's a primary key!
Yes, I would love to be a co-maintainer for database-reports, and thank-you for the opportunity.
I added you as a maintainer for the tool. Are you on Github? Then I can add you as a collaborator on the repo and you can push code easily. :) Also, are you on IRC? --
NKohli (WMF) (
talk) 15:34, 15 April 2016 (UTC)reply
I just created a github user (thparkth). I am very familiar with git but less so with github. I am "thparkth" on IRC also. Thparkth (
talk) 16:37, 15 April 2016 (UTC)reply
Welcome to The Wikipedia Adventure!
Hi NKohli (WMF)! We're so happy you wanted to play to learn, as a friendly and fun way to get into our community and mission. I think these links might be helpful to you as you get started.
Did you see the
announcement that http:// access to the API is going away in a few weeks? It looks like the Community Tech bot is going to break as a result of this change.
BTW, I'm encouraging people who need help updating their code to ask at
w:en:Wikipedia:Bot owners' noticeboard or on the mailing list. I don't know whether there will be any requests, but if you can help, it'd probably make someone's day much happier. :-)
Whatamidoing (WMF) (
talk) 23:50, 19 May 2016 (UTC)reply
Thank you for pointing this out to me,
Whatamidoing (WMF)! I did indeed miss the announcement. I'll fix up the bot over the weekend and try to keep an eye on the mailing list and the noticeboard as well. Really happy to help. :) Thank you so much.
NKohli (WMF) (
talk) 03:29, 20 May 2016 (UTC)reply
Hey
Whatamidoing (WMF) Can you point me to where I should be making the https fix? I couldn't see where I'm using http in my code instead of https (in a very cursory glance through). Thanks! --
NKohli (WMF) (
talk) 06:43, 21 May 2016 (UTC)reply
I don't really know anything except that your bot was on the list. :-(
Brandon Black in Ops should be able to provide you with more information.
Whatamidoing (WMF) (
talk) 05:11, 22 May 2016 (UTC)reply
Hi Niharika.
Wikipedia:Database reports/Unused templates has been broken for over two years, and I haven't had much luck finding someone from the community interested in getting it back up and running. Is this something you or others on your team might be able to help with? If it's a technically trivial extension, low transclusion templates (1 or 2 transclusions) would be of interest as well. ~
Rob13Talk 05:27, 27 July 2016 (UTC)reply
Hi Rob, thanks for bringing this to my attention. I'd try and look into it soon. --
NKohli (WMF) (
talk) 16:24, 28 July 2016 (UTC)reply
Community Tech bot
I noticed that Community Tech bot has stopped updating as of the end of August. Can you give the bot a push and get it working again? Or if this is a known problem, do you have an ETA on when it might be back up? Thanks. Pinging
Thparkth on this, too. --
Gogo Dodo (
talk) 01:58, 7 September 2016 (UTC)reply
Hey @
Gogo Dodo:, thanks for the ping. I'll look into the problem today. --
NKohli (WMF) (
talk) 08:30, 7 September 2016 (UTC)reply
Okay, this should be fixed now. The bot will resume updating pages as usual. Feel free to report back if you find any more problems with this. Thanks! --
NKohli (WMF) (
talk) 11:51, 7 September 2016 (UTC)reply
Thank you for fixing it. It is updating now. While I'm here, I noticed that a few talk pages listed are false positives and have been appearing for awhile now. Can you check it out? The ones that keep reappearing are:
It's
Wikipedia:Database reports/Orphaned talk pages. All the above pages except
Talk:DDWG were created between 22 April and 3 May 2016.
DDWG was moved to that name 6 May 2016. Maybe a database got some bad entries in that period. I recall an incident where some pages were designated as mainspace pages somewhere even though their name specified another namespace, but I think that was longer ago.
PrimeHunter (
talk) 11:42, 12 September 2016 (UTC)reply
The latest database reports by the bot have omitted <onlyinclude>...</onlyinclude> around the timestamp. Example:
[1]. It's needed to only transclude the timestamp and not the whole report at
Wikipedia:Database reports. I have fixed two reports so right now there is no problem at
Wikipedia:Database reports.
PrimeHunter (
talk) 01:00, 10 September 2016 (UTC)reply
The page itself looks the same.
onlyinclude only affects how it looks when it's transcluded on another page like
Wikipedia:Database reports where only the part inside <onlyinclude>...</onlyinclude> will be shown. When the bot version was current the entire page was shown in a single cell in the "Data as of" column at the "PRODed articles with deletion logs" row. My edit
[4] means only "06:30, 10 September 2016 (UTC)" is currently shown in that cell. For testing, try previewing this section without nowiki around the below code.
PrimeHunter (
talk) 15:49, 10 September 2016 (UTC)reply
Understood. I'll fix it by Sunday. Thanks! --
NKohli (WMF) (
talk) 18:01, 10 September 2016 (UTC)reply
I have added a parameter to omit the transclusion for now so there is no rush.
[5]PrimeHunter (
talk) 11:02, 12 September 2016 (UTC)reply
Thanks for that. This should be fixed now (in future report updates, that is). I pushed those reports today so they should update soon. I'll try to keep an eye on it and make sure it behaves. --
NKohli (WMF) (
talk) 11:12, 12 September 2016 (UTC)reply
Thanks for adding onlyinclude taqs. The timestamp should be inside the tags like the old revision in
[6] in order to display on transclusion at
Wikipedia:Database reports. The current revision only displays "..." on transclusion.
PrimeHunter (
talk) 11:10, 13 September 2016 (UTC)reply
Oops, sorry. I changed it to <onlyinclude>~~~</onlyinclude>. Is that okay? Thanks. -
NKohli (WMF) (
talk) 15:43, 15 September 2016 (UTC)reply
You need five tildes for a timestamp alone. Three tildes make a username without timestamp so this should work: ~~~ <onlyinclude>~~~~~</onlyinclude>.
PrimeHunter (
talk) 18:47, 15 September 2016 (UTC)reply
It's working perfectly now. I manually moved the timestamp in some weekly and monthly reports which I guess will automatically do it in future updates. Regarding the above post by Gogo Dodo,
Wikipedia talk:Database reports#Zombies in the database shows a report by another bot is also unable to detect that
Category:216 BC births and
Category:235 BC births exist, so I guess it's a database issue and not a problem in the bot code.
PrimeHunter (
talk) 11:36, 17 September 2016 (UTC)reply
[[Wikipedia:Database reports/PRODed articles with deletion logs]]:
{{Wikipedia:Database reports/PRODed articles with deletion logs}}
[[Wikipedia:Database reports/Articles by size]] (doesn't use onlyinclude but isn't currently transcluded at [[Wikipedia:Database reports]]:
{{Wikipedia:Database reports/Articles by size}}
To get around the 50 page restriction, you can split the result array into multiple arrays each with 50 pages...
//Split into lists of 50 (max number for api)result_split=newArray(Math.ceil(result.length/50));for(varj=0;j<result.length;j+=50){result_splitj/50=result.slice(j,j+49);}
Though you might still want to limit the number of watched pages to a reasonable number, as there are some pretty large categories out there. - Evad37[
talk 23:48, 27 January 2017 (UTC)reply
This is useful. Thanks! I'll update the script soon. :) --
NKohli (WMF) (
talk) 11:06, 2 February 2017 (UTC)reply
Your feedback matters: Final reminder to take the global Wikimedia survey
Hello! This is a final reminder that the Wikimedia Foundation survey will close on 28 February, 2017 (23:59 UTC). The survey is available in various languages and will take between 20 and 40 minutes. Take the survey now.
If you already took the survey - thank you! We won't bother you again.
About this survey: You can find more information about
this project here or you can read the
frequently asked questions. This survey is hosted by a third-party service and governed by this
privacy statement. If you need additional help, or if you wish to opt-out of future communications about this survey, send an email through EmailUser function to
User:EGalvez (WMF). About the Wikimedia Foundation: The
Wikimedia Foundation supports you by working on the software and technology to keep the sites fast, secure, and accessible, as well as supports Wikimedia programs and initiatives to expand access and support free knowledge globally. Thank you! --
EGalvez (WMF) (
talk) 08:15, 23 February 2017 (UTC)reply
Hi! The popular pages report shows the top-viewed 500/1000 projects in a Wikiproject in the past month. See
Wikipedia:WikiProject Alaska/Popular pages for example. There was a bot, Mr. Z bot which used to generate these reports previously but it died a few months ago and the reports were broken. So we made a new bot to do the same job. If you do not want a report for WikiProject Chicago I can remove it from the bot config. The current report is at
Wikipedia:WikiProject Chicago/Popular pages. Thanks. --
NKohli (WMF) (
talk) 20:16, 24 March 2017 (UTC)reply
Hi
Elisfkc, I see that both WikiProject Disney and Amusement Parks are listed in that config. So that means that the bot is already working on generating their reports. The bot is running a little behind schedule since this is its second run and the code is getting changed frequently but both of those projects should be updated soon. You can find the reports here:
Wikipedia:WikiProject Amusement Parks/Popular pages and
Wikipedia:WikiProject Disney/Popular pages. --
NKohli (WMF) (
talk) 04:51, 27 April 2017 (UTC)reply
Oh, I just didn't see them. Thanks.
Elisfkc (
talk) 13:47, 27 April 2017 (UTC)reply
Wikipedia:WikiProject New York City Public Transportation/Popular pages
Could you possibly help set up this page? Thanks.--
Kew Gardens 613 (
talk) 12:17, 6 August 2017 (UTC)reply
Done! Sorry for the delay, I was on vacation. Let me know if anything looks out of place. Thank you! --
NKohli (WMF) (
talk) 22:41, 9 August 2017 (UTC)reply
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
You can now see a new log of pages being created at
Special:Log/create. It includes pages which are later deleted. It is now available on all Wikimedia wikis except Commons and Wikidata.
[8]
You can see how many pageviews a wiki had from specific countries. The
Wikistats2 maps have now been updated.
[9]
Changes later this week
Your watchlist will show changes from the last seven days instead of three. If you have already set a length preference it will not change.
[10]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 17. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from July 18. It will be on all wikis from July 19 (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
July 17 at 18:30 (UTC). See
how to join.
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
July 18 at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
Some articles have messages to readers about problems with the article. For example that it does not cite sources or might not be neutral. Readers do not see these messages on the mobile version. The developers now want to show them. You can
read more and leave feedback.
You can use <inputbox> to create search boxes for specific pages. For example to search the archives of a community discussion page. Instead of prefix:Page name you will see a text that explains which pages are being searched. You can
read more and leave feedback.
Hello. How I can request WikiProject to popular pages task? I thought it will be updated after I create certain page but it didn't happened.
Eurohunter (
talk) 13:04, 24 October 2018 (UTC)reply
Hi
Eurohunter. The process for enabling the bot to work on a certain project involves adding the project to
this config page. I can add the project to that page if you can tell me the details for which project you want this for, which page you want the report on and how many records would you like (maximum of 1000). Thank you. --
NKohli (WMF) (
talk) 19:05, 24 October 2018 (UTC)reply
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can post proposals for the
Community Wishlist Survey. The survey decides what the
Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals until 11 November. You can vote on proposals from 16 November to 30 November.
The wikis now have a
content security policy report. This means that you might get a warning in your javascript console when you load external resources in your user scripts. For security reasons it is recommended that you don't do this. It might not be possible to load external resources in your scripts in the future.
[11]
Problems
Your watchlist can show which changes you have already seen. This did not work for a few days. It has been fixed.
[12]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 October. It will be on all wikis from 1 November (
calendar).
The 2006 wikitext editor is no longer available. It will be removed from
Special:Preferences. It has not been the standard editor for a long time. It was replaced by the
2010 wikitext editor.
[13][14]
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
31 October at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can now use
TemplateWizard to edit templates. This works only with the
2010 wikitext editor and not in the visual editor or the
2017 wikitext editor. If you click on you can enter the information in a pop-up. You can turn on TemplateWizard in your beta feature preferences.
[15]
Changes later this week
You can choose to see edit conflicts in a two-column view. This is a beta feature. You can find it in your preferences. The interface for the two-column edit conflict will change. You can
read more.
When you edit with the visual editor you can use the "Automatic" citation tab. This helps you generate citations. You will now be able to write plain text citations or the title of a journal article or a book in this tab. This will search the
Crossref and
WorldCat databases and add the top result.
[16]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 November. It will be on all wikis from 8 November (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
7 November at 16:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Some old mobile browsers can use the watchlist again. This has not worked for a while. These browsers are called
grade C browsers. This helps for example Windows Phone 8.1 with Internet Explorer and Lumia 535 with Windows 10.
[17]
Problems
You can choose to see edit conflicts in a two-column view. This is a beta feature. You can find it in your preferences. Users who use this view saw the edit conflict resolution page when they wanted to see a preview. This has been fixed.
[18][19][20]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 November. It will be on all wikis from 15 November (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
14 November at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
You can use the
content translation tool to translate articles. The developers are working on
a new version. One of the changes will be a maintenance category. Articles where users add a lot of text from machine translation without changing it will be in that category. This is so the community can review it. The users will also have been warned before they publish the article that it has a lot of unchanged text from machine translations.
[21]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
There is an
A/B test for sameAs data. This is to make it easier to find the right information with a search engine. This changes the
metadata for a wiki page. It doesn't change how the page looks.
[22]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
21 November at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
The Wikimedia wikis use templates to show readers there are problems with the content on some pages. For example if there are no sources or the page needs to be rewritten. The mobile website will soon show more information when you use these templates. Some templates may need to be updated.
[23]
The
Education Program extension was removed from all Wikimedia projects. The
database tables used by the extension will be archived. This will happen in a month. If you want the information on your wiki you should move it to a normal wiki page.
[24]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
On wikis with
translatable pages you could create a mess when you moved a page that had translatable subpages. A subpage is when you use / to create a new page: /wiki/Page/Subpage. The subpages would be moved but not the translations. The subpages are no longer automatically be moved. This is to make it safer to move pages.
[25]
Changes later this week
The
advanced search interface will be available by default on all Wikimedia wikis. It makes it easier to use some of the special search functions that most editors don't know exist. It's already active on German, Farsi, Arabic and Hungarian Wikipedia.
[26]
Special:UnusedCategories show empty categories with no files or other categories. You can soon choose to not show soft redirect categories or some maintenance categories there. You can do this with the
magic word__EXPECTUNUSEDCATEGORY__.
[27]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 November. It will be on all wikis from 29 November (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
28 November at 16:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
The mw.util.jsMessage() function was deprecated in 2012. It will be removed next week.
Look for the warningUse of "mw.util.jsMessage" is deprecated in the JavaScript console to know if you use an affected script or gadget. If you are a gadget maintainer you should check if your JavaScript code contains mw.util.jsMessage. There is a
migration guide. It explains how to use mw.notify instead.
[28]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Admins will not be able to unblock themselves if they are blocked by someone other than themselves. This is because it can cause damage if someone else takes over an admin account and other admins can't block them. If this is a problem for your community you can
report it on Phabricator. You can also ask questions
on Meta. There is a discussion
on Phabricator about how to solve this if two admins fight with each other on a small wiki.
[29]
You can go to a section from the edit summary by clicking on the section name. Before this you had to click on the arrow.
[31]
When you jumped to a footnote that was referenced several times in an article it could be difficult to see where you were in the text. Now there are jump marks and highlights to help you find your way back.
[32][33]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 December. It will be on all wikis from 13 December (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
12 December at 16:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
New accounts will need passwords that are at least 8 characters long. Admins, interface admins, bureaucrats, oversighters, CentralNotice admins, global renamers, check users, stewards and some other user groups will need passwords that are at least 10 characters long. This is because an attacker could cause damage to the wikis if they took over these accounts.
[34][35]
When you hover over a footnote it will show you the reference as a pop-up. This is so you don't have to jump down to the bottom of the page to see a reference. This will happen in 2019. Some wikis already have gadgets that do this. You will be able to turn it off.
[36]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Tech News
Because of the
holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 7 January 2019.
Recent changes
Some templates that show notices about the content of the page will now be shown on the mobile website. In many cases they were hidden before.
[37][38]
Admins can no longer unblock themselves, except for self-blocks. A blocked admin can block the user who blocked them but no one else. This is so no one can block all admins on a wiki without being stopped.
[39]
The
ParserMigration extension has been removed. It compared the result of two versions of the MediaWiki wikitext parsing pipeline. It was used when we moved to the
Remex parsing library instead of
Tidy.
Problems
<ref> tags can use parameters such as "name" or "group". For example <ref name="adams" group="books">. If a <ref> tag has more than two parameters all parameters are ignored. You don't get a warning that they don't work. This will soon be fixed.
[40]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 December. It will be on all wikis from 20 December (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
19 December at 16:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
The Wikimedia Foundation
Android app team are working on making it easier to edit on mobile phones. You can
read more about these plans. If you have an Android phone and speak at least two languages you can help testing in English. Tell
Dchen (WMF) you want to be part of the testing by writing on her talk page or email her.
tiles.wmflabs.org and wma.wmflabs.org will stop working. They have no maintainers and run an old operating system. Tools which use it could stop working. This includes
the mapnik gadget, hill shading, and hike and bike layers. New maintainers could help out and keep it going.
[41]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Tech News writers, editors and translators wish you a pleasant 2019 year.
Recent changes
RelatedSites extension has been undeployed. It was used to create interwiki links on Wikivoyage, now handled by Wikidata.
[42]
MediaWiki logstash logging is moving to a new infrastructure. This is an ongoing deployment.
[43]
codesearch.wmflabs.org has been updated, with new and updated repositories and a new search options for code.
[44]
On several wikis, an account named "Edit filter" has been created on December 17 to perform some technical maintenance on AbuseFilter. This account has sysop rights but it's a system user and no human can use it. The account already existed on wikis where AbuseFilter can perform blocks, which are issued using this account. See
T212268 for more information and future plans.
Problems
In
AbuseFilter, the "Throttle" action takes three parameters: count, period and groups. They must now strictly respect the requirements listed
on mediawiki.org. A list of broken filters is
on Phabricator. If you're familiar with AbuseFilter, please take a look and fix them.
[45]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from January 8. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from January 9. It will be on all wikis from January 10 (
calendar).
Meetings
Search Platform Office Hours is rescheduled to January 9.
Check the details for time and date.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
You can read but not edit 17 wikis for a few minutes on 10 August. This is planned at
05:00 UTC. This is because of work on the database.
[46]
Changes later this week
The
Wikimania Hackathon will take place remotely on 13 August, starting at 5:00 UTC, for 24 hours. You can participate in many ways. You can still propose projects and sessions.
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 August. It will be on all wikis from 12 August (
calendar).
The old CSS <div class="visualClear"></div> will not be supported after 12 August. Instead, templates and pages should use <div style="clear:both;"></div>. Please help to replace any existing uses on your wiki. There are global-search links available at
T287962.
Future changes
The Wikipedia Library is a place for Wikipedia editors to get access to sources. There is an
extension which has a new function to tell users when they can take part in it. It will use notifications. It will start pinging the first users in September. It will ping more users later.
[47]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can add language links in the sidebar in the
new Vector skin again. You do this by connecting the page to a Wikidata item. The new Vector skin has moved the language links but the new language selector cannot add language links yet.
[49]
Problems
There was a problem on wikis which use the Translate extension. Translations were not updated or were replaced with the English text. The problems have been fixed.
[50][51][52]
Changes later this week
A
revision tag will soon be added to edits that add links to
disambiguation pages. This is because these links are usually added by accident. The tag will allow editors to easily find the broken links and fix them. If your wiki does not like this feature, it can be
hidden.
[53]
Would you like to help improve the information about tools? Would you like to attend or help organize a small virtual meetup for your community to discuss the list of tools? Please get in touch on the
Toolhub Quality Signal Sessions talk page. We are also looking for feedback
from tool maintainers on some specific questions.
In the past, edits to any page in your user talk space ignored your
mute list, e.g. sub-pages. Starting this week, this is only true for edits to your talk page.
[54]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 August. It will be on all wikis from 19 August (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The
Score extension (<score> notation) has been re-enabled on public wikis and upgraded to a newer version. Some musical score functionality may no longer work because the extension is only enabled in "safe mode". The security issue has been fixed and an
advisory published.
Problems
You will be able to read but not edit
some wikis for a few minutes on 25 August. This will happen around
06:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. During this time, operations on the CentralAuth will also not be possible.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 August. It will be on all wikis from 26 August (
calendar).
Also during this time, operations on the CentralAuth will not be possible (GlobalRenames, changing/confirming e-mail addresses, logging into new wikis, password changes).
For more details about the operation and on all impacted services, please check
on Phabricator.
A banner will be displayed 30 minutes before the operation.
Please help your community to be aware of this maintenance operation. Thank you!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Some musical score syntax no longer works and may needed to be updated, you can check
Category:Pages with score rendering errors on your wiki for a list of pages with errors.
Problems
Musical scores were unable to render lyrics in some languages because of missing fonts. This has been fixed now. If your language would prefer a different font, please file a request in Phabricator.
[55]
Changes later this week
The parameters for how you obtain
tokens in the MediaWiki API were changed in 2014. The old way will no longer work from 1 September. Scripts, bots and tools that use the parameters from before the 2014 change need to be updated. You can
read more about this.
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 September. It will be on all wikis from 2 September (
calendar).
Future changes
You will be able to read but not edit
Commons for a few minutes on 6 September. This will happen around
05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance.
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes in the week of 13 September. More information will be published in Tech News later. It will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
[56]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The wikis that have
Growth features deployed have been part of A/B testing since deployment, in which some newcomers did not receive the new features. Now, all of the newcomers on 21 of the smallest of those wikis will be receiving the features.
[57]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
In 2017, the provided jQuery library was upgraded from version 1 to 3, with a compatibility layer. The migration will soon finish, to make the site load faster for everyone. If you maintain a gadget or user script, check if you have any JQMIGRATE errors and fix them, or they will break.
[58][59]
Last year, the Portuguese Wikipedia community embarked on an experiment to make log-in compulsory for editing. The
impact report of this trial is ready. Moving forward, the Anti-Harassment Tools team is looking for projects that are willing to experiment with restricting IP editing on their wiki for a short-term experiment.
Learn more.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
A majority of Wikipedias now have access to the Growth features. The Growth team
has published an FAQ page about the features. This translatable FAQ covers the description of the features, how to use them, how to change the configuration, and more.
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 September. It will be on all wikis from 16 September (
calendar).
Starting this week, Wikipedia in Italian will receive weekly software updates on Wednesdays. It used to receive the updates on Thursdays. Due to this change, bugs will be noticed and fixed sooner.
[62]
You can add language links in the sidebar in
the new Vector skin again. You do this by connecting the page to a Wikidata item. The new Vector skin has moved the language links but the new language selector cannot add language links yet.
[63]
The
syntax highlight tool marks up code with different colours. It now can highlight 23 new code languages. Additionally, golang can now be used as an alias for the
Go programming language, and a special output mode has been added to show a program's output.
[64][65]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
MediaWiki had a feature that would highlight local links to short articles in a different style. Each user could pick the size at which "stubs" would be highlighted. This feature was very bad for performance, and following a consultation, has been removed.
[66]
A technical change was made to the MonoBook skin to allow for easier maintenance and upkeep. This has resulted in some minor changes to HTML that make MonoBook's HTML consistent with other skins. Efforts have been made to minimize the impact on editors, but please ping
Jon (WMF) on wiki or in
phabricator if any problems are reported.
Problems
There was a problem with search last week. Many search requests did not work for 2 hours because of an accidental restart of the search servers.
[67]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 September. It will be on all wikis from 23 September (
calendar).
The
meta=proofreadpage API has changed. The piprop parameter has been renamed to prpiprop. API users should update their code to avoid unrecognized parameter warnings. Pywikibot users should upgrade to 6.6.0.
[68]
Future changes
The
Reply tool will be deployed to the remaining wikis in the coming weeks. It is currently part of "Discussion tools" in
Beta features at most wikis. You will be able to turn it off in
Editing Preferences.
[69]
The
previously announced change to how you obtain tokens from the API has been delayed to September 21 because of an incompatibility with Pywikibot. Bot operators using Pywikibot can follow
T291202 for progress on a fix, and should plan to upgrade to 6.6.1 when it is released.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
iOS 15 has a new function called
Private Relay (Apple website). This can hide the user's IP when they use
Safari browser. This is like using a
VPN in that we see another IP address instead. It is opt-in and only for those who pay extra for
iCloud. It will come to Safari users on
OSX later. There is a
technical discussion about what this means for the Wikimedia wikis.
Problems
Some gadgets and user-scripts add items to the
portlets (article tools) part of the skin. A recent change to the HTML may have made those links a different font-size. This can be fixed by adding the CSS class .vector-menu-dropdown-noicon.
[70]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 September. It will be on all wikis from 30 September (
calendar).
The
GettingStarted extension was built in 2013, and provides an onboarding process for new account holders in a few versions of Wikipedia. However, the recently developed
Growth features provide a better onboarding experience. Since the vast majority of Wikipedias now have access to the Growth features, GettingStarted will be deactivated starting on 4 October.
[71]
A small number of users will not be able to connect to the Wikimedia wikis after 30 September. This is because an old
root certificate will no longer work. They will also have problems with many other websites. Users who have updated their software in the last five years are unlikely to have problems. Users in Europe, Africa and Asia are less likely to have immediate problems even if their software is too old. You can
read more.
You can
receive notifications when someone leaves a comment on user talk page or mentions you in a talk page comment. Clicking the notification link will now bring you to the comment and highlight it. Previously, doing so brought you to the top of the section that contained the comment. You can find
more information in T282029.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
A more efficient way of sending changes from Wikidata to Wikimedia wikis that show them has been enabled for the following 10 wikis: mediawiki.org, the Italian, Catalan, Hebrew and Vietnamese Wikipedias, French Wikisource, and English Wikivoygage, Wikibooks, Wiktionary and Wikinews. If you notice anything strange about how changes from Wikidata appear in recent changes or your watchlist on those wikis you can
let the developers know.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 October. It will be on all wikis from 7 October (
calendar).
Some gadgets and bots that use the API to read the AbuseFilter log might break. The hidden property will no longer say an entry is implicit for unsuppressed log entries about suppressed edits. If your bot needs to know this, do a separate revision query. Additionally, the property will have the value false for visible entries; previously, it wasn't included in the response.
[73]
A more efficient way of sending changes from Wikidata to Wikimedia wikis that show them will be enabled for all production wikis. If you notice anything strange about how changes from Wikidata appear in recent changes or your watchlist you can
let the developers know.
Future changes
You can soon get cross-wiki notifications in the
iOS Wikipedia app. You can also get notifications as push notifications. More notification updates will follow in later versions.
[74]
The JavaScript variables wgExtraSignatureNamespaces, wgLegalTitleChars, and wgIllegalFileChars will soon be removed from mw.config. These are not part of the "stable" variables available for use in wiki JavaScript.
[75]
The JavaScript variables wgCookiePrefix, wgCookieDomain, wgCookiePath, and wgCookieExpiration will soon be removed from mw.config. Scripts should instead use mw.cookie from the "
mediawiki.cookie" module.
[76]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 October. It will be on all wikis from 14 October (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Toolhub is a catalogue to make it easier to find software tools that can be used for working on the Wikimedia projects. You can
read more.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 October. It will be on all wikis from 21 October (
calendar).
3–5% of editors may be blocked in the next few months. This is because of a new service in Safari, which is similar to a
proxy or a
VPN. It is called iCloud Private Relay. There is a
discussion about this on Meta. The goal is to learn what iCloud Private Relay could mean for the communities.
Wikimedia Enterprise is a new
API for those who use a lot of information from the Wikimedia projects on other sites. It is a way to get big commercial users to pay for the data. There will soon be a copy of the Wikimedia Enterprise dataset. You can
read more. You can also ask the team questions
on Zoom on
22 October 15:00 UTC.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The
Coolest Tool Award 2021 is looking for nominations. You can recommend tools until 27 October.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 October. It will be on all wikis from 28 October (
calendar).
Future changes
Diff pages will have an improved copy and pasting experience.
The changes will allow the text in the diff for before and after to be treated as separate columns and will remove any unwanted syntax.
[77]
The version of the
Liberation fonts used in SVG files will be upgraded. Only new thumbnails will be affected. Liberation Sans Narrow will not change.
[78]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a limit on the amount of emails a user can send each day. This limit is now global instead of per-wiki. This change is to prevent abuse.
[79]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 November. It will be on all wikis from 4 November (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Mobile IP editors are now able to receive warning notices indicating they have a talk page message on the mobile website (similar to the orange banners available on desktop). These notices will be displayed on every page outside of the main namespace and every time the user attempts to edit. The notice on desktop now has a slightly different colour.
[80][81]
In the future, unregistered editors will be given an identity that is not their
IP address. This is for legal reasons. A new user right will let editors who need to know the IPs of unregistered accounts to fight vandalism, spam, and harassment, see the IP. You can read the
suggestions for how that identity could work and
discuss on the talk page.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Most
large file uploads errors that had messages like "stashfailed" or "DBQueryError" have now been fixed. An
incident report is available.
Problems
Sometimes, edits made on iOS using the visual editor save groups of numbers as telephone number links, because of a feature in the operating system. This problem is under investigation.
[83]
There was a problem with search last week. Many search requests did not work for 2 hours because of a configuration error.
[84]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 November. It will be on all wikis from 18 November (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 December. It will be on all wikis from 2 December (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
MediaWiki 1.38-wmf.11 was scheduled to be deployed on some wikis last week. The deployment was delayed because of unexpected problems.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 December. It will be on all wikis from 9 December (
calendar).
At all Wikipedias, a Mentor Dashboard is now available at Special:MentorDashboard. It allows registered mentors, who take care of newcomers' first steps, to monitor their assigned newcomers' activity. It is part of the
Growth features. You can learn more about
activating the mentor list on your wiki and about
the mentor dashboard project.
The predecessor to the current
MediaWiki Action API (which was created in 2008), action=ajax, will be removed this week. Any scripts or bots using it will need to switch to the corresponding API module.
[85]
An old ResourceLoader module, jquery.jStorage, which was deprecated in 2016, will be removed this week. Any scripts or bots using it will need to switch to mediawiki.storage instead.
[86]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
There are now default
short aliases for the "Project:" namespace on most wikis. E.g. On Wikibooks wikis, [[WB:]] will go to the local language default for the [[Project:]] namespace. This change is intended to help the smaller communities have easy access to this feature. Additional local aliases can still be requested via
the usual process.
[87]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 December. It will be on all wikis from 16 December (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Tech News
Because of the
holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 10 January 2022.
Recent changes
Queries made by the DynamicPageList extension (<DynamicPageList>) are now only allowed to run for 10 seconds and error if they take longer. This is in response to multiple outages where long-running queries caused an outage on all wikis.
[88]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.
The Wikimedia
Cloud VPS hosts technical projects for the Wikimedia movement. Developers need to
claim projects they use. This is because old and unused projects are removed once a year. Unclaimed projects can be shut down from February.
[89]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
A oauth_consumer variable has been added to the
AbuseFilter to enable identifying changes made by specific tools.
[90]
Gadgets are
now able to directly include JSON pages. This means some gadgets can now be configured by administrators without needing the interface administrator permission, such as with the Geonotice gadget.
[91]
Gadgets
can now specify page actions on which they are available. For example, |actions=edit,history will load a gadget only while editing and on history pages.
[92]
Gadgets can now be loaded on demand with the withgadget URL parameter. This can be used to replace
an earlier snippet that typically looks like withJS or withCSS.
[93]
Four special pages (and their API counterparts) now have a maximum database query execution time of 30 seconds. These special pages are: RecentChanges, Watchlist, Contributions, and Log. This change will help with site performance and stability. You can read
more details about this change including some possible solutions if this affects your workflows.
[97]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 January. It will be on all wikis from 13 January (
calendar).
Events
Community Wishlist Survey 2022 begins. All contributors to the Wikimedia projects can propose for tools and platform improvements. The proposal phase takes place from 10 January 18:00 UTC to 23 January 18:00 UTC.
Learn more.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
When using
WikiEditor (also known as the 2010 wikitext editor), people will now see a warning if they link to disambiguation pages. If you click "Review link" in the warning, it will ask you to correct the link to a more specific term. You can
read more information about this completed 2021 Community Wishlist item.
When asked to create a new page or talk page section, input fields can be
"preloaded" with some text. This feature is now limited to wikitext pages. This is so users can't be tricked into making malicious edits. There is a discussion about
if this feature should be re-enabled for some content types.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 January. It will be on all wikis from 20 January (
calendar).
Events
Community Wishlist Survey 2022 continues. All contributors to the Wikimedia projects can propose for tools and platform improvements. The proposal phase takes place from 10 January 18:00 UTC to 23 January 18:00 UTC.
Learn more.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 January. It will be on all wikis from 27 January (
calendar).
The following languages can now be used with
syntax highlighting: BDD, Elpi, LilyPond, Maxima, Rita, Savi, Sed, Sophia, Spice, .SRCINFO.
You can now access your watchlist from outside of the user menu in the
new Vector skin. The watchlist link appears next to the notification icons if you are at the top of the page.
[99]
Events
You can see the results of the
Coolest Tool Award 2021 and learn more about 14 tools which were selected this year.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
If a gadget should support the new ?withgadget URL parameter that was
announced 3 weeks ago, then it must now also specify supportsUrlLoad in the gadget definition (
documentation).
[100]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 February. It will be on all wikis from 3 February (
calendar).
Future changes
A change that was
announced last year was delayed. It is now ready to move ahead:
The user group oversight will be renamed suppress. This is for
technical reasons. This is the technical name. It doesn't affect what you call the editors with this user right on your wiki. This is planned to happen in three weeks. You can comment
in Phabricator if you have objections. As usual, these labels can be translated on translatewiki (
direct links are available) or by administrators on your wiki.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Category counts are sometimes wrong. They will now be completely recounted at the beginning of every month.
[101]
Problems
A code-change last week to fix a bug with
Live Preview may have caused problems with some local gadgets and user-scripts. Any code with skin-specific behaviour for vector should be updated to also check for vector-2022.
A code-snippet, global search, and example are available.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 February. It will be on all wikis from 10 February (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Purging a category page with fewer than 5,000 members will now recount it completely. This will allow editors to fix incorrect counts when it is wrong.
[102]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 February. It will be on all wikis from 17 February (
calendar).
In the
AbuseFilter extension, the rmspecials() function has been updated so that it does not remove the "space" character. Wikis are advised to wrap all the uses of rmspecials() with rmwhitespace() wherever necessary to keep filters' behavior unchanged. You can use the search function on
Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage.
[103]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
At Wikipedias, all new accounts now get the
Growth features by default when creating an account. Communities are encouraged to
update their help resources. Previously, only 80% of new accounts would get the Growth features. A few Wikipedias remain unaffected by this change.
[105]
You can now prevent specific images that are used in a page from appearing in other locations, such as within PagePreviews or Search results. This is done with the markup class=notpageimage. For example, [[File:Example.png|class=notpageimage]].
[106]
There has been a change to the HTML of Special:Contributions, Special:MergeHistory, and History pages, to support the grouping of changes by date in
the mobile skin. While unlikely, this may affect gadgets and user scripts. A
list of all the HTML changes is on Phabricator.
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 February. It will be on all wikis from 24 February (
calendar).
Future changes
The software to play videos and audio files on pages will change soon on all wikis. The old player will be removed. Some audio players will become wider after this change.
The new player has been a beta feature for over four years.
[107][108]
Toolforge's underlying operating system is being updated. If you maintain any tools there, there are two options for migrating your tools into the new system. There are
details, deadlines, and instructions on Wikitech.
[109]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Mentors using the
Growth Mentor dashboard will now see newcomers assigned to them who have made at least one edit, up to 200 edits. Previously, all newcomers assigned to the mentor were visible on the dashboard, even ones without any edit or ones who made hundred of edits. Mentors can still change these values using the filters on their dashboard. Also, the last choice of filters will now be saved.
[111][112]
The user group oversight was renamed suppress. This is for
technical reasons. You may need to update any local references to the old name, e.g. gadgets, links to Special:Listusers, or uses of
NUMBERINGROUP.
Problems
The recent change to the HTML of
tracking changes pages caused some problems for screenreaders. This is being fixed.
[113]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 March. It will be on all wikis from 3 March (
calendar).
Future changes
Working with templates will become easier.
Several improvements are planned for March 9 on most wikis and on March 16 on English Wikipedia. The improvements include: Bracket matching, syntax highlighting colors, finding and inserting templates, and related visual editor features.
If you are a template developer or an interface administrator, and you are intentionally overriding or using the default CSS styles of user feedback boxes (the classes: successbox, messagebox, errorbox, warningbox), please note that these classes and associated CSS will soon be removed from MediaWiki core. This is to prevent problems when the same class-names are also used on a wiki. Please let us know by commenting at
phab:T300314 if you think you might be affected.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
There was a problem with some interface labels last week. It will be fixed this week. This change was part of ongoing work to simplify the support for skins which do not have active maintainers.
[114]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 March. It will be on all wikis from 10 March (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
In the Wikipedia Android app
it is now possible to change the toolbar at the bottom so the tools you use more often are easier to click on. The app now also has a focused reading mode.
[115][116]
Problems
There was a problem with the collection of some page-view data from June 2021 to January 2022 on all wikis. This means the statistics are incomplete. To help calculate which projects and regions were most affected, relevant datasets are being retained for 30 extra days. You can
read more on Meta-wiki.
There was a problem with the databases on March 10. All wikis were unreachable for logged-in users for 12 minutes. Logged-out users could read pages but could not edit or access uncached content then.
[117]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 March. It will be on all wikis from 17 March (
calendar).
Access to
Special:RevisionDelete has been expanded to include users who have deletelogentry and deletedhistory rights through their group memberships. Before, only those with the deleterevision right could access this special page.
[119]
On the
Special:Undelete pages for diffs and revisions, there will be a link back to the main Undelete page with the list of revisions.
[120]
Future changes
The Wikimedia Foundation has announced the IP Masking implementation strategy and next steps. The
announcement can be read here.
The
Wikimedia Hackathon 2022 will take place as a hybrid event on 20-22 May 2022. The Hackathon will be held online and there are grants available to support local in-person meetups around the world. Grants can be requested until 20 March.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
New code release schedule for this week
There will be four MediaWiki releases this week, instead of just one. This is an experiment which should lead to fewer problems and to faster feature updates. The releases will be on all wikis, at different times, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. You can
read more about this project.
The Jupyter notebooks tool
PAWS has been updated to a new interface.
[123]
Future changes
Interactive maps via
Kartographer will soon work on wikis using the
FlaggedRevisions extension.
Please tell us which improvements you want to see in Kartographer. You can take this survey in simple English.
[124]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a simple new Wikimedia Commons upload tool available for macOS users,
Sunflower.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 March. It will be on all wikis from 31 March (
calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of regular database maintenance. It will be performed on 29 March at 7:00 UTC (
targeted wikis) and on 31 March at 7:00 UTC (
targeted wikis).
[125][126]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
For a few days last week, edits that were suggested to newcomers were not tagged in the
Special:RecentChanges feed. This bug has been fixed.
[127]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 April. It will be on all wikis from 7 April (
calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 7 April at 7:00 UTC (
targeted wikis).
Future changes
Starting next week, Tech News' title will be translatable. When the newsletter is distributed, its title may not be Tech News: 2022-14 anymore. It may affect some filters that have been set up by some communities.
[128]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a new public status page at www.wikimediastatus.net. This site shows five automated high-level metrics where you can see the overall health and performance of our wikis' technical environment. It also contains manually-written updates for widespread incidents, which are written as quickly as the engineers are able to do so while also fixing the actual problem. The site is separated from our production infrastructure and hosted by an external service, so that it can be accessed even if the wikis are briefly unavailable. You can
read more about this project.
On Wiktionary wikis, the software to play videos and audio files on pages has now changed. The old player has been removed. Some audio players will become wider after this change.
The new player has been a beta feature for over four years.
[129][130]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 April. It will be on all wikis from 14 April (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 April. It will be on all wikis from 21 April (
calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 19 April at 07:00 UTC (
targeted wikis) and on 21 April at 7:00 UTC (
targeted wikis).
On
selected wikis, 50% of logged-in users will see the new
table of contents. When scrolling up and down the page, the table of contents will stay in the same place on the screen. This is part of the
Desktop Improvements project.
[131]
Message boxes produced by MediaWiki code will no longer have these CSS classes: successbox, errorbox, warningbox. The styles for those classes and messagebox will be removed from MediaWiki core. This only affects wikis that use these classes in wikitext, or change their appearance within site-wide CSS. Please review any local usage and definitions for these classes you may have. This was previously announced in the
28 February issue of Tech News.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
On
many wikis (group 1), the software to play videos and audio files on pages has now changed. The old player has been removed. Some audio players will become wider after this change.
The new player has been a beta feature for over four years.
[136][137]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 April. It will be on all wikis from 28 April (
calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 26 April at 07:00 UTC (
targeted wikis).
Some very old browsers and operating systems are no longer supported. Some things on the wikis might look weird or not work in very old browsers like Internet Explorer 9 or 10, Android 4, or Firefox 38 or older.
[138]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
On
all remaining wikis (group 2), the software to play videos and audio files on pages has now changed. The old player has been removed. Some audio players will become wider after this change.
The new player has been a beta feature for over four years.
[139][140]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 May. It will be on all wikis from 5 May (
calendar).
Future changes
The developers are working on talk pages in the
Wikipedia app for iOS. You can
give feedback. You can take the survey in English, German, Hebrew or Chinese.
Several CSS IDs related to MediaWiki interface messages will be removed. Technical editors should please
review the list of IDs and links to their existing uses. These include #mw-anon-edit-warning, #mw-undelete-revision and 3 others.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Last week, there was a problem with Wikidata's search autocomplete. This has now been fixed.
[145]
Last week, all wikis had slow access or no access for 20 minutes, for logged-in users and non-cached pages. This was caused by a problem with a database change.
[146]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
[147]
The
Vector (2022) skin will be set as the default on several more wikis, including Arabic and Catalan Wikipedias. Logged-in users will be able to switch back to the old Vector (2010). See the
latest update about Vector (2022).
Future meetings
The next
open meeting with the Web team about Vector (2022) will take place on 17 May. The following meetings are currently planned for: 7 June, 21 June, 5 July, 19 July.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
The
Wikimedia Hackathon 2022 will take place online on May 20–22. It will be in English. There are also local
hackathon meetups in Germany, Ghana, Greece, India, Nigeria and the United States. Technically interested Wikimedians can work on software projects and learn new skills. You can also host a session or post a project you want to work on.
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 May. It will be on all wikis from 19 May (
calendar).
Future changes
You can soon edit translatable pages in the visual editor. Translatable pages exist on for examples Meta and Commons.
[149]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Administrators using the mobile web interface can now access Special:Block directly from user pages.
[150]
The Growth team maintains a mentorship program for newcomers. Previously, newcomers weren't able to opt out from the program. Starting May 19, 2022, newcomers are able to fully opt out from Growth mentorship, in case they do not wish to have any mentor at all.
[152]
Some editors cannot access the content translation tool if they load it by clicking from the contributions menu. This problem is being worked on. It should still work properly if accessed directly via Special:ContentTranslation.
[153]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 May. It will be on all wikis from 26 May (
calendar).
Future changes
Gadget and user scripts developers are invited to give feedback on a
proposed technical policy aiming to improve support from MediaWiki developers.
[154]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
In the
AbuseFilter extension, an ip_in_ranges() function has been introduced to check if an IP is in any of the ranges. Wikis are advised to combine multiple ip_in_range() expressions joined by | into a single expression for better performance. You can use the search function on
Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage.
[155]
The
IP Info feature which helps abuse fighters access information about IPs,
has been deployed to all wikis as a beta feature. This comes after weeks of beta testing on test.wikipedia.org.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 June. It will be on all wikis from 2 June (
calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 31 May at 07:00 UTC (
targeted wikis).
The
New Topic Tool will be deployed for all editors at most wikis soon. You will be able to opt out from within the tool and in
Preferences.
[156][157]
The
list=usercontribs API will support fetching contributions from an
IP range soon. API users can set the uciprange parameter to get contributions from any IP range within
the limit.
[158]
A new parser function will be introduced: {{=}}. It will replace existing templates named "=". It will insert an
equal sign. This can be used to escape the equal sign in the parameter values of templates.
[159]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 June. It will be on all wikis from 9 June (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 June. It will be on all wikis from 16 June (
calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 14 June at 06:00 UTC (
targeted wikis).
[163]
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "
Add a link" (Abkhazian Wikipedia, Achinese Wikipedia, Adyghe Wikipedia, Afrikaans Wikipedia, Akan Wikipedia, Alemannisch Wikipedia, Amharic Wikipedia, Aragonese Wikipedia, Old English Wikipedia, Syriac Wikipedia, Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia, Asturian Wikipedia, Atikamekw Wikipedia, Avaric Wikipedia, Aymara Wikipedia, Azerbaijani Wikipedia, South Azerbaijani Wikipedia). This is part of the
progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can
configure how this feature works locally.
[164]
The
New Topic Tool will be deployed for all editors at Commons, Wikidata, and some other wikis soon. You will be able to opt out from within the tool and in
Preferences.
[165][166]
Future meetings
The next
open meeting with the Web team about Vector (2022) will take place today (13 June). The following meetings will take place on: 28 June, 12 July, 26 July.
Future changes
By the end of July, the
Vector 2022 skin should be ready to become the default across all wikis. Discussions on how to adjust it to the communities' needs will begin in the next weeks. It will always be possible to revert to the previous version on an individual basis.
Learn more.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The
Wikipedia App for Android now has an option for editing the whole page at once, located in the overflow menu (three-dots menu ).
[167]
Some recent database changes may affect queries using the
Quarry tool. Queries for site_stats at English Wikipedia, Commons, and Wikidata will need to be updated.
Read more.
A new user_global_editcount variable can be used in
abuse filters to avoid affecting globally active users.
[168]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 June. It will be on all wikis from 23 June (
calendar).
Users of non-responsive skins (e.g. MonoBook or Vector) on mobile devices may notice a slight change in the default zoom level. This is intended to optimize zooming and ensure all interface elements are present on the page (for example the table of contents on Vector 2022). In the unlikely event this causes any problems with how you use the site, we'd love to understand better, please ping Jon (WMF) to any on-wiki conversations.
[169]
Parsoid's HTML output will soon stop annotating file links with different typeof attribute values, and instead use mw:File for all types. Tool authors should adjust any code that expects: mw:Image, mw:Audio, or mw:Video.
[170]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 June. It will be on all wikis from 30 June (
calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 28 June at 06:00 UTC (
targeted wikis).
[171]
Some global and cross-wiki services will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 30 June at 06:00 UTC. This will impact ContentTranslation, Echo, StructuredDiscussions, Growth experiments and a few more services.
[172]
Users will be able to sort columns within sortable tables in the mobile skin.
[173]
Future meetings
The next
open meeting with the Web team about Vector (2022) will take place tomorrow (28 June). The following meetings will take place on 12 July and 26 July.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 July. It will be on all wikis from 7 July (
calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 5 July at 07:00 UTC (
targeted wikis) and on 7 July at 7:00 UTC (
targeted wikis).
This change only affects pages in the main namespace in Wikisource. The Javascript config variable proofreadpage_source_href will be removed from mw.config and be replaced with the variable prpSourceIndexPage.
[174]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
In the
Vector 2022 skin, the page title is now displayed above the tabs such as Discussion, Read, Edit, View history, or More.
Learn more.
[175]
The Anti-Harassment Tools team
recently deployed the IP Info Feature as a
Beta Feature at all wikis. This feature allows abuse fighters to access information about IP addresses. Please check our update on
how to find and use the tool. Please share your feedback using a link you will be given within the tool itself.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 12 July at 07:00 UTC (
targeted wikis).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
The feature on mobile web for
Nearby Pages was missing last week. It will be fixed this week.
[177]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 July. It will be on all wikis from 21 July (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Last week, some wikis were in read-only mode for a few minutes because of an emergency switch of their main database (
targeted wikis).
[179]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 July. It will be on all wikis from 28 July (
calendar).
The external link icon will change slightly in the skins Vector legacy and Vector 2022. The new icon uses simpler shapes to be more recognizable on low-fidelity screens.
[180]
Administrators will now see buttons on user pages for "Change block" and "Unblock user" instead of just "Block user" if the user is already blocked.
[181]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 August. It will be on all wikis from 4 August (
calendar).
This week, three meetings about
Vector (2022) with live interpretation will take place. On Tuesday, interpretation in Russian will be provided. On Thursday, meetings for Arabic and Spanish speakers will take place.
See how to join.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 9 August at 07:00 UTC (
targeted wikis) and on 11 August at 7:00 UTC (
targeted wikis).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Persian (Farsi) Wikipedia community decided to block IP editing from October 2021 to April 2022. The Wikimedia Foundation's Product Analytics team tracked the impact of this change.
An impact report is now available.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 August. It will be on all wikis from 18 August (
calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 16 August at 07:00 UTC (
targeted wikis) and on 18 August at 7:00 UTC (
targeted wikis).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Two problems with
Kartographer maps have been fixed. Maps are no longer shown as empty when a geoline was created via VisualEditor. Geolines consisting of points with QIDs (e.g., subway lines) are no longer shown with pushpins.
[186][187]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 August. It will be on all wikis from 25 August (
calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 25 August at 7:00 UTC (
targeted wikis).
The colours of links and visited links will change. This is to make the difference between links and other text more clear.
[188]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
In recent months, there have been inaccurate numbers shown for various
Special:Statistics at Commons, Wikidata, and English Wikipedia. This has now been fixed.
[190]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 August. It will be on all wikis from 1 September (
calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 30 August at 07:00 UTC (
targeted wikis) and on 1 September at 7:00 UTC (
targeted wikis).
Future changes
The Wikimedia Foundation wants to improve how Wikimedia communities report harmful incidents by building the
Private Incident Reporting System (PIRS) to make it easy and safe for users to make reports. You can leave comments on the talk page, by answering the
questions provided. If you have ever faced a harmful situation that you wanted to report/reported, join a PIRS interview to share your experience. To sign up
please emailMadalina Ana.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 September. It will be on all wikis from 8 September (
calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 6 September at 07:00 UTC (
targeted wikis) and on 8 September at 7:00 UTC (
targeted wikis).
On Special pages that only have one tab, the tab-bar's row will be hidden in the Vector-2022 skin to save space. The row will still show if Gadgets use it. Gadgets that currently append directly to the CSS id of #p-namespaces should be updated to use the mw.util.addPortletLink function instead. Gadgets that style this id should consider also targeting #p-associated-pages, the new id for this row.
Examples are available.
[191][192]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The search servers have been upgraded to a new major version. If you notice any issues with searching, please report them on
Phabricator.
[193]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 September. It will be on all wikis from 15 September (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Two database fields in the templatelinks table are now being dropped: tl_namespace and tl_title. Any queries that rely on these fields need to be changed to use the new normalization field called tl_target_id. See T299417 for more information. This is part of
normalization of links tables.
[195][196]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 September. It will be on all wikis from 22 September (
calendar).
In
Kartographer maps, you can use icons on markers for common points of interest. On Tuesday, the
previous icon set will be updated to
version maki 7.2. That means, around 100 new icons will be available. Additionally, all existing icons were updated for clarity and to make them work better in international contexts.
[197][198]
Future changes
In a
group discussion at Wikimania, more than 30 people talked about how to make content partnership software in the Wikimedia movement more sustainable. What kind of support is acceptable for volunteer developers? Read the summary and
leave your feedback.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Parsoid clients should be updated to allow for space-separated multi-values in the rel attribute of links. Further details are in
T315209.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 September. It will be on all wikis from 29 September (
calendar).
Visual diffs will become available to all users, except at the Wiktionaries and Wikipedias.
[199]
Talk pages on the mobile site will change at the Arabic, Bangla, Chinese, French, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Korean, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. They should be easier to use and provide more information.
[200][201]
In the
Module namespace, pages ending with .json will be treated as JSON, just like they already are in the User and MediaWiki namespaces.
[202]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Kartographer maps can now show geopoints from Wikidata, via QID or SPARQL query. Previously, this was only possible for geoshapes and geolines.
[203][204]
The
Coolest Tool Award 2022 is looking for nominations. You can recommend tools until 12 October.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 October. It will be on all wikis from 6 October (
calendar).
Talk pages on the mobile site will change at the Arabic, Bangla, Chinese, French, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Korean, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. They should be easier to use and provide more information. (Last week's release was delayed)
[205][206]
The scribunto-console API module will require a
CSRF token. This module is documented as internal and use of it is not supported.
[5]
The Vector 2022 skin will become the default across the smallest Wikimedia projects.
Learn more.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 October. It will be on all wikis from 13 October (
calendar).
On some wikis,
Kartographer maps in full size view will be able to display nearby articles. After a feedback period, more wikis will follow.
[207][208]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
A bug that caused problems in loading article thumbnails in Special:Search has been fixed. Further details are in
T320406.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 October. It will be on all wikis from 20 October (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
There have been some minor visual fixes in Special:Search, regarding audio player alignment and image placeholder height. Further details are in
T319230.
On Wikipedias, a new
preference has been added to hide article thumbnails in Special:Search. Full details are in
T320337.
Problems
Last week, three wikis (French Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Russian Wikipedia) had read-only access for 25 minutes. This was caused by a hardware problem.
[213]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 October. It will be on all wikis from 27 October (
calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 25 October at 07:00 UTC (
targeted wikis) and on 27 October at 7:00 UTC (
targeted wikis).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "
Add a link" (Assamese Wikipedia, Bashkir Wikipedia, Balinese Wikipedia, Bavarian Wikipedia, Samogitian Wikipedia, Bikol Central Wikipedia, Belarusian Wikipedia, Belarusian (Taraškievica) Wikipedia, Bulgarian Wikipedia, Bhojpuri Wikipedia, Bislama Wikipedia, Banjar Wikipedia, Bambara Wikipedia, Bishnupriya Wikipedia, Breton Wikipedia, Bosnian Wikipedia, Buginese Wikipedia, Buryat Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia). This is part of the
progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can
configure how this feature works locally.
[214]
Pages with titles that start with a lower-case letter according to Unicode 11 will be renamed or deleted. There is a list of affected pages at
m:Unicode 11 case map migration. More information can be found at
T292552.
The Vector 2022 skin will become the default across the smallest Wikipedias.
Learn more.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
When using keyboard navigation on a
Kartographer map, the focus will become more visible.
[219]
In Special:RecentChanges, you can now hide the log entries for new user creations with the filter for "⧼rcfilters-filter-newuserlogactions-label⧽".
[220]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 November. It will be on all wikis from 3 November (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
An updated version of the
Event Registration tool is now available for testing at
testwiki and
test2wiki. The tool provides features for event organizers and participants. Your feedback is welcome at our
project talkpage. More information about
the project is available.
[225]
Problems
Twice last week, for about 45 minutes, some files and thumbnails failed to load and uploads failed, mostly for logged-in users. The cause is being investigated and an incident report will be available soon.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
At Wikidata, an interwiki link can now point to a redirect page if certain conditions are met. This new feature is called
sitelinks to redirects. It is needed when one wiki uses one page to cover multiple concepts but another wiki uses more pages to cover the same concepts. Your
feedback on the talkpage of the new proposed guideline is welcome.
[226]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 November. It will be on all wikis from 17 November (
calendar).
There will be a new link to directly "Edit template data" on Template pages.
[228]
Future changes
Wikis where mobile
DiscussionTools are enabled (
these ones) will soon use full CSS styling to display any templates that are placed at the top of talk pages. To adapt these “talk page boxes” for narrow mobile devices you can use media queries, such as in
this example.
[229]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The display of non-free media in the search bar and for article thumbnails in Special:Search has been deactivated. Further details are in
T320661.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 22 November at 07:00 UTC (
targeted wikis) and on 24 November at 07:00 UTC (
targeted wikis).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
A new preference, “Enable limited width mode”, has been added to the
Vector 2022 skin. The preference is also available as a toggle on every page if your monitor is 1600 pixels or wider. It allows for increasing the width of the page for logged-out and logged-in users.
[230]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 November. It will be on all wikis from 1 December (
calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 29 November at 07:00 UTC (
targeted wikis) and on 1 December at 07:00 UTC (
targeted wikis).
Mathematical formulas shown in SVG image format will no longer have PNG fall-backs for browsers that don't support them. This is part of work to modernise the generation system. Showing only PNG versions was the default option until in February 2018.
[231][232][233]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Wikisources use a tool called ProofreadPage. ProofreadPage uses OpenSeadragon which is an open source tool. The OpenSeadragon JavaScript API has been significantly re-written to support dynamically loading images. The functionality provided by the older version of the API should still work but it is no longer supported. User scripts and gadgets should migrate over to the newer version of the API. The functionality provided by the newer version of the API is
documented on MediaWiki.
[236][237]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 December. It will be on all wikis from 8 December (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
The character = cannot be used in new usernames, to make usernames work better with templates. Existing usernames are not affected.
[239]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 December. It will be on all wikis from 15 December (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Tech News
Because of the
holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 9 January 2023.
Recent changes
On a user's contributions page, you can filter it for edits with a tag like 'reverted'. Now, you can also filter for all edits that are not tagged like that. This was part of a Community Wishlist 2022 request.
[241]
A new function has been used for gadget developers to add content underneath the title on article pages. This is considered a stable API that should work across all skins.
Documentation is available.
[242]
One of our test wikis is now being served from a new infrastructure powered by
Kubernetes (
read more). More Wikis will switch to this new infrastructure in early 2023. Please test and let us know of any issues.
[243]
Problems
Last week, all wikis had no edit access for 9 minutes. This was caused by a database problem.
[244]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.
The word "Reply" is very short in some languages, such as Arabic ("ردّ"). This makes the Discussion tools button on talk pages difficult to use. An arrow icon will be added to those languages. This will only be visible to editors who have the
Beta Feature turned on.
[245][246]
Future changes
Edits can be automatically "tagged" by the system software or the Edit filter configuration system. Those tags link to a help page about the tags. Soon they will also link to Recent Changes to let you see other edits tagged this way. This was a Community Wishlist 2022 request.
[247]
The Trust & Safety tools team
have shared new plans for building the Private Incident Reporting System. The system will make it easier for editors to ask for help if they are harassed or abused.
Realtime Preview for Wikitext is coming out of beta as an enabled feature for every user of the 2010 Wikitext
editor in the week of January 9, 2023. It will be available to use via the toolbar in the 2010 Wikitext editor. The feature was the 4th most popular wish of the Community Wishlist Survey 2021.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can use tags to filter edits in the recent changes feed or on your watchlist. You can now use tags to filter out edits you don't want to see. Previously you could only use tags to focus on the edits with those tags.
[248]
You can now use the
thanks function on your watchlist and the user contribution page.
[249]
A wiki page can be moved to give it a new name. You can now get a dropdown menu with common reasons when you move a page. This is so you don't have to write the explanation every time.
[250]
Matrix is a chat tool. You can now use matrix: to create Matrix links on wiki pages.
[251]
You can filter out translations when you look at the recent changes on multilingual wikis. This didn't hide translation pages. You can now also hide subpages which are translation pages.
[252]
Changes later this week
Realtime preview for wikitext is a tool which lets editors preview the page when they edit wikitext. It will be enabled for all users of the 2010 wikitext editor. You will find it in the editor toolbar.
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 10 January at 07:00 UTC (
targeted wikis) and on 12 January at 07:00 UTC (
targeted wikis).
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 January. It will be on all wikis from 12 January (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
The URLs in "prev" links on page history now contain diff=prev&oldid=[revision ID] in place of diff=[revision ID]&oldid=[revision ID]. This is to fix a problem with links pointing to incorrect diffs when history was filtered by a tag. Some user scripts may break as a result of this change.
[253]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 January. It will be on all wikis from 19 January (
calendar).
Some
changes to the appearance of talk pages have only been available on Talk: and User talk: namespaces. These will be extended to other talk namespaces, such as Wikipedia talk:. They will continue to be unavailable in non-talk namespaces, including Wikipedia: pages (e.g., at the Village Pump). You can
change your preferences (
beta feature).
[254]
On Wikisources, when an image is zoomed or panned in the Page: namespace, the same zoom and pan settings will be remembered for all Page: namespace pages that are linked to a particular Index: namespace page.
[255]
The Vector 2022 skin will become the default for the English Wikipedia desktop users. The change will take place on January 18 at 15:00 UTC.
Learn more.
Future changes
The 2023 edition of the
Community Wishlist Survey, which invites contributors to make technical proposals and vote for tools and improvements, starts next week on 23 January 2023 at 18:00 UTC. You can start drafting your proposals in
the CWS sandbox.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
Last week, for ~15 minutes, all wikis were unreachable for logged-in users and non-cached pages. This was caused by a timing issue.
[256]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 January. It will be on all wikis from 26 January (
calendar).
If you have the Beta Feature for
DiscussionTools enabled, the appearance of talk pages will add more information about discussion activity.
[257][258]
The 2023 edition of the
Community Wishlist Survey (CWS), which invites contributors to make technical proposals and vote for tools and improvements, starts on Monday 23 January 2023 at
18:00 UTC.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
Last week, for ~15 minutes, some users were unable to log in or edit pages. This was caused by a problem with session storage.
[259]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 February. It will be on all wikis from 2 February (
calendar).
Future changes
Wikis that use localized numbering schemes for references need to add new CSS. This will help to show citation numbers the same way in all reading and editing modes. If your wiki would prefer to do it yourselves, please see the
details and example CSS to copy from, and also add your wiki to the list. Otherwise, the developers will directly help out starting the week of February 5.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
In the
Vector 2022 skin, logged-out users using the full-width toggle will be able to see the setting of their choice even after refreshing pages or opening new ones. This only applies to wikis where Vector 2022 is the default.
[260]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 February. It will be on all wikis from 9 February (
calendar).
Previously, we announced when some wikis would be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. These switches will not be announced any more, as the read-only time has become non-significant. Switches will continue to happen at 7AM UTC on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
[261]
Across all the wikis, in the Vector 2022 skin, logged-in users will see the page-related links such as "What links here" in a
new side menu. It will be displayed on the other side of the screen. This change had previously been made on Czech, English, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
[262]
Gadgets and user scripts will be changing to load on desktop and mobile sites. Previously they would only load on the desktop site. It is recommended that wiki administrators audit the
gadget definitions prior to this change, and add skins=… for any gadgets which should not load on mobile.
More details are available.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
On wikis where patrolled edits are enabled, changes made to the
mentor list by autopatrolled mentors are not correctly marked as patrolled. It will be fixed later this week.
[263]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 February. It will be on all wikis from 16 February (
calendar).
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for
14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
[265][266][267]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
Last week, during planned maintenance of Cloud Services, unforeseen complications forced the team to turn off all tools for 2–3 hours to prevent data corruption. Work is ongoing to prevent similar problems in the future.
[268]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 February. It will be on all wikis from 23 February (
calendar).
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for
14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
[269][270][271]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
Last week, in some areas of the world, there were problems with loading pages for 20 minutes and saving edits for 55 minutes. These issues were caused by a problem with our caching servers due to unforseen events during a routine maintenance task.
[272][273]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 March. It will be on all wikis from 2 March (
calendar).
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for
14:00 UTC.
[274]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Community Wishlist Survey 2023 edition has been concluded. Community Tech has
published the results of the survey and will provide an update on what is next in April 2023.
On wikis which use
LanguageConverter to handle multiple writing systems, articles which used custom conversion rules in the wikitext (primarily on Chinese Wikipedia) would have these rules applied inconsistently in the table of contents, especially in the Vector 2022 skin. This has now been fixed.
[275]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 March. It will be on all wikis from 9 March (
calendar).
A search system has been added to the
Preferences screen. This will let you find different options more easily. Making it work on mobile devices will happen soon.
[276]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 March. It will be on all wikis from 16 March (
calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "
Add a link" (Chavacano de Zamboanga Wikipedia, Min Dong Chinese Wikipedia, Chechen Wikipedia, Cebuano Wikipedia, Chamorro Wikipedia, Cherokee Wikipedia, Cheyenne Wikipedia, Central Kurdish Wikipedia, Corsican Wikipedia, Kashubian Wikipedia, Church Slavic Wikipedia, Chuvash Wikipedia, Welsh Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia). This is part of the
progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can
configure how this feature works locally.
[277][278]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
Last week, some users experienced issues loading image thumbnails. This was due to incorrectly cached images.
[279]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 March. It will be on all wikis from 23 March (
calendar).
There will be a new option for Administrators when they are unblocking a user, to add the unblocked user’s user page to their watchlist. This will work both via
Special:Unblock and via the API.
[280]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Wikipedia mobile apps teams. During the meeting, we will discuss the current features and future roadmap. The meeting will be on
24 March at 17:00 (UTC). See
details and how to join.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The
AbuseFilter condition limit was increased from 1000 to 2000.
[281]
Desktop users are now able to subscribe to talk pages by clicking on the Subscribe link in the Tools menu. If you subscribe to a talk page, you receive
notifications when new topics are started on that talk page. This is separate from putting the page on your watchlist or subscribing to a single discussion.
[283]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 March. It will be on all wikis from 30 March (
calendar).
The legacy
Mobile Content Service is going away in July 2023. Developers are encouraged to switch to Parsoid or another API before then to ensure service continuity.
[285]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The system for automatically creating categories for the
Babel extension has had several important changes and fixes. One of them allows you to insert templates for automatic category descriptions on creation, allowing you to categorize the new categories.
[286][287][288][289][290]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 April. It will be on all wikis from 6 April (
calendar).
Some older
Web browsers will stop being able to use
JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis from this week. This mainly affects users of Internet Explorer 11. If you have an old web browser on your computer you can try to upgrade to a newer version.
[291]
The deprecated jquery.hoverIntent module has been removed. This module could be used by gadgets and user scripts, to create an artificial delay in how JavaScript responds to a hover event. Gadgets and user scripts should now use jQuery hover() or on() instead. Examples can be found in the
migration guide.
[292]
Some of the links in
Special:SpecialPages will be re-arranged. There will be a clearer separation between links that relate to all users, and links related to your own user account.
[293]
You will be able to hide the
Reply button in archived discussion pages with a new __ARCHIVEDTALK__ magic word. There will also be a new .mw-archivedtalk CSS class for hiding the Reply button in individual sections on a page.
[294][295][296]
Future changes
The Vega software that creates data visualizations in pages, such as graphs, will be upgraded to the newest version in the future. Graphs that still use the very old version 1.5 syntax may stop working properly. Most existing uses have been found and updated, but you can help to check, and to update any local documentation.
Examples of how to find and fix these graphs are available.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
There was a problem with all types of CentralNotice banners still being shown to logged-in users even if they had
turned off specific banner types. This has now been fixed.
[299]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 April. It will be on all wikis from 13 April (
calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "
Add a link" (Moroccan Arabic Wikipedia, Danish Wikipedia, Dinka Wikipedia, Lower Sorbian Wikipedia, Ewe Wikipedia, Greek Wikipedia, Emiliano-Romagnolo Wikipedia, Esperanto Wikipedia, Estonian Wikipedia, Basque Wikipedia, Extremaduran Wikipedia, Tumbuka Wikipedia, Fulah Wikipedia, Finnish Wikipedia, Võro Wikipedia, Fijian Wikipedia, Faroese Wikipedia, Arpitan Wikipedia, Northern Frisian Wikipedia, Friulian Wikipedia, Irish Wikipedia, Guianan Creole Wikipedia, Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia, Galician Wikipedia, Gilaki Wikipedia, Guarani Wikipedia, Goan Konkani Wikipedia, Gothic Wikipedia, Gujarati Wikipedia, Manx Wikipedia). This is part of the
progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can
configure how this feature works locally.
[300][301]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
At Wikimedia Commons, some thumbnails have not been getting replaced correctly after a new version of the image is uploaded. This should be fixed later this week.
[305][306]
For the last few weeks, some external tools had inconsistent problems with logging-in with OAuth. This has now been fixed.
[307]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 April. It will be on all wikis from 20 April (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Due to security issues with the
Graph extension, graphs have been disabled in all Wikimedia projects. Wikimedia Foundation teams are working to respond to these vulnerabilities.
[309]
For a few days, it was not possible to save some kinds of edits on the mobile version of a wiki. This has been fixed.
[310][311][312]
Changes later this week
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on April 26. This is planned for
14:00 UTC.
[313]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 April. It will be on all wikis from 27 April (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
The
Video2commons tool has been updated. This fixed several bugs related to YouTube uploads.
[317]
The
Special:Preferences page has been redesigned on mobile web. The new design makes it easier to browse the different categories and settings at low screen widths. You can also now access the page via a link in the Settings menu in the mobile web sidebar.
[318]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 May. It will be on all wikis from 4 May (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Last week, Community Tech released the first update for providing
better diffs, the #1 request in the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey.
This update adds legends and tooltips to inline diffs so that users unfamiliar with the blue and yellow highlights can better understand the type of edits made.
When you close an image that is displayed via MediaViewer, it will now return to the wiki page instead of going back in your browser history. This feature request was
voted #65 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.
[319]
The
SyntaxHighlight extension now supports wikitext as a selected language. Old alternatives that were used to highlight wikitext, such as html5, moin, and html+handlebars, can now be replaced.
[320]
Graph Extension update: Foundation developers have completed upgrading the visualization software to Vega5. Existing community graphs based on Vega2 are no longer compatible. Communities need to update local graphs and templates, and shared lua modules like
de:Modul:Graph. The
Vega Porting guide provides the most comprehensive detail on migration from Vega2 and
here is an example migration. Vega5 has currently just been enabled on mediawiki.org to provide a test environment for communities.
[322]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 May. It will be on all wikis from 11 May (
calendar).
Until now, all new OAuth apps went through manual review. Starting this week, apps using identification-only or basic authorizations will not require review.
[323]
There will be an
A/B test on 10 Wikipedias where the Vector 2022 skin is the default skin. Half of logged-in desktop users will see an interface where the different parts of the page are more clearly separated. You can
read more.
[325][326]
jquery.tipsy will be removed from the MediaWiki core. This will affect some user scripts. Many lines with .tipsy( can be commented out. OO.ui.PopupWidget can be used to keep things working like they are now. You can
read more and
read about how to find broken scripts.
[327]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
Citations that are automatically generated based on
ISBN are currently broken. This affects citations made with the
VisualEditor Automatic tab, and the use of the citoid API in gadgets and user scripts. Work is ongoing to restore this feature.
[328]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 May. It will be on all wikis from 18 May (
calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "
Add a link" (Gorontalo Wikipedia, Hausa Wikipedia, Hakka Chinese Wikipedia, Hawaiian Wikipedia, Fiji Hindi Wikipedia, Croatian Wikipedia, Upper Sorbian Wikipedia, Haitian Creole Wikipedia, Interlingua Wikipedia, Interlingue Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Iloko Wikipedia, Ingush Wikipedia, Ido Wikipedia, Icelandic Wikipedia, Inuktitut Wikipedia, Jamaican Patois Wikipedia, Javanese Wikipedia). This is part of the
progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can
configure how this feature works locally.
[329]
Gadget and userscript developers should replace jquery.cookie with mediawiki.cookie. The jquery.cookie library will be removed in ~1 month, and staff developers will run a script to replace any remaining uses at that time.
[330]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
An
improved impact module will be available at Wikipedias. The impact module is a feature available to newcomers
at their personal homepage. It will show their number of edits, how many readers their edited pages have, how many thanks they have received and similar things. It is also accessible by accessing Special:Impact.
[332]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 May. It will be on all wikis from 25 May (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Citations can once again be added automatically from ISBNs, thanks to Zotero's ISBN searches. The current data sources are the Library of Congress (United States), the Bibliothèque nationale de France (French National Library), and K10plus ISBN (German repository). Additional data source searches can be
proposed to Zotero. The ISBN labels in the
VisualEditor Automatic tab will reappear later this week.
[333]
For a few days earlier this month, the "Add interlanguage link" item in the Tools menu did not work properly. This has now been fixed.
[335]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 May. It will be on all wikis from 1 June (
calendar).
VisualEditor will be switched to a new backend on
small and
medium wikis this week. Large wikis will follow in the coming weeks. This is part of the effort to move Parsoid into MediaWiki core. The change should have no noticeable effect on users, but if you experience any slow loading or other strangeness when using VisualEditor, please report it on the phabricator ticket linked here.
[336]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The
RealMe extension allows you to mark URLs on your user page as verified for Mastodon and similar software.
Previously, clicking on someone else's link to Recent Changes with filters applied within the URL could unintentionally change your preference for "Group results by page". This has now been fixed.
[338]
Problems
For a few days last week, some tools and bots returned outdated information due to database replication problems, and may have been down entirely while it was being fixed. These issues have now been fixed.
[339]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 June. It will be on all wikis from 8 June (
calendar).
Bots will no longer be prevented from making edits because of URLs that match the
spam blacklist.
[340]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
The
Search Preview panel has been deployed on four Wikipedias (Catalan, Dutch, Hungarian and Norwegian). The panel will show an image related to the article (if existing), the top sections of the article, related images (coming from MediaSearch on Commons), and eventually the sister projects associated with the article.
[342]
The
RealMe extension now allows administrators to verify URLs for any page, for Mastodon and similar software.
[343]
The default project license
has been officially upgraded to CC BY-SA 4.0. The software interface messages have been updated. Communities should feel free to start updating any mentions of the old CC BY-SA 3.0 licensing within policies and related documentation pages.
[344]
Problems
For three days last month, some Wikipedia pages edited with VisualEditor or DiscussionTools had an unintended __TOC__ (or its localized form) added during an edit. There is
a listing of affected pages sorted by wiki, that may still need to be fixed.
[345]
Currently, the "Sort this page by default as" feature in VisualEditor is broken. Existing {{DEFAULTSORT:...}} keywords incorrectly appear as missing templates in VisualEditor. Developers are exploring how to fix this. In the meantime, those wishing to edit the default sortkey of a page are advised to switch to source editing.
[346]
Last week, an update to the delete form may have broken some gadgets or user scripts. If you need to manipulate (empty) the reason field, replace #wpReason with #wpReason > input. See
an example fix.
[347]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 June. It will be on all wikis from 15 June (
calendar).
VisualEditor will be switched to a new backend on English Wikipedia on Monday, and all other
large wikis on Thursday. The change should have no noticeable effect on users, but if you experience any slow loading or other strangeness when using VisualEditor, please report it on the phabricator ticket linked here.
[348]
Future changes
From 5 June to 17 July, the Foundation's
Security team is holding a consultation with contributors regarding a draft policy to govern the use of third-party resources in volunteer-developed gadgets and scripts. Feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome at
Third-party resources policy on meta-wiki.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Flame graphs are now available in WikimediaDebug.
[349][350]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
There is now a toolbar search popup in the visual editor. You can trigger it by typing \ or pressing ctrl + shift + p. It can help you quickly access most tools in the editor.
[351][352]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Action API modules and Special:LinkSearch will now add a trailing / to all prop=extlinks responses for bare domains. This is part of the work to remove duplication in the externallinks database table.
[353]
Problems
Last week, search was broken on Commons and Wikidata for 23 hours.
[354][355]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 June. It will be on all wikis from 29 June (
calendar).
The Minerva skin now applies more predefined styles to the .mbox-text CSS class. This enables support for mbox templates that use divs instead of tables. Please make sure that the new styles won't affect other templates in your wiki.
[356][357]
Gadgets will now load on both desktop and mobile by default. Previously, gadgets loaded only on desktop by default. Changing this default using the |targets= parameter is also deprecated and should not be used. You should make gadgets work on mobile or disable them based on the skin (with the |skins= parameter in MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition) rather than whether the user uses the mobile or the desktop website. Popular gadgets that create errors on mobile will be disabled by developers on the Minerva skin as a temporary solution.
[358]
All namespace tabs now have the same browser
access key by default. Previously, custom and extension-defined namespaces would have to have their access keys set manually on-wiki, but that is no longer necessary.
[359]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
From this week all gadgets automatically load on mobile and desktop sites. If you see any problems with gadgets on your wikis, please adjust the
gadget options in your gadget definitions file.
[363]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 July. It will be on all wikis from 6 July (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The
Section-level Image Suggestions feature has been deployed on seven Wikipedias (Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, Catalan, Hungarian, Finnish and Norwegian Bokmål). The feature recommends images for articles on contributors' watchlists that are a good match for individual sections of those articles.
Special:BlockedExternalDomains is a new tool for administrators to help fight spam. It provides a clearer interface for blocking plain domains (and their subdomains), is more easily searchable, and is faster for the software to process for each edit on the wiki. It does not support regex (for complex cases), nor URL path-matching, nor the
MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist, but otherwise it replaces most of the functionalities of the existing
MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. There is a Python script to help migrate all simple domains into this tool, and more feature details, within
the tool's documentation. It is available at all wikis except for Meta-wiki, Commons, and Wikidata.
[365]
The WikiEditor extension was updated. It includes some of the most frequently used features of wikitext editing. In the past, many of its messages could only be translated by administrators, but now all regular translators on translatewiki can translate them. Please check
the state of WikiEditor localization into your language, and if the "Completion" for your language shows anything less than 100%, please complete the translation. See
a more detailed explanation.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 July. It will be on all wikis from 13 July (
calendar).
The default protocol of
Special:LinkSearch and API counterparts has changed from http to both http and https.
[366]
Special:LinkSearch and its API counterparts will now search for all of the URL provided in the query. It used to be only the first 60 characters. This feature was requested fifteen years ago.
[367]
Future changes
There is an experiment with a
ChatGPT plugin. This is to show users where the information is coming from when they read information from Wikipedia. It has been tested by Wikimedia Foundation staff and other Wikimedians. Soon all ChatGPT plugin users can use the Wikipedia plugin. This is the same plugin which was mentioned in
Tech News 2023/20.
[368]
There is an ongoing discussion on a
proposed Third-party resources policy. The proposal will impact the use of third-party resources in gadgets and userscripts. Based on the ideas received so far, policy includes some of the risks related to user scripts and gadgets loading third-party resources, some best practices and exemption requirements such as code transparency and inspectability. Your feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome until July 17, 2023 on
on the policy talk page.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 July. It will be on all wikis from 20 July (
calendar).
MediaWiki
system messages will now look for available local fallbacks, instead of always using the default fallback defined by software. This means wikis no longer need to override each language on the
fallback chain separately. For example, English Wikipedia doesn't have to create en-ca and en-gb subpages with a transclusion of the base pages anymore. This makes it easier to maintain local overrides.
[369]
The action=growthsetmentorstatus API will be deprecated with the new MediaWiki version. Bots or scripts calling that API should use the action=growthmanagementorlist API now.
[370]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 July. It will be on all wikis from 27 July (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The
Synchronizer tool is now available to keep Lua modules synced across Wikimedia wikis, along with
updated documentation to develop global Lua modules and templates.
The tag filter on
Special:NewPages and revision history pages can now be inverted. For example, you can hide edits that were made using an automated tool.
[371][372]
The Wikipedia
ChatGPT plugin experiment can now be used by ChatGPT users who can use plugins. You can participate in a
video call if you want to talk about this experiment or similar work.
[373]
Problems
It was not possible to generate a PDF for pages with non-Latin characters in the title, for the last two weeks. This has now been fixed.
[374]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 August. It will be on all wikis from 3 August (
calendar).
Starting on Tuesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "
Add a link" (Georgian Wikipedia, Kara-Kalpak Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Kabardian Wikipedia, Kabiyè Wikipedia, Kikuyu Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Khmer Wikipedia, Kannada Wikipedia, Kashmiri Wikipedia, Colognian Wikipedia, Kurdish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia). This is part of the
progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can
configure how this feature works locally.
[375]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Mobile Web editors can now
edit a whole page at once. To use this feature, turn on "⧼Mobile-frontend-mobile-option-amc⧽" in your settings and use the "Edit full page" button in the "More" menu.
[376]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Content translation system is no longer using Youdao's
machine translation service. The service was in place for several years, but due to no usage, and availability of alternatives, it was deprecated to reduce maintenance overheads. Other services which cover the same languages are still available.
[377]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 August. It will be on all wikis from 17 August (
calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "
Add a link" (Latin Wikipedia, Ladino Wikipedia, Luxembourgish Wikipedia, Lak Wikipedia, Lezghian Wikipedia, Lingua Franca Nova Wikipedia, Ganda Wikipedia, Limburgish Wikipedia, Ligurian Wikipedia, Lombard Wikipedia, Lingala Wikipedia, Latgalian Wikipedia, Latvian Wikipedia, Maithili Wikipedia, Basa Banyumasan Wikipedia, Moksha Wikipedia, Malagasy Wikipedia, Armenian Wikipedia, Kyrgyz Wikipedia). This is part of the
progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can
configure how this feature works locally.
[378]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 August. It will be on all wikis from 24 August (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
As part of the changes for the
better diff handling of paragraph splits, improved detection of splits is being rolled out. Over the last two weeks, we deployed this support to
group0 and group1 wikis. This week it will be deployed to group2 wikis.
[389]
All
Special:Contributions pages now show the user's local edit count and the account's creation date.
[390]
Wikisource users can now use the prpbengalicurrency label to denote Bengali currency characters as page numbers inside the <pagelist> tag.
[391]
Two preferences have been relocated. The preference "Enable the visual editor" is now shown on the
"Editing" tab at all wikis. Previously it was shown on the "Beta features" tab at some wikis. The preference "Use the wikitext mode inside the visual editor, instead of a different wikitext editor" is now also shown on the "Editing" tab at all wikis, instead of the "Beta features" tab.
[392][393]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 August. It will be on all wikis from 31 August (
calendar).
All right-to-left language wikis, plus Korean, Armenian, Ukrainian, Russian, and Bulgarian Wikipedias, will have a link in the sidebar that provides a short URL of that page, using the
Wikimedia URL Shortener. This feature will come to more wikis in future weeks.
[394]
Future changes
The removal of the
DoubleWiki extension is being discussed. This extension currently allows Wikisource users to view articles from multiple language versions side by side when the <=> symbol next to a specific language edition is selected. Comments on this are welcomed at
the phabricator task.
A proposal has been made to merge the second hidden-categories list (which appears below the wikitext editing form) with the main list of categories (which is further down the page).
More information is available on Phabricator; feedback is welcome!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
EditInSequence, a feature that allows users to edit pages faster on Wikisource has been moved to a Beta Feature based on community feedback. To enable it, you can navigate to the
beta features tab in Preferences.
[395]
There is a new option for Administrators when they are changing the usergroups for a user, to add the user’s user page to their watchlist. This works both via
Special:UserRights and via the API.
[397]
The
LoginNotify extension was not sending notifications since January. It has now been fixed, so going forward, you may see notifications for failed login attempts, and successful login attempts from a new device.
[399]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 September. It will be on all wikis from 7 September (
calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "
Add a link" (Eastern Mari Wikipedia, Maori Wikipedia, Minangkabau Wikipedia, Macedonian Wikipedia, Malayalam Wikipedia, Mongolian Wikipedia, Marathi Wikipedia, Western Mari Wikipedia, Malay Wikipedia, Maltese Wikipedia, Mirandese Wikipedia, Erzya Wikipedia, Mazanderani Wikipedia, Nāhuatl Wikipedia, Neapolitan Wikipedia, Low German Wikipedia, Low Saxon Wikipedia, Nepali Wikipedia, Newari Wikipedia, Norwegian Nynorsk Wikipedia, Novial Wikipedia, N'Ko Wikipedia, Nouormand Wikipedia, Northern Sotho Wikipedia, Navajo Wikipedia, Nyanja Wikipedia, Occitan Wikipedia, Livvi-Karelian Wikipedia, Oromo Wikipedia, Oriya Wikipedia, Ossetic Wikipedia, Punjabi Wikipedia, Pangasinan Wikipedia, Pampanga Wikipedia, Papiamento Wikipedia, Picard Wikipedia, Pennsylvania German Wikipedia, Palatine German Wikipedia, Norfuk / Pitkern Wikipedia, Piedmontese Wikipedia, Western Punjabi Wikipedia, Pontic Wikipedia, Pashto Wikipedia). This is part of the
progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can
configure how this feature works locally.
[400][401]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
ORES, the revision evaluation service, is now using a new open-source infrastructure on all wikis except for English Wikipedia and Wikidata. These two will follow this week. If you notice any unusual results from the Recent Changes filters that are related to ORES (for example, "Contribution quality predictions" and "User intent predictions"), please
report them.
[402]
When you are logged in on one Wikimedia wiki and visit a different Wikimedia wiki, the system tries to log you in there automatically. This has been unreliable for a long time. You can now visit the login page to make the system try extra hard. If you feel that made logging in better or worse than it used to be, your feedback is appreciated.
[403]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 September. It will be on all wikis from 14 September (
calendar).
As part of the changes for the
Better diff handling of paragraph splits wishlist proposal, the inline switch widget in diff pages is being rolled out this week to all wikis. The inline switch will allow viewers to toggle between a unified inline or two-column diff wikitext format.
[404]
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on 20 September.
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.
[405]
The Enterprise API is launching a new feature called "
breaking news". Currently in BETA, this attempts to identify likely "newsworthy" topics as they are currently being written about in any Wikipedia. Your help is requested to improve the accuracy of its detection model, especially on smaller language editions, by recommending templates or identifiable editing patterns. See more information at
the documentation page on MediaWiki or
the FAQ on Meta.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
MediaWiki now has a
stable interface policy for frontend code that more clearly defines how we deprecate MediaWiki code and wiki-based code (e.g. gadgets and user scripts). Thank you to everyone who contributed to the content and discussions.
[406][407]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 September. It will be on all wikis from 21 September (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Vector 2022 skin will now remember the pinned/unpinned status for the Table of Contents for all logged-out users.
[410]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 September. It will be on all wikis from 28 September (
calendar).
Gadget definitions will have a
new "namespaces" option. The option takes a list of namespace IDs. Gadgets that use this option will only load on pages in the given namespaces.
Future changes
New variables will be added to
AbuseFilter: global_account_groups and global_account_editcount. They are available only when an account is being created. You can use them to prevent blocking automatic creation of accounts when users with many edits elsewhere visit your wiki for the first time.
[411][412]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Wikipedia mobile apps teams. During the meeting, we will discuss the current features and future roadmap. The meeting will be on
27 October at 17:00 (UTC). See
details and how to join.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a new
user preference for "Always enable
safe mode". This setting will make pages load without including any on-wiki JavaScript or on-wiki stylesheet pages. It can be useful for debugging broken JavaScript gadgets.
[413]
Gadget definitions now have a
new "contentModels" option. The option takes a list of page content models, like wikitext or css. Gadgets that use this option will only load on pages with the given content models.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 October. It will be on all wikis from 5 October (
calendar).
Future changes
The Vector 2022 skin will no longer use the custom styles and scripts of Vector legacy (2010). The change will be made later this year or in early 2024. See
how to adjust the CSS and JS pages on your wiki.
[414]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in
Fon (
w:fon:)
[415]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 October. It will be on all wikis from 12 October (
calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "
Add a link" (Swahili Wikipedia, Walloon Wikipedia, Waray Wikipedia, Wolof Wikipedia, Kalmyk Wikipedia, Xhosa Wikipedia, Mingrelian Wikipedia, Yiddish Wikipedia, Yoruba Wikipedia, Zhuang Wikipedia, Zeelandic Wikipedia, Min Nan Wikipedia, Zulu Wikipedia). This is part of the
progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can
configure how this feature works locally.
[416]
At some wikis, newcomers are suggested images from Commons to add to articles without any images. Starting on Tuesday, newcomers at these wikis will be able to add images to unillustrated article sections. The specific wikis are listed under "Images recommendations"
at the Growth team deployment table. You can
learn more about this feature.[417]
In the mobile web skin (Minerva) the CSS ID #page-actions will be replaced with #p-views. This change is to make it consistent with other skins and to improve support for gadgets and extensions in the mobile skin. A few gadgets may need to be updated; there are
details and search-links in the task.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The
Unified login system's edge login should now be fixed for some browsers (Chrome, Edge, Opera). This means that if you visit a new sister project wiki, you should be logged in automatically without the need to click "Log in" or reload the page. Feedback on whether it's working for you is welcome.
[418]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 October. It will be on all wikis from 19 October (
calendar).
Future changes
In 3 weeks, in the Vector 2022 skin, code related to addPortletLink and #p-namespaces that was deprecated one year ago will be removed. If you notice tools that should appear next to the "Discussion" tab are then missing, please tell the gadget's maintainers to see
instructions in the Phabricator task.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a new
Language and internationalization newsletter, written quarterly. It contains updates on new feature development, improvements in various language-related technical projects, and related support work.
Source map support has been enabled on all wikis. When you open the debugger in your browser's developer tools, you should be able to see the unminified JavaScript source code.
[419]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 October. It will be on all wikis from 26 October (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Structured Content team, as part of its project of
improving UploadWizard on Commons, made some UX improvements to the upload step of choosing own vs not own work (
T347590), as well as to the licensing step for own work (
T347756).
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 November. It will be on all wikis from 2 November (
calendar).
Listings on category pages are sorted on each wiki for that language using a
library. For a brief period on 2 November, changes to categories will not be sorted correctly for many languages. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the library. They will then use a script to fix the existing categories. This will take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can
read more.
[420][421]
Starting November 1, the impact module (Special:Impact) will be upgraded by the Growth team. The new impact module shows newcomers more data regarding their impact on the wiki. It was tested by a few wikis during the last few months.
[422]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
In the Vector 2022 skin, the default font-size of a number of navigational elements (tagline, tools menu, navigational links, and more) has been increased slightly to match the font size used in page content.
[423]
Problems
Last week, there was a problem displaying some recent edits on
a few wikis, for 1-6 hours. The edits were saved but not immediately shown. This was due to a database problem.
[424]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 November. It will be on all wikis from 9 November (
calendar).
The Growth team will reassign newcomers from former mentors to
the currently active mentors. They have also changed the notification language to be more user-friendly.
[425][426]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Last week, users who previously visited Meta-Wiki or Wikimedia Commons and then became logged out on those wikis could not log in again. The problem is now resolved.
[431]
Last week, some pop-up dialogs and menus were shown with the wrong font size. The problem is now resolved.
[432]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 November. It will be on all wikis from 16 November (
calendar).
Future changes
Reference Previews are coming to many wikis as a default feature. They are popups for references, similar to the
PagePreviews feature.
You can opt out of seeing them. If you are
using the gadgets Reference Tooltips or Navigation Popups, you won’t see Reference Previews.
Deployment is planned for November 22, 2023.
Canary (also known as heartbeat) events will be produced into
Wikimedia event streams from December 11. Streams users are advised to filter out these events, by discarding all events where meta.domain == "canary". Updates to
Pywikibot or
wikimedia-streams will discard these events by default.
[433]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
[434][435]
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "
Add a link" (Quechua Wikipedia, Romansh Wikipedia, Romani Wikipedia, Rundi Wikipedia, Aromanian Wikipedia, Tarandíne Wikipedia, Rusyn Wikipedia, Kinyarwanda Wikipedia, Sanskrit Wikipedia, Sakha Wikipedia, Santali Wikipedia, Sardinian Wikipedia, Sicilian Wikipedia, Scots Wikipedia, Sindhi Wikipedia, Northern Sami Wikipedia, Sango Wikipedia, Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, Sinhala Wikipedia, Slovak Wikipedia, Slovenian Wikipedia, Samoan Wikipedia, Somali Wikipedia, Albanian Wikipedia, Serbian Wikipedia, Sranan Tongo Wikipedia, Swati Wikipedia, Southern Sotho Wikipedia, Saterland Frisian Wikipedia, Sundanese Wikipedia, Silesian Wikipedia, Tamil Wikipedia, Tulu Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Tetum Wikipedia, Tajik Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Turkmen Wikipedia, Tagalog Wikipedia, Tswana Wikipedia, Tongan Wikipedia, Tok Pisin Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Tsonga Wikipedia, Tatar Wikipedia, Twi Wikipedia, Tahitian Wikipedia, Tuvinian Wikipedia, Udmurt Wikipedia, Uyghur Wikipedia, Uzbek Wikipedia, Venda Wikipedia, Venetian Wikipedia, Veps Wikipedia, West Flemish Wikipedia, Volapük Wikipedia). This is part of the
progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can
configure how this feature works locally.
[436][437][438]
The Vector 2022 skin will have some minor visual changes to drop-down menus, column widths, and more. These changes were added to four Wikipedias last week. If no issues are found, these changes will proceed to all wikis this week. These changes will make it possible to add new menus for readability and dark mode.
Learn more.
[439]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 November. It will be on all wikis from 30 November (
calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week.
[440][441]
MediaWiki's JavaScript system will now allow async/await syntax in gadgets and user scripts. Gadget authors should remember that users' browsers may not support it, so it should be used appropriately.
[442]
The deployment of "
Add a link" announced
last week was postponed. It will resume this week.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The spacing between paragraphs on Vector 2022 has been changed from 7px to 14px to match the size of the text. This will make it easier to distinguish paragraphs from sentences.
[443]
The "Sort this page by default as" feature in VisualEditor is working again. You no longer need to switch to source editing to edit {{DEFAULTSORT:...}} keywords.
[444]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
[445][446]
Registration & Scholarship applications are now open for the
Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 that will take place from 3–5 May in Tallinn, Estonia. Scholarship applications are open until 5 January 2024.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
On Wikimedia Commons, there are some minor user-interface improvements for the "choosing own vs not own work" step in the UploadWizard. This is part of the Structured Content team's project of
improving UploadWizard on Commons.
[448][449]
Problems
There was a problem showing the
Newcomer homepage feature with the "impact module" and their page-view graphs, for a few days in early December. This has now been fixed.
[450][451]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 December. It will be on all wikis from 14 December (
calendar).
[452][453]
Future changes
The
2023 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 5 January 2024, and has an associated
privacy statement.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Tech News
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 8 January 2024 because of
the holidays.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 December. It will be on all wikis from 21 December (
calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week.
[454][455]
Starting December 18, it won't be possible to activate Structured Discussions on a user's own talk page using the Beta feature. The Beta feature option remains available for users who want to deactivate Structured Discussions. This is part of
Structured Discussions' deprecation work.
[456]
There will be full support for redirects in the Module namespace. The "Move Page" feature will leave an appropriate redirect behind, and such redirects will be appropriately recognized by the software (e.g. hidden from
Special:UnconnectedPages). There will also be support for
manual redirects.
[457]
Future changes
The MediaWiki JavaScript documentation is moving to a new format. During the move, you can read the old docs using
version 1.41. Feedback about
the new site is welcome on the
project talk page.
The Wishathon is a new initiative that encourages collaboration across the Wikimedia community to develop solutions for wishes collected through the
Community Wishlist Survey. The first community Wishathon will take place from 15–17 March. If you are interested in a project proposal as a user, developer, designer, or product lead, you can
register for the event and read more.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
mediawiki2latex is a tool that converts wiki content into the formats of LaTeX, PDF, ODT, and EPUB. The code now runs many times faster due to recent improvements. There is also an optional Docker container you can
install on your local machine.
The way that Random pages are selected has been updated. This will slowly reduce the problem of some pages having a lower chance of appearing.
[458]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 January. It will be on all wikis from 11 January (
calendar).
[459][460]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Pages that use the JSON
contentmodel will now use tabs instead of spaces for auto-indentation. This will significantly reduce the page size.
[461]
Gadgets and personal user scripts may now use JavaScript syntax introduced in ES6 (also known as "ES2015") and ES7 ("ES2016"). MediaWiki validates the source code to protect other site functionality from syntax errors, and to ensure scripts are valid in all
supported browsers. Previously, Gadgets could use the requiresES6 option. This option is no longer needed and will be removed in the future.
[462]
An update on the status of the Community Wishlist Survey for 2024
has been published. Please read and give your feedback.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 January. It will be on all wikis from 18 January (
calendar).
[465][466]
Starting on January 17, it will not be possible to login to Wikimedia wikis from some specific old versions of the Chrome browser (versions 51–66, released between 2016 and 2018). Additionally, users of iOS 12, or Safari on Mac OS 10.14, may need to login to each wiki separately.
[467]
The jquery.cookie module was deprecated and replaced with the mediawiki.cookie module last year. A script has now been run to replace any remaining uses, and this week the temporary alias will be removed.
[468]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
A bug in UploadWizard prevented linking to the userpage of the uploader when uploading. It has now been fixed.
[469]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 January. It will be on all wikis from 25 January (
calendar).
[470][471]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Starting Monday January 29, all talk pages messages' timestamps will become a link. This link is a permanent link to the comment. It allows users to find the comment they are looking for, even if this comment was moved elsewhere. This will affect all wikis except for the English Wikipedia. You can read more about this change
on Diff or
on Mediawiki.org.
[472]
There are some improvements to the CAPTCHA to make it harder for spam bots and scripts to bypass it. If you have feedback on this change, please comment on
the task. Staff are monitoring metrics related to the CAPTCHA, as well as secondary metrics such as account creations and edit counts.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 January. It will be on all wikis from 1 February (
calendar).
[473][474]
Gadgets which only work in some skins have sometimes used the targets option to limit where you can use them. This will stop working this week. You should use the skins option instead.
[476]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The mobile site history pages now use the same HTML as the desktop history pages. If you hear of any problems relating to mobile history usage please point them to
the phabricator task.
On most wikis, admins can now block users from making specific actions. These actions are: uploading files, creating new pages, moving (renaming) pages, and sending thanks. The goal of this feature is to allow admins to apply blocks that are adequate to the blocked users' activity.
Learn more about "action blocks".
[477][478]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 February. It will be on all wikis from 8 February (
calendar).
[479][480]
Talk pages permalinks that included diacritics and non-Latin script were malfunctioning. This issue is fixed.
[481]
Future changes
24 Wikipedias with
Reference Tooltips as a default gadget are encouraged to remove that default flag. This would make
Reference Previews the new default for reference popups, leading to a more consistent experience across wikis. For
46 Wikipedias with less than 4 interface admins, the change is already scheduled for mid-February,
unless there are concerns. The older Reference Tooltips gadget will still remain usable and will override this feature, if it is available on your wiki and you have enabled it in your settings.
[482][483]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The
WDQS Graph Split experiment is working and loaded onto 3 test servers. The team in charge is testing the split's impact and requires feedback from WDQS users through the UI or programmatically in different channels.
[484][485][486] Users' feedback will validate the impact of various use cases and workflows around the Wikidata Query service.
[487][488]
Problems
There was a bug that affected the appearance of visited links when using mobile device to access wiki sites. It made the links appear black;
this issue is fixed.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 February. It will be on all wikis from 15 February (
calendar).
[489][490]
As work continues on the grid engine deprecation,
[491] tools on the grid engine will be stopped starting on February 14th, 2024. If you have tools actively migrating you can ask for an extension so they are not stopped.
[492]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
If you have the "Email me when a page or a file on my watchlist is changed" option enabled, edits by bot accounts no longer trigger notification emails. Previously, only minor edits would not trigger the notification emails.
[493]
There are changes to how user and site scripts load for
Vector 2022 on specific wikis. The changes impacted the following Wikis: all projects with
Vector legacy as the default skin, Wikivoyage, and Wikibooks. Other wikis will be affected over the course of the next three months. Gadgets are not impacted. If you have been affected or want to minimize the impact on your project, see
this ticket. Please coordinate and take action proactively.
Newly auto-created accounts (the accounts you get when you visit a new wiki) now have the same local notification preferences as users who freshly register on that wiki. It is effected in four notification types listed in the
task's description.
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 February. It will be on all wikis from 22 February (
calendar).
[495][496]
Selected tools on the grid engine have been
stopped as we prepare to shut down the grid on March 14th, 2024. The tool's code and data have not been deleted. If you are a maintainer and you want your tool re-enabled reach out to the
team. Only tools that have asked for extension are still running on the grid.
The CSS filter property can now be used in HTML style attributes in wikitext.
[497]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The
mobile visual editor is now the default editor for users who never edited before, at a small group of wikis.
Research shows that users using this editor are slightly more successful publishing the edits they started, and slightly less successful publishing non-reverted edits. Users who defined the wikitext editor as their default on desktop will get the wikitext editor on mobile for their first edit on mobile as well.
[498]
The
mw.config value wgGlobalGroups now only contains groups that are active in the wiki. Scripts no longer have to check whether the group is active on the wiki via an API request. A code example of the above is: if (/globalgroupname/.test(mw.config.get("wgGlobalGroups"))).
[499]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 February. It will be on all wikis from 29 February (
calendar).
[500][501]
Future changes
The right to change
edit tags (changetags) will be removed from users in Wikimedia sites, keeping it by default for admins and bots only. Your community can ask to retain the old configuration on your wiki before this change happens. Please indicate in
this ticket to keep it for your community before the end of March 2024.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Special:Book page (as well as the associated "Create a book" functionality) provided by the old
Collection extension has been removed from all Wikisource wikis, as it was broken. This does not affect the ability to download normal books, which is provided by the
Wikisource extension.
[502]
Maintenance on
etherpad is completed. If you encounter any issues, please indicate in
this ticket.
Gadgets allow interface admins to create custom features with CSS and JavaScript. The Gadget and Gadget_definition namespaces and gadgets-definition-edit user right were reserved for an experiment in 2015, but were never used. These were visible on Special:Search and Special:ListGroupRights. The unused namespaces and user rights are now removed. No pages are moved, and no changes need to be made.
[503]
A usability improvement to the "Add a citation" in Wikipedia workflow has been made, the insert button was moved to the popup header.
[504]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 March. It will be on all wikis from 7 March (
calendar).
[505][506]
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. 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.
[507]
The HTML markup of headings and section edit links will be changed later this year to improve accessibility. See
Heading HTML changes for details. The new markup will be the same as in the new Parsoid wikitext parser. You can test your gadget or stylesheet with the new markup if you add ?useparsoid=1 to your URL (
more info) or turn on Parsoid read views in your user options (
more info).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 March. It will be on all wikis from 14 March (
calendar).
[508][509]
After consulting with various communities, the line height of the text on the
Minerva skin will be increased to its previous value of 1.65. Different options for typography can also be set using the options in the menu, as needed.
[510]
The active link color in
Minerva will be changed to provide more consistency with our other platforms and best practices.
[511]
Structured data on Commons will no longer ask whether you want to leave the page without saving. This will prevent the “information you’ve entered may not be saved” popups from appearing when no information have been entered. It will also make file pages on Commons load faster in certain cases. However, the popups will be hidden even if information has indeed been entered. If you accidentally close the page before saving the structured data you entered, that data will be lost.
[512]
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. 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.
[513][514]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The notice "Language links are at the top of the page" that appears in the
Vector 2022 skin main menu has been removed now that users have learned the new location of the Language switcher.
[515]
IP info feature displays data from Spur, an IP addresses database. Previously, the only data source for this feature was MaxMind. Now, IP info is more useful for patrollers.
[516]
The Toolforge Grid Engine services have been shut down after the final migration process from Grid Engine to Kubernetes.
[517][518][519]
RevisionSlider is an interface to interactively browse a page's history. Users in
right-to-left languages reported RevisionSlider reacting wrong to mouse clicks. This should be fixed now.
[521]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 March. It will be on all wikis from 21 March (
calendar).
[522][523]
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at
14:00 UTC.
[524][525]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
An update was made on March 18th 2024 to how various projects load site, user JavaScript and CSS in
Vector 2022 skin. A
checklist is provided for site admins to follow.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 March. It will be on all wikis from 28 March (
calendar).
[526][527]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Users of the
reading accessibility beta feature will notice that the default line height for the standard and large text options has changed.
[528]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 April. It will be on all wikis from 4 April (
calendar).
[529][530]
Future changes
The Wikimedia Foundation has an annual plan. The annual plan decides what the Wikimedia Foundation will work on. You can now read
the draft key results for the Product and Technology department. They are suggestions for what results the Foundation wants from big technical changes from July 2024 to June 2025. You can
comment on the talk page.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Web browsers can use tools called
extensions. There is now a Chrome extension called
Citation Needed which you can use to see if an online statement is supported by a Wikipedia article. This is a small experiment to see if Wikipedia can be used this way. Because it is a small experiment, it can only be used in Chrome in English.
A new
Edit Recovery feature has been added to all wikis, available as a
user preference. Once you enable it, your in-progress edits will be stored in your web browser, and if you accidentally close an editing window or your browser or computer crashes, you will be prompted to recover the unpublished text. Please leave any feedback on the
project talk page. This was the #8 wish in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.
Readers using the
Minerva skin on mobile will notice there has been an improvement in the line height across all typography settings.
[533]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 April. It will be on all wikis from 11 April (
calendar).
[534][535]
New accounts and logged-out users will get the
visual editor as their default editor on mobile. This deployment is made at all wikis except for the English Wikipedia.
[536]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
Between 2 April and 8 April, on wikis using
Flagged Revisions, the "Reverted" tag was not applied to undone edits. In addition, page moves, protections and imports were not autoreviewed. This problem is now fixed.
[537][538]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 April. It will be on all wikis from 18 April (
calendar).
[539][540]
Default category sort keys will now affect categories added by templates placed in
footnotes. Previously footnotes used the page title as the default sort key even if a different default sort key was specified (category-specific sort keys already worked).
[541]
A new variable page_last_edit_age will be added to
abuse filters. It tells how many seconds ago the last edit to a page was made.
[542]
Future changes
Volunteer developers are kindly asked to update the code of their tools and features to handle
temporary accounts.
Learn more.
Four database fields will be removed from database replicas (including
Quarry). This affects only the abuse_filter and abuse_filter_history tables. Some queries might need to be updated.
[543]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
You can
nominate your favorite tools for the fifth edition of the Coolest Tool Award. Nominations will be open until May 10.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 April. It will be on all wikis from 25 April (
calendar).
[545][546]
Future changes
This is the last warning that by the end of May 2024 the Vector 2022 skin will no longer share site and user scripts/styles with old Vector. For user-scripts that you want to keep using on Vector 2022, copy the contents of
Special:MyPage/vector.js to
Special:MyPage/vector-2022.js. There are
more technical details available. Interface administrators who foresee this leading to lots of technical support questions may wish to send a mass message to your community, as was done on French Wikipedia.
[547]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The appearance of talk pages changed for the following wikis: Azerbaijani Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, Persian Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Romanian Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Vietnamese Wikipedia. These wikis participated to a test, where 50% of users got the new design, for one year. As this test
gave positive results, the new design is deployed on these wikis as the default design. It is possible to opt-out these changes
in user preferences ("Show discussion activity"). The deployment will happen at all wikis in the coming weeks.
[548]
Kartographer maps can use an alternative visual style without labels, by using mapstyle="osm". This wasn't working in previews, creating the wrong impression that it wasn't supported. This has now been fixed.
[557]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 May. It will be on all wikis from 2 May (
calendar).
[558][559]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The appearance of talk pages changed for all wikis, except for Commons, Wikidata and most Wikipedias (
a few have already received this design change). You can read the detail of the changes
on Diff. It is possible to opt-out these changes
in user preferences ("Show discussion activity"). The deployment will happen at remaining wikis in the coming weeks.
[560][561]
Interface admins now have greater control over the styling of article components on mobile with the introduction of the SiteAdminHelper. More information on how styles can be disabled can be found
at the extension's page.
[562]
Wikimedia Enterprise has added article body sections in JSON format and a curated short description field to the existing parsed Infobox. This expansion to the API is also available via Wikimedia Cloud Services.
[563]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 May. It will be on all wikis from 9 May (
calendar).
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When you look at the Special:Log page, the first view is labelled "All public logs", but it only shows some logs. This label will now say "Main public logs".
[566]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
On Wikisource there is a special page listing pages of works without corresponding scan images. Now you can use the new magic word __EXPECTWITHOUTSCANS__ to exclude certain pages (list of editions or translations of works) from that list.
[568]
If you use the
user-preference "Show preview without reloading the page", then the template-page feature "Preview page with this template (
what's this?)" will now also work without reloading the page.
[569]
Kartographer maps can now specify an alternative text via the alt= attribute. This is identical in usage to the alt= attribute in the
image and gallery syntax. An exception for this feature is wikis like Wikivoyage where the miniature maps are interactive.
[570]
The old
Guided Tour for the "
New Filters for Edit Review" feature has been removed. It was created in 2017 to show people with older accounts how the interface had changed, and has now been seen by most of the intended people.
[571]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 May. It will be on all wikis from 16 May (
calendar).
[572][573]
The
Special:Search results page will now use CSS flex attributes, for better accessibility, instead of a table. If you have a gadget or script that adjusts search results, you should update your script to the new HTML structure.
[574]
Future changes
In the Vector 2022 skin, main pages will be displayed at full width (like special pages). The goal is to keep the number of characters per line large enough. This is related to the coming changes to typography in Vector 2022.
Learn more.
[575]
Two columns of the pagelinks database table (pl_namespace and pl_title) are being dropped soon. Users must use two columns of the new linktarget table instead (lt_namespace and lt_title). In your existing SQL queries:
Replace JOIN pagelinks with JOIN linktarget and pl_ with lt_ in the ON statement
Below that add JOIN pagelinks ON lt_id = pl_target_id
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The
Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, will now correctly delete pages which were moved to another title.
[578]
New changes have been made to the UploadWizard in Wikimedia Commons: the overall layout has been improved, by following new styling and spacing for the form and its fields; the headers and helper text for each of the fields was changed; the Caption field is now a required field, and there is an option for users to copy their caption into the media description.
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Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 May. It will be on all wikis from 23 May (
calendar).
[581][582]
The HTML used to render all headings
is being changed to improve accessibility. It will change on 22 May in some skins (Timeless, Modern, CologneBlue, Nostalgia, and Monobook). Please test gadgets on your wiki on these skins and
report any related problems so that they can be resolved before this change is made in all other skins. The developers are also considering the introduction of a
Gadget API for adding buttons to section titles if that would be helpful to tool creators, and would appreciate any input you have on that.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Several bugs related to the latest updates to the UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons have been fixed. For more information, see
T365107 and
T365119.
In March 2024 a new
addPortlet API was added to allow gadgets to create new portlets (menus) in the skin. In certain skins this can be used to create dropdowns. Gadget developers are invited to try it and
give feedback.
Some CSS in the Minerva skin has been removed to enable easier community configuration. Interface editors should check the rendering on mobile devices for aspects related to the classes: .collapsible, .multicol, .reflist, .coordinates, .topicon.
Further details are available on replacement CSS if it is needed.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 May. It will be on all wikis from 30 May (
calendar).
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When you visit a wiki where you don't yet have a local account, local rules such as edit filters can sometimes prevent your account from being created. Starting this week, MediaWiki takes your global rights into account when evaluating whether you can override such local rules.
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