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Latest comment: 2 months ago by MediaWiki message delivery in topic Wikidata weekly summary #724

Tech News: 2026-05

Latest comment: 4 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion

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

  • Wikimedia Foundation invites comments on proposed future of the Product and Technology Advisory Council until 28 February.
  • All users with registered accounts can now use passkeys for two-factor authentication (2FA). Passkeys are a simple way to log in without using a second device. They verify the user's identity using a fingerprint, face scan, or a PIN code. To set up a passkey, first set up a regular 2FA method. Currently, to log in with a passkey, users must also use a password. Later this quarter, passwordless login will allow users to log in with a single click and a passkey. Users with advanced rights will also be required to have 2FA enabled. This is part of the Account Security project.
  • Unregistered contributors on blocked IPs or blocked IP ranges can now interact on-wiki to appeal a block by creating a temporary account to appeal a block on the user talk page, unless the "prevent this user from editing their own talk page" is enabled. This solves the problem of logged-out users unable to use the default unblock process via user talk page. [1]
  • Recurrent item View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) methods description on the management page has been updated. It is now clearer and easier for users to understand and make use of. [2]

Updates for technical contributors

  • A new AbuseFilter variable, account_type, has been added to provide a reliable way to determine the account type being created in the createaccount and autocreateaccount actions. As part of this change, the variable accountname has been renamed to account_name, and accountname is now deprecated. Edit filter managers should update any filters that use hardcoded account type checks or the deprecated variable. [3]
  • Image thumbnails that are requested in non-standard sizes, and using non-standard methods such as direct requests to upload.wikimedia.org/… will stop working in the near future. This change is to prevent ongoing external abuse by web-scrapers and bots. Some users with custom CSS/JS, Interface Admins who can fix gadgets and local skins, and Tool-authors, will need to update their code to use standard thumbnail sizes. Details, search-links, and examples of how to fix them, are available in the task.
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 21:17, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 January 2026

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's newspaper

Wikidata weekly summary #717

Latest comment: 4 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2026-02-02. Missed the previous one? See issue #716.


Discussions

Events

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

Tool of the week

Other Noteworthy Stuff

Newest properties and property proposals to review

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

Development

  • Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects:
    • We are making progress with identifying additional ways in which we can reduce the number of irrelevant changes from Wikidata showing up in recent changes and watchlist on Wikipedia and co.
    • We are discussing with pilot Wikipedias about turning on showing Wikidata changes by default in watchlist and recent changes (moving it from opt-in to opt-out)
  • GraphQL: We are putting the last touches on a GraphQL endpoint for Wikidata. We are planning to get it live later this month for feedback.
  • LDF endpoint: We are planning to decommission the endpoint in preparation for the migration away from Blazegraph on the 18th of February (phab:T415696)
  • Mobile statement editing:
    • We are almost done with adding support for editing statements with quantity and monolingual text datatype and finished support for mathematical expression statements. We started support for editing coordinate statements.
    • We are continuing the work on showing constraint violations.
  • Wikibase Ecosystem: We are in the process of setting up a demo system for ontology federation (i.e. using Wikidata Items as values in statements on another Wikibase instance)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

Tech News: 2026-06

Latest comment: 4 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion

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

  • The "Page information" feature, which gives validating information about a page (example), now automatically includes a table of contents. If there is a local MediaWiki:Pageinfo-header page created by individual users, it can now be removed. [4]
  • Recurrent item View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, VisualEditor previously added bold or italic formatting inside link descriptions, making the wikicode complex. This has now been fixed. [5]

Updates for technical contributors

  • There was no XML dump on 20 January. Additionally, from now on, dumps will be generated once per month only. [6]
  • The MediaWiki Interfaces team removed support for all transform endpoints containing a trailing slash from the MediaWiki REST API. All API users currently calling those endpoints are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. If you have questions or encounter any problems, please file a ticket in phabricator to the #MW-Interfaces-Team board.
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Weekly highlight

  • Users are reminded that the Wikimedia Foundation has shared some guiding questions for the July 2026–June 2027 Annual Plan on Meta and Diff. These focus on global trends, faster and healthier experimentation, better support for newcomers, strengthening editors and advanced users, improving collaboration across projects, and growing and retaining readership. Feedback and ideas are welcome on the talk page.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 17:44, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #718

Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2026-02-09. Missed the previous one? See issue #717.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

Tool of the week

  • Wiki Clarity Tool: Clarity Tool is a lightweight web application built to empower editors across Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons. It helps contributors identify missing information in articles and suggests structured data from Wikidata to fill those gaps.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

  • Mobile editors can now edit String and External ID datatypes directly in the mobile view. To help improve this new interface, Wikimedia Deutschland is looking for volunteers for UX testing sessions. Participants will be compensated for their time. Sign up here (greatquestion) and learn more on the project page: Mobile editing of statements

Newest properties and property proposals to review

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

Development

  • Dumps: We published the report from our research into the user experience with Wikidata's dumps.
  • Mobile editing: We are finalizing the support for quantity, monolingual text, mathematical expression and musical notation statements as well as a first version for coordinate statements.
  • Wikidata integration in the Wikimedia projects: We have continued our investigation into existing Lua modules in order to find more ways in which we can reduce unwanted entries from Wikidata in Recent changes and watchlists on Wikipedia and co. We found a number of options that we are looking into now. (phab:T416822, phab:T416825, phab:T416826, phab:T416827)
  • Wikidata Vector embedding: We added German to the embedding (next to English, French and Arabic)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

Tech News: 2026-07

Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion

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

  • Wishlist item Logged-in contributors who manage large or complex watchlists can now organise and filter watched pages in ways that improve their workflows with the new Watchlist labels feature. By adding custom labels (for example: pages you created, pages being monitored for vandalism, or discussion pages) users can more quickly identify what needs attention, reduce cognitive load, and respond more efficiently. This improves watchlist usability, especially for highly active editors.
  • A new feature available on Special:Contributions shows temporary accounts that are likely operated by the same person, and so makes patrolling less time-consuming. Upon checking contributions of a temporary account, users with access to temporary account IP addresses can now see a view of contributions from the related temporary accounts. The feature looks up all the IPs associated with a given temporary account within the data retention period and shows all the contributions of all temporary accounts that have used these IPs. Learn more. [7]
  • When editors preview a wikitext edit, the reminder box that they are only seeing a preview (which is shown at the top), now has a grey/neutral background instead of a yellow/warning background. This makes it easier to distinguish preview notes from actual warnings (for example, edit conflicts or problematic redirect targets), which will now be shown in separate warning or error boxes. [8]
  • The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension continues to improve — it now properly supports more than one Wikibase site, for example both Wikidata and testwikidata. In addition, issues regarding text direction have been fixed for users who prefer Wikidata or other Wikibase sites in right-to-left (RTL) languages. [9][10]
  • The automatic "magic links" for ISBN, RFC, and PMID numbers have been deprecated in wikitext since 2021 due to inflexibility and difficulties with localization. Several wikis have successfully replaced RFC and PMID magic links with equivalent external links, but a template was often required to replace the functionality of the ISBN magic link. There is now a new built-in parser function {{#isbn}} available to replace the basic functionality of the ISBN magic link. This makes it easier for wikis who wish to migrate off of the deprecated magic link functionality to do so. [11]
  • Two new wikis have been created:
  • Recurrent item View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • A new global user group has been created: Local bots. It will be used internally by the software to allow community bots to bypass rate limits that are applied to abusive web scrapers. Accounts that are approved as bots on at least one Wikimedia wiki will be automatically added to this group. It will not change what user permissions the bot has. [14]
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 23:30, 9 February 2026 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: January 2026

Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion


Headlines
Read this edition in full • Single-page

To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

Tech News: 2026-08

Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion

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 SRE Team will be performing a cleanup of Wikimedia's Etherpad instance, the web-based editor for real-time collaborative document editing. All pads will be permanently deleted after 30 April, 2026 – if there are still migration projects in progress at that point the team can revisit the date on a case by case basis. Please create local backups of any content you wish to keep, as deleted data cannot be recovered. This cleanup helps reduce database size and minimize infrastructure footprint. Etherpad will continue to support real-time collaboration, but long-term storage should not be expected. Additional cleanups may occur in the future without prior notice. [16]

Updates for editors

  • The Information Retrieval team will be launching an Android mobile app experiment that tests hybrid search capabilities which can handle both semantic and keyword queries. The improvement of on-platform search will enable readers to find what they’re looking for directly on Wikipedia more easily. The experiment will first be launched on Greek Wikipedia in late February, followed by English, French, and Portuguese in March. Read more on Diff blog. [17]
  • The Reader Growth team will run an experiment for mobile web users, that adds a table of contents and automatically expands all article sections, to learn more about navigation issues they face. The test will be available on Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
  • Previously, site notices (MediaWiki:Sitenotice and MediaWiki:Anonnotice) would only render on the desktop site. Now, they will render on all platforms. Users on mobile web will now see these notices and be informed. Site administrators should be prepared to test and fix notices on mobile devices to avoid interference with articles. To opt out, interface admins can add #siteNotice { display: none; } to MediaWiki:Minerva.css. [18][19]
  • Recurrent item View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue on Special:RecentChanges has been fixed. Previously, clicking hide in the active filters caused the "view new changes since…" button to disappear, though it should have remained visible. The button now behaves as expected. [20]

Updates for technical contributors

  • New documentation is now available to help editors debug on-site search features. It supports troubleshooting when pages do not appear in results, when ranking seems unexpected, and when you need to inspect what content is being indexed, helping make search behavior easier to understand and analyze. Learn more. [21]
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 19:17, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 17 February 2026

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's newspaper

Wikidata weekly summary #719

Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2026-02-16. Missed the previous one? See issue #718.

Discussions

  • Open request for adminship: Sjö - RfP scheduled to end after 17 February 2026 10:02 (UTC)
  • New requests for permissions/Bot: SEEKCommonsBot - Task: Synchronize Wikidata records created by the SEEKCommons project with OpenAlex
  • Closed request for permissions/Bot:
    • AmeisenBot 3 - Task: Adding descriptions (and possibly labels and aliases as well) to items based on their statements. Request closed as approved.
    • Che-W-bot - Request withdrawn.

Events

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

Tool of the week

  • Queer Memory multilingual web app that explores global queer history through live Wikidata timelines, places, rights, culture, and activism. Currently available in English, French, and Spanish.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

  • Etherpad cleanup, save your pads now. All pads after 1st March 2026 willbe deleted so if you need any of your pads, please make a local backup.
  • The Wikibase REST API search endpoints are now available on v1 and considered stable! It's important to note that the older v0, which has been live on Wikidata since July 2025, will remain available for a two month transition period until mid-April 2026. We encourage all users to migrate to the new v1 endpoints during this time to ensure that their applications can continue to work seamlessly.
  • The WMF Wikidata Platform team has published its February 2026 newsletter. It includes result of an initial evaluation of open-source triple store candidates as part of the migration away from Blazegraph, the next Blazegraph migration office hour, and more. To have new issues of the WDP monthly newsletter delivered to your user talk page, Subscribe to WDP newsletter!

Newest properties and property proposals to review

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

Development

  • Mobile statement editing:
    • We are putting finishing touches on editing support for external ID, URL, monolingual text, quantities and coordinate statements.
    • We worked on visually highlighting preferred and deprecated statements on the mobile site similar to how it is done on desktop.
    • We worked on showing more than one constraint violation when a statement violates multiple constraints.
  • Ontology Federation: We continued working allowing other Wikibase instances to use Wikidata Items in their statements (and later from other Wikibase instances). You can see a demo video of the current development state at ontology federation demo.
  • GraphQL: We worked on documentation to get get the GraphQL endpoint ready for a first release.
  • Wikidata Query Service: The Wikidata Platform team published their report of the evaluation of Blazegraph alternatives. You can read it at File:WDQS Triple Store Evaluation - Benchmark Results Report.pdf.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

Tech News: 2026-09

Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion

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

  • Reference Check has been deployed to English Wikipedia, completing its rollout across all Wikipedias. The feature prompts newcomers to add a citation before publishing new content, helping reduce common citation-related reverts and improve verifiability. In A/B testing, the impact was substantial: newcomers shown Reference Check were approximately 2.2 times more likely to include a reference on desktop and about 17.5 times more likely on mobile web. [22]

Updates for editors

  • The InterwikiSorting extension, which allowed for the sorting of interwiki links, has been undeployed from Wikipedia. As a result, editors who had enabled interwiki link sorting in non-compact mode (full list format) will now see links reordered. The links moving forward will be listed in the alphabetical order of language code. [23]
  • Later this week, people who are editing a page-section using the mobile visual editor, will notice a new "Edit full page" button. When tapped, you will be able to edit the entire article. This helps when the change you want to make is outside the section you initially opened. [24][25]
  • The Reader Experience team is inviting editors to assess whether dark mode should still be considered "beta" on their wiki, based on their experience of how well it functions on desktop and mobile. If the feature is deemed mature, editors can update the interface messages in MediaWiki:skin-theme-description and MediaWiki:Vector-night-mode-beta-tag to indicate that dark mode is ready and no longer considered beta.
  • The improved Activity tab which displays user-insights is now available to all users of the Wikipedia iOS app (version 7.9.0 and later). Following earlier A/B testing that showed higher account creation among users with access to the feature, it has been rolled out to 100% of users along with some updates. The Activity tab now shows your edited articles in the timeline, offers editing impact insights like contribution counts and article view trends, and customization options to improve in-app experience for users.
  • Recurrent item View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug that prevented DiscussionTools from working on mobile has now been fixed, restoring full functionality. [26]

Updates for technical contributors

  • The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension that makes this possible continues to improve. The latest upgrade is the inclusion of a new hook, ext.globalwatchlist.rebuild, which fires after each watchlist rebuild. This allows you to run gadgets and user scripts for the Special page. [27]
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 19:03, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #720

Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2026-02-23. Missed the previous one? See issue #719.

Discussions

  • Open request for adminship: Jan Myšák - RfP scheduled to end after 28 February 2026 11:11 (UTC)
  • Closed request for adminship: Sjö - Closed as successful, congratulations User:Sjö.
  • New request for comments: Notability policy reform: Round 2, where policy is suggested based on round 1 discussions.

Events

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

Tool of the week

  • Dagbanli dictionary - a monolingual Dagbanli dictionary built using Wikidata lexemes, with 20000 native audio recordings as usage examples pulled from Mozilla Common Voice. This means when you look up a word, you can hear it spoken in example sentences. See this in action here: suɣulo

Other Noteworthy Stuff

Newest properties and property proposals to review

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

Development

  • Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are preparing to reach out to editors about improving specific templates that are written in a way that creates a lot of unnecessary entries in Recent Changes and Watchlists.
  • Mobile statement editing: We are getting close to having editing support for all datatypes. We are currently still working on the support for globe coordinates. We also added support for showing constraint violations on qualifiers and references.
  • Data quality: We are doing technical investigations about how to make constraint violations available for querying again.
  • GraphQL: We are getting ready to make GraphQL available on Wikidata later this week.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

Wikidata weekly summary #721

Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2026-03-02. Missed the previous one? See issue #720.

Discussions

  • Closed request for adminship: Jan Myšák: Closed as successful, congratulations to Wikidata's newest admin!
  • New request for comments: Notability Policy - Round 2: we are still requesting your input on the new Notablity policy. Including whether to elevate the self-promotion essay to a policy.

Events

  • Upcoming events:
    • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session 3 March, 2026: We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Session on Tuesday, March 3 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET (Time zone converter). Wikiproject P244 maintenance uses SPARQL queries to identify and resolve two types of constraint violations in Wikidata: instances of Wikidata items with more than one LCNAF identifier and instances of the same LCNAF identifier existing on more than one Wikidata item. The February 17th session walked participants through how to resolve the former issue, while the March 3rd session will focus on the latter. This session will be more discussion-focused, since instances where two LCNAF identifier have the same Wikidata item can be difficult to resolve because of Wikidata’s innate quirks. Maybe your ideas will become the official best practice! Event page: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_LD4_Wikidata_Affinity_Group/Project_Series/LCNAF_Duplicate_Detection_P244_Maintenance
    • Bring-Your-Own-Data-Lab, on 24.04.2026, the HERMES Data Competence centre hosts an online BYODL. Dr. Katrin Moeller and Dr. Olaf Simons will share how to enrich your own personal data with standard data and the Wikibase FactGrid. Click the link for registration and more information.
    • Wikidata Workshop w/ Wikipedia Riba Aruba + University of Aruba Research Center (UARC), March 2, 12 - 2pm GMT-4. Click here to register.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

Tool of the week

Newest properties and property proposals to review

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

Development

  • Mobile statement editing:
  • GraphQL: We are getting ready to launch the first version later this week, including preparing the documentation for how to use it.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

Tech News: 2026-10

Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion

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

  • Wikipedia 25 Birthday mode is now live on Betawi, Breton, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, Gorontalo, Indonesian, Italian, Luxembourgish, Madurese, Sicilian, Spanish, Thai, and Vietnamese Wikipedias! This limited-time campaign feature celebrates 25 years of Wikipedia with a birthday mascot, Baby Globe. When turned on, Baby Globe is shown on ~2,500 articles, waiting to be discovered by readers. Communities can choose to turn Birthday mode on by getting consensus from their community and asking an admin to enable the feature and customize it via community configuration on the local wiki.

Updates for editors

  • Sub-referencing, a new feature to re-use references with different details has been released to Swedish Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia and a couple of other wikis. You can try the feature on these projects or on testwiki and betawiki. Learnings from the first pilot wiki German Wikipedia have been published in a report. Reach out to the Wikimedia Deutschland team if you are interested in becoming a pilot wiki.
  • Paste Check will become available at all Wikipedias this week. The feature prompts newcomers who are pasting text they are not likely to have written into VisualEditor to consider whether doing so risks a copyright violation. Paste Check tags all edits where it is shown for potential review. Local administrators can configure various aspects of the feature via Special:EditChecks. Research across 22 wikis found that Paste Check resulted in an 18% decrease in relative reverted-edits compared to the control group. Translators can help to localize this and related features.
  • The Reader Experience team will be standardizing the user menu in the top right for all mobile users so that it is closer to the desktop experience. Currently this user menu is only visible to users with Advanced Mobile Controls (AMC) turned on. The only change is that a couple buttons previously in the left-side menu will move to the top right for users who do not have AMC turned on. This change is expected to go out March 9 and seeks to improve the user interface. [28]
  • Starting in the week of March 2, the emails sent out when an email address was added, removed, or changed for an account will switch to a substantially nicer and clearer HTML email from the prior plaintext one. [29]
  • Notifications are currently limited to 2,000 historic entries per user, and extend back to 2013 when the feature was released. This is going to be changed to only store Notifications from the last 5 years, but up to 10,000 of them. This will help with long-term infrastructure health and help to prevent more recent notifications from disappearing too soon. [30]
  • The Global Watchlist which lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on a single page continues to see improvements. The latest update improves label usage experience. The extension now allows activating the language fallback system for Wikidata items without labels in the viewed language, and showing those labels in the user’s preferred Wikidata language if no uselang= URL parameter is provided. [31][32]
  • The Wikipedia Android team has started a beta test of hybrid search on Greek Wikipedia. Hybrid search capabilities can handle both semantic and keyword queries enabling readers to find what they’re looking for directly on Wikipedia more easily.
  • For security reasons, members of certain user groups are required to have two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled. Currently, 2FA is required to use the group, but not to be a member of it. Given that this model still has some vulnerabilities, the situation will gradually change in March. Members of these groups will be unable to disable last 2FA method on their account, and it will be impossible to add users without 2FA to these groups. Users will still be able to add new authentication methods or remove them, as long as at least one method is continuously enabled. In the second half of March, users without 2FA will be removed from these groups. This applies to: CentralNotice administrators, checkusers, interface administrators, suppressors, Wikidata staff, Wikifunctions staff, WMF Office IT and WMF Trust & Safety. Nothing will change for other users. See the linked task for deployment schedule. [33]
  • Recurrent item View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue preventing users from creating an instance in Wikibase.cloud has now been fixed. [34]

Updates for technical contributors

  • To help ensure fair use of infrastructure, over the next month the Wikimedia Foundation will implement global API rate limits across our APIs. In early March, stricter limits will be applied to unidentified requests from outside Toolforge/WMCS and API requests that are made from web browsers. In April, higher limits will be applied to identified traffic. These limits are intentionally set as high as possible to minimise impact on the community. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits.
  • The Wikidata Query Service Linked Data Fragment (LDF) endpoint will be decommissioned in February. This endpoint served limited traffic, which was successfully migrated to other data access methods that were better suited to support existing use cases. The hardware used to support the LDF endpoint will be reallocated to support the ongoing backend migration efforts. [35]
  • The new Parsoid parser continues to be deployed to additional wikis, improving platform sustainability and making it easier to introduce new reading and editing features. Parsoid is now the default parser on 488 WMF wikis (268 Wikipedias), now covering more than 10% of all Wikipedia page views.
  • The process and criteria for requesting exceptional access to the high volume feed of the Wikimedia Enterprise APIs (at no cost for mission-aligned usecases), have now been published. This is to provide more thorough and clearer documentation for users.
  • Tech Blog, the blog dedicated to the Wikimedia technical community will be migrating to Diff, the community news and event blog. The migration should be complete in April 2026, after which new posts will be accepted for publishing. Readers will be able to access posts – old and new – on the landing page at https://diff.wikimedia.org/techblog.
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 17:52, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary 722

Latest comment: 2 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2026-03-09. Missed the previous one? See issue #721.

Discussions

  • New requests for permissions/Bot: DifoolBot 8 - Task: Remove Wikipedia import references from statements where the referenced article has since been deleted.

Events

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

Tool of the week

  • Data2Go : An iOS app for browsing and editing Wikidata with a mobile-first UI. It combines fast search, rich item detail views, statement editing, map previews, media galleries, and account-based write access to Wikidata.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

Newest properties and property proposals to review

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

Development

  • GraphQL: We have released the first version of this new API. You can read more about it and try it out.
  • Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We have worked with editors to improve some highly-used modules that access Wikidata in a suboptimal way. They have been adjusted to lead to less unneeded change notification in people's watchlists and recent changes on Wikipedia and co.
  • Mobile statement editing: We fixed an issue where certain Properties were not accessible in the new mobile UI. We are also working on fixing a bug with saving musical notation statements. We are continuing the work on supporting editing of geocoordinates.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

Tech News: 2026-11

Latest comment: 2 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion

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

  • All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday, 25 March 2026 at 15:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests, which happen twice a year. During the switchover, all Wikimedia website traffic is shifted from one primary data center to the backup data center to test availability and prevent service disruption even in emergencies.
  • Last week, all wikis had 2 hours of read-only time, and extended unavailability for user-scripts and gadgets. This was due to a security incident which has since been resolved. Work is ongoing to prevent re-occurrences. For current information please see the post on the Stewards' noticeboard (translations).

Updates for editors

  • Users facing multiple blocks on mobile will now see the reasons for each block separately, instead of a generic message. This helps them understand why they are blocked and what steps they can take to resolve the issue. For example, users affected for using common VPNs (such as iCloud Private Relay) will receive clearer guidance on what they need to do to start editing again. [36]
  • Later this week, Suggestion Mode will become available as a beta feature within the visual editor at all Wikipedias. This feature proactively suggests various types of actions that people can consider taking to improve Wikipedia articles, and learn about related guidelines. The feature is locally configurable, and can also be locally expanded with custom Suggestions. Current settings can be seen at Special:EditChecks and there are instructions for how administrators can customize the links to point to local guidelines. The feature is connected to Edit check which suggests improvements while someone is writing new content. In the future, the Editing team plans to evaluate the feature's impact with newcomers through a controlled experiment. [37]
  • Recurrent item View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where the cursor became misaligned during the use of CodeMirror’s syntax highlighting, which makes wikitext and code easier to read, has now been fixed. This problem specifically affected users who defined a font rule in a custom stylesheet while creating a new topic with DiscussionTools. [38]

Updates for technical contributors

  • API rate limiting update: To help ensure fair use of infrastructure, global API rate limits will be applied this week to requests without a compliant User-Agent that originate from outside Toolforge/WMCS and to unauthenticated requests made from web browsers. Higher limits will be applied to identified traffic in April. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits.
  • The new GraphQL API has been released. The API was developed as a flexible alternative to select features of the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS), to improve developer experience and foster adaptability, and efficient data access. Try it out and give feedback. You can also sign up for usability tests.
  • The PTAC Unsupported Tools Working Group continued improvements to Video2Commons in February, with fixes addressing authentication errors, large-file handling, task queue visibility, and clearer upload behavior. Work is still ongoing in some areas, including changes related to deprecated server-side uploads. Read this update to learn more.
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

  • The Article Guidance team invites experienced Wikipedia editors from selected pilot wikis and interested contributors from other Wikipedias to fill out this questionnaire which is available in English, Arabic, Bengali, Japanese, Portuguese, Persian, and Turkish. Your answers will help the team customize guidance for less experienced editors and help them learn community policies and practices while creating an article. Learn more on the project page.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 18:53, 9 March 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 10 March 2026

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's newspaper

This Month in GLAM: February 2026

Latest comment: 2 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion


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Wikidata weekly summary #723

Latest comment: 2 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2026-03-16. Missed the previous one? See issue #722.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

Tool of the week

Other Noteworthy Stuff

Newest properties and property proposals to review

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

Development

  • Mobile statement editing:
    • If you have not tried it yet, now is an excellent time to turn it on in the beta features section of your preferences, test it and give feedback.
    • We have added support for editing globe coordinate statements
  • Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are continuing to work on the issue of too many Wikidata in recent changes and watchlists on Wikipedia and co. We are currently prototyping a way to only consider changes that actually have an impact on the article (phab:T419823). We also finished the work on an emergency switch to turn off sending changes for qualifiers and references to Wikipedia and co in case of major database disruptions (phab:T412956).
  • Ontology federation: We are working towards getting the code for ontology federation (in its first version of using Wikidata Items as values on other Wikibase instances) ready for wider testing.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

Tech News: 2026-12

Latest comment: 2 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion

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

  • The ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽ beta feature, also known as CodeMirror 6, has been used for wikitext syntax highlighting since November 2024. It will be promoted out of beta by May 2026 in order to bring improvements and new features to all editors who use the standard syntax highlighter. If you have any questions or concerns about promoting the feature out of beta, please share. [39]
  • Some changes to local user groups are performed by stewards on Meta-Wiki and logged there only. Now, interwiki rights changes will be logged both on Meta-Wiki and the wiki of the target user to make it easier to access a full record of user's rights changes on a local wiki. Past log entries for such changes will be backfilled in the coming weeks. [40]
  • On wikis using Flagged Revisions, the number of pending changes shown on Special:PendingChanges previously counted pages which were no longer pending review, because they have been removed from the system without being reviewed, e.g. due to being deleted, moved to a different namespace, or due to wiki configuration changes. The count will be correct now. On some wikis the number shown will be much smaller than before. There should be no change to the list of pages itself. [41]
  • Wikifunctions composition language has been rewritten, resulting in a new version of the language. This change aims to increase service stability by reducing the orchestrator's memory consumption. This rewrite also enables substantial latency reduction, code simplification, and better abstractions, which will open the door to later feature additions. Read more about the changes.
  • Users can now sort search results alphabetically by page title. The update gives an additional option to finding pages more easily and quickly. Previously, results could be sorted by Edit date, Creation date, or Relevance. To use the new option, open 'Advanced Search' on the search results page and select 'Alphabetically' under 'Sorting Order'. [42]
  • Recurrent item View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the bug that prevented UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons from importing files from Flickr has now been fixed. [43]

Updates for technical contributors

  • A new special page, Special:LintTemplateErrors, has been created to list transcluded pages that are flagged as containing lint errors to help users discover them easily. The list is sorted by the number of transclusions with errors. For example: Special:LintTemplateErrors/night-mode-unaware-background-color. [44]
  • Users of the ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽ beta feature have been using CodeMirror instead of CodeEditor for syntax highlighting when editing JavaScript, CSS, JSON, Vue and Lua content pages, for some time now. Along with promoting CodeMirror 6 out of beta, the plan is to replace CodeEditor as the standard editor for these content models by May 2026. Feedback or concerns are welcome. [45]
  • The CodeMirror JavaScript modules will soon be upgraded to CodeMirror 6. Leading up to the upgrade, loading the ext.CodeMirror or ext.CodeMirror.lib modules from gadgets and user scripts was deprecated in July 2025. The use of the ext.CodeMirror.switch hook was also deprecated in March 2025. Contributors can now make their scripts or gadgets compatible with CodeMirror 6. See the migration guide for more information. [46]
  • The MediaWiki Interfaces team is expanding coverage of REST API module definitions to include extension APIs. REST API modules are groups of related endpoints that can be independently managed and versioned. Modules now exist for GrowthExperiments and Wikifunctions APIs. As we migrate extension APIs to this structure, documentation will move out of the main MediaWiki OpenAPI spec and REST Sandbox view, and will instead be accessible via module-specific options in the dropdown on the REST Sandbox (i.e., Special:RestSandbox, available on all wiki projects).
  • The Scribunto extension provides different pieces of information about the wiki where the module is being used via the mw.site library. Starting last week, the library also provides a way of accessing the wiki ID that can be used to facilitate cross-wiki module maintenance. [47]
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 19:36, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #724

Latest comment: 2 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2026-03-23. Missed the previous one? See issue #723.

Discussions

  • New requests for permissions/Bot:
    • AraBot - Tasks: Adding Aragonese sitelinks and updating articles on Aragonese Wikipedia with Wikidata's data.
    • InventaireBot - Task: Make automated edits generated by the inventaire.io (Q32193244) server and manual edits on behalf of users without a Wikidata account.
  • Closed request for permissions/Bot: DelintBot - Task: Fix lint errors on pages across all namespaces where Wikitext can be written (namespaces not managed by Wikibase).
  • New request for comments: archive.today - due to a RfC and policy on enwiki, this discussion needs your input on whether Wikidata will continue listing archive.today links.
  • Ongoing request for comments: Notability policy reform is looking for input about remaining questions around marginalized knowledge and external identifiers

Events

  • Upcoming events: (German) Art History Loves Wiki im Museum Schnütgen, YouTube livestream – 28 March 2026 (UTC+1): presentations by Lisa Dieckmann at 12.30 - 12.50 (“Bilder verknüpfen – prometheus, Normdaten und Wikidata”), Lucy Patterson & Lukas Fuchsgruber at 16.30 - 16.45 (“Kritische Arbeit mit Sammlungsdaten auf Wikidata”), and Max Kristen at 17.30 - 17.45 (“usefulQueries: Unkompliziert Kunstgeschichte in Wikidata erkunden”).

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

Tool of the week

  • Wikidata Property Creation Helper takes a property proposal page and translates it into a QuickStatements batch (and then a second one for the examples) that a property creator can use to quickly create a new property. By ArthurPSmith

Other Noteworthy Stuff

  • GraphQL API ongoing feedback: If you haven’t tried it yet, you can still explore it as a developer-friendly alternative to select WDQS features. Please Share your feedback on the project page, or sign up for deeper usability testing.

Newest properties and property proposals to review

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

  • Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject LAGL (Linked Ancient and Greek Latin) has been established to develop guidelines for adding statements for ancient authors.
  • WikiProject Highlights: WikiProject IDEA: Oral Histories - International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA) added a subpage for resources, guidelines and progress for adding oral history Items and Statements.
  • Showcase Items: Ngondo (Q3339328) - worship of water oracles and associated cultural traditions among the Sawa

Development

  • Infrastructure sustainability: We started working with a contractor to look at Wikidata's data storage to find opportunities for improving it.
  • Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are continuing the work on a prototype to compare a wiki page before and after it has been parsed to see if this is a feasible way to reduce the number of Wikidata changes in recent changes and watchlist that do not affect the article (phab:T419823)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

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