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

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Description

Remove Language Link edits from the Recent Changes and Watchlist Feed

This proposal is to discuss the implications of removing Language link edits from the Special:RecentChanges (RC) and Special:Watchlist (WL) feeds of Wikimedia Projects (other than Wikidata).
This proposal does not affect other types of Wikidata edit from the RC and WL feeds, such as changes to Claims, References, Label, Description or Alias changes, and Sitelink changes to the local or home wiki are also excluded.

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T437582

Currently

1. When an edit is made, a diff is created in the version history of the Wiki where the edit occurs. This information is always (as long as the page is not deleted).

2. When this local diff is created, a change is also sent to the Recent Changes feed, and also to any Watchlists that are watching the page where the edit occurred.

3. Behind the Recent Changes visual display or feed, is a database table where the information presented is stored and organised. When step 1 happens, a row is created in the rc_table and the edit is stored into it.
This happens for every published edit made on the Wiki.

4. Entries into this table persist for 30 days, (see mw:Manual:$wgRCMaxAge) after which they are purged, or removed; they 'age out' and will no longer be visible on the Recent Changes feed.

Our Proposal

Step 1 remains the same. Wherever the edit is made, a diff is created in the Version History of the repo Wiki.

If the edit adds, removes, or changes a language link (aka sitelink), the change will not be sent to the client wiki rc_table.

This would mean:

• No row in the client rc_table is created for that edit
• No change or edit information is stored in the client wiki rc_table
• If you view Special:RecentChanges, you will not see edit summaries that describe:
  • (Language link added: lang:page name)
  • (Language link removed: lang:page name)
  • (Language link changed from lang:page name1 to lang:page name2)
• You will still see (A Wikidata item has been linked to this page)

Why Language Links?

We have heard anecdotally that Language Links changes flood the Recent Changes feed when Wikidata edits are enabled. This dilutes changes that warrant a human review, and can be enough of an annoyance that editors default to disabling Wikidata edits entirely — hiding all changes, including ones that would have value to the reader.

A variety of "Language Link" edits as seen in the Recent Changes feed

Why only Language Links?

The proposal is already a big change, and language link changes account for a considerable volume of Wikidata-triggered edits that go to the client Wikis recent changes and watchlists feeds.

Transparency is a cornerstone of the Wikimedia Projects; how does this help?

1. We're not deleting any data.
   The version history of the edit will be available in the place it was published. As language link edits occur on Wikidata (see d:Help:Sitelinks), a diff is created on the Wikidata item where the sitelink has been edited.
2. The edit will still go to the home Wiki Recent Changes feed (Wikidata).
   
3. Noise undermines transparency. A feed that is ignored due to a flood of low-value changes is detrimental.
   
4. We believe that the majority of Wikimedians do not have Wikidata edits enabled for their Recent Changes feed, so this change should not drastically alter their experience.

I don't see these edits anyway, are they already hidden?

These edits or changes are only visible when the active filter or user preference show Wikidata edits in Recent Changes / Watchlist is enabled.
For help on how to do this, please see this guide on enabling this option.

Feedback

Please share your thoughts on the Talk page and feel free to share this page with other Wikimedians you think might be impacted or have feedback to share.

If you are not comfortable giving feedback in English, please post in your native language.
Your input is invaluable and will determine the direction and future of this potential change, thank you for participating!

Deployment

(progression assumes the previous step did not encounter any breakages)

• inform communities of proposed change (phab:T437575)
• initial testing on test instances (test.wikipedia) (phab:T438464)
• code review on Config change for train deployment (phab:T438463)
• activate changes on group 1 wikis - 05.10.2026 Monday (due to staff illness, deployment has been delayed by 24 hours)
  06.10.2026 Tuesday 09:00 CEST / 07:00 UTC (phab:T439415)
• observation period for 2 weeks
• at this stage, we will either continue deployment to all other client Wikis
• or rollback the change and implement an active filter
• post-deployment work includes configuration deployment.

Mitigations

Replicate your Wikipedia Watchlist on Wikidata

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

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

Wikidata Vandalism Dashboard

A toolforge tool that will create a list of unpatrolled edits, with an ORES score to suggest the likelihood of the edit being vandalism or requiring a human-review. The tool has a couple of limitations however:

1. You have to input the languages you wish to check
2. Only checks for language link/sitelink removal - it will not inform you of language link / sitelink added or changed.

• enter a comma-separated list of language codes, these are the languages the tool will retrieve changes for.
  • en,de,fr,es,nl,
• Set the limit of changes you want to review. Base is set to 50.
• from the three checkboxes, select Sitelink removals if you only want to review items that have had a language link removed from a Wikidata item.

Research

Filtering out Wikipedia No-Diff notifications, caused by Wikidata edits

During quarter 1 and quarter 2, 2026, our engineer team undertook research into the volume and type of Wikidata edits that end up going to the Recent Changes and Watchlist pages.

In particular, we wanted to understand the quantity of "no reparse" edits, or edits that do not cause any visible change in the Wiki pages content, or page HTML, and explore the possibility of hiding or removing them from the rc feed.

During this research, we categorised the different types of Wikidata edits and this began revealing the scale of the language link edits (page 06) and (page 17).

While ultimately we decided not to further pursue the "Lil Diff" tool, we did make several recommendations of tasks we could pursue to address the issue of too much 'noise' in the Recent Changes feed. Suppressing language links is one of these (page 19).

Glossary

• Client Wiki: consumes data from the repo wiki, does not store that data on its own tables.
• Repo Wiki: hosts and stores structured data
• rc_table: shorthand for Recentchanges_table, contains information about edits made to the wiki, generates the Recent Changes, Watchlist, Related Changes and lists of new pages feeds.
• Language link: an alias of Sitelink
• Sitelink: an identification of a linked page on another site. Consists of a site identifier and a title, and is stored in individual items in Wikidata. Sitelinks are used both for identifying an item from an external site, and as a central storage of interlanguage links (per Wikidata:Glossary)