User talk:Mayur-WMF

Tech News: 2026-38

Latest comment: 24 days 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 Future Audiences team has started a discussion on English Wikipedia about a proposed new experiment to show a temporary notice about the new Google Preferred Sources feature to Wikipedia readers coming from Google. The experiment is to test whether this notice makes visitors come back to Wikipedia more often. Preferred Sources feature lets users choose websites they trust so Google can highlight content from those sources more prominently in Search and AI experiences. We are interested in testing this on other languages that Google supports and would welcome assistance with starting conversations on other wikis. If interested, please reach out to Future Audiences on the talk page.

Updates for editors

The chat platform Discord is releasing a new self-service framework that websites can use to specify how their links should look when shared on Discord. The Future Audiences team is planning to start using this new framework to improve how Wikipedia links look when shared on Discord, giving better attribution and credit to contributors. The link appearance and behavior won't change in the first phase of this project as we want to first collect some baseline data to assess the impact of future changes. However, if community members who are active on Discord spot any issues, they can reach out on Phabricator or Metawiki.
The Reader Growth team will be running an experiment to test whether compacting article lead sections on mobiles with the addition of a "read more" button improves reader retention. The test will begin on September 17 on Arabic, Spanish, French, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Vietnamese, and Chinese Wikipedias and will run for four weeks.
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 23. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming week. [1]
View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where Wikistats for Wikipedias was returning an HTTP 500 error and could not be reached, has now been fixed. [2]

Updates for technical contributors

Developers who maintain a tool that queries the Wikimedia Commons links tables need to update their code to connect to the new x4 database cluster. The links tables have been moved from the s4 cluster to x4, and will no longer receive updates on s4. The page and redirect tables remain available on both clusters. A wiki replica for the x4 cluster will be set up afterwards. The change is being made because the s4 cluster has grown too large to operate efficiently. You can read more.
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 15:28, 14 September 2026 (UTC)Reply

Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 17

Latest comment: 23 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on August 28. Please help translate.

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.org to thumb.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 from upload.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)Reply

Tech News: 2026-39

Latest comment: 12 days 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, 23 September 2026 at 14:00 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. [3]

Updates for editors

The Growth team tested a new post-edit notice designed to encourage Temporary Account holders to register for a permanent account. The new notice replaced multiple dialogs and a simultaneous welcome notification with a single message highlighting the benefits of creating an account. The experiment increased permanent account creation from 1.94% to 3.66%, an 87% relative increase. The change will now be released to all wikis. [4]
For Wikipedia editors using the "Suggestion mode" Beta Feature, there is a new opt-in user preference for showing "experimental" edit checks and suggestions. These types are listed at Special:EditChecks, and are intended for early developer-testing and for gathering feedback from experienced users. Administrators can change the configuration details for each suggestion as usual. Administrators can also use this feature to help test their community's ideas for locally created checks and suggestions. Experimental types will have a more distinct visual style later this week. Feedback is welcome.
The CEE Technical Village Pump has been launched as a space for technical discussions and collaboration among Wikimedia communities in Central and Eastern Europe.
A new tool, Starter Kit, is now available for new and small language Wikipedia communities. It brings together guided tasks, tools, and resources to help communities get started, monitor their progress, and collaborate with the broader Wikimedia community. Starter Kit is hosted on Wikimedia Toolforge and is designed for Wikipedias with fewer than 50,000 articles. Learn more about how Starter Kit works and how communities have been using it in this Diff blog post.
The Reader Growth team is launching a retest of the image carousel experiment. The retest will use 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. The experiment will begin the week of September 28 and will run on Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Czech, English, Farsi, French, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
After successful rollouts to Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Czech, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias, the Reading Lists feature from the Reader Experience team will be available to all logged-in users on all Wikipedia wikis starting September 28.
View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the mentor status script repeatedly updated mentors’ status even when nothing had changed, creating unnecessary Recent Changes entries, has now been fixed. [5]

Updates for technical contributors

The abusefilters list query API, used to retrieve specific details about active or historical abuse filters configured on a wiki, has been updated to support the formatversion=2 configuration parameter, thereby leading to breaking changes to the API response. All users who maintain user-scripts or other code need to check if they use the abusefilters list query API, and respond to any breaking changes. [6]
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 11:54, 27 September 2026 (UTC)Reply

Tech News: 2026-40

Latest comment: 11 days 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

Users of default skins on desktop and mobile web (Vector 2022 and Minerva respectively) will now be informed if the search suggestions displayed as they type into Search come from page redirects. Previously, users could get confused when the top search suggestions did not match exactly what they had typed. The new redirect notice clarifies that these suggestions are not random, but related to the search. The suggested pages may be redirects to the most relevant destination articles being searched for. [7]
Logged-out Wikipedia users on mobile web will begin to see a bookmark button for saving articles to their reading lists instead of the current Watchstar button. When clicked, the bookmark button prompts users to log in or create an account to save an article for later. An earlier experiment found that the bookmark icon was four times more likely than the Watchstar button to encourage logged-out users to create an account. This change is part of efforts to encourage more readers to become account holders and use features that help them save and return to content. [8]
An experiment will begin on September 29 on Spanish, Arabic, English, and French Wikipedias to simplify the experience users encounter immediately after account creation. The test will explore whether removing friction from the current Welcome Survey helps new users understand what to do next more easily. The experiment will run through the end of October. [9]

The Product and Technology Advisory Council has put out a call for the community to suggest topics that it should consider and discuss with the Wikimedia Foundation. Editors and technical contributors are invited to add topics to the council's talk page.
Later this week, it will be possible for communities to configure Edit Checks and Suggestions so that they are shown within additional namespaces, such as a Draft: namespace. Feedback is welcome.
A bug in the Global Watchlist is causing the page to fail to load for users that have unseen changes on Wikimedia Commons. Developers are working on a fix. Until then, affected users can follow the workarounds described in the relevant help section.
New magic words {{CATEGORYSORT:TIMESTAMP}} and {{CATEGORYSORT:RTIMESTAMP}} are now available for use. They are able to change the default sorting of categories to be based on timestamp of categorization. [10]
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where Wikistats for Wikipedias was not reachable has now been fixed. [11]

Updates for technical contributors

The datacenter switchover, scheduled on September 23, 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.
On September 23, a power loss briefly affected all wikis, creating intermittent issues on both reading and editing modes. This also affected Gerrit. This is unrelated to the datacenter switchover postponement. [12]
Produnto has been deployed to mediawiki.org and some Indic language wikis. We want to hear your feedback on this experimental product. Produnto allows users to use Lua modules hosted in Wikimedia's GitLab. It simplifies the sharing of Lua code between wikis. Instead of copying each individual Lua module from one wiki to another, users will be able to easily share packages across all wikis.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

A Cross-wiki code collaboration workshop will be held online on October 2 at 12:30 UTC, bringing together South Asian technical contributors to learn about Produnto and begin piloting it on Hindi, Punjabi, Odia, Telugu, and Malayalam Wikipedias. Produnto is a package manager for deploying Lua modules hosted on GitLab to Wikimedia wikis, and was recently deployed on some pilot wikis.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 10:46, 28 September 2026 (UTC)Reply

Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 18

Latest comment: 9 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on 15 September. Please help translate.

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)Reply

Tech News: 2026-41

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 process for this year’s Community Wishlist has been published, incorporating community feedback. The wish submission process will end on November 8. This year, a working group (open for volunteering) that includes community members familiar with the technical aspect of our wikis alongside Wikimedia Foundation staff, will take care of the triage process. The triage is expected to be completed by late November. Votes for wishes will start in January.

Updates for editors

Editors using the visual editor will now see a warning when they paste text that is likely to have initially been copied from one of five external generative AI chatbots into Wikipedia. This feature is known as LLM Paste Check. It is a type of Edit Check that is community configurable. The check looks for markers in the copied HTML and is not using content watermark detection. Edits will also be tagged so that patrollers can review them more closely. The feature helps newcomers add content that respects Wikipedia’s policies and makes it easier for experienced editors to identify problematic edits. Communities with local policies about LLM usage can adjust the wording and policy that is linked. The team apologizes that this was rolled out without a delay for translations.
Editors can now easily access the web visual editor directly from the iOS and Android apps. When opening the editor, users will be given a choice between visual editing and source editing. If they choose visual editing, they will be sent to a mobile web window in their phone's browser. After completing their edit, a banner will give them the option to return to the app. This enables readers to make quick contributions while casually reading.
Users of the Wikipedia Android and iOS apps will now see a one-time account creation prompt after they have used the app for two consecutive weeks. This prompt explains the benefits of having an account. It is intended to help more casual readers become logged-in users who return to the apps regularly. [13]
Editors on group1 wikis, including Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikivoyage, and Wikisource, will no longer see notifications on Recent Changes and Watchlist when a link to another language version of a page is added, removed, or changed in its Wikidata item. This change will begin on October 5 at 07:00 UTC as a two-week trial to reduce high-volume, low-value notifications and make important changes easier to identify. Editors who rely on these notifications can read more on the project page and share feedback or concerns on the talk page. [14]
View all 36 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where mentors who removed themselves from the mentorship program could still have mentees assigned to them and receive questions, has now been fixed. Mentees will now be reassigned when a mentor leaves the program. [15]

Updates for technical contributors

Wikimedia Brasil has published its Development Best Practices Framework (ABPD). It is a guide for staff, contractors and volunteers building technical tools and projects. It covers the project lifecycle, security, accessibility, personal data protection and responsible AI use, and explains how movement-wide guidelines were adapted to a local context. They encourage other affiliates to reuse it and adapt it. Read more in the Diff post.
A new, canonical base URL for Wikimedia APIs will soon be introduced. The new canonical route follows a {projectName}/api/ pattern and will act as an alternative path for current REST APIs (for example: {projectName}/w/rest.php/). Both versions will be callable for all existing APIs, but the new structure will be the preferred path for newly created API modules. This change will be non-breaking for most users. The existing pathways will remain available for all existing endpoint requests. However, some endpoints may return URLs following the new pattern in response bodies. Changes will be available on test wiki first, with the rollout expected to cover all wikis by the end of October. [16]
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.

18:49, 5 October 2026 (UTC)