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Administrators' newsletter – March 2026
[edit]News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2026).

- Following an RfC, the web archival service archive.today has been deprecated; links to the site should be removed.
- A request for comment is open to discuss retiring CSD criterion R3 in favour of handling such redirects through RfD.
- Following a motion, remedy 9.1 of the Conduct in deletion-related editing case has been amended to limit TenPoundHammer to one XfD nomination or PROD per 24-hour period.
- Following a motion, the Iskandar323 further POV pushing motion has been rescinded.
- The Arbitration Committee has passed a housekeeping motion rescinding a number of outdated remedies and enforcement provisions across multiple legacy cases. In most instances, existing sanctions remain in force and continue to be appealable through the usual processes, while some case-specific remedies were amended or clarified.
- Following the 2026 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: A09, AmandaNP, Barras, Count Count, M7, SHB2000, Teles and VIGNERON.
- An Unreferenced articles backlog drive is taking place in March 2026 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!
Tech News: 2026-10
[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.
Weekly highlight
- Wikipedia 25 Birthday mode is now live on Betawi, Breton, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, Gorontalo, Indonesian, Italian, Luxembourgish, Madurese, Sicilian, Spanish, Thai, and Vietnamese Wikipedias! This limited-time campaign feature celebrates 25 years of Wikipedia with a birthday mascot, Baby Globe. When turned on, Baby Globe is shown on ~2,500 articles, waiting to be discovered by readers. Communities can choose to turn Birthday mode on by getting consensus from their community and asking an admin to enable the feature and customize it via community configuration on the local wiki.
Updates for editors
- Sub-referencing, a new feature to re-use references with different details has been released to Swedish Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia and a couple of other wikis. You can try the feature on these projects or on testwiki and betawiki. Learnings from the first pilot wiki German Wikipedia have been published in a report. Reach out to the Wikimedia Deutschland team if you are interested in becoming a pilot wiki.
- Paste Check will become available at all Wikipedias this week. The feature prompts newcomers who are pasting text they are not likely to have written into VisualEditor to consider whether doing so risks a copyright violation. Paste Check tags all edits where it is shown for potential review. Local administrators can configure various aspects of the feature via Special:EditChecks. Research across 22 wikis found that Paste Check resulted in an 18% decrease in relative reverted-edits compared to the control group. Translators can help to localize this and related features.
- The Reader Experience team will be standardizing the user menu in the top right for all mobile users so that it is closer to the desktop experience. Currently this user menu is only visible to users with Advanced Mobile Controls (AMC) turned on. The only change is that a couple buttons previously in the left-side menu will move to the top right for users who do not have AMC turned on. This change is expected to go out March 9 and seeks to improve the user interface. [1]
- Starting in the week of March 2, the emails sent out when an email address was added, removed, or changed for an account will switch to a substantially nicer and clearer HTML email from the prior plaintext one. [2]
- Notifications are currently limited to 2,000 historic entries per user, and extend back to 2013 when the feature was released. This is going to be changed to only store Notifications from the last 5 years, but up to 10,000 of them. This will help with long-term infrastructure health and help to prevent more recent notifications from disappearing too soon. [3]
- The Global Watchlist which lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on a single page continues to see improvements. The latest update improves label usage experience. The extension now allows activating the language fallback system for Wikidata items without labels in the viewed language, and showing those labels in the user’s preferred Wikidata language if no
uselang=URL parameter is provided. [4][5] - The Wikipedia Android team has started a beta test of hybrid search on Greek Wikipedia. Hybrid search capabilities can handle both semantic and keyword queries enabling readers to find what they’re looking for directly on Wikipedia more easily.
- For security reasons, members of certain user groups are required to have two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled. Currently, 2FA is required to use the group, but not to be a member of it. Given that this model still has some vulnerabilities, the situation will gradually change in March. Members of these groups will be unable to disable last 2FA method on their account, and it will be impossible to add users without 2FA to these groups. Users will still be able to add new authentication methods or remove them, as long as at least one method is continuously enabled. In the second half of March, users without 2FA will be removed from these groups. This applies to: CentralNotice administrators, checkusers, interface administrators, suppressors, Wikidata staff, Wikifunctions staff, WMF Office IT and WMF Trust & Safety. Nothing will change for other users. See the linked task for deployment schedule. [6]
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue preventing users from creating an instance in Wikibase.cloud has now been fixed. [7]
Updates for technical contributors
- To help ensure fair use of infrastructure, over the next month the Wikimedia Foundation will implement global API rate limits across our APIs. In early March, stricter limits will be applied to unidentified requests from outside Toolforge/WMCS and API requests that are made from web browsers. In April, higher limits will be applied to identified traffic. These limits are intentionally set as high as possible to minimise impact on the community. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits.
- The Wikidata Query Service Linked Data Fragment (LDF) endpoint will be decommissioned in February. This endpoint served limited traffic, which was successfully migrated to other data access methods that were better suited to support existing use cases. The hardware used to support the LDF endpoint will be reallocated to support the ongoing backend migration efforts. [8]
- The new Parsoid parser continues to be deployed to additional wikis, improving platform sustainability and making it easier to introduce new reading and editing features. Parsoid is now the default parser on 488 WMF wikis (268 Wikipedias), now covering more than 10% of all Wikipedia page views.
- The process and criteria for requesting exceptional access to the high volume feed of the Wikimedia Enterprise APIs (at no cost for mission-aligned usecases), have now been published. This is to provide more thorough and clearer documentation for users.
- Tech Blog, the blog dedicated to the Wikimedia technical community will be migrating to Diff, the community news and event blog. The migration should be complete in April 2026, after which new posts will be accepted for publishing. Readers will be able to access posts – old and new – on the landing page at https://diff.wikimedia.org/techblog.
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 17:50, 2 March 2026 (UTC)
(This message was sent to User talk:Twistedmath and is being posted here due to a redirect.)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 4
[edit]

Highlights
Let's Talk continues
- Birthday mode: This limited-time campaign feature celebrates 25 years of Wikipedia with a birthday mascot, Baby Globe. When turned on, Baby Globe is shown on ~2,500 articles, waiting to be discovered by readers. The feature is available for all Wikipedias to customise through Community Configuration until 6 April 2026. So far 17 Wikipedias have joined in the fun.
- Wikipedia's 25th birthday party celebrated on Commons: Content from the January 15th global birthday party selected as Media of the day.
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
- Etherpad cleanup: For security and performance reasons, all current pads on Wikimedia’s Etherpad instance, the web-based "ephemeral" editor for real-time collaborative document editing, will be permanently deleted after 30 April. We will continue running this Etherpad instance to support events and other short-term collaboration, but will be periodically deleting data going forward. If you have content in Etherpad you want to keep, please create local backups, as data will be permanently deleted and will not be able to be recovered.
- Activity tab: Wikipedia iOS app has rolled out the improved Activity tab to all users in version 7.9.0. A/B test results showed increased account creation among users with access to the feature. Updates include enhanced editing impact insights, module customization, and relocation of History into the Search tab.
- Reference Check: The feature Reference Check has been deployed to all Wikipedias. In A/B testing, the impact was substantial: newcomers shown Reference Check were approximately 2.2 times more likely to include a reference on desktop (or acknowledge/explain why they did not) and about 17.5 times more likely on mobile web.
- Semantic search: The Foundation has launched a limited Android mobile app experiment that tests hybrid search capabilities which can handle both semantic and keyword queries. The Phase 1 beta is now live on Greek Wikipedia. The goal is to understand whether combining meaning-based retrieval with keyword search helps readers find information more effectively. Testing will expand to English, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias in March.
- Navigation experience: The Foundation will run an experiment for mobile web users, that adds a table of contents and automatically expands all article sections, to learn more about navigation issues they face. The test will be available on Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.

- Site notices: Site notices (MediaWiki:Sitenotice and MediaWiki:Anonnotice) now will render on all platforms, not just on the desktop site. Users on mobile web will now see these notices and be informed.
- Tech News: Latest updates from Tech News week 08 and 09 include the new “Edit full page” button for people who are editing a page-section using the mobile visual editor. They also link to the 40 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
- Wikifunctions: Abstract Wikipedia is going to have its public preview within the next few weeks, here is the preview.
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · The Wikipedia Library · list of movement events
- Gender gap: The Celebrate Women 2026 is coming! The Wikimedia Foundation will host a kick-off celebration that will work as a welcome session for both organizers and participants on March 5 at 13:00 UTC.
- Language: New edition of the Language and internationalization newsletter highlights new feature developments and improvements in various language-related technical projects.
- Let’s Connect Learning Clinic: Watch the recordings of past learning clinics about Wikipedia’s 25th Birthday Tool and Strengthening Local-Language Admin Communities.
- Wikimedia Research Showcase: You can watch the recording of this month research showcase whose theme is about "AI and Communities".
- Hubs: Lessons from hub pilots.
- Banners & logo policies: Wikimedia Foundation has adopted new and updated policies regarding the use of banners, logo changes, and blackouts on the projects, particularly for advocacy purposes.
- Digital Safety: The next edition of Digital Safety Office Hours will be on Mar 27 at 9:00 UTC and 19:00 UTC. The session will explore practical threat modelling: a structured way to think about risks, assess your exposure, and make informed choices.
Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness
See also: Progress on the annual plan
- Wikimedia Enterprise: Ecosia Enriches Search Results and AI Answers with Wikimedia Enterprise.
- Human centered AI: Members of the Wikimedia Enterprise team presented on "Wikipedia in the Age of AI and Bots" at the seminar of Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
- Inclusive AI: Advancing Open, Inclusive AI with Free and Open Knowledge at the India AI Impact Summit 2026.
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 · 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 foundationbulletin
wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 12:36, 3 March 2026 (UTC)
(This message was sent to User talk:Twistedmath and is being posted here due to a redirect.)





