Community Wishlist/Updates

June 18, 2025: Results of our last Wishathon sprint

Hello everyone! We wanted to share with you the results of the recently closed “Wishathon”, our internal hackathon organized by Community Tech to help fulfill more wishes from Community Wishlist.

The Wishathon, which ran from Monday 19 to Friday 23 May, engaged Wikimedia Foundation staff to help fulfill more wishes, and also foster cross-team and cross-departmental collaboration.

22 patches were written during the week, of which 4 were already merged. This allowed us to grant three wishes from the community, and we have a clearer path ahead for five more wishes.

The wishes granted through our Wishathon include:

Filing a patch to introduce the ability to set default watchlist expiries (phab:T265716; thanks to This, that and the other, MusikAnimal, and Susana Cardenas Molinar)
Fixing a bug that prevented the “[show/hide]” dropdown button of the navigational boxes to be shown by the “edit preview” reload button (phab:T315894, which came also with phab:T394078 to be fixed first; thanks to Sam Wilson and Joydeep Sengupta)
Filing seven different patches to the CSS sanitizer (phab:T324526, phab:T394619, phab:T277755, phab:T360725, phab:T368089, phab:T293633, and phab:T371809) that are awaiting code review at the moment, plus a couple more ideas to be evaluated (phab:T394963 and phab:T394964; thanks to Tim Starling and MusikAnimal)

In addition to that, we also worked on the following tasks and wishes:

Improved the way translation on discussion pages of wishes work (phab:T295862 and phab:T363306; thanks to Nik Gkountas and Joydeep Sengupta)
Realising a functional prototype to select templates by categories, related to Template recall and discovery (phab:T392553, thanks to Sam Wilson)
Completing the design and WIP implementation to revamp pagination of page navigation (phab:T394637, thanks to Michelle Horsey and Bárbara Martínez)
Improved the modules of the Wikimedia Dashboard (thanks to Arina Igumenshcheva, Dayllan Maza, Harumi Monroy, Jack Wheeler, Julieta Fernandez, and Katherine Graessle)

As you can see, wishes are very different in complexity and feasibility, so in some cases (such as the “[show/hide]” dropdown button and the CSS sanitizer) we were able to resolve all or at least most of the it, others (such as the Wikimedia Dashboard modules) are more experimental in nature, and we could only do some improvements without resolving it completely. Our work will be used to guide the direction of teams in this regard.

May 14, 2025: Multiblocks, Favourite templates, and upcoming Wishlist improvements

Multiblocks, the #14 wish in the Community Wishlist Survey 2023, has been successfully released on four wikis (Polish, German, Italian and Hebrew Wikipedia) and will begin mass deployment by the end of the month: all non-Wikipedia projects plus Catalan Wikipedia will adopt Multiblocks on the week of May 26, while all other Wikipedias will adopt it on the week of June 2. Consult our current deployment schedule on Phabricator to know more.

With Multiblocks, admins get more block options: a sitewide and a partial block can run at the same time with different expiry dates. This eliminates the need to wait for the expiration of one block to apply the other. An admin may want to initially impose a temporary sitewide block on a disruptive user, and later keep their access to specific pages or namespaces restricted. This may be useful in cases of blocking Wikipedians heavily involved in editing specific namespaces or pages.

We are also working on Favourite Templates, a new feature that was suggested by several users, that will provide a better way for new and experienced contributors to recall and discover templates via the template dialog. We hope this will increase dialog usage and the number of templates added.

Since 2013, experienced volunteers have asked for a more intuitive template selector, exposing popular or most-used templates on the templates dialog. At this stage of work, we are focusing on allowing users to put templates in a “favourite” list, so that their reuse will be easier. We are currently exploring additional ways to help users discover or find templates, and welcome your ideas and feedback.

We will involve Polish and Arabic Wikipedias for piloting this new feature, and we are already evaluating involving other projects for a second phase of piloting. We will keep you posted about this.

Lastly we are working on some improvements to the Wishlist:

we are exploring new ways to update the status of the focus areas and wishes, to make them more clear to users;
we will introduce a better way to categorise wishes, as requested, as well as ordering them by date of creation, to make them more browsable;
and finally, we will introduce (in the upcoming months, probably July-September 2025) a way for users to support individual wishes, and not just focus areas.

We also want to discuss one more consideration for the Wishlist, which we’d like your input. As WMF product teams and developers work off Phabricator to prioritize tasks, some teams have asked for a tighter integration between the Wishlist and Phabricator, so they can evaluate wishes and Phabricator tasks when they prioritize work. We’ve evaluated the data, and approximately 30% of wishes have a Phabricator task already. What is the ideal relationship between the Wishlist and Phabricator, and how should that be represented?

March 12, 2025: Multiblocks pilot

Multiblocks, the #14 wish in the Community Wishlist Survey 2023 will be released to the Polish-language Wikipedia by the end of March 2025 for piloting. We are also seeking additional wikis to pilot with. We have a deployment schedule on Phabricator.

With Multiblocks, admins get more block options: a sitewide and a partial block can run at the same time with different expiry dates. This eliminates the need to wait for the expiration of one block to apply the other. An admin may want to initially impose a temporary sitewide block on a disruptive user, and later keep their access to specific pages or namespaces restricted. This may be useful in cases of blocking Wikipedians heavily involved in editing specific namespaces or pages.

Currently, admins must wait for the first block to expire before applying a second one. They need to find other solutions like setting reminders to return and update the restrictions manually. With Multiblocks, this extra step is no longer necessary. As part of preparations for building Multiblocks, Community Tech has redesigned the Special:Block page using Codex. The block log has been repositioned towards the top of the page so the admins can easily access this information to decide the nature of subsequent blocks.

Blocks can now be applied using precise date selections, providing clearer and more consistent expiration settings compared to written time intervals such as "fortnights." These design changes serve as foundational steps for the Multiblocks implementation.

The refreshed Special:Block page is accessible via applying a url parameter ?usecodex=1 to the end of the link to an admin's block page. You can try it out. Give feedback about the refreshed Special:Block page on the project talk page.

Some communities may need to update their policies or guidelines for using Multiblocks. We encourage you to start considering these needs if they apply to you. Community Tech is here to support your discussions and will also be listening to how communities wish to approach this.

Thank you for your patience as we work towards delivering this helpful new feature.

February 20, 2025: Codex Special:Block Design Testers Needed

As CommTech prepares to fulfil the Multiblocks wish, we are redesigning the Special:Block page using Codex. Admins are invited to test a prototype of the refreshed block page in a moderated user test conducted by CommTech's Principal User Experience Designer Joydeep Sengupta. To sign up, please visit the Multiblocks talk page where we have some slots open for booking.

December 16, 2024: Better stitching between Commons and other projects is open for discussion and support

The Community Wishlist has curated a focus area from requests to improve connection between Wikimedia Commons and other Wikimedia projects. The focus area is titled Better stitching between Commons and other projects. It is also open for discussion and support.

October 27, 2024: Article Creation focus area is open for discussion and support

The Community Wishlist has created a collection of wishes and suggestions over time, highlighting the need for better support and guidance for newcomers as they create articles, while also aiming to reduce frustration and reverts. These ideas have been grouped under the Article Creation Guidance Focus Area.

All who are interested in the improvement of newcomer workflows are invited to explore these wishes, join the discussion on the focus area's collective talk page, and support if this topic resonates with you.

This announcement has been shared with:

Teahouse
African Wikimedians Telegram
Event Organizers Telegram

October 16, 2024: Update on edit restoration

Thank you all for your valuable feedback on the Edit Recovery feature! We've made some important improvements based on your comments on the Edit Recovery talk page. Previously, the feature would automatically recover changes by default when you resume editing and then give you the option to revert them as the next step. With this update, you'll be asked first if you want to recover changes or not. Now, editors have more control over their workflow.

For a visual demonstration of these changes, please refer to the screenshots below:

Previous version: Changes were automatically restored, editors had to discard the changes if they didn't want them.
New version: Editors are notified of unsaved changes and have the choice to recover or discard changes.

October 16, 2024: Conversations Made Easier: Machine-Translated Wishes Are Here!

The Community Wishlist is now testing machine translations for Wishlist content. Volunteers can now read machine-translated versions of wishes and dive into discussions even before translators arrive to translate content. Our goal is to make Wishlist content more accessible. We are inviting you to try this out by activating the "WishlistTranslation" gadget preference on MetaWiki. Please see below a screenshot of the section where you can turn on the feature.

Please bear in mind that these machine translations are not human-reviewed. Therefore, the quality of translations will vary, and we welcome any feedback from you via the Community Wishlist talkpage.

This feature is powered by MinT, a machine translation service hosted in the Wikimedia Foundation infrastructure designed to provide translation from multiple open source translation models.

September 16, 2024: Edit-Recovery feedback requested

Hello community, the Edit-Recovery feature has been active in Special:Preferences, Editing since spring 2024, and based on feedback, we wanted to ask how the feature should behave moving forward.

Currently, Edit-Recovery assumes that a user wants to recover their edits upon reloading or reopening a page, and prompts users to discard their edits. However, based on feedback on our Talk page, some users would prefer for Edit-Recovery to assume that a user does not want to recover edits, and instead, they should be prompted to restore edits.

The Community Tech team, at this stage, seeks community input on whether Edit-Recovery works as expected, or if users would prefer for Edit-Recovery to prompt users to restore edits.

Please provide feedback on the talk page. We hope to make a decision by Wednesday, 26 September 2024.