User talk:Adi.iiita/Archive 38

Tech News: 2025-20

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• The "Get shortened URL" link on the sidebar now includes a QR code. Wikimedia site users can now use it by scanning or downloading it to quickly share and access shared content from Wikimedia sites, conveniently.

Updates for editors

• The Wikimedia Foundation is working on a system called Edge Uniques, which will enable A/B testing, help protect against distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks), and make it easier to understand how many visitors the Wikimedia sites have. This is to help more efficiently build tools which help readers, and make it easier for readers to find what they are looking for. Tech News has previously written about this. The deployment will be gradual. Some might see the Edge Uniques cookie the week of 19 May. You can discuss this on the talk page.
• Starting May 19, 2025, Event organisers in wikis with the CampaignEvents extension enabled can use Event Registration in the project namespace (e.g., Wikipedia namespace, Wikidata namespace). With this change, communities don't need admins to use the feature. However, wikis that don't want this change can remove and add the permitted namespaces at Special:CommunityConfiguration/CampaignEvents.
• The Wikipedia project now has a Wikipedia in Nupe (w:nup:). This is a language primarily spoken in the North Central region of Nigeria. Speakers of this language are invited to contribute to new Wikipedia.
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Developers can now access pre-parsed Dutch Wikipedia, amongst others (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese) through the Structured Contents snapshots (beta). The content includes parsed Wikipedia abstracts, descriptions, main images, infoboxes, article sections, and references.
• The /page/data-parsoid REST API endpoint is no longer in use and will be deprecated. It is scheduled to be turned off on June 7, 2025.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The IPv6 support is a newly introduced Cloud virtual network that significantly boosts Wikimedia platforms' scalability, security, and readiness for the future. If you are a technical contributor eager to learn more, check out this blog post for an in-depth look at the journey to IPv6.

Meetings and events

• The 2nd edition of 2025 of Afrika Baraza, a virtual platform for African Wikimedians to connect, will take place on May 15 at 17:00 UTC. This edition will focus on discussions regarding Wikimedia Annual planning and progress.
• The MENA Connect Community Call, a virtual meeting for MENA Wikimedians to connect, will take place on May 17 at 17:00 UTC. You can register now to attend.

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MediaWiki message delivery 22:37, 12 May 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-21

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• The Editing Team and the Machine Learning Team are working on a new check for newcomers: Peacock check. Using a prediction model, this check will encourage editors to improve the tone of their edits, using artificial intelligence. We invite volunteers to review the first version of the Peacock language model for the following languages: Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Japanese. Users from these wikis interested in reviewing this model are invited to sign up at MediaWiki.org. The deadline to sign up is on May 23, which will be the start date of the test.

Updates for editors

• From May 20, 2025, oversighters and checkusers will need to have their accounts secured with two-factor authentication (2FA) to be able to use their advanced rights. All users who belong to these two groups and do not have 2FA enabled have been informed. In the future, this requirement may be extended to other users with advanced rights. Learn more.
• Multiblocks will begin mass deployment by the end of the month: all non-Wikipedia projects plus Catalan Wikipedia will adopt Multiblocks in the week of May 26, while all other Wikipedias will adopt it in the week of June 2. Please contact the team if you have concerns. Administrators can test the new user interface now on your own wiki by browsing to Special:Block?usecodex=1, and can test the full multiblocks functionality on testwiki. Multiblocks is the feature that makes it possible for administrators to impose different types of blocks on the same user at the same time. See the help page for more information. [1]
• Later this week, the Special:SpecialPages listing of almost all special pages will be updated with a new design. This page has been redesigned to improve the user experience in a few ways, including: The ability to search for names and aliases of the special pages, sorting, more visible marking of restricted special pages, and a more mobile-friendly look. The new version can be previewed at Beta Cluster now, and feedback shared in the task. [2]
• The Chart extension is being enabled on more wikis. For a detailed list of when the extension will be enabled on your wiki, please read the deployment timeline.
• Wikifunctions will be deployed on May 27 on five Wiktionaries: Hausa, Igbo, Bengali, Malayalam, and Dhivehi/Maldivian. This is the second batch of deployment planned for the project. After deployment, the projects will be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in their pages. A function is something that takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, such as adding up two numbers, converting miles into metres, calculating how much time has passed since an event, or declining a word into a case. Wikifunctions will allow users to do that through a simple call of a stable and global function, rather than via a local template.
• Later this week, the Wikimedia Foundation will publish a hub for experiments. This is to showcase and get user feedback on product experiments. The experiments help the Wikimedia movement understand new users, how they interact with the internet and how it could affect the Wikimedia movement. Some examples are generated video, the Wikipedia Roblox speedrun game and the Discord bot.
• View all 29 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a bug with creating an account using the API, which has now been fixed. [3]

Updates for technical contributors

• Gadgets and user scripts that interact with Special:Block may need to be updated to work with the new manage blocks interface. Please review the developer guide for more information. If you need help or are unable to adapt your script to the new interface, please let the team know on the talk page. [4]
• The mw.title object allows you to get information about a specific wiki page in the Lua programming language. Starting this week, a new property will be added to the object, named isDisambiguationPage. This property allows you to check if a page is a disambiguation page, without the need to write a custom function. [5]
• User script developers can use a new reverse proxy tool to load javascript and css from gitlab.wikimedia.org with mw.loader.load. The tool's author hopes this will enable collaborative development workflows for user scripts including linting, unit tests, code generation, and code review on gitlab.wikimedia.org without a separate copy-and-paste step to publish scripts to a Wikimedia wiki for integration and acceptance testing. See Tool:Gitlab-content on Wikitech for more information.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• The 12th edition of Wiki Workshop 2025, a forum that brings together researchers that explore all aspects of Wikimedia projects, will be held virtually on 21-22 May. Researchers can register now.

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MediaWiki message delivery 23:12, 19 May 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-22

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• A community-wide discussion about a very delicate issue for the development of Abstract Wikipedia is now open on Meta: where to store the abstract content that will be developed through functions from Wikifunctions and data from Wikidata. The discussion is open until June 12 at Abstract Wikipedia/Location of Abstract Content, and every opinion is welcomed. The decision will be made and communicated after the consultation period by the Foundation.

Updates for editors

• Since last week, on all wikis except the largest 20, people using the mobile visual editor will have additional tools in the menu bar, accessed using the new + toolbar button. To start, the new menu will include options to add: citations, hieroglyphs, and code blocks. Deployment to the remaining wikis is scheduled to happen in June.
• The #ifexist parser function will no longer register a link to its target page. This will improve the usefulness of Special:WantedPages, which will eventually only list pages that are the target of an actual red link. This change will happen gradually as the source pages are updated. [6]
• This week, the Moderator Tools team will launch a new filter to Recent Changes, starting at Indonesian Wikipedia. This new filter highlights edits that are likely to be reverted. The goal is to help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic edits. Other wikis will benefit from this filter in the future.
• Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users will see suggestions of articles for further reading. The feature will be available on both desktop and mobile. Readers of Catalan, Hebrew, and Italian Wikipedias and some sister projects will receive the change between May 21 and mid-June. Readers of other wikis will receive the change later. The goal is to encourage users to read the wikis more. Learn more.
• Some users of the Wikipedia Android app can use a new feature for readers, WikiGames, a daily trivia game based on real historical events. The release has started as an A/B test, available to 50% of users in the following languages: English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Turkish.
• The Newsletter extension that is available on MediaWiki.org allows the creation of various newsletters for global users. The extension can now publish new issues as section links on an existing page, instead of requiring a new page for each issue. [7]
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• The previously deprecated ipblocks views in Wiki Replicas will be removed in the beginning of June. Users are encouraged to query the new block and block_target views instead.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• Wikidata and Sister Projects is a multi-day online event that will focus on how Wikidata is integrated to Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects. The event runs from May 29 – June 1. You can read the Program schedule and register.

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MediaWiki message delivery 20:05, 26 May 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-23

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• The Chart extension is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. Editors can use this new extension to create interactive data visualizations like bar, line, area, and pie charts. Charts are designed to replace many of the uses of the legacy Graph extension.

Updates for editors

• It is now easier to configure automatic citations for your wiki within the visual editor's citation generator. Administrators can now set a default template by using the _default key in the local MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json page (example diff). Setting this default will also help to future-proof your existing configurations when new item types are added in the future. You can still set templates for individual item types as they will be preferred to the default template. [8]
• View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Starting the week of June 2, bots logging in using action=login or action=clientlogin will fail more often. This is because of stronger protections against suspicious logins. Bots using bot passwords or using a loginless authentication method such as OAuth are not affected. If your bot is not using one of those, you should update it; using action=login without a bot password was deprecated in 2016. For most bots, this only requires changing what password the bot uses. [9]
• From this week, Wikimedia wikis will allow ES2017 features in JavaScript code for official code, gadgets, and user scripts. The most visible feature of ES2017 is async/await syntax, allowing for easier-to-read code. Until this week, the platform only allowed up to ES2016, and a few months before that, up to ES2015. [10]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• Scholarship applications to participate in the GLAM Wiki Conference 2025 are now open. The conference will take place from 30 October to 1 November, in Lisbon, Portugal. GLAM contributors who lack the means to support their participation can apply here. Scholarship applications close on June 7th.

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MediaWiki message delivery 23:55, 2 June 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-24

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• The Trust and Safety Product team is finalizing work needed to roll out temporary accounts on large Wikipedias later this month. The team has worked with stewards and other users with extended rights to predict and address many use cases that may arise on larger wikis, so that community members can continue to effectively moderate and patrol temporary accounts. This will be the second of three phases of deployment – the last one will take place in September at the earliest. For more information about the recent developments on the project, see this update. If you have any comments or questions, write on the talk page, and join a CEE Catch Up this Tuesday.

Updates for editors

• The watchlist expiry feature allows editors to watch pages for a limited period of time. After that period, the page is automatically removed from your watchlist. Starting this week, you can set a preference for the default period of time to watch pages. The preferences also allow you to set different default watch periods for editing existing pages, pages you create, and when using rollback. [11]

Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.

• The appearance of talk pages will change at almost all Wikipedias (some have already received this design change, a few will get these changes later). You can read details about the changes on Diff. It is possible to opt out of these changes in user preferences ("Show discussion activity"). [12][13]
• Users with specific extended rights (including administrators, bureaucrats, checkusers, oversighters, and stewards) can now have IP addresses of all temporary accounts revealed automatically during time-limited periods where they need to combat high-speed account-hopping vandalism. This feature was requested by stewards. [14]
• This week, the Moderator Tools and Machine Learning teams will continue the rollout of a new filter to Recent Changes, releasing it to several more Wikipedias. This filter utilizes the Revert Risk model, which was created by the Research team, to highlight edits that are likely to be reverted and help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic contributions. The feature will be rolled out to the following Wikipedias: Afrikaans Wikipedia, Belarusian Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Welsh Wikipedia, Hawaiian Wikipedia, Icelandic Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia. The rollout will continue in the coming weeks to include the rest of the Wikipedias in this project. [15]
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• AbuseFilter editors active on Meta-Wiki and large Wikipedias are kindly asked to update AbuseFilter to make it compatible with temporary accounts. A link to the instructions and the private lists of filters needing verification are available on Phabricator.
• Lua modules now have access to the name of a page's associated thumbnail image, and on some wikis to the WikiProject assessment information. This is possible using two new properties on mw.title objects, named pageImage and pageAssessments. [16][17]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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MediaWiki message delivery 01:17, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-25

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• You can nominate your favorite tools for the sixth edition of the Coolest Tool Award. Nominations are anonymous and will be open until June 25. You can re-use the survey to nominate multiple tools.
• View all 33 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• Foundation staff and technical volunteers use Wikimedia APIs to build the tools, applications, features, and integrations that enhance user experiences. Over the coming years, the MediaWiki Interfaces team will be investing in Wikimedia web (HTTP) APIs to better serve technical volunteer needs and protect Wikimedia infrastructure from potential abuse. You can read more about their plans to evolve the APIs in this Techblog post.

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MediaWiki message delivery 23:38, 16 June 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-26

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• This week, the Moderator Tools and Machine Learning teams will continue the rollout of a new filter to Recent Changes, releasing it to the third and last batch of Wikipedias. This filter utilizes the Revert Risk model, which was created by the Research team, to highlight edits that are likely to be reverted and help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic contributions. The feature will be rolled out to the following Wikipedias: Azerbaijani Wikipedia, Latin Wikipedia, Macedonian Wikipedia, Malayalam Wikipedia, Marathi Wikipedia, Norwegian Nynorsk Wikipedia, Punjabi Wikipedia, Swahili Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Tagalog Wikipedia. The rollout will continue in the coming weeks to include the rest of the Wikipedias in this project. [18]

Updates for editors

• Last week, temporary accounts were rolled out on Czech, Korean, and Turkish Wikipedias. This and next week, deployments on larger Wikipedias will follow. Share your thoughts about the project. [19]
• Later this week, the Editing team will release Multi Check to all Wikipedias (except English Wikipedia). This feature shows multiple Reference checks within the editing experience. This encourages users to add citations when they add multiple new paragraphs to a Wikipedia article. This feature was previously available as an A/B test. The test shows that users who are shown multiple checks are 1.3 times more likely to add a reference to their edit, and their edit is less likely to be reverted (-34.7%). [20]
• A few pages need to be renamed due to software updates and to match more recent Unicode standards. All of these changes are related to title-casing changes. Approximately 71 pages and 3 files will be renamed, across 15 wikis; the complete list is in the task. The developers will rename these pages next week, and they will fix redirects and embedded file links a few minutes later via a system settings update.
• View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that had caused pages to scroll upwards when text near the top was selected. [21]

Updates for technical contributors

• Editors can now use Lua modules to filter and transform tabular data for use with Extension:Chart. This can be used for things like selecting a subset of rows or columns from the source data, converting between units, statistical processing, and many other useful transformations. Information on how to use transforms is available. [22]
• The all_links variable in AbuseFilter is now renamed to new_links for consistency with other variables. Old usages will still continue to work. [23]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: the recent updates for the "Add a Link" Task, two new Newcomer Engagement Features, and updates to Community Configuration.

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MediaWiki message delivery 23:21, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-27

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• The CampaignEvents extension has been enabled on all Wikipedias. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. The extension has three features: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List. To request the extension for your wiki, visit the Deployment information page.

Updates for editors

• AbuseFilter maintainers can now match against IP reputation data in AbuseFilters. IP reputation data is information about the proxies and VPNs associated with the user's IP address. This data is not shown publicly and is not generated for actions performed by registered accounts. [24]
• Hidden content that is within collapsible parts of wikipages will now be revealed when someone searches the page using the web browser's "Find in page" function (Ctrl+F or ⌘F) in supporting browsers. [25][26]
• A new feature, called Favourite Templates, will be deployed later this week on all projects (except English Wikipedia, which will receive the feature next week), following a piloting phase on Polish and Arabic Wikipedia, and Italian and English Wikisource. The feature will provide a better way for new and experienced contributors to recall and discover templates via the template dialog, by allowing users to put templates on a special "favourite list". The feature works with both the visual editor and the wikitext editor. The feature is a community wishlist focus area.
• View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that had caused some Notifications to be sent multiple times. [27]

Updates for technical contributors

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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MediaWiki message delivery 23:41, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-28

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• Temporary accounts have been rolled out on 18 large and medium-sized Wikipedias, including German, Japanese, French, and Chinese. Now, about 1/3 of all logged-out activity across wikis is coming from temporary accounts. Users involved in patrolling may be interested in two new documentation pages: Access to IP, explaining everything related to access to temporary account IP addresses, and Repository with a list of new gadgets and user scripts.

Updates for editors

• Anyone can play an experimental new game, WikiRun, that lets you race through Wikipedia by clicking from one article to another, aiming to reach a target page in as few steps and in as little time as possible. The project's goal is to explore new ways of engaging readers. Try playing the game and let the team know what you think on the talk page.
• Users of the Wikipedia Android app in some languages can now play the new trivia game. Which came first? is a simple history game where you guess which of two events happened earlier on today's date. It was previously available as an A/B test. It is now available to all users in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, and Chinese. The goal of the feature is to help engage with new generations of readers. [28]
• Users of the iOS Wikipedia App in some languages may see a new tabbed browsing feature that enables you to open multiple tabs while reading. This feature makes it easier to explore related topics and switch between articles. The A/B test is currently running in Arabic, English, and Japanese in selected regions. More details are available on the Tabbed Browsing project page.
• Bureaucrats on Wikimedia wikis can now use Special:VerifyOATHForUser to check if users have enabled two-factor authentication. [29]
• A new feature related to Template Recall and Discovery will be deployed later this week to all Wikimedia projects: a template category browser will be introduced to assist users in finding templates to put in their “favourite” list. The browser will allow users to browse a list of templates which have been organised into a given category tree. The feature has been requested by the community through the Community Wishlist.
• It is now possible to access watchlist preferences from the watchlist page. Also the redundant button to edit the watchlist has been removed. [30]
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• As part of MediaWiki 1.44 there is now a unified built-in Notifications system that makes it easier for developers to send, manage, and customize notifications. Check out the updated documentation at Manual:Notifications, information about migration in T388663 and details on deprecated hooks in T389624.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• WikidataCon 2025, the conference dedicated to Wikidata is now open for session proposals and for registration. This year's event will be held online from October 31 – November 02 and will explore on the theme of "Connecting People through Linked Open Data".

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MediaWiki message delivery 00:05, 8 July 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-29

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• Featured templates, a new feature related to Template Recall and Discovery will be deployed this week to all Wikimedia projects: With this feature, editors will be able to quickly access a list of templates that are likely to be useful. These templates will be displayed in a list, under the "featured" tab of the template discovery interface. Administrators can define the list via the Community Configuration interface. The feature fulfills a request by the community through the Community Wishlist. [31][32]
• View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the request to add Malayalam fonts in the Wikisource Book Export Tool was resolved and now, the rendering of Malayalam letters in exported Wikisource books are accurate. [33]

Updates for technical contributors

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• Developers, designers, and all Wikimedians are invited to submit a project idea for the Wikimania Hackathon 2025. Read this Diff blog post for more details.

Meetings and events

• WikiIndaba 2025 scholarship application and program submission is open until 23:59 GMT on July 20. WikiIndaba is a regional conference for African Wikimedians both on the continent and in the diaspora to unite and grow together. Submit your scholarship application and program proposal now!
• WikiCon Brasil 2025 will take place on July 19-20 in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. The Brazilian community members are encouraged to register and attend!

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MediaWiki message delivery 20:09, 14 July 2025 (UTC)