Talk:Wikidata For Wikimedia Projects/Clearer Wikidata Edit Summaries/Hide Language Link edits

Request for comment and feedback

Hello, please could you share your thoughts on the proposed change. If you would like to leave your comments in your native language, please do! A machine-translation for non-English comments will be added for other participants to follow the discussion.

We are interested in receiving all types of feedback, and particularly your concerns if you rely on these (Language link ) changes in your workflows, Bot, User Script or other use we haven't described. We are also open to changing our proposed deployment, especially if it mitigates any disruption to your work, so feel free to include your suggestions below.

This proposal does not affect other types of Wikidata edit from the RC and WL feeds, such as changes to Claims, References, Label, Description or Aliases, or Sitelink changes to the local or home wiki.

To help us quickly identify and find differing opinions, criticisms and questions to follow-up on, we ask if you could please indicate your position with a polling template such as  Support, Neutral and  Oppose.
While we will use the type and number of templates as a general gauge of interest and consensus, we do not intend them to be the deciding factor in determining the deployment of this change. Feedback will be requested from a large number of Wikis and languages, and these visual indicators will help us avoid misunderstandings when we receive feedback in non-English languages.

Thank you for your votes, thoughts and comments! -- Danny Benjafield (WMDE) (talk) 13:44, 17 September 2026 (UTC)

Completely support making this change in all cases but one: if the language link was added/removed for the current wiki. This is really one of the things that pollutes my own watchlist, so not having those useless items there would be great. Интервики-ссылка изменена с fa:ویکی‌پدیا:سیاست حذف رده‌ها на fa:ویکی‌پدیا:رده‌های در حال بررسی tells me nothing about anything. I have zero idea why that’s relevant to me. Currently for 733 items in my watchlist 60 (so almost 10%) are variations of interwiki link added/changed/removed. I don’t think there is any relevance to it for most people using the watchlist, and if someone wants to watch ‘lemmata changes’, they can do so on Wikidata itself. stjn^[ru] 17:13, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

I agree that it would be useful to be able to filter notifications such that only those for mainspace articles on language Wikipedia X would appear on watchlists/recent changes feeds for language Wikipedia X. I appreciate this would make implementation more difficult, since the recent changes table would have to continue to be updated, with filtering done on the display side.

For non-mainspace pages: I do occasionally check when a language link is added for a project space page. I have found at times that the topic of a project space page has been misinterpreted and an incorrect language link added. As there are a lot fewer language links for these pages, I don't find their inclusion on my watchlist to be bothersome. isaacl (talk) 17:51, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

My example from Farsi Wikipedia is for the page Wikipedia:Categories for discussion (Q10785646). Personally I don't find those changes useful at all either (especially since any ‘power user’ inevitably follows a bunch of forum-type pages that can be linked to Wikidata sometimes, some projects even weirdly rename those and then change links from archive ones to normal ones). stjn^[ru] 17:58, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

Cross-wiki links for project space pages are generally of no use to me, either. But as a courtesy to help maintain the accuracy of the data, I may examine the added link. To be fair, though, I've only done it a very small number of times. isaacl (talk) 18:12, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

Hello @Stjn, the intent would be to exclude the local or home wiki from the proposal, so you would still be notified if Wikidata is connected or disconnected from a page on your current wiki.

@Isaacl, my takeaway from your comment is that you would prefer to see a filter for language links, instead of removal, and would mostly use it in tandem with the namespace filters? -- Danny Benjafield (WMDE) (talk) 12:03, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

I'll leave implementation aside because I don't really know enough about the internals. If there is an existing Wikidata item to which someone links a mainspace article on Wikipedia language X, then I would like to see it on my watchlist for Wikipedia language X (sounds like this is already covered by the notification that a Wikidata item has been linked to the article; it just won't show up as a language link with your proposal). I have a mild desire to see language links for project space pages. But as I noted, in all fairness it's not something I would double check very much (historically, only a few times when I though there might have been some misinterpretation of the purpose of the page). Thus I'm not that likely to switch my watchlist filters around just to check for this scenario, so it would have to be something I could set and forget if the functionality were provided using filters. isaacl (talk) 17:16, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

I find the sitelink changes causing too much noise on my watchlists so  Support from me. The proposal mentions that "A Wikidata item has been linked to this page" diffs will continue to be shown. I would assume that "This page has been unlinked from Wikidata item. Language links removed." diffs would also continue to be shown when the wiki's own sitelinks are removed? That is relevant information. Samoasambia ✎ 18:31, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

I would assume that "This page has been unlinked from Wikidata item. Language links removed." diffs would also continue to be shown when the wiki's own sitelinks are removed?
Hi @Samoasambia, you are correct. We would not remove edits about the current wiki from the RC/WL feed. I added this to both the content and talk pages, thank you! Danny Benjafield (WMDE) (talk) 12:25, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

 Support I think this would make me turn on "Show Wikidata edits" again. ♥Ainali ^talk_{contributions} 18:52, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

 Support bots used to handle interwiki links (before WD) and bot edits are typically hidden from recent changes. So the proposal seems fine to me. Nux (talk) 20:02, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

Hi @Nux, thanks for the comment. Since you mention the previous manual interwikilinks being generated often by bots and that these edits were hidden from the recent changes feed, I just want to reaffirm that our idea is more than to default hide them, (should this change your opinion):

The edit wouldn't make it into the recent changes table of the current wiki, so there would be nothing to hide/filter. Danny Benjafield (WMDE) (talk) 12:36, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

Still fine by me. I don't review bot edits on RC anyway. Nux (talk) 13:24, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

 Support Gżdacz (talk) 20:33, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

 Support At the very least, split the filter "Show Wikidata edits" between interwiki links, properties and label/description. That way, anyone who actually wants to see those has a chance to enable them, while also making it useful for everyone else. I for one would love to make sense of recent changes by seeing only the Wikidata properties changes that have actual impact on Wikipedia pages.Andrei Stroe (talk) 07:09, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

 Support Definitely an improvement. Might be worth looking also at other changes that is not relevant for the local language of the wiki. Like labels and descriptions. Multilanguage strings will be more complex as eg. we in nowiki can use imagedescriotions from a few other languages if nb is missing. Haros (talk) 09:13, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

 Support I've never really understood the point of those language link edits. I think it would be more useful to see changes to the labels, descriptions, and aliases in that language instead. Similar to the Wikidata vandalism dashboard. Nemoralis (talk) 09:27, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

 Support From fa.wikipedia. I looked at our own feed before answering. Of the last 500 non-bot Wikidata entries in our Recent Changes, 394 (78.8%) were language-link edits: 245 added, 145 changed, 4 removed. So for us this takes out about four fifths of the Wikidata noise. Worth noting that in the whole sample, not one of them touched fa.wikipedia's own sitelink.

Two things I'd ask you to keep in mind. First, please treat removal of the local wiki's own sitelink as a separate case. When that link goes, the article quietly drops out of the language menu, and it is sometimes vandalism or a bad merge. It is also rare (zero out of 500 here), so leaving that one case visible costs almost nothing and answers the worry a few people have raised above. Second, I would much rather see this as a toggle in the Recent Changes filter UI than as an unconditional removal. Quiet by default, but still there for the people who follow cross-language development. That would also cover what Andrei Stroe suggested above about splitting the filter. Mamouri (talk) 12:32, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

Thanks @Mamouri, indeed we don't want to remove changes that refer to the local Wiki's own pages, whether linking to a WD item, or being unlinked. I'll take yours and @Andrei Stroe's comment on adding an active filter to the team for consideration. Danny Benjafield (WMDE) (talk) 13:06, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

 Support I totally agree with dear @Mamouri. Given a small project such as Persian Wiktionary (in which I am serving as the sole sysop right now), I have not experienced a Language Link noise yet, but as my colleaugue mentioned correctly, rather than removing those links, it is better to have them as a separate filter. The.shahab (talk) 17:06, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

 Oppose I use this feature often, and need to be informed when sitelinks change. There is often vandalism, or erroneous merges, and these notifications help me react sooner. Furthermore I don't see the point in this, there is already a way to filter out wikidata edits on watchlists. Ultimately, as long as I get notified when there is any change to the sitelink for any pages on my watchlist I will be happy. - Rooiratel (talk) 18:34, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

 Oppose To be honest I don't really get it why the sitelinks changes should be completely removed from the watchlist – especially since they are only visible if the filter to show Wikidata edits is explicitly enabled. By default (and thus for the most users) all kind of these edits aren't shown at all. So if the only reason for removing it is to reduce noise, – which by the way is an opinion I don't really agree with – I think it would be far better to extend the filter for another option where I can enable to show or hide the sitelinks changes. Completely removing this information would be bad in my opinion. Personally I like this kind of information in my watchlist, because I get „informed“ as soon as one of my watched pages gets linked with a page in another language and see how it „grows“ globally – even if I don't understand this language. Guardian of Arcadia (talk) 20:14, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

 Support Gabriel3 (talk) 12:22, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

 Oppose. I agree with and above. Aletrnatively, we can make this a choice in the user's prefernces: Show all WikiData changes, Hide all Wikidata changes, or Show all but language link changes.--Naḥum (talk) 13:10, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

Neutral Allow users to show or hide site link language edits. We must be allowed to see all kinds of edits if we chose to. That's what I think. Based on the comment by Guardian of Arcadia, that's already the case, so I don't understand why are we having this discussion --Esperfulmo (talk) 05:25, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

 Oppose: දැනටත් මෙය ඝොෂාවක් ලෙස දකින අයට එය ඉවත් කිරීම සඳහා විකල්ප තිබෙනවා නේද? ඉතින් ඇයි දැනට මෙය භාවිතා කරන අයට, ඒ පහසුකම නැති කරන්න හදන්නේ? ඒක නිකං "මට එපා නම් කාටත් එපා" කිව්වා වාගේ කතාවක් නේ. --Lee (talk) 13:39, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

For those who still see this as a nuisance, there are options to remove it, right? So why are you trying to remove that feature for those who are currently using it? It's like saying, "If I don't want it, no one else will."
Danny Benjafield (WMDE) (talk) 13:42, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

@Esperfulmo: I think you might have misunderstood my comment a little. Yes, there is already a filter to hide or show changes from Wikidata in the recent changes and watchlist, but this affects all changes, which means show everything (label, property, sitelinks, … changes) from Wikidata or show nothing. If this proposal were to be implemented as originally planned, the sitelink changes would be removed completely from the feed without having an option for users who want to see them to show them again. Guardian of Arcadia (talk) 21:44, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

 Comment I would like to see the changes, to be able to revert vandalism etc. on Wikidata for articles on my watchlists. While many changes are in scripts I cannot decipher, some are in languages I more or less can understand. However, on Wikivoyage, articles include links to Wikidata for many places that are described in short in them. This makes the volume of Wikidata edits too massive to care about. The fact that I have voy:en:Nice on my watchlist (and would like to see when language links to it are added or changed) doesn't imply that I know anything about Nice#Chateâu de Bellet – language link changes to that item (Château de Bellet (Q125343610)) are just noise. –LPfi (talk) 18:27, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

Neutral to  Oppose: I like to see the changes in the language linking, and I understand they are an annoying flood sometimes. I would support removing them by default if there be a possibility to switch them on. But I strongly oppose the idea they would disappear without possibility to see them. --Mmh (talk) 20:14, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

Support – Useless feature that just adds clutter. FaviFake (talk) 23:50, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

 Support I look up sitelink changes on Wikidata, where they really happen, never on the local Wiki. So I don't want to see the clutter on the local language platforms. --Geert Van Pamel (WMBE) 18:16, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

 Support This would make me turn on "Show Wikidata edits" again. Cantons-de-l'Est (talk) 19:29, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

 Support Akbarali (talk)

Optional

I don't frequently look at this in Recent Changes, and I probably won't miss it if it's gone, but some other patrolers may look at it, and it's important to try to hear from them. Perhaps you could advertise it not just on talk pages, but on the Recent Changes page itself, to the most relevant audience?

Also, I'm not sure I understand: will they be completely gone or will it be possible to enable them as an option? Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 14:21, 21 September 2026 (UTC)

Hello Amir, thanks for the tip. I will be reaching out to them too.

As for the question, our proposal is yes, to completely remove them from the Recent Changes and Watchlist feed (of the client Wikis), so that even if you have show Wikidata edits enabled, these (Language links added:/removed:, changed) edits won't appear as they won't be copied across from the Wiki where they occur (Wikidata).
The diff and Recent Change edit would still appear on their home wiki though (again, Wikidata). --Danny Benjafield (WMDE) (talk) 12:21, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

Thanks. It's not a very big issue to me personally, but I do think that it would be safer product-wise if it is made optional rather than removed completely, so that patrolers who are interested in it would be able to see it. In general, the disconnection of the Wikidata content from the local wiki is one of the biggest reasons for some people in the larger wikis to be opposed to tighter integration of Wikidata information, so disconnecting it even more might be the wrong move.

But again, it's not a deal-breaker for me, and other people should chime in. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 13:58, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

This specific change does not help the adoption of Wikidata patrolling on wikis, though, and if anything, it actively hinders it by displaying non-relevant data. When people talk about the disconnection of the Wikidata content, they typically talk that you cannot watch changes to Wikidata items effectively, and currently I cannot in good conscience recommend anyone to turn on this specific feature because its output is mostly very irrelevant data (label/description/interwiki changes in languages that most people would never know on a specific language wiki).
When ideally on some wikis with heavy Wikidata usage it should be on by default if anything. But for that two things need to be done: this proposal to remove interwiki changes from the output, and 2) removing unused properties from the output. All of this would make Wikidata patrolling from wikis a reality. stjn^[ru] 17:20, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

I don't agree that this data is "irrelevant". Maybe irrelevant for you but not for me. I have been using this feature for years and it's very important and useful for me, and not the least part of it is exactly the "language links". They greatly influence lemma debates on my home wiki (de.wikipedia). Mautpreller (talk) 19:42, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

xkcd:1172. Not that I have any idea how exactly addition of ko:브라이트바트 to Andrew Breitbart (Q503917) (real example from my watchlist) could influence any debates in German Wikipedia. Maybe you can elaborate. stjn^[ru] 20:13, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

Not this one, of course, but e.g. this one: [1]. Mautpreller (talk) 20:38, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

I still don’t get it. Maybe you can provide some examples in the section you opened. All I see is just a new interwiki link. Which is probably more useful to track on Wikidata itself since then you can pick and choose which items you need to watch for those purposes and which are like the example I provided. stjn^[ru] 20:43, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

Interwiki links used to be on wiki and only later were transferred to wikidata. While this was useful as it reduced the bot traffic on the individual wikis and contributed to avoid incoherent interwiki linking, at the same it contributed to a loss of awareness of the existence of these links and of the multilingual nature of wikipedia itself on the individual wikis. In fact, for anybody reading and writing in several languages these links are very important, and it is also important to be able to control which links have been added to or have been removed from articles you are interested in. The possibility to show interwiki link changes on wikidata among the recent changes on the individual wikis is thus highly welcome, so I was recently positively surprised that such a possibility had been inabled on some wikis. I think there is no reason to abolish it, but rather to create a possibilty for the user to selectively choose which changes on wikidata they want to see among the recent changes, so anybody not interested in interwiki links might selectively switch them of without switching of other changes on wikidata. --~2026-51132-50 (talk) 00:56, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

I have not known this was possible to show until today and I am very quickly turning it back off again. I don't see how this is exactly relevant to patrollers on non-Wikidata projects. However, I do agree it might be nice for this to stay optional for those who want it, so I share Amir's opinion. Personally though, I'd be perfectly ok with removal. ~KormiSK (talk) 15:37, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

It is not important specifically for "patrollers", but for anybody interested in specific articles in more than one language. --~2026-51132-50 (talk) 00:56, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

Somewhat astonished

If I understand you correctly, these "language links" indicate that a language version of an article is either added, removed, or has its name changed on Wikidata, right? If this is correct, I definitely  Oppose the change you propose. This is very valuable information for me as I am interested in the international development of lemmata. I am grateful that there is still heterogenity in lemma attribution and distribution as well as text contents over the language versions, in spite of a certain tendency of homogenization especially due to automatic translation (a very dangerous feature in my opinion). I need to know how this changes in articles I am watching. Mautpreller (talk) 15:54, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

As far as I see on the Content Page, this seems to be correct. As interlanguage linking is one of the weakest points of Wikidata, this must be closely watched and monitored on all project pages. Such edits definitely must not fly "under the radar". So please refrain from implementing this change.--Mautpreller (talk) 16:09, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

Well, I think we don't need less, but rather more Wikidata integration in sister projects. And then, changes in labels and descriptions of Wikidata items are at the very heart of our work on the encyclopaedia. This is why I agree with Mautpreller. I also  Oppose removing language links by default from my watch list. Any changes in this respect should please remain optional. If a user wants to render his watchlist 'more quiet' there should be a switch in preferences for him to do so. Regards, Aschmidt (talk) 19:27, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

@Mautpreller, it's curious that you say that interlanguage linking is one of the weakest points of Wikidata. As far as I can tell, it has been one of strongest points of Wikidata literally from the first day it was deployed. There is occasional vandalism in it, just like with everything else in wikis, but not to a degree that I'd call it "one of the weakest points". Can you say why you think like that? Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 20:27, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

Because the interlanguage links are so often too unflexible. Often the lemmata in one language differ greatly from the lemmata in another language, not only the words but also the distribution (say, one language version has one article, the other one two, the third one merges this lemma with a totally other one etc.). These are not mistakes but unavoidable and logical consequences of an international encyclopedia project. But Wikidata insists on a one-to-one basis which is very often unsuitable and impedes search processes across languages greatly. This one-to-one dogma leads to wrong attributions of totally dissimilar lemmata to each othet but also separates articles that deal with the same subject, albeit in a slightly different framework. This is also the reason why I find it so important to monitor the assignment to Wikidata objects. Mautpreller (talk) 20:49, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

I agree that the ontology is not 100% the same across languages and it's a bit of a weak point that should be addressed somehow, but the display of links changing in recent changes is not going to fix it, certainly not by itself. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 21:03, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

Please note that Wikidata integration with your Wikipedia watchlist makes such inconsistencies and how they develop visible to Wikipedians. Regards, Aschmidt (talk) 21:09, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

It does, of course. I just don't think that the details of the problem as @Mautpreller described will be solved by keeping this feature on. Perhaps removing this feature may make this problem a bit worse , but not by far. This problem needs a solution, but it would be much more complicated than what is discussed here. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 22:11, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

Well, the absence of an ontology from the beginning indeed is a major problem of Wikidata. It had been criticised then, even in the press. I understand that the inconsistencies stemming from there existed from the very beginning, when sitelinks used to be handled on Wikimedia project sites. But, I'm afraid this discussion is about something different, isn't it? On German Wikipedia we were quite happy when Wikidata integration with our watchlists finally was introduced because we wanted to have everything in one place, viz. on our Wikipedia watchlist. I'm afraid I do not understand why we should abolish sitelink integration, while other edits on Wikidata still would be indicated on Wikipedia? What is the difference between the two? If you do not want to have any edits on Wikidata in your Wikipedia watchlist, simply do not tick the box in your account preferences that makes this. It's not switched on by default, I had to activate it, then. You might like to introduce another preference for edits on sitelinks. But why these, while others would remain as it has been so far. Regards, Aschmidt (talk) 06:50, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the comment @Aschmidt. Great question, why language links get a special or different treatment than other Wikidata edit types?

• They wouldn't necessarily be the only change we would propose as we work towards making Wikidata edits being enabled for editors in RC and WL more useful, they would be the first major change.
• We want to make incremental changes to measure impact of the changes
• Language link edits account for a high proportion of Wikidata-edits in Wikis, hiding them is one approach and might make the feed a lot more manageable for readers, but not sending them at all would be technically easy, and have overlapping benefits in greatly reducing computational load writing to all the different rc_tables.

Danny Benjafield (WMDE) (talk) 15:06, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

@Danny Benjafield (WMDE), thank you for elaborating the reasons behind your move. I gather that technical aspects play a major role, and I can well understand that this is so. OTOH, I think there please still should remain a switch to re-activate language links for those editors who prefer to leave their watchlist as it has been for such a long time. Regards, Aschmidt (talk) 20:59, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

Add more options to the filter

I can't really think of a use case for patrolling Wikidata sitelinks changes from my home wiki, but it seems some users have one. Another very noisy and prevalent change is label/description changes in a language not present in my home wiki. Changes to the actual data is much more important to me, as that data could be being displayed at my wiki and any changes will affect the page I'm watching. Surely there must be a way to filter those three kinds of changes on or off Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 17:34, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

I assume that the proposal is to remove only the language linking from the RC, and the other edits like "Created claim", "A Wikidata item has been linked to this page" will continue. If so, it will be useful if this is stated in the introduction of this talk page, to avoid any ambiguity. And, my opinion is not to remove the feature but to make it a separate option in the Preferences so that users can choose. Note: I do not watch for the Wikidata related edits in RC.__Chaduvari (talk) 03:28, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

Thanks @Chaduvari, I added to the introduction to clarify that yes, this would not affect changes that are happening to the current wiki (Wikidata item linked to this page or Created claim and co.), thanks for your feedback! Danny Benjafield (WMDE) (talk) 13:51, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

Why not make it client-side?

The current proposal will cause changes not to be written to the database table any more. Which means, this data is not available to local wikis any more. If instead the data is still written to the table, but just not shown if the user does not want that, the result will be the same, just it allows users to re-enable these links. The following filters for en:uBlock Origin basically do the same for the English wikipedia:

en.wikipedia.org##span.comment:has-text("Language link added"):upward(1)
en.wikipedia.org##span.comment:has-text("Language link removed"):upward(1)
en.wikipedia.org##span.comment:has-text("Language link changed"):upward(1)

This is not fool proof, it will also remove items from the watchlist when someone enters the same text as comment for a different change. And of course, this example is just for English. Instead of using UBO, it would also be possible to create a gadget which can be enabled/disabled in the preferences. And possibly a server-side change would make it possible to detect this kind of change in a language neutral way. Wimmel (talk) 13:27, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

This is a hack, not a solution. Those items still end up wasting space in the recent changes and watchlist instead of allowing for the more useful items to appear instead. In my watchlist, the interwiki link changes are consistently 10% of all watchlist changes in total (and 25% of all Wikidata changes on a Wikidata-heavy project), and the vast majority of those changes are entirely uncontroversial (additions of interwiki links by experienced editors). It would be more useful for the proponents of this to suggest ways those changes can be surfaced without clutter (for instance, by relying on patrol status on Wikidata or something else). stjn^[ru] 01:05, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Fairly new semi-related opt-in bot on the English Wikipedia for notifying article creators about new interwiki links on articles they've created

See en:User:NervousBot, operated by @Balance3641:. I don't have Wikidata edits enabled on my watchlist so this change doesn't affect me but one advantage of the old interwiki system was that I could easily find out about new interlanguage versions of articles I'd worked on. I was in a situation in 2024 where a German translation made in 2021 of an article I'd written in the English Wikipedia had new information that wasn't on the English page, and I wish I'd known about the translation when it was made and not a few years later (see this edit summary). But in that case, the above-mentioned bot wouldn't have helped in its current configuration because I'm not the article creator (but I'll elaborate on that on the bot's talk page). I just wonder if other people try to use interwiki link watching for this purpose. Graham87 (talk) 09:49, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Thank you @Graham87, I will check the bot's function and get in touch with the owner. Danny Benjafield (WMDE) (talk) 10:46, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for linking my bot, I have now provided configuration options that allow users to opt-in to notifications for any article. Not just ones that have been authored by the user. Balance3641 (talk) 12:44, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Update on our next steps

Thank you for sharing your feedback! 34 community members from 25 different wikis participated in our RfC or shared their thoughts elsewhere (e.g. discussions on their local wiki).

We saw moderately more support for removing language-links than opposing, however many editors on both sides mentioned the option to add an active-filter exclusively for language link/sitelink changes and this remains an open-possibility we are looking at. 

Respondents mentioned the need to exclude language link changes from the local or current wiki. Our change will not affect Recent Changes or Watchlist notifications about Wikidata items being connected or removed from pages on the current wiki.

Some respondents questioned the need for this proposal since an active filter already exists for all Wikidata edits. Language links do represent a significant portion of Wikidata edits, but they are just one type or category of Wikidata-triggered changes. We are actually hoping to have more users enable Wikidata edits in their RC or WL feeds, by making the quantity and type of Wikidata edits less obtrusive, overwhelming and making the other types of Wikidata edit that can affect page content stand out more clearly.

We want to conduct an experiment by deploying our proposed change of removing language links from a Wikimedia Project’s Special:Recent Changes and Special:Watchlist pages.
We will deploy this change to group 1 wikis, which is mostly the smaller-language non-Wikipedia projects (Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikibooks etc.).

To see if your wiki is on this list, please check here.
Unsure how to search? Remove the period .between the language code and wiki-project from the url, and then search the combination in the linked list:
Italian Wikiquote = it.wikiquote.org = itwikiquote <- search for this

Deployment of this change is scheduled for the week of 05 October, from 07:00 UTC (phab:T439415 ) and will last for a 2 week period. Feel free to subscribe to the task or watch our project page for updates, we'll share more details soon. All wikis are feature-flagged, meaning we can selectively exclude individual wikis after deployment.

If you are worried about the loss of these language link changes to your Watchlist, we can suggest this alternative:

1. From your home wiki, go to your Watchlist
2. Open the articles and pages you want to track language link changes to.
3. Open the Tools menu () click the ‘Wikidata Item’ link (under the “In other projects” section header). This will take you to the Wikidata Item that matches the article or page.
4. On the Wikidata item, click the star-icon to add the item to your Wikidata watchlist.
5. Periodically check the Wikidata watchlist to see language link changes. 

Based on the feedback we received, we believe this proposed change may not be what some have hoped for, but we do believe ultimately this will deliver value to volunteer editors, while reducing load and stress on technical infrastructure.
With the Wikidata Vandalism Dashboard and Wikidata Watchlists, we believe some concerns can be mitigated (e.g. by providing an alternative path to seeing language link changes to articles or pages you care about).

We want to continue to receive your thoughts, feedback, questions and concerns you might have so please reply here. Thank you, - - Danny Benjafield (WMDE) (talk) 16:21, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

This is not a resonable solution. The result will be a decline in the quality of monitoring vandalism, or just plain good-faith errors, on wikidata by ordinary watchlist viewers like me. Sad.-- Naḥum (talk) 15:13, 1 October 2026 (UTC)

Due to staff absence due to sickness, the decision was made to delay the de-activation by 24 hours.
The change is now scheduled for 06 October, from 07:00 UTC (phab:T439415). Sorry for the delay. Danny Benjafield (WMDE) (talk) 09:49, 5 October 2026 (UTC)

What can I do to switch it on again?

As a project admin, I follow all the language link changes. I think I need to do it. Some users do not want to do it. They could switch off the Wikidata changes. They do not want to do it. Is it really the best solution to make it impossible for everybody to follow those changes? I cannot open all the thousands of pages and start to follow their Wikidata changes. Why should not be possible to switch the tracking of language link changes off/on optionally? --Mmh (talk) 23:14, 3 October 2026 (UTC)

Hi @Mmh, we can opt-in / out Wikis, just let me know your Wiki language code (English Wikipedia = en.wikipedia.org) and I will forward the request to our engineers. Best, -- Danny Benjafield (WMDE) (talk) 10:47, 14 October 2026 (UTC)

Mitigations

Hi. I suggest to expand "Periodically check the Wikidata watchlist to see language link changes." to "Periodically check the Wikidata watchlist or Global Watchlist to see language link changes." This is because the Global Watchlist is much better for cross-wiki work. Thank you. IKhitron (talk) 11:17, 3 October 2026 (UTC)

Incorrect links for the same wiki

By the way, when the interwiki link change is within the same language wiki I am currently on, the links to the pages are actually wildly incorrect:

G5 (значения) (Q347207) (разн. | история) . . Stjn (обсуждение | вклад) (Интервики-ссылка изменена с ru:G-5 на ru:G5 (значения))

Despite having ru: in the name, both links erroneously link to non-existing pages on Wikidata. Would be great to see this fixed while you’re at it. stjn^[ru] 11:39, 7 October 2026 (UTC)

Hi @Stjn, is this a known or existing problem, or something you only experienced since the language links were removed yesterday? Thanks -- Danny Benjafield (WMDE) (talk) 14:26, 7 October 2026 (UTC)

It’s unrelated to the change since this is the output in Russian Wikipedia. I think I’ve noticed it before a few times but I am unaware if it was reported before by people (or by me). stjn^[ru] 14:49, 7 October 2026 (UTC)

Hi @Stjn, thanks for bringing this to us. We could replicate it and have opened up a bug ticket: phab:T440564. I hope we find time to investigate it soon but feel free to subscribe to the ticket to be notified on updates. Danny Benjafield (WMDE) (talk) 11:17, 8 October 2026 (UTC)