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Tech News: 2025-12

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

• Twice a year, around the equinoxes, the Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team performs a datacenter server switchover, redirecting all traffic from one primary server to its backup. This provides reliability in case of a crisis, as we can always fall back on the other datacenter. Thanks to the Listen to Wikipedia tool, you can hear the switchover take place: Before it begins, you'll hear the steady stream of edits; Then, as the system enters a brief read-only phase, the sound stops for a couple of minutes, before resuming after the switchover. You can read more about the background and details of this process on the Diff blog. If you want to keep an ear out for the next server switchover, listen to the wikis on March 19 at 14:00 UTC.

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. [1]
• 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. [2]
• 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. [3]

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.
• 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 23:45, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-13

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 Wikimedia Foundation is seeking your feedback on the drafts of the objectives and key results that will shape the Foundation's Product and Technology priorities for the next fiscal year (starting in July). The objectives are broad high-level areas, and the key-results are measurable ways to track the success of their objectives. Please share your feedback on the talkpage, in any language, ideally before the end of April.

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. [4]
• 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. [5]
• 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. [6][7]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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MediaWiki message delivery 22:39, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-14

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.
• 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.
• 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 00:02, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-15

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

• From now on, interface admins and centralnotice admins are technically required to enable two-factor authentication before they can use their privileges. In the future this might be expanded to more groups with advanced user-rights. [8]
• View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

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.
• 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 18:49, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-16

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. [9]
• 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. [10][11]

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. [12]
• "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.
• 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.
• 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 00:21, 15 April 2025 (UTC)