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Growth News, October 2024

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Latest comment: 6 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Current work

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Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module

We will add a new module to the Newcomer Homepage that will allow communities to highlight specific events, projects, campaigns, and initiatives. We have released a simple version on beta wikis and we will soon start an A/B test on our pilot wikis. This module will only display on the Newcomer Homepage if communities decide to utilize it, so learn how to configure the Community Updates module, or share your thoughts on the project's talk page.

One design concept aimed to increase constructive activation

Constructive activation experimentation

After showcasing early design ideas at Wikimania, we conducted user testing of design prototypes. We now aim to engage communities in further discussions and plan to run a targeted experiment, presenting a structured task within the reading view to logged-in new account holders with zero edits.

Community Configuration

This Community Configuration extension was developed to help communities customize wiki features to meet their unique needs. The Growth team is now helping other Wikimedia Foundation teams make their products configurable:

  • The Moderation Tools team now provides Community Configuration for Automoderator. (T365046)
  • Certain Babel extension settings will be configurable soon. (T328171)

Future work

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As part of the Growth team annual plan, we will continue to investigate ways to increase constructive activation on mobile, while also working with Data Products to move forward A/B testing functionality via the Metrics Platform.

Community events

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  • Growth team members presented Community Configuration: Shaping On-Wiki Functionality Together at Wikimania (slides). The session recording is available to watch on YouTube. This session provided an update on the Community Configuration project and introduced details about the upcoming features that communities will soon be able to configure. Representatives from the Moderator Tools, Editing, Web, and Campaigns teams shared their plans for utilizing Community Configuration in the future. Following these presentations, the WMF Growth team's Benoît Evellin and Martin Urbanec answered audience questions.
  • Habib Mhenni gave a presentation of how mentorship works at WikiIndaba 2024. The recording is available.

Stay informed

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Growth team weekly updates are available on wiki (in English) if you want to know more about our day-to-day work. If you want to receive more general updates about technical activity happening across the Wikimedia movement (including Growth work), we encourage you to subscribe to Tech News.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

Trizek_(WMF), 15:44, 22 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

The Signpost: 15 January 2025

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

Tech News: 2025-05

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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

  • Patrollers and admins - what information or context about edits or users could help you to make patroller or admin decisions more quickly or easily? The Wikimedia Foundation wants to hear from you to help guide its upcoming annual plan. Please consider sharing your thoughts on this and 13 other questions to shape the technical direction for next year.

Updates for editors

  • iOS Wikipedia App users worldwide can now access a personalized Year in Review feature, which provides insights based on their reading and editing history on Wikipedia. This project is part of a broader effort to help welcome new readers as they discover and interact with encyclopedic content.
  • Wishlist item Edit patrollers now have a new feature available that can highlight potentially problematic new pages. When a page is created with the same title as a page which was previously deleted, a tag ('Recreated') will now be added, which users can filter for in Special:RecentChanges and Special:NewPages. [1]
  • Later this week, there will be a new warning for editors if they attempt to create a redirect that links to another redirect (a double redirect). The feature will recommend that they link directly to the second redirect's target page. Thanks to the user SomeRandomDeveloper for this improvement. [2]
  • Advanced item Wikimedia wikis allow WebAuthn-based second factor checks (such as hardware tokens) during login, but the feature is fragile and has very few users. The MediaWiki Platform team is temporarily disabling adding new WebAuthn keys, to avoid interfering with the rollout of SUL3 (single user login version 3). Existing keys are unaffected. [3]
  • Recurrent item View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • For developers that use the MediaWiki History dumps: The Data Platform Engineering team has added a couple of new fields to these dumps, to support the Temporary Accounts initiative. If you maintain software that reads those dumps, please review your code and the updated documentation, since the order of the fields in the row will change. There will also be one field rename: in the mediawiki_user_history dump, the anonymous field will be renamed to is_anonymous. The changes will take effect with the next release of the dumps in February. [4]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:14, 27 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

Tech News: 2025-06

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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

  • Editors who use the "Special characters" editing-toolbar menu can now see the 32 special characters you have used most recently, across editing sessions on that wiki. This change should help make it easier to find the characters you use most often. The feature is in both the 2010 wikitext editor and VisualEditor. [5]
  • Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor can now create sublists with correct indentation by selecting the line(s) you want to indent and then clicking the toolbar buttons.[6] You can now also insert <code> tags using a new toolbar button.[7] Thanks to user stjn for these improvements.
  • Help is needed to ensure the citation generator works properly on each wiki.
    • (1) Administrators should update the local versions of the page MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json to include entries for preprint, standard, and dataset; Here are example diffs to replicate for 'preprint' and for 'standard' and 'dataset'.
    • (2.1) If the citoid map in the citation template used for these types of references is missing, one will need to be added. (2.2) If the citoid map does exist, the TemplateData will need to be updated to include new field names. Here are example updates for 'preprint' and for 'standard' and 'dataset'. The new fields that may need to be supported are archiveID, identifier, repository, organization, repositoryLocation, committee, and versionNumber. [8]
  • One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Central Kanuri (w:knc:) [9]
  • Recurrent item View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the OCR (optical character recognition) tool used for Wikisource now supports a new language, Church Slavonic. [10]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:09, 4 February 2025 (UTC)Reply

The Signpost: 7 February 2025

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

Tech News: 2025-07

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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

Updates for editors

  • The "Special pages" portlet link will be moved from the "Toolbox" into the "Navigation" section of the main menu's sidebar by default. This change is because the Toolbox is intended for tools relating to the current page, not tools relating to the site, so the link will be more logically and consistently located. To modify this behavior and update CSS styling, administrators can follow the instructions at T385346. [11]
  • As part of this year's work around improving the ways readers discover content on the wikis, the Web team will be running an experiment with a small number of readers that displays some suggestions for related or interesting articles within the search bar. Please check out the project page for more information.
  • Advanced item Template editors who use TemplateStyles can now customize output for users with specific accessibility needs by using accessibility related media queries (prefers-reduced-motion, prefers-reduced-transparency, prefers-contrast, and forced-colors). Thanks to user Bawolff for these improvements. [12]
  • Recurrent item View all 22 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the global blocks log will now be shown directly on the Special:CentralAuth page, similarly to global locks, to simplify the workflows for stewards. [13]

Updates for technical contributors

  • Wikidata now supports a special language as a "default for all languages" for labels and aliases. This is to avoid excessive duplication of the same information across many languages. If your Wikidata queries use labels, you may need to update them as some existing labels are getting removed. [14]
  • The function getDescription was invoked on every Wiki page read and accounts for ~2.5% of a page's total load time. The calculated value will now be cached, reducing load on Wikimedia servers. [15]
  • As part of the RESTBase deprecation effort, the /page/related endpoint has been blocked as of February 6, 2025, and will be removed soon. This timeline was chosen to align with the deprecation schedules for older Android and iOS versions. The stable alternative is the "morelike" action API in MediaWiki, and a migration example is available. The MediaWiki Interfaces team can be contacted for any questions. [16]

In depth

  • The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: Updates about the "Contribute" menu; details on some of the newest language editions of Wikipedia; details on new languages supported by the MediaWiki interface; updates on the Community-defined lists feature; and more.
  • The latest Chart Project newsletter is available. It includes updates on the progress towards bringing better visibility into global charts usage and support for categorizing pages in the Data namespace on Commons.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:12, 11 February 2025 (UTC)Reply

Tech News: 2025-08

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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

  • Communities using growth tools can now showcase one event on the Special:Homepage for newcomers. This feature will help newcomers to be informed about editing activities they can participate in. Administrators can create a new event to showcase at Special:CommunityConfiguration. To learn more about this feature, please read the Diff post, have a look at the documentation, or contact the Growth team.

Updates for editors

Highlighted talk pages improvements
  • Starting next week, talk pages at these wikis – Spanish Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia – will get a new design. This change was extensively tested as a Beta feature and is the last step of talk pages improvements. [17]
  • You can now navigate to view a redirect page directly from its action pages, such as the history page. Previously, you were forced to first go to the redirect target. This change should help editors who work with redirects a lot. Thanks to user stjn for this improvement. [18]
  • When a Cite reference is reused many times, wikis currently show either numbers like "1.23" or localized alphabetic markers like "a b c" in the reference list. Previously, if there were so many reuses that the alphabetic markers were all used, an error message was displayed. As part of the work to modernize Cite customization, these errors will no longer be shown and instead the backlinks will fall back to showing numeric markers like "1.23" once the alphabetic markers are all used.
  • The log entries for each change to an editor's user-groups are now clearer by specifying exactly what has changed, instead of the plain before and after listings. Translators can help to update the localized versions. Thanks to user Msz2001 for these improvements.
  • A new filter has been added to the Special:Nuke tool, which allows administrators to mass delete pages, to enable users to filter for pages in a range of page sizes (in bytes). This allows, for example, deleting pages only of a certain size or below. [19]
  • Non-administrators can now check which pages are able to be deleted using the Special:Nuke tool. Thanks to user MolecularPilot for this and the previous improvements. [20]
  • Recurrent item View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed in the configuration for the AV1 video file format, which enables these files to play again. [21]

Updates for technical contributors

  • Parsoid Read Views is going to be rolling out to most Wiktionaries over the next few weeks, following the successful transition of Wikivoyage to Parsoid Read Views last year. For more information, see the Parsoid/Parser Unification project page. [22][23]
  • Developers of tools that run on-wiki should note that mw.Uri is deprecated. Tools requiring mw.Uri must explicitly declare mediawiki.Uri as a ResourceLoader dependency, and should migrate to the browser native URL API soon. [24]

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, 17 February 2025 (UTC)Reply

Tech News: 2025-09

[edit]
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

  • Administrators can now customize how the Babel feature creates categories using Special:CommunityConfiguration/Babel. They can rename language categories, choose whether they should be auto-created, and adjust other settings. [25]
  • The wikimedia.org portal has been updated – and is receiving some ongoing improvements – to modernize and improve the accessibility of our portal pages. It now has better support for mobile layouts, updated wording and links, and better language support. Additionally, all of the Wikimedia project portals, such as wikibooks.org, now support dark mode when a reader is using that system setting. [26][27][28]
  • One new wiki has been created: a Wiktionary in Santali (wikt:sat:) [29]
  • Recurrent item View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that prevented clicking on search results in the web-interface for some Firefox for Android phone configurations. [30]

Meetings and events

  • The next Language Community Meeting is happening soon, February 28th at 14:00 UTC. This week's meeting will cover: highlights and technical updates on keyboard and tools for the Sámi languages, Translatewiki.net contributions from the Bahasa Lampung community in Indonesia, and technical Q&A. If you'd like to join, simply sign up on the wiki page.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:41, 25 February 2025 (UTC)Reply

The Signpost: 27 February 2025

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

Tech News: 2025-10

[edit]
Latest comment: 1 month 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

  • All logged-in editors using the mobile view can now edit a full page. The "Edit full page" link is accessible from the "More" menu in the toolbar. This was previously only available to editors using the Advanced mobile contributions setting. [31]
  • Interface administrators can now help to remove the deprecated Cite CSS code matching "mw-ref" from their local MediaWiki:Common.css. The list of wikis in need of cleanup, and the code to remove, can be found with this global search and in this example, and you can learn more about how to help on the CSS migration project page. The Cite footnote markers ("[1]") are now rendered by Parsoid, and the deprecated CSS is no longer needed. The CSS for backlinks ("mw:referencedBy") should remain in place for now. This cleanup is expected to cause no visible changes for readers. Please help to remove this code before March 20, after which the development team will do it for you.
  • When editors embed a file (e.g. [[File:MediaWiki.png]]) on a page that is protected with cascading protection, the software will no longer restrict edits to the file description page, only to new file uploads.[32] In contrast, transcluding a file description page (e.g. {{:File:MediaWiki.png}}) will now restrict edits to the page.[33]
  • When editors revert a file to an earlier version it will now require the same permissions as ordinarily uploading a new version of the file. The software now checks for 'reupload' or 'reupload-own' rights,[34] and respects cascading protection.[35]
  • When administrators are listing pages for deletion with the Nuke tool, they can now also list associated talk pages and redirects for deletion, alongside pages created by the target, rather than needing to manually delete these pages afterwards. [36]
  • The previously noted update to Single User Login, which will accommodate browser restrictions on cross-domain cookies by moving login and account creation to a central domain, will now roll out to all users during March and April. The team plans to enable it for all new account creation on Group0 wikis this week. See the SUL3 project page for more details and an updated timeline.
  • Since last week there has been a bug that shows some interface icons as black squares until the page has fully loaded. It will be fixed this week. [37]
  • One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Sylheti (w:syl:) [38]
  • Recurrent item View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed with loading images in very old versions of the Firefox browser on mobile. [39]

Updates for technical contributors

  • 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 02:31, 4 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

Growth Newsletter #33

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A quarterly update from the Growth team on our work to improve the new editor experience.

Constructive Activation Experiments

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This year, the Growth team is exploring ways to help more new account holders start editing—and do so constructively, meaning their edits are not reverted. Our latest experiments include:

  • Gradual rollout of "Add a Link" at English Wikipedia – We are gradually introducing the "Add a Link" structured task to newcomers at English Wikipedia (T386029). This serves as a natural A/B test to measure its impact on activation, retention, and revert rates (T382603). Previous experiments on pilot wikis showed that "Add a Link" increases newcomer participation, particularly by helping them make constructive (non-reverted) edits.
  • Testing in-article suggestions for first-time editors – Many new account holders want to contribute but don’t know where to start. To help, we’re piloting a feature that surfaces structured task suggestions directly in an article’s read view for brand-new editors (T385343). These suggestions will appear for logged-in users with no edits, providing a clear, simple way to begin contributing that is surfaced while they read.

Community Updates

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Newcomers often struggle to find their place in Wikipedia’s collaborative environment. While experienced editors easily discover events like edit-a-thons and writing campaigns, newcomers often miss out.

  • To bridge this gap, we launched the Community Updates module for the Newcomer Homepage. This module is disabled by default, allowing Community Admins to decide how (or if) to use it.
  • If your community hosts events, consider setting up a Community Update to engage and welcome newcomers! Learn more on Diff. To configure, visit Special:CommunityConfiguration.

Community Configuration

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Community Configuration is now available across all wikis, including non-Wikipedia projects (T383910). Community Configuration allows admins to customize various features like Growth features and Automoderator for their communities, and more recently the Babel extension now allows admins to modify configuration:

Mentorship

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Mentors play a key role in guiding new editors. If you’re interested in mentoring, or turning mentorship on at your wiki, check out the Mentorship FAQ

  • Starting February 17, 100% of new accounts at English Wikipedia will be assigned a mentor (T384505).
  • At Spanish Wikipedia, on 50% of newcomers get a mentor. Experienced contributors are encouraged to join mentorship so that Spanish Wikipedia can provide a mentor to all new users.

Looking Ahead

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In the coming months, we will continue balancing maintenance work—such as deprecating EditGrowth Config (T367574) and migrating Statslib (T359352) — with user-facing improvements that support new editors and foster the next generation of contributors.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

19:00, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-11

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Latest comment: 1 month 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

  • Editors who use password managers at multiple wikis may notice changes in the future. The way that our wikis provide information to password managers about reusing passwords across domains has recently been updated, so some password managers might now offer you login credentials that you saved for a different Wikimedia site. Some password managers already did this, and are now doing it for more Wikimedia domains. This is part of the SUL3 project which aims to improve how our unified login works, and to keep it compatible with ongoing changes to the web-browsers we use. [40][41]
  • The Wikipedia Apps Team is inviting interested users to help improve Wikipedia’s offline and limited internet use. After discussions in Afrika Baraza and the last ESEAP call, key challenges like search, editing, and offline access are being explored, with upcoming focus groups to dive deeper into these topics. All languages are welcome, and interpretation will be available. Want to share your thoughts? Join the discussion or email aramadan@wikimedia.org!
  • All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 19. 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 weeks.
  • Recurrent item View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

  • The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: the launch of the Community Updates module, the most recent changes in Community Configuration, and the upcoming test of in-article suggestions for first-time editors.
  • An old API that was previously used in the Android Wikipedia app is being removed at the end of March. There are no current software uses, but users of the app with a version that is older than 6 months by the time of removal (2025-03-31), will no longer have access to the Suggested Edits feature, until they update their app. You can read more details about this change.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:09, 10 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

Tech News: 2025-12

[edit]
Latest comment: 1 month 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

Updates for editors

  • The improved Content Translation tool dashboard is now available in 10 Wikipedias and will be available for all Wikipedias soon. With the unified dashboard, desktop users can now: Translate new sections of an article; Discover and access topic-based article suggestion filters (initially available only for mobile device users); Discover and access the Community-defined lists filter, also known as "Collections", from wiki-projects and campaigns.
  • On Wikimedia Commons, a new system to select the appropriate file categories has been introduced: if a category has one or more subcategories, users will be able to click on an arrow that will open the subcategories directly within the form, and choose the correct one. The parent category name will always be shown on top, and it will always be possible to come back to it. This should decrease the amount of work for volunteers in fixing/creating new categories. The change is also available on mobile. These changes are part of planned improvements to the UploadWizard.
  • The Community Tech team is seeking wikis to join a pilot for the Multiblocks feature and a refreshed Special:Block page in late March. Multiblocks enables administrators to impose multiple different types of blocks on the same user at the same time. If you are an admin or steward and would like us to discuss joining the pilot with your community, please leave a message on the project talk page.
  • Starting March 25, the Editing team will test a new feature for Edit Check at 12 Wikipedias: Multi-Check. Half of the newcomers on these wikis will see all Reference Checks during their edit session, while the other half will continue seeing only one. The goal of this test is to see if users are confused or discouraged when shown multiple Reference Checks (when relevant) within a single editing session. At these wikis, the tags used on edits that show References Check will be simplified, as multiple tags could be shown within a single edit. Changes to the tags are documented on Phabricator. [42]
  • The Global reminder bot, which is a service for notifying users that their temporary user-rights are about to expire, now supports using the localized name of the user-rights group in the message heading. Translators can see the listing of existing translations and documentation to check if their language needs updating or creation.
  • The GlobalPreferences gender setting, which is used for how the software should refer to you in interface messages, now works as expected by overriding the local defaults. [43]
  • Recurrent item View all 26 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the Wikipedia App for Android had a bug fixed for when a user is browsing and searching in multiple languages. [44]

Updates for technical contributors

  • Later this week, the way that Codex styles are loaded will be changing. There is a small risk that this may result in unstyled interface message boxes on certain pages. User generated content (e.g. templates) is not impacted. Gadgets may be impacted. If you see any issues please report them. See the linked task for details, screenshots, and documentation on how to fix any affected gadgets.
  • 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 23:48, 17 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

The Signpost: 22 March 2025

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

Tech News: 2025-13

[edit]
Latest comment: 1 month 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

Updates for editors

  • The CampaignEvents extension will be released to multiple wikis (see deployment plan for details) in April 2025, and the team has begun the process of engaging communities on the identified wikis. The extension provides tools to organize, manage, and promote collaborative activities (like events, edit-a-thons, and WikiProjects) on the wikis. The extension has three tools: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation Lists. It is currently on 13 Wikipedias, including English Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia, as well as Wikidata. Questions or requests can be directed to the extension talk page or in Phabricator (with #campaigns-product-team tag).
  • Starting the week of March 31st, wikis will be able to set which user groups can view private registrants in Event Registration, as part of the CampaignEvents extension. By default, event organizers and the local wiki admins will be able to see private registrants. This is a change from the current behavior, in which only event organizers can see private registrants. Wikis can change the default setup by requesting a configuration change in Phabricator (and adding the #campaigns-product-team tag). Participants of past events can cancel their registration at any time.
  • Administrators at wikis that have a customized MediaWiki:Sidebar should check that it contains an entry for the Special pages listing. If it does not, they should add it using * specialpages-url|specialpages. Wikis with a default sidebar will see the link moved from the page toolbox into the sidebar menu in April. [45]
  • The Minerva skin (mobile web) combines both Notice and Alert notifications within the bell icon (). There was a long-standing bug where an indication for new notifications was only shown if you had unseen Alerts. This bug is now fixed. In the future, Minerva users will notice a counter atop the bell icon when you have 1 or more unseen Notices and/or Alerts. [46]
  • Recurrent item View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • VisualEditor has introduced a new client-side hook for developers to use when integrating with the VisualEditor target lifecycle. This hook should replace the existing lifecycle-related hooks, and be more consistent between different platforms. In addition, the new hook will apply to uses of VisualEditor outside of just full article editing, allowing gadgets to interact with the editor in DiscussionTools as well. The Editing Team intends to deprecate and eventually remove the old lifecycle hooks, so any use cases that this new hook does not cover would be of interest to them and can be shared in the task.
  • Developers who use the mw.Api JavaScript library, can now identify the tool using it with the userAgent parameter: var api = new mw.Api( { userAgent: 'GadgetNameHere/1.0.1' } );. If you maintain a gadget or user script, please set a user agent, because it helps with library and server maintenance and with differentiating between legitimate and illegitimate traffic. [47][48]
  • 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 22:43, 24 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

Tech News: 2025-14

[edit]
Latest comment: 29 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

  • The Editing team is working on a new Edit check: Peacock check. This check's goal is to identify non-neutral terms while a user is editing a wikipage, so that they can be informed that their edit should perhaps be changed before they publish it. This project is at the early stages, and the team is looking for communities' input: in this Phabricator task, they are gathering on-wiki policies, templates used to tag non-neutral articles, and the terms (jargon and keywords) used in edit summaries for the languages they are currently researching. You can participate by editing the table on Phabricator, commenting on the task, or directly messaging Trizek (WMF).
  • Single User Login has now been updated on all wikis to move login and account creation to a central domain. This makes user login compatible with browser restrictions on cross-domain cookies, which have prevented users of some browsers from staying logged in.
  • Recurrent item View all 35 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Starting on March 31st, the MediaWiki Interfaces team will begin a limited release of generated OpenAPI specs and a SwaggerUI-based sandbox experience for MediaWiki REST APIs. They invite developers from a limited group of non-English Wikipedia communities (Arabic, German, French, Hebrew, Interlingua, Dutch, Chinese) to review the documentation and experiment with the sandbox in their preferred language. In addition to these specific Wikipedia projects, the sandbox and OpenAPI spec will be available on the on the test wiki REST Sandbox special page for developers with English as their preferred language. During the preview period, the MediaWiki Interfaces Team also invites developers to share feedback about your experience. The preview will last for approximately 2 weeks, after which the sandbox and OpenAPI specs will be made available across all wiki projects.
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

  • Sometimes a small, one line code change can have great significance: in this case, it means that for the first time in years we're able to run all of the stack serving maps.wikimedia.org - a host dedicated to serving our wikis and their multi-lingual maps needs - from a single core datacenter, something we test every time we perform a datacenter switchover. This is important because it means that in case one of our datacenters is affected by a catastrophe, we'll still be able to serve the site. This change is the result of extensive work by two developers on porting the last component of the maps stack over to kubernetes, where we can allocate resources more efficiently than before, thus we're able to withstand more traffic in a single datacenter. This work involved a lot of complicated steps because this software, and the software libraries it uses, required many long overdue upgrades. This type of work makes the Wikimedia infrastructure more sustainable.

Meetings and events

  • MediaWiki Users and Developers Workshop Spring 2025 is happening in Sandusky, USA, and online, from 14–16 May 2025. The workshop will feature discussions around the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies in different industries and will inspire and onboard new users. Registration and presentation signup is now available at the workshop's website.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:05, 1 April 2025 (UTC)Reply

Tech News: 2025-15

[edit]
Latest comment: 22 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

Updates for technical contributors

  • The Design System Team is preparing to release the next major version of Codex (v2.0.0) on April 29. Editors and developers who use CSS from Codex should see the 2.0 overview documentation, which includes guidance related to a few of the breaking changes such as font-size, line-height, and size-icon.
  • The results of the Developer Satisfaction Survey (2025)  are now available. Thank you to all participants. These results help the Foundation decide what to work on next and to review what they recently worked on.
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

  • The 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon will take place in Istanbul, Turkey, between 2–4 May. Registration for attending the in-person event will close on 13 April. Before registering, please note the potential need for a visa or e-visa to enter the country.

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, 7 April 2025 (UTC)Reply

The Signpost: 9 April 2025

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

Tech News: 2025-16

[edit]
Latest comment: 15 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

  • Later this week, the default thumbnail size will be increased from 220px to 250px. This changes how pages are shown in all wikis and has been requested by some communities for many years, but wasn't previously possible due to technical limitations. [50]
  • File thumbnails are now stored in discrete sizes. If a page specifies a thumbnail size that's not among the standard sizes (20, 40, 60, 120, 250, 330, 500, 960), then MediaWiki will pick the closest larger thumbnail size but will tell the browser to downscale it to the requested size. In these cases, nothing will change visually but users might load slightly larger images. If it doesn't matter which thumbnail size is used in a page, please pick one of the standard sizes to avoid the extra in-browser down-scaling step. [51][52]

Updates for editors

  • The Wikimedia Foundation are working on a system called Edge Uniques which will enable A/B testing, help protect against Distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks), and make it easier to understand how many visitors the Wikimedia sites have. This is so that they can more efficiently build tools which help readers, and make it easier for readers to find what they are looking for.
  • To improve security for users, a small percentage of logins will now require that the account owner input a one-time password emailed to their account. It is recommended that you check that the email address on your account is set correctly, and that it has been confirmed, and that you have an email set for this purpose. [53]
  • "Are you interested in taking a short survey to improve tools used for reviewing or reverting edits on your Wiki?" This question will be asked at 7 wikis starting next week, on Recent Changes and Watchlist pages. The Moderator Tools team wants to know more about activities that involve looking at new edits made to your Wikimedia project, and determining whether they adhere to your project's policies.
  • On April 15, the full Wikidata graph will no longer be supported on query.wikidata.org. After this date, scholarly articles will be available through query-scholarly.wikidata.org, while the rest of the data hosted on Wikidata will be available through the query.wikidata.org endpoint. This is part of the scheduled split of the Wikidata Graph, which was announced in September 2024. More information is available on Wikidata.
  • The latest quarterly Wikimedia Apps Newsletter is now available. It covers updates, experiments, and improvements made to the Wikipedia mobile apps.
  • Recurrent item View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: an invitation for tool maintainers to attend the Toolforge UI Community Feedback Session on April 15th; recent community metrics; and recent technical blog posts.
  • 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 00:24, 15 April 2025 (UTC)Reply

Tech News: 2025-17

[edit]
Latest comment: 8 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

  • Wikifunctions is now integrated with Dagbani Wikipedia since April 15. It is the first project that will be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in articles. A function is something that takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, such as adding up two numbers, converting miles into metres, calculating how much time has passed since an event, or declining a word into a case. Wikifunctions will allow users to do that through a simple call of a stable and global function, rather than via a local template. [54]
  • A new type of lint error has been created: Empty headings (documentation). The Linter extension's purpose is to identify wikitext patterns that must or can be fixed in pages and provide some guidance about what the problems are with those patterns and how to fix them. [55]
  • Recurrent item View all 37 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Following its publication on HuggingFace, the "Structured Contents" dataset, developed by Wikimedia Enterprise, is now also available on Kaggle. This Beta initiative is focused on making Wikimedia data more machine-readable for high-volume reusers. They are releasing this beta version in a location that open dataset communities already use, in order to seek feedback, to help improve the product for a future wider release. You can read more about the overall Structured Contents project, and about the first release that's freely usable.
  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings and events

  • The Editing and Machine Learning Teams invite interested volunteers to a video meeting to discuss Peacock check, which is the latest Edit check that will detect "peacock" or "overly-promotional" or "non-neutral" language whilst an editor is typing. Editors who work with newcomers, or help to fix this kind of writing, or are interested in how we use artificial intelligence in our projects are encouraged to attend. The meeting will be on April 28, 2025 at 18:00–19:00 UTC and hosted on Zoom.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 21:00, 21 April 2025 (UTC)Reply

Tech News: 2025-18

[edit]
Latest comment: 1 day 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

  • Event organizers who host collaborative activities on multiple wikis, including Bengali, Japanese, and Korean Wikipedias, will have access to the CampaignEvents extension this week. Also, admins in the Wikipedia where the extension is enabled will automatically be granted the event organizer right soon. They won't have to manually grant themselves the right before they can manage events as requested by a community.
  • Recurrent item View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • The release of the next major version of Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, is scheduled for 29 April 2025. Technical editors will have access to the release by the week of 5 May 2025. This update will include a number of breaking changes and minor visual changes. Instructions on handling the breaking and visual changes are documented on this page. Pre-release testing is reported in T386298, with post-release issues tracked in T392379 and T392390.
  • Users of Wiki Replicas will notice that the database views of ipblocks, ipblocks_ipindex, and ipblocks_compat are now deprecated. Users can query the block and block_target new views that mirror the new tables in the production database instead. The deprecated views will be removed entirely from Wiki Replicas in June, 2025.
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

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 19:32, 28 April 2025 (UTC)Reply

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