User talk:Asaf (WMF)
Add topic
Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2026: How to deliver a good lightning talk
[edit]
Dear Asaf,
On behalf of the Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2026 programme committee, I am pleased to invite you to take part in a 1-hour training session on how to deliver a good lightning talk. To attend the session please register here: Event:CEEM 2026-How to deliver a good lightning talk. The session will be held on Thursday, August 27 at 16:00 UTC (check your local time here). If you have slides already ready -- you would be able to get a second opinion from the programme committee. If you do not have slides yet -- please come prepared with an outline of what you plan to (not) include in your lightning talk. This is not a mandatory session, but we would like to see you there! Especially, as you are an experienced speaker, so you might share your own tips with the participants of the session.
Best regards -- アンタナナ 07:50, 23 August 2026 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 16
[edit]
Highlights
- Simplifying account creation: The Special:CreateAccount page has been simplified as part of ongoing work to modernize the account creation experience. Multiple account creation experiments show that a simpler form helps newcomers complete registration.
- Movement Ecosystem strategy: Deadline to provide feedback on the first version of the proposal are extended until Sep 30 to allow more time for community feedback and discussion.
- New format for the Community Wishlist: You can read the proposed ideas on Meta. This new process plans to improve how wishes are triaged, voted on, and prioritized in a way that is transparent and balanced across project families and language editions. Please let us know what you think will work well or if there are ways to make this proposal stronger. This consultation is open for two weeks.
Annual Goals Progress on Engage
See also: Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · The Wikipedia Library · list of movement events · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia
- Improving page performance: In order to improve page performance, images now load when they are viewed. This means images that are lower down within an article will not load if a reader never scrolls to that part of the page, which may affect some image-related metrics.
- Android Reading list updates: Some of the recent Android releases include updates to the Saved feature. This first round of changes on the Android app include redesigning the "Saved" tab to include an "All articles" view, and remove the user-facing default "Saved" reading list.
- Reading list on desktop: Reading lists has been released on Chinese, Bengali, Czech, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. The feature is now available for logged-in users on those wikis.
- Event Registration tool: The Worklist feature for the Event Registration tool is now live on all Wikimedia wikis. With Worklist, event organizers can add the articles their event will focus on directly to the event page. The Worklist also powers Event Pathways which notifies other editors of the upcoming or ongoing event when they edit an article featured in the event’s Worklist.
- Call for Projects and Mentors for Outreachy: Wikimedia is participating in Round 33 of the Outreachy program that runs from December 2026 through March 2027. The deadline to submit projects on Phabricator is Sept 4 at 4pm UTC and the project list will be finalized by Sep 11.
- Latest experiments: A current experiment is testing to introduce a new content type in Apps home. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
- Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News week 34 and 35 include that a new Wikipedia in Bole has been created. See also the 58 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
- UwER Conference: In December, the Wikimedia Portugal and Wikimedia Foundation will be hosting a first-of-its-kind convening for users with extended rights. Applications to attend opened August 13 and will close on September 4.
Annual Goals Progress on Enable
See also: Research newsletter · WikiLearn News · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Wikimedia Endowment: Updates from the July 2026 Wikimedia Endowment Board Meeting.
Annual Goals Progress on Protect
See also: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog
- Don't Blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
- Legal footer update: The Foundation had updated the Legal and Safety Contact Information on 300+ content wikis. The project adds a link to a Foundation-managed central page where people can find contact information to report illegal issues and serve official legal notices. This helps to resolve gaps if community-managed contact pages are missing or incomplete.
Annual Goals Progress on Reach
See also: Wikimedia Apps · Readers
- Collaboration: UNESCO and Wikimedia Movement deepen their partnership at Wikimania 2026.
- Digitization: Bringing Balinese Manuscripts to Wikimania 2026.
- Language related projects: Read some key highlights from the latest edition of the Language and internationalization newsletter.
Board and Board committee updates
See also: Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- AffCom: The Affiliations Committee is extending the pause on new affiliate recognition until the affiliate recognition and funding model is further clarified.
Other Movement-curated newsletters & news
Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l'actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. If you have feedback or suggestions about the bulletin, let us know at foundationbulletin@wikimedia.org. For questions about the Wikimedia Foundation's work, contact us!
MediaWiki message delivery 21:00, 1 September 2026 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 17
[edit]
Highlights
- Data center switch: All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 23 at 14:00 UTC as part of a scheduled switchover to allow for essential maintenance and improvements. A banner will be displayed on all wikis 30 minutes in advance.
- Baseline NPOV Policy: The public conversation regarding the proposed baseline NPOV policy for Wikipedias that do not yet have one has been concluded. Read the summary report and the updated baseline NPOV policy text and enforcement guidance here.
- Save the date. Wikimania 2027 will be taking place in Santiago, Chile, and online from August 18 to 21, with the theme "The Internet we want". See the Wikimania 2026 coverage highlights and a brief update on what's ahead.
- Chart extension is now beginner-friendly: Creating graphs and charts previously required manual JSON editing. In response to a Community wish to make the Charts extension more user-friendly, a new Visual mode for adding values has been introduced.
Annual Goals Progress on Engage
See also: Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · The Wikipedia Library · list of movement events · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia
- Introducing TextMatch: Communities are shaping Suggestion Mode with TextMatch to create custom suggestions that are tailored to their own policies and writing conventions. Share your feedback.
- Visual editor becoming default: Design work on the user experience for visual editing for newcomers is underway. This follows visual editor becoming default on English Wikipedia following a community discussion.
- Community Wishlist 2027 consultation: The consultation on the proposed new Wishlist process is closing this week. This year's cycle plans for wish submissions in late October/early November, triage completed by late November, and voting in early to mid January. Share feedback in any language on the talk page.
- Improved Add a Link feature: Add a Link has been upgraded for English Wikipedia users with improved detection of links that have different capitalization. This will help reduce ambiguous suggestions caused by differences in capitalization in article titles, including articles about cultural goods.
- Wikipedia Android app: Latest release includes updates to the Saved feature, bringing the app’s saving experience closer to iOS and Web. The update redesigns the Saved tab with an “All articles” view, removes the default “Saved” reading list, renames reading lists to “Collections,” and modernizes the article-saving experience.
- Domain change for thumbnails: The domain of URLs for thumbnails is changing from
upload.wikimedia.orgtothumb.wikimedia.org. The old URLs will continue to work but MediaWiki will advertise the new domain instead. Original files, videos, and transcodes will still be served fromupload.wikimedia.org. - Reading lists rollout continues on desktop: Following the initial deployment to Bengali, Chinese, Czech, and Vietnamese Wikipedias, reading lists went live on Arabic, French, and Indonesian Wikipedias and will go live on English Wikipedia on Sep 14, with all remaining wikis following on Sep 28.
- New features of Pageviews Analysis: Several new features have been added to the Pageviews Analysis tool which allows users to compare pageviews across multiple pages. They include WikiNav which provides insights into how readers of Wikipedia explore the content, editing stats in Siteviews, the ability to lookup articles belonging to a WikiProject, and support for dark mode.
- Article guidance: As part of an A/B experiment, Article guidance is now available in Turkish and Simple English.
- Latest experiments: A current experiment for logged-out mobile readers on Bengali, Czech, English, Farsi, and Polish Wikipedias is testing whether simplifying the Minerva navigation bar improves reader retention. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
- Wikifunctions status updates: Thanks to all contributors, Wikifunctions has now reached 5,000 functions.
- Latest highlights from Tech News: Weeks 36 and 37 of Tech News include the Article guidance feature is now enabled by default for editors with less than 100 edits on Simple English and Turkish Wikipedia.
Annual Goals Progress on Enable
See also: Research newsletter · WikiLearn News · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Affiliates and grant funding: Have your say on proposals establishing (1) a new model and set of expectations for movement affiliates; (2) new, connected requirements to determine eligibility for receiving Community Fund grants from the Wikimedia Foundation; and (3) updated criteria for affiliate recognition processes.
- Community Fund reflections: Read the reflections on the fiscal year 2025–2026 of the Rapid Fund and General Support Fund, covering $17.73 million across 427 grants in 90 countries, with 56.2% distributed outside North America and Northern & Western Europe.
Annual Goals Progress on Reach
See also: Wikimedia Apps · Readers
- World of Wikipedia launches: The World of Wikipedia game has been released. It is an online collectible card game where players sort fact from fiction across Wikipedia articles to build their card library. The game is the latest experiment in reaching younger audiences through familiar formats, following Wikispeedia on Roblox and Which Came First? on the Wikipedia app.
Other updates
See also: Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- Celebrate Women 2026: Read the impact of Celebrate Women 2026 as the campaign concluded with 112 events, 238,222 unreverted content edits and 2,499,773,577 bytes added.
- US staff union vote: On Sep 3, eligible Wikimedia Foundation staff in the United States voted in favor of union representation in a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election.
Other Movement-curated newsletters & news
Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l'actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. If you have feedback or suggestions about the bulletin, let us know at foundationbulletin@wikimedia.org. For questions about the Wikimedia Foundation's work, contact us!
MediaWiki message delivery 01:53, 16 September 2026 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 18
[edit]
Highlights
- Introducing the Wikipedia Starter Kit: The Foundation has launched a new Toolforge-hosted tool giving new and small language Wikipedia communities a guided pathway through essential onboarding tasks, activity indicators, and connections to the wider movement.
- Apply for a scholarship to Wikimania 2027: Scholarship applications are now open to attend Wikimania 2027 in Santiago. To help with preparing submissions, orientation sessions in Spanish, Portuguese, and English will be held starting the week of October 5. The final deadline is October 31.
- Reading Lists rolling out to all Wikipedias: Starting September 28, logged-in users on every Wikipedia will be able to save articles to a "read later" list using the bookmark icon, following successful rollouts on Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Czech, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
- WikiCelebrate: WikiCelebrating Juan "BugWarp" Kulichevsky, who has contributed to Wikimedia projects since childhood and is passionate about sports photography and community building in Argentina and beyond.
- The 2026 appointment cycle is open now through 31 October 2026 for the Ombuds Commission (OC) and the Case Review Committee (CRC). You can learn more about the committees, the roles, and how to apply on the Committee Appointments page on Meta-wiki.
Annual Goals Progress on Engage
See also: Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · The Wikipedia Library · list of movement events · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia
- Community Wishlist 2027: The Community Wishlist Process is now updated, taking into account the feedback received. Look out for the call for wish submissions towards the end of October.
- Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2026: From Sep 18-20, Wikimedians, open-knowledge researchers, and free-culture advocates from Central and Eastern Europe gathered for the first time in Romania. Take a look at the novelties and history behind CEE Meeting.
- Increasing account creation: To convert more casual users into logged-in daily users, the evergreen account creation prompt is released into Beta / TestFlight for iOS and Android. Also, a new post-edit notice designed to encourage Temporary Account holders to register for a permanent account will now be released to all wikis. The new notice has proven to increase permanent account creation from 1.94% to 3.66%.
- VisualEditor is now the default at English Wikipedia: this wiki has now adopted VisualEditor as the default editor on both desktop and mobile web, following a sitewide discussion that found overwhelming consensus to make the change.
- Retesting image carousel: The image carousel experiment will be retested using three new versions of the design, updated based on community feedback. The team will assess results and determine with communities whether or not to proceed with the feature.
- Wikifunctions: Your code can now call back to the Wikidata fetch functions. Wikifunctions have deployed an initial capability by which a code Implementation (in JavaScript or Python) can call certain other Wikifunctions Functions, get back the result, and have it available for further processing.
- Latest experiments: A current experiment is testing whether offering a "generic guidance" path for Article Guidance that does not depend on a Wikidata match would increase the chances of more article creation attempts. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
- Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News weeks 38 and 39 include a Reader Growth experiment testing whether showing only part of an article at first on mobile, with a “Read more” button to reveal the rest, encourages people to keep reading. See also the 56 community-submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
- Suggestions for Transliterated Search: If you regularly use two different writing systems (such as Hindi and Latin alphabet), sometimes you accidentally type with the wrong one and need to switch to the right keyboard. Now, this gadget will be able to suggest query based on what you typed.
- Peer-to-peer learning program: Let’s Connect, a peer-to-peer learning program is shifting to a community-organized model.
- LLM Paste Check rolling out to Wikipedia: A new Edit Check will prompt editors who paste text likely copied from an external AI chatbot to consider whether it aligns with movement AI-use policies and decide whether to keep or remove it. It goes live as a default-on feature at English Wikipedia on Sep 24 and at all Wikipedias on Oct 8.
Annual Goals Progress on Enable
See also: Research newsletter · WikiLearn News · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Wikidata bulk downloads now free via Wikimedia Enterprise: New beta API endpoints let anyone download full Wikidata snapshots and pull hourly batch diffs at no cost, opening up bulk access that previously required a paid tier.
- Accountability for Wikimedia production services: To ensure clear accountability for responding to incidents in Wikimedia production services, Wikimedia Foundation published the Service Catalog page. The page is the canonical source of service ownership for code deployed to the Wikimedia Foundation cluster. See also FAQ pages which contain more background details.
- Datacenter switchover has been postponed: The equinox exercise revealed capacity issues, preventing the switch of all services to the other datacenter. The process has been paused, prioritizing investigating that issue, to ensure that we continue to be able to serve our users reliably. A new exercise will be scheduled. Meanwhile, all traffic and edits continue to work as usual.
- Affiliates and grant funding: The conversations on the new proposed model, requirements and criteria continues until the end of next week with public calls on 1) Tuesday, September 29, 16:00-17:00 UTC on affiliate growth paths and Friday, October 2nd, 17:00-18:00 UTC on affiliate overlaps.
Annual Goals Progress on Reach
See also: Wikimedia Apps · Readers
- AI literacy program: A new regional initiative in ASEAN was launched to support training and conversations around AI literacy, accountability, and Indigenous self-determination.
- Testing Google preferred sources: An experiment is proposed on English Wikipedia to run a temporary (2-week) notice asking readers who come from Google to set Wikipedia as a “preferred source” in Google. We would see if this causes people who use Google to visit Wikipedia more. If your language wiki is interested, please reach out on the project's talk page.
Other Movement-curated newsletters & news
Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · The Headword (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l'actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. If you have feedback or suggestions about the bulletin, let us know at foundationbulletin@wikimedia.org. For questions about the Wikimedia Foundation's work, contact us!
MediaWiki message delivery 01:50, 30 September 2026 (UTC)
September 2026 CEE Newsletter is out
[edit]Hi everyone,
The September 2026 issue of the CEE Newsletter has been published.
This issue highlights diverse efforts to create, protect, and share open knowledge, featuring activities in education, GLAM, photography, and community engagement. It also explores new recognition and funding proposal, resources for smaller Wikipedia language editions, and peer-learning experiences.
Read the full newsletter here.
Enjoy the read!
Caner (User:Kurmanbek)