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Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2025 Issue 20
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Upcoming and current events and conversations
Let's Talk continues
- Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees selection: Additional perspectives on current and future board selection processes.
- Global trends: We are seeing 8% declines in human page views on Wikipedia as some users don't directly visit Wikipedia to get information. Learn about this new user trend, how the Wikimedia Foundation anticipate these changes, and how you can help.
- WECUDI 2025: The second conference of Wikimedia, Education, and Digital Cultures will be held from October 29–31 in Mexico City, Mexico.
- GLAM Conference: Wiki GLAM Culture and Heritage Conference (WGCHC) will take place on 30 October – 1 November in Lisbon, Portugal.
- WikidataCon 2025: WikidataCon 2025 will take place online from October 31 – November 2.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Making it easier to say thanks: Users on most wikis will now have the ability to thank a comment directly from the talk page it appears on. Before this change, thanking could only be done by visiting the revision history of the talk page.
- Account security: Improvements to account security and two-factor authentication (2FA) features were enabled across all wikis. Another part of the project is making 2FA generally available to all users. Along with editors with advanced privileges, such as administrators and bureaucrats, 40% of editors now have access to 2FA. You can check if you have access at Special:AccountSecurity.
- Abstract Wikipedia: The naming contest for the new Wikimedia project, known until now as Abstract Wikipedia, is ongoing. Voting is now open until November 3.
- Tech News: Read updates from Tech News week 42 and 43 including the community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
- Wikimedia apps: The Wikipedia iOS App launched an A/B/C test of improvements to the Tabbed browsing feature into Beta for select regions & languages. Called “More dynamic tabs”, the experiment adds user-requested improvements and introduces article recommendations within the tabs overview, showing “Did you know” or “Because you read” content depending on how many tabs are open.
- CampaignEvents extension: Campaignevents extension will be deployed to all remaining wikis during the week of 17 November 2025. The extension currently includes three features: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List. For this rollout, Invitation List will not be enabled on Wikifunctions and MediaWiki unless requested by those communities.
- Event registration tool: Autoconfirmed users on small and medium wikis with the extension can now use Event Registration without the Event Organizer right. This feature lets organizers enable registration, manage participants, and lets users register with one click instead of signing event pages.
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · list of movement events
- Digital safety: Explore how you can help make Wikimedia safer by taking our new self-paced course, Safety for Young Wikimedians.
- Wikimedia Core Curriculum: The Wikimedia Foundation has developed seven online video learning modules covering the core English Wikipedia policies. You are invited to use, adapt, and translate the course.
- Advocacy: The Wikimedia Foundation has signed onto a statement that calls on governments and UN bodies to keep discussions about the future of internet governance accessible to non-government actors like industry and civil society. This statement is part of ongoing joint advocacy with affiliates to influence UN discussions about the future of internet governance such as the Global Digital Compact campaign and WSIS+20 deliberations.
- GLAM: The Wikimedia Foundation and several affiliates have signed onto the Open Heritage Statement, which supports galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM institutions) to have the legal rights they need to collect, preserve, and provide access to cultural heritage.
Foundation statements
- How Wikipedia works: Wikimedia Foundation responds to questions about how Wikipedia works.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: 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 · The Wikipedia Library · 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. Let askcac
wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 16:08, 28 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #224 is out: Round 1 of “abstract content wiki” naming vote ending Monday; An example of short descriptions
[edit]There is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!
In this issue, we update you on our naming contest for Abstract Wikipedia, we announce our first experimentation with short descriptions on Wikidata, we talk about our presentations at the upcoming WikidataCon 2025, and we take a look at the latest Type and software developments.
Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!
Also, we remind you that if you have questions or ideas to discuss, the next Volunteers' Corner will be held on November 3, at 18:30 UTC (link to the meeting).
Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 13:48, 30 October 2025 (UTC)
Guide to temporary accounts
[edit]Hello, Mike Peel. This message is being sent to remind you of significant upcoming changes regarding logged-out editing.
Starting 4 November, logged-out editors will no longer have their IP address publicly displayed. Instead, they will have a temporary account (TA) associated with their edits. Users with some extended rights like administrators and CheckUsers, as well as users with the temporary account IP viewer (TAIV) user right will still be able to reveal temporary users' IP addresses and all contributions made by temporary accounts from a specific IP address or range.
How do temporary accounts work?
- When a logged-out user completes an edit or a logged action for the first time, a cookie will be set in this user's browser and a temporary account tied with this cookie will be automatically created for them. This account's name will follow the pattern:
~2025-12345-67(a tilde, year of creation, a number split into units of 5). - All subsequent actions by the temporary account user will be attributed to this username. The cookie will expire 90 days after its creation. As long as it exists, all edits made from this device will be attributed to this temporary account. It will be the same account even if the IP address changes, unless the user clears their cookies or uses a different device or web browser.
- A record of the IP address used at the time of each edit will be stored for 90 days after the edit. Users with the temporary account IP viewer (TAIV) user right will be able to see the underlying IP addresses.
- As a measure against vandalism, there are two limitations on the creation of temporary accounts:
- There has to be a minimum of 10 minutes between subsequent temporary account creations from the same IP (or /64 range in case of IPv6).
- There can be a maximum of 6 temporary accounts created from an IP (or /64 range) within a period of 24 hours.
Temporary account IP viewer user right
- Administrators may grant the temporary account IP viewer (TAIV) user right to non-administrators who meet the criteria for granting. Importantly, an editor must make an explicit request for the permission (e.g. at WP:PERM/TAIV)—administrators are not permitted to assign the right without a request.
- Administrators will automatically be able to see temporary account IP information once they have accepted the Access to Temporary Account IP Addresses Policy via Special:Preferences or via the onboarding dialog which comes up after temporary accounts are deployed.
Impact for administrators
- It will be possible to block many abusers by just blocking their temporary accounts. A blocked person won't be able to create new temporary accounts quickly if the admin selects the autoblock option.
- It will still be possible to block an IP address or IP range.
- Temporary accounts will not be retroactively applied to contributions made before the deployment. On Special:Contributions, you will be able to see existing IP user contributions, but not new contributions made by temporary accounts on that IP address. Instead, you should use Special:IPContributions for this (see a video about IPContributions in a gallery below).
Rules about IP information disclosure
- Publicizing an IP address gained through TAIV access is generally not allowed (e.g. ~2025-12345-67 previously edited as 192.0.2.1 or ~2025-12345-67's IP address is 192.0.2.1).
- Publicly linking a TA to another TA is allowed if "reasonably believed to be necessary". (e.g.
~2025-12345-67 and ~2025-12345-68 are likely the same person, so I am counting their reverts together toward 3RR
, but not Hey ~2025-12345-68, you did some good editing as ~2025-12345-67) - See Wikipedia:Temporary account IP viewer § What can and can't be said for more detailed guidelines.
Useful tools for patrollers
- It is possible to view if a user has opted-in to view temporary account IPs via the User Info card, available in Preferences → Appearance → Advanced options →
Enable the user info card
- This feature also makes it possible for anyone to see the approximate count of temporary accounts active on the same IP address range.
- Special:IPContributions allows viewing all edits and temporary accounts connected to a specific IP address or IP range.
- Similarly, Special:GlobalContributions supports global search for a given temporary account's activity.
- The auto-reveal feature (see video below) allows users with the right permissions to automatically reveal all IP addresses for a limited time window.
Videos
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How to use Special:IPContributions
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How automatic IP reveal works
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How to use IP Info
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How to use User Info
Further information and discussion
- For more information and discussion regarding this change, please see the announcement from the Wikimedia Foundation at Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF) § Temporary accounts rollout.
Most of this message was written by Mz7 (source). Thanks, 🎃 SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 02:47, 31 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #704
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week leading up to 2025-11-03. Missed the previous one? See issue #703.
Discussions
- Closed request for adminship: Samoasambia
- New requests for permissions/Bot: langCodesBot - Task(s): Python script to automate the cleanup of deprecated language codes (e.g., kr) from Wikidata items. Delete or move labels, descriptions, and aliases based on comparisons with fallback and related languages. The script uses the Pywikibot framework to process each item and logs cases it skips due to data inconsistencies or ambiguity to a CSV file for manual review.
- New request for comments: Exhibition models by Hexatekin - This proposal focuses on standardizing models for art exhibitions. There is not a consistent data model used for art exhibitions that factors in parent-child relationships for traveling exhibitions, show series, or biennials, despite these being important and common types of events in international art history.
Events
- Past:
- Happy Birthday, Wikidata 🎉! We celebrated Wikidata’s 13th birthday with a community call to unveil presents and play games. Check out the replay of the event and the cool gifts people made: Wikidata:Thirteenth Birthday/Presents & messages
- WikidataCon: You can catch up on the recordings and slides in the program
- Wikidata Workshop at ISWC: You can catch up on the published papers on the website.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs:
- Building an Internet for Everyone: Wikidata Recognized as a Digital Public Good
- Enriching Wikidata with AuthorityBox. An interview with Stefano Bargioni
- examples of AuthorityBox can be seen in PUSC catalogue, URBE catalogue (code), Keratsini-Drapetsona catalogue; cf. also Stefano Bargioni, From Authority Enrichment to AuthorityBox. Applying RDA in a Koha environment (2020)
- Exploring Nairobi and Building a Global Network: The Inspiring Wikimania@20 Experience
- Supercharging Cultural Institution Collections with Wikidata
- Videos:
- Por qué el conocimiento libre importa más que nunca | Gustavo Candela | Jornadas Anuales 2025
- Wikidata Ontology Course | A NotebookLM Deep Dive
- Odia Wikimedians User Group Celebration of the 13th Wikidata Birthday
- Como utilizar o OpenRefine para cadastrar artigos científicos na Wikidata? - WikiTutoriais #05
- Supercharging Cultural Institution Collections with Wikidata [October 2025]
- ¿Cómo es la ontología de Wikidata?
- Wikidata @13 celebration by the Tyap Wikimedians
Tool of the week The Wikidata Reference Validator by User:JosefAnthony helps check and replace broken or outdated references — keeping Wikidata’s knowledge verifiable and trustworthy. It checks whether external references are still accessible or offline, so we can ensure that every statement on Wikidata shows how we know what we know.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Wikidata has been recognized as a digital public good by the Digital Public Goods Alliance
- Wikimedia chapters are providing scholarships for Wikimania 2026. Apply here if you're interested: Wikipedia:Förderung/Wikimania/English
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest External identifiers: Newegg item ID, Hardcore Gaming 101 game ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- Luminous flux (Numerical value of the luminous flux emitted by a lighting device or light source, measured in lumens)
- anatomical structure in view (the anatomical structure in view in the photo, e.g. head, wing, habitus (body))
- anatomical view (view of an anatomical structure, e.g. ventral, dorsal, frontal)
- collector (person or group who physically collected a specimen or object in the field)
- Serbo-Croatian preferred project code (For an interwiki article, the property points to the Serbo-Croatian project (sh, bs, hr, sr) that either has a special connection to the topic or the highest quality article.)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: BG IISDA org ID, BG NACID person ID, GCatholic former diocese ID, Grokipedia ID, The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland ID, Encyclopedia of African American History 1896 to the Present entry ID, Davis Cup player ID 2025, Eiga.com drama ID, AntCat ID, Last Address ID, Disney+ browse ID, Japanese Film Database ID, Japan Location Database ID, Fight.ru fighters ID, IMI person id
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- Showcase Items: perestroïka (Q167634) - political movement for reformation within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the 1980s, widely associated with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his glasnost policy reform
- Showcase Lexemes:baseline (L46097) - English noun (ˈbeɪslaɪn) meaning "a starting point for comparison", "a benchmark in budgeting", or "a reference line in typography or surveying"
Development
- Mobile editing of statements: We are continuing the work on qualifiers and reference editing
- GraphQL: We are continuing the work on making labels of linked entities available in GraphQL (phab:T404692)
- Dumps: We are continuing to look into improvements for the dump process
You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.
Weekly Tasks
- Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
- Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country:
- Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
- Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
- Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
- Help write the next summary!
Tech News: 2025-45
[edit]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 will now find that Special:MergeHistory is now significantly more flexible about what it can merge. It can now merge sections taken from the middle of the history of the source (rather than only the start) and insert revisions anywhere in the history of the destination page (rather than only the start). [1]
- For users with "Automatically subscribe to topics" enabled in their preferences, starting a new topic or adding a reply to an existing topic will now subscribe them to replies to that topic. Previously, this would only happen if the DiscussionTools "Add topic" or "Reply" widgets were used. When DiscussionTools was originally launched existing accounts were not opted in to automatic topic subscriptions, so this change should primarily affect newer accounts and users who have deliberately changed their preferences since that time. [2]
- Scribunto modules can now be used to generate SVG images. This can be used to build charts, graphics and other visualizations dynamically through Lua, reducing the need to compose them externally and upload them as files. [3]
- Wikimedia sites now provide all anonymous users with the option to enable a dark mode color scheme, featuring light-colored text on a dark background. This enhancement aims to deliver a more enjoyable reading experience, especially in dimly lit environments. [4]
- Users with large watchlists have long faced timeouts when editing Special:EditWatchlist. The page now loads entries in smaller sections instead of all at once due to a paging update, allowing everyone to edit their watchlists smoothly. As part of the database update, sorting by expiry has been removed because it was over 100× slower than sorting by title. A community wish has been created to explore alternative ways to restore sort-by-expiry. If this feature is important to you, please support the wish! [5]
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the fixing of the persisting highlighting when using VisualEditor find and replace during a query. [6]
Updates for technical contributors
- Since 2019 the Wikimedia URL Shortener at https://w.wiki is available for all Wikimedia wikis to create short links to articles, permalinks, diffs, etc. It is available in the sidebar as "Get shortened URL". There are 30 wikis that also install an older "ShortUrl" extension. The old extension will soon be removed. This means
/s/URLs will not be advertised under article titles via HTMLclass="title-shortlink". The/s/URLs will keep working. [7] - On Thursday, October 30, the MediaWiki Interfaces and SRE Service Operations teams began rerouting Action API traffic through a common API gateway. Individual wikis will be updated based on the standard release groups, with total traffic increased over time. This change is expected to be non-breaking and non-disruptive. If any issues are observed, please file a Phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board.
- MediaWiki Train deployments will pause for the final two weeks of 2025: 22 December and 29 December. Backport windows will also pause between Monday, 22 December 2025 and Thursday, 2 January 2026. A backport window is a scheduled time to add things like bug fixes and configuration changes. There are seven deployment trains remaining for 2025. [8]
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- In 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation reported that AI systems and search engines increasingly use Wikipedia content without driving users to the site, contributing to an 8% drop in human pageviews compared to 2024. After detecting bots disguised as humans, Wikimedia updated its traffic data to reflect this shift. Read more about current user trends on Wikipedia in a Diff blog post.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 19:31, 3 November 2025 (UTC)
Administrators' newsletter – November 2025
[edit]News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2025).

- The speedy deletion criteria U5 has been repealed, with U6 and U7 replacing it. See the FAQ for more clarifications.
- Community-designated contentious topics may now be enforced and appealed at the arbitration enforcement noticeboard (AE) as a result of an RfC.
- You can enable a handy user info card next to usernames, which when clicked displays edit count, blocks, thanks, and other information. To enable this feature, visit Preferences → Appearance → Advanced options →
Enable the user info card
- The arbitration case Transgender healthcare and people has been closed
- Uninvolved administrators may impose an AE participation restriction on any thread at the Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard.
- An unreferenced articles backlog drive is happening in November 2025 to reduce the backlog of articles tagged with {{Unreferenced}}. You can help reduce the backlog by adding citations to these articles. Sign up to participate!