User talk:SirOlgen
Add topicLatest comment: 14 hours ago by MediaWiki message delivery in topic Tech News: 2026-36
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Tech News: 2026-23
[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
- The Reader Experience team is conducting an experiment to show the reading lists feature, which is still in development, to logged-out mobile readers to test whether it encourages account creation at a higher rate compared to the watchstar button. The experiment was launched on May 18th on German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, and Urdu wikis, and it will run for a month.
- The Wikimedia Apps team released Phase 1 of the redesigned Home Feed to the Android Beta app. The new Home Feed includes a refreshed "Community" tab and a personalized "For You" tab featuring daily updated reading recommendations. The redesign is part of a broader effort to improve content discovery and create more engaging learning experiences in the Wikipedia apps.
View all 18 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where images could fail to load for some suggested edits on Special:Homepage, leaving the thumbnail stuck in a loading state, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- 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.
Your changes to November 1926 have been reverted. The placement of images around the context box has been accepted in these articles for more than 15 years, and I note that you have made no other contributions to the research or writing to this article. In this case, this appears to be disruptive editing based on your own personal preferences.Mandsford 12:38, 3 June 2026 (UTC)
- @Mandsford: I was unaware that Events by Month articles enjoyed that particular MOS: SANDWICH exemption. Thanks for letting me know. SirOlgen (talk) 13:27, 3 June 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-24
[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
- Wikimedia Enterprise has increased the free usage limits for its API offerings. The monthly request limit for the On-demand API has increased from 5,000 to 50,000 requests, while the Snapshot API limit has increased from 15 to 30 requests per month. In addition, Structured Contents snapshots are now available for free accounts. These changes expand access to Wikimedia Enterprise data for developers, researchers, and organizations using Wikimedia content.
Updates for editors
- The refreshed Explore Feed, now called the Home Feed, is rolling out to 50% of users of the Wikipedia Android app. The Home Feed helps readers discover relevant content through two new tabs: Community and For You. The Community tab provides a scrollable feed of curated content and updates from the broader Wikimedia community and movement, while the For You tab offers a full-screen, swipeable experience that shows content tailored to a user's interests. The redesign is part of a broader effort to improve discovery and enhance the learning experience in the Wikipedia app.
- The Which came first? daily trivia game is now available in the beta version of the Wikipedia iOS app in English, German, French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Turkish. The game uses historical events from Wikipedia's "On This Day" content and challenges readers to guess which of two events happened first. The game was previously released on Android. Communities interested in making the game available in their languages can read the instructions and requirements.
- Sub-referencing, a new MediaWiki feature that allows editors to reuse references with different details, will begin rolling out to Wikimedia wikis following a successful pilot phase. Deployment will start on 8 June for most Group 1 wikis and French Wikipedia, with additional Wikipedia language editions receiving the feature over the coming months. Communities are encouraged to prepare by checking for untranslated Cite extension messages in their language and reviewing any use of Reference Tooltips, which may require updates to support the new functionality. Wikis using Reference Previews do not need to take any action. Communities may also wish to create the cite-tracking-category-ref-details tracking category as a hidden category using
__HIDDENCAT__(or a dedicated template), and connect it to the corresponding Wikidata item d:Q129764848. - The Page Previews experiment on mobile web has concluded. The team decided not to roll out the feature after the results showed no statistically significant impact on reader retention, as the primary success metric was retention improvement. Page Previews, which are already available on desktop and in the apps, display a thumbnail, lead paragraph, and link to the full article when readers tap a blue link. The experiment tested this experience on mobile web across six Wikipedias.
- The user interface icon library will be updated later this week or next week. Most of the ~300 icons have been slightly refined and ~30 new icons have been added. These changes improve the icons to make them more consistent and comprehensible, and provide more visual balance when they are used in groups.
- The Universal Language Selector (ULS) interface in MediaWiki, which helps users select content in other languages, has been updated. The new version improves speed and accessibility, and users of Wikimedia projects can now pin languages for quicker language switching. The deployment to Wikimedia sites will happen gradually in the coming weeks. You can test it now as a beta feature by selecting beta features in your profile preferences and share your feedback on the project page.
- View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the Pageviews Analysis dashboard on pageviews.wmcloud.org stopped updating graph data in May 2026, affecting all users, has been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- The function signature for
mw.util.addPortletLink()has been simplified. Developers can now pass a configuration object instead of a list of positional parameters when creating portlet links. The previous function signature remains supported for backwards compatibility. For example, instead of:mw.util.addPortletLink('p-cactions', '#', 'Stub', 'ca-stubtag', 'Add a stub tag to this page');usemw.util.addPortletLink('p-cactions', { href: '#', text: 'Stub', id: 'ca-stubtag', tooltip: 'Add a stub tag to this page' });. Script maintainers are encouraged to review existing uses ofaddPortletLink()and update them where appropriate. This change will be available on all wikis from 11 June. Thanks to community volunteer Gerges for contributing this improvement. - Community Wishlist discussion: Product & Technology introduced changes meant to increase the number and complexity of wishes fulfilled, including the disbanding of the Community Tech team. They are engaging in discussions about a proposed direction for the wishlist from community members. Includes ways to structure annual voting, better tracking of wishes, removing focus areas, and staffing updates.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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Howrah station
[edit]Thank you very much for your edit to fix the infobox map length deviation in Howrah railway station article. Can you make the route map section collapsible also?
It'll look better and will shorten the length of the infobox in first view. I can't understand how to do that and therefore asking you. Thank you Kalpesh Manna 2002 (talk) 11:59, 13 June 2026 (UTC)
- @Kalpesh Manna 2002: You're quite welcome for the edit.
- In looking at this page from various ways, the Route Map section seems to collapse fine when viewed via a browser in Desktop view and via the Wikipedia app (the Android version, at least), but not when viewed via a browser in Mobile view. Is it safe to assume you're viewing the article using a phone/tablet browser?
- The Route Map section of {{Infobox station}} source code is as follows:
:| rowcellstyle75 = padding: 0 :| data76 = {{#if:{{{route_map|}}}{{{map_name|}}}| :{{ infobox :| bodystyle = {{Subinfobox bodystyle}} :| bodyclass = collapsible {{{map_state|}}} :| headerstyle = {{#invoke:Adjacent stations|style|subheader|{{{style|}}}|{{{style2|}}}}} :| header1 = {{#if:{{{map_name|}}}|<div style="margin:0 3.5em">{{{map_name}}}</div>|<div style="margin:0 3.5em">{{#ifeq:{{#invoke:String|find|{{{route_map}}}|[[Template:Railway track legend|Legend]]}}|0|Route map|Track layout}}</div>}} :| data2 = {{{route_map}}} :}}}} :
- For whatever reason, the
{{{map_state|}}}value (or maybe thebodyclassarg altogether) seems to be getting lost after being passed to the {{infobox}} template, but only in Mobile view. - I played around, hoping it might be due to (A) not specifying a
map_name =arg in {{Infobox station}} or (B) specifying multiple route map templates/text strings in theroute_map =arg. When that didn't resolve things, I tried various scenarios using {{if mobile}} to strip-out the {{switcher}} and just list the maps via a {{ubl}} only in Mobile view. Then I tried passing various collapse-related args directly in the {{Howrah–Kharagpur line}} and other line templates to see if the individual maps could be collapsed. I seem unable to get that section to collapse in Mobile view no matter what I try. - The best option might be to post an Edit Request at Template talk:Infobox station outlining the problem and see if a Template Editor is able to figure out where things are getting off-track.
- I wish you luck! — SirOlgen (talk) 22:03, 13 June 2026 (UTC)
- Thank you for your efforts and explanation. I'm indeed looking through a mobile browser. I'll raise the issue at the template talk page as advised. Kalpesh Manna 2002 (talk) 07:32, 14 June 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-25
[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
- The Reader Growth team has launched an Image Browsing beta feature on the mobile web version of all Wikipedias. The feature shows an image carousel at the top of articles with 3 or more images. Editors can configure this feature with the following controls: to hide a specific image from a page, either use
class=notpageimageexcluding it from thumbnail previews, orclass=noviewerexcluding it from MediaViewer. The carousel can also be disabled from a page entirely, with the magic word__NOMEDIAVIEWERCAROUSEL__. To submit feedback or flag bugs, please visit the project page. - Wikitables can now be sorted in descending order on the first click by adding
data-sort-order="desc"to the header cell. Previously, by default, clicking a column header for the first time sorts it in ascending order. This addition to a Wikitable gives it more control and flexibility, while the default behavior for subsequent clicks remains unchanged.
Updates for editors
- The Article guidance feature is currently being tested with some editors creating new articles on the Simple English, French, and Turkish Wikipedias. The experiment will soon begin on the Arabic and Bangla Wikipedias as well. This feature gives editors community-curated guidance to help them create articles that follow community standards. Experienced editors can continue creating or adapting outlines for specific article types that are commonly created by less experienced contributors. The outlines guide less experienced editors in creating high-quality articles. A quick guide to markups used in outlines can be found on this page. Example outlines that can be adapted and instructions for how to adapt them are on this section of the project page.
- Wikis that wish to replace the "indefinitely" button in Special:Block for temporary accounts (for example, wikis that block temporary users only until account expiration) will be able to do so by creating MediaWiki:ipb-indefinite-expiry-temporary-account with the block duration they want.
- View all 41 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- By the end of June, a valid user-agent string will be required for automated dumps downloads from the dumps.wikimedia.org website. Automated requests that provide a generic or empty user-agent will be blocked. This extends enforcement of the long standing user-agent policy. Access to dumps through Wikimedia Cloud Services will not change.
- The roll out of global API rate limits is now complete, with limits enforced across all APIs and at the documented levels for all groups. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki remain exempt. All bots should continue to follow the documented best practices to avoid being rate limited.
- The API Portal wiki will be read only starting this week (June 15-18). The following week (June 22-25), all API Portal wiki URLs will redirect to Wikimedia APIs on mediawiki.org. Learn more on the project page.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- On June 17th at 6pm UTC the WMF will be holding Discord call focused on a code review. We've heard through the Developer Satisfaction Survey that volunteers are struggling with code review and we'd like to discuss these experiences with the goal of surfacing workable solutions. You can join the call via the Wikimedia Community Discord server.
- The Latin American Wikimedia Conference will host a regional hackathon that will bring together the Wikimedia movement’s technical community including developers, system administrators, data scientists, and users with extended rights. Interested technical contributors can apply for a scholarship to participate until June 21 at midnight (Bolivia time, UTC-4).
- Sign up for Wikimania Team Challenges to join this special event. The Team challenges will take place online and in person from July 21 to 22, before Wikimania conference. Everyone is welcome, regardless of skills or Wikimania registration. Teams will work on 10 important challenges supporting the Wikimedia community. For details, visit the Team Challenges page and register there. Registration closes on June 20th at 11pm UTC.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Monreale Cathedral mosaics: template "in use" on the top
[edit]Please DO NOT EDIT pages with such template! I'm loosing my work in visual editor because of you. --Shakko (talk) 21:41, 18 June 2026 (UTC)
- @Shakko: oops, apologies... navigating directly to an error from the Linter error reports, one doesn't see the tag (unfortunately, it doesn't appear to add any sort of warning to the edit page). — SirOlgen (talk) 21:56, 18 June 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-26
[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
- Growth features are now available at Wikidata. This update enables access to Mentorship (if configured), Impact module, the Help Panel, and a simplified Newcomer Homepage (without Suggested Edits). Wikidata administrators are still configuring the features through Community Configuration.
Updates for editors
- The special page Special:RangeCalculator has been created. It allows users to find an IP range without needing to rely on external tools. Until now, this tool was only available to CheckUsers.
- Sub-referencing is a new MediaWiki feature that allows editors to reuse references with different details. It will be deployed to most small and medium-sized Wikipedia language versions on June 23. The FAQ lists possible actions to take on your wiki to support the deployment. Check the rollout plan for the next deployment steps.
- Starting next week, users will get a notification when they are blocked or unblocked from editing, or if this block changes.
- View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Starting next week, abuse filters that are set to "require CAPTCHA verification" will begin to also affect users with the
skipcaptcharight, which includes most autoconfirmed users. Bots are exempted. This change only affects edits that trigger an abuse filter. Theskipcaptcharight will continue to exempt users from having to solve CAPTCHAs in the ordinary course of using the wikis. - Reference documentation for the Lift Wing API has moved from the API Portal to the interactive REST Sandbox.
- The API Portal wiki is now closed. For API documentation, see Wikimedia APIs on mediawiki.org. All API Portal wiki URLs (https://api.wikimedia.org/wiki/) will redirect to the mediawiki.org page starting June 22.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- Join an online call on 25 June at 2:30pm UTC to meet the current Wikimedia interns for Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. Interns will provide an overview of their projects and a brief demo of their work so far. Attendees are encouraged to share ideas and connections in their community.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Copyvio templates
[edit]Hi, please do not remove copyvio templates if you aren't a copyright clerk, admin or VRT agent. These do need to be checked and CP has sometimes found copyvio even if no source is specified. — Tenshi! (Talk page) 20:00, 25 June 2026 (UTC)
- Understood. Thanks. — SirOlgen (talk) 20:05, 25 June 2026 (UTC)
CS1 error on Khmer people
[edit]
Hello, I'm Qwerfjkl (bot). I have automatically detected that this edit performed by you, on the page Khmer people, may have introduced referencing errors. They are as follows:
- A missing title error. References show this error when they do not have a title. Please edit the article to add the appropriate title parameter to the reference. (Fix | Ask for help)
Please check this page and fix the errors highlighted. If you think this is a false positive, you can report it to my operator. Thanks, Qwerfjkl (bot) (talk) 20:32, 25 June 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-27
[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
- As part of the Account Creation Experiments, the Growth team tested adding a user account icon in the mobile web header for logged-out users, providing direct access to "Create account" and "Log in" actions. The experiment increased account creation by about 20% without negatively affecting edit quality or constructive edit rates. The feature will now be rolled out to all Wikimedia Foundation wikis on mobile web in the first week of July.
- After a successful experiment, logged-in users who did not confirm their email address when their account was created see a new banner asking them to complete that process. This helps reduce the risk that users get locked out of their account, and makes account email addresses overall more reliable. This is part of the Account Security project.
- An update to Search is refining how the
-prefix:behaves when used to exclude results. Previously, using-prefix:with negation could unintentionally broaden search results by adding the namespaces included in the search scope, leading to confusing behavior for users expecting a straightforward exclusion filter. With the update,-prefix:will now strictly exclude matching page titles as intended and may display a warning if the relevant namespace has not been explicitly selected. The behavior ofprefix:without negation however remains unchanged. - View all 33 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where reviewers using the Page Curation toolbar were not automatically subscribed to talk page discussions they started has now been fixed. Reviewers will now receive notifications when someone replies to those discussions.
Updates for technical contributors
- Starting June 29th, automated downloads from the dumps.wikimedia.org website will be subject to the user-agent policy. Automated requests that provide a generic or empty user-agent will be blocked. Access to dumps through Wikimedia Cloud Services remains unaffected. This is a follow up to the announcement made in the 2026/25 issue of Tech News.
- 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.
Tech News: 2026-28
[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
- View all 34 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the search bar results on Wikidata, showed English results instead of using the correct language fallback for users of language variants, has now been fixed. Search suggestions will now follow the expected language fallback chain.
Updates for technical contributors
- In preparation for Celebrate Women campaign planned for March 2027, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Content Enablement team has launched a 22-question survey to better understand technical contributions by women+ (anyone who identifies as a woman) across Wikimedia projects. The survey takes approximately 15–20 minutes to complete and will remain open until 20 July 2026. The questions are also available on-wiki for review in advance.
- The Score extension now supports rendering music scores as SVG images in addition to PNG, addressing a long-standing feature request and resolving historical image quality issues. Both formats are now provided to clients, with PNG in the
srcattribute and SVG in thesrcsetattribute. - The new Parsoid parser continues to be deployed to additional wikis, making it easier to introduce new reading and editing features. It was enabled on French Wikipedia, bringing total progress to covering 78.9% of Wikipedia page views. Rollout to English Wikipedia desktop will progress through this week.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The Wikimedia Hackathon 2026 recap blog post is now live. It highlights the projects, sessions, and social activities from this year’s event, and shares initial plans for the 2027 Wikimedia Hackathon.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
July 2026 meetup in Portland (Online participation available!)
[edit].jpg)
Hey SirOlgen,
You're invited to the July 2026 meetup in Portland, Oregon! Join us either online or at the Northwest Library at 2:00 PM on Saturday, July 25.
Please RSVP at the link above, even if you might be interested, so we can know how many people to expect, and add your agenda items. Hope to see you there!
(To unsubscribe from these updates, remove yourself from this list. Sent via MediaWiki message delivery.) —TechnoSquirrel69 (talk) 22:00, 11 July 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-29
[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
- Revise Tone helps newcomers identify passages in Wikipedia articles that may contain non-encyclopedic language and encourages them to consider revising the tone. The feature was A/B tested on the Arabic, English, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias, where newcomer task completion rates increased by 38.7% compared to the default Copyedit task, with no decrease in edit quality. The test ended on July 9, and the feature is now available for everyone on these wikis, configurable via Community Configuration. The plan is to release Revise Tone to more wikis.
- The community configuration that allows automatic removal of inactive mentors based on configurable criteria will be enabled on Thursday 16, on some wikis to keep mentor lists up to date. Mentors are experienced contributors who opt in to help new users on-wiki through the Growth Features. Administrators can now prepare the settings via Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship; they will take effect starting Thursday.
- View all 38 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where some users of the Wikipedia Android app were logged out immediately after signing in, preventing them from staying logged in and editing pages, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- Editing a page via user scripts or gadgets was causing watchlist labels that the user had assigned to that page to reset. This has now been fixed.
- To work around a Safari bug (see phab:T425211), on Parsoid-enabled wikis, wikilink hrefs now use absolute urls instead of protocol-relative urls. REST API output remains unchanged and continue to use protocol-relative urls. Gadgets, user scripts, bots, and CSS might need to be adapted if they relied on the presence of protocol-relative urls in wikilink hrefs.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The Wikimedia Foundation’s Experiment Platform Team has published a blog post reflecting on its first year of structured experimentation. It highlights successful experiments such as Paste Check, Reference Check, and Tone Check, which improved editing outcomes and have been rolled out to more users, as well as experiments that did not lead to product changes. Read more.
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Tech News: 2026-30
[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
- The Reader Experience team has incorporated community feedback around the placement of watchstar and watchlist buttons for the Reading Lists beta feature, which would allow for saving articles for later reading – a wishlist item to bring the functionality to web. Editors are invited to enable the beta feature to test it out and share their thoughts.
- Suggestion Mode offers edit suggestions within the VisualEditor for improving Wikipedia articles. All suggestions are community-configurable. The TextMatch feature is a way for volunteers to create custom local suggestions. The feature searches in articles for strings of text, and now includes support for regular expressions. This gives volunteers greater precision and flexibility over the kinds of local suggestions they can create. Note: Suggestions can be targeted based on the edit count of the person editing as well as other aspects of the page. You can find examples from other communities for inspiration, including TextMatches that detect: typos, grammar-errors, potential advertisements, clichés, incorrect dash or hyphen usage, non-specific time keywords, outdated names, and more. Any feedback is appreciated.
- View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the SVG Translate tool could use an outdated version of a file, causing existing translations to be overwritten when new ones were uploaded, has now been fixed. Overall, in the last quarter from April – June 2026 about 337 community tasks were resolved by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Updates for technical contributors
- On Parsoid-enabled wikis, Parsoid now renders a maximum of 1,250 images per page. A new tracking category, "media-limit-reached", will be soon made available to identify pages where this limit is reached, making it easier to find content whose media output may have been restricted during rendering. See phab:T430854 for more information and to provide feedback.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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They were there on purpose
[edit]On the Results of the 1982 Swedish general election I left those things there on purpose to save myself future work. Sorry if that was not clear while you edited all of that. Glottran (talk) 21:22, 21 July 2026 (UTC)
- @Glottran: Apologies for missing that. Lone
'''tags hit Linter's missing-end-tag error reports, and I may have been a bit overeager in clearing them from the list. I'll try to be less of a meatbot the next time I see a similar volume of tags. - As an aside, using a pair of bold tags separated by a space (i.e.
''' ''') won't hit the Linter reports, so wouldn't draw attention (and would hopefully still be useful as a placeholder for future work like this). - Apologies again! — SirOlgen (talk) 21:49, 21 July 2026 (UTC)
- No worries on that one. I did not do this particular editing on Swedish election results from the last century for a couple of years and indeed the suggested solution was what I used to do back in the day. I just forgot about that one. Good luck with your future endeavours. Glottran (talk) 21:54, 21 July 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-31
[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
Content Translation now supports dark mode, fulfilling a Community Wishlist request. This brings the tool in line with the accessibility features available in the Vector 2022 and Minerva skins, helping reduce visual fatigue for users translating content. - DiscussionTools' source mode and the 2017 wikitext editor will now offer autocomplete for links (
[[), templates ({{), HTML and parser tags (<), and magic words (__), making it quicker and easier to insert links, templates, and other wiki markup while editing. - The Readers Growth team has concluded its experiment with mobile page previews and will not roll out the feature. Page Previews are a pop-up bottom sheet that appears when readers tap a blue link, showing a thumbnail, lead paragraph, and an option to open the article. The experiment showed flat retention and negative indicator metrics, suggesting that mobile web readers preferred navigating directly to linked articles rather than using page previews.
- The Reader Experience team has seen encouraging early results from the Reading Lists feature, with 93% of participating users reporting that it was useful. Reading Lists help active readers save articles for future reading and support their learning goals on Wikimedia projects. The team plans further improvements before expanding the feature to more users.
- The Explore Feed Refresh initiative was tested with new and casual Wikipedia app readers. The refreshed feed helps readers discover new and relevant content. After a 10.5% increase in engagement with the feed, Wikimedia Apps team has decided to scale the Home Feed redesign to iOS with the learnings from the Android release applied.
- View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where subject names in the Article Guidance feature were displayed with incorrect capitalization on French Wikipedia, has now been fixed. Subject names will now follow the correct capitalization rules for the language.
Updates for technical contributors
- After running several Account Creation Experiments to improve registration completion rates, a new version of the username field on Create Account has been rolled out. It includes a popover summarizing the username policy to provide clearer guidance during account creation. As part of this change, the messages
createacct-helpusernameandcreateacct-username-helpthat several communities have configured will no longer be used. If communities want to customize the guidance shown in the new popover, they can instead edit the following messages:createacct-username-policy-popover-bullet1,createacct-username-policy-popover-bullet2, andcreateacct-username-policy-popover-bullet3. - Later this week, the CodeMirror syntax highlighter will offer themes. The themes can be picked from a dropdown menu in the full CodeMirror preferences dialog. For wikitext, available themes are default, colorblind-friendly (previously the colorblind preference option on Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing) and no-highlighting. For code languages (i.e., CSS/JavaScript/JSON/Vue/Lua), there are several themes available. These same themes will eventually be available for wikitext, too.
- From now on, wikis can restrict editing in the "User" namespace to only the page owner and certain user groups. Read the configuration documentation to learn more.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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Tech News: 2026-32
[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
- The Reader Experience team has developed a patch demo that wraps the page toolbar onto two lines when there is not enough horizontal space for all the buttons. This aims to reduce crowding in the Vector 2022 toolbar, which can occur on some language Wikipedias at certain screen widths.
- The Reader Experience team is planning to launch Reading Lists, a Community Wishlist item, which is currently available to try in beta, as a full feature in September. Before then, volunteer translator help is needed for string translations into a number of languages. The feature supports reading and learning goals on Wikipedia.
- Next week, the table of contents on Wikimedia Commons file pages will be improved by consolidating the file page table of contents with the page table of contents. This will make it easier to understand a file page’s structure, navigate to specific sections, and share links to individual sections.
- View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where some TIFF images failed to load after clicking their thumbnail, causing a broken image to be displayed instead of the full-size image, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- The variable and function selector in AbuseFilter has been updated to support search and autocomplete. It will allow filter maintainers to find the desired variable or function more quickly.
- The MJPEG and VP8 formats are removed from the video player. The MP4 format (MPEG-4 Part 2) is added instead, which provides higher quality videos to older iPhone devices. It may take a few weeks to retroactively update all existing videos. The default format for modern devices stays the same (VP9/WebM).
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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Linter corrections.
[edit]Hi SirOlgen. Thank you for you edits to Alfred Robert Grindlay. Clearly I am doing something wrong but I honestly don’t understand what? I followed the exact structure of the info box for Margaret Thatcher for AR Grindlay so the boxes all line up in the same way, but apparently this is still “misnested”. Is the M Thatcher structure also incorrect or am I missing something? WidoWido (talk) 10:04, 8 August 2026 (UTC)
- Hi @WidoWido: if I add line breaks and indents to the wikitext, it might clarify things a bit.
- Before linter correction:
:{{collapsed infobox section begin : |Further government positions : | titlestyle = border:1px dashed lightgrey;width:21.75em; :}} :{{Infobox officeholder : | embed = yes : | office = Chairman of Coventry Progressive Party : | office1 = Chairman of City Redevelopment Committee : ... : | office7 = City Engineer for Coventry : {{Collapsed infobox section end}} :}} :
- This effectively places the {{Collapsed infobox section end}} inside the {{Infobox officeholder}} that you're intending to collapse. This imbalance is what is generating the Linter error on Alfred Robert Grindlay.
- My understanding is that Linter wants to see <begin a> <begin b> <end b> <end a> (with all tagging for b nested neatly within the tagging for a), and flags as an imbalance ("misnesting") instances of <begin a> <begin b> <end a> <end b> (where the tagging for a and b intermingle).
- After linter correction:
:{{collapsed infobox section begin : |Further government positions : | titlestyle = border:1px dashed lightgrey;width:21.75em; :}} :{{Infobox officeholder : | embed = yes : | office = Chairman of Coventry Progressive Party : | office1 = Chairman of City Redevelopment Committee : ... : | office7 = City Engineer for Coventry :}} :{{Collapsed infobox section end}} :
- The real mystery has to do with why, as you suggest, Margaret Thatcher isn't also generating the Linter error. I suspect this may be a glitch with Linter itself, or possibly the result of the interplay between the 'Infobox' and 'Collapsed Infobox Section' templates (based on my own experience and what I've read on various Talk pages, it becomes less predictable as 'Infobox' complexity increases). I had performed a null edit and a cache purge on the Thatcher article to try and shake something loose, but neither had an effect.
- In any case, let me know if this helps clarify things or if it just confuses things further.
- Regards — SirOlgen (talk) 18:15, 8 August 2026 (UTC)
- I also meant to suggest looking into whether there's a CSS style attribute that could possibly be added to one/both of the {{collapsed infobox section begin}} titlestyle= args to add a slight bit of padding between the templates when rendered in their collapsed state. I'm not a CSS expert, but I've seen it used to produce some fairly creative formatting over the years. — SirOlgen (talk) 18:29, 8 August 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-33
[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
- A new ChartWizard is now available on Wikimedia Commons for users interested in creating charts from their own data. The wizard makes the Chart extension more beginner-friendly by allowing editors to create charts, such as bar and pie charts, without needing to use JSON. Users can still switch to the JSON editor if they prefer. Feedback on the new tool is welcome on the wish talk page.
- View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the Wikipedia iOS app’s Picture of the Day widget displayed the same image every day instead of updating daily, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- Math formula SVG images will soon be generated in the browser instead of on the server. MathML continues to be generated on the server and renders in the browser without JavaScript. Wikibooks will see this change on 12 August, Wikisource on 19 August and Wikipedia from 20-27 August. You can try this by selecting "MathML with SVG image (client side MathJax rendering)" in your preferences. This change is part of deprecating RESTBase and deprecating Mathoid.
- Category pages will soon support sorting entries by the time they are added to a category. This will make it easier to find recently or long-standing categorized pages. It will also improve workflows for maintenance categories such as deletion backlogs and other time-based review tasks. You can use
cldsort=timestampURL argument in category view to sort the entries. - Gadgets and user scripts on Wikimedia wikis may now use ES2018 features and ES2019 features in JavaScript code. Previously, the platform only allowed up to ES2017. MediaWiki validates the source code to protect functionality from syntax errors and to ensure scripts are valid in all supported browsers.
- 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.
2026 Wiknic in Portland, Oregon
[edit]
Hey SirOlgen,
You're invited to the 2026 Wiknic in Portland! Join us for a social potluck at 4:00 PM on Saturday, September 5.
Please RSVP at the link above, even if you might be interested, so we can know how many people to expect, or even add something to the menu. Hope to see you there!
(To unsubscribe from these updates, remove yourself from this list. Sent via MediaWiki message delivery.) —TechnoSquirrel69 (talk) 04:43, 15 August 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-34
[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
- The Worklist feature for the Event Registration tool is now live on all Wikimedia wikis. With Worklist, event organizers can add the articles their event will focus on directly to the event page. The Worklist also powers Event Pathways which notifies other editors of the upcoming or ongoing event when they edit an article featured in the event's Worklist. This is the minimum viable version (MVP), and feedback is welcome. Organizers are encouraged to try the feature. A hands-on Worklist Setup Workshop will take place on 18 August at 16:00 UTC and 19 August at 11:00 UTC.
Updates for editors
- Special:ShortPages displays short pages by their size, but in many cases it gets filled with disambiguations and soft redirects, making it harder to find the short articles themselves. Starting this weekend, you will be able to choose not to include an article in the special page by adding the magic word
__EXPECTSHORTPAGE__. - One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Bole (
w:bol:) - Starting the week of August 17, the page toolbar will wrap onto two lines when there is not enough horizontal space for all the buttons. This is a fully merged patch from the Reader Experience team which aims to reduce crowding in the Vector 2022 toolbar, that may occur on some language Wikipedias at certain screen widths.
- View all 16 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, uploading large files to Wikimedia Commons has become more stable and less prone to failure following some fixes related to the “Could not acquire lock” upload error.
Updates for technical contributors
- Debian Bullseye will reach the end of its Long Term Support on 31 August 2026. Some Cloud VPS projects still have instances running Debian Bullseye. Maintainers of those projects are encouraged to migrate to Debian Bookworm or Debian Trixie. A migration guide is available to help with the process, and users may also want to consider whether their workload is better suited to Toolforge. If you need help or cannot complete the migration by 31 August, please contact the Cloud VPS admins as soon as possible. Read more.
- 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.
Tech News: 2026-35
[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
- The Special:CreateAccount page has been simplified as part of ongoing work to modernize the account creation experience. The panel showing project statistics no longer appears next to the form on desktop and mobile web. Multiple account creation experiments show that a simpler form helps newcomers complete registration.
- In order to improve page performance, images now load when they are viewed. This means images lower down an article will not load if a reader never scrolls to that part of the page, which may affect some image-related metrics.
- View all 42 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where image thumbnails in Abstract Wikipedia could fail to display after the corresponding file was moved on Wikimedia Commons, has now been fixed. Thumbnails will now update correctly when files are moved.
Updates for technical contributors
- User Info card is a feature that helps patrollers see information about user accounts. So far, it has been available only in places such as page history, logs and recent changes. Now, it's possible to place it in the page content as well, using the
{{#uic:}}parser function. It can be particularly useful in templates like{{Userlinks}}(or their specialized variants), as it will make it easier to see the context about a user on various noticeboard pages. The card will be displayed only to users who have it enabled in their preferences. - Due to user security and privacy risks, we have disabled access to
Special:MyPageURLs when specifically usingaction=raw. If you are impacted by this, consider whether you can use an alternative approach.Special:MyPageURLs can still be accessed and used withoutaction=raw. Specified user page URLs (e.g.User:Myusername) can still be used withaction=raw. - Due to an update, the thumbnailing software has been improved. This includes upgrading
librsvgto 2.60 andImageMagickto 7, as well as resolving a number of long-standing thumbnailing bugs like rendering errors.
- 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.
The Barnstar of Diligence and The Template Barnstar
[edit] |
The Barnstar of Diligence | |
| For spotting and carefully diagnosing the {{Cite Hong Kong case}} pinpoint regression, including the tracing of the malformed URL and identifying the other affected citations. Thank you for the exceptionally helpful and detailed bug report! ManducatingMouser (talk) 04:17, 28 August 2026 (UTC) |
 |
The Template Barnstar | |
| For catching and carefully documenting the {{Cite Hong Kong case}} pinpoint regression. Your detailed report made the problem much more easier to identify and fix. Thank you! ManducatingMouser (talk) 04:17, 28 August 2026 (UTC) |
Tech News: 2026-36
[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
- A new format for the Community Wishlist is open for feedback. You can read the proposed ideas on Meta. This new process plans to improve how wishes are triaged, voted on, and prioritized in a way that is transparent and balanced across project families and language editions. This consultation is open for two weeks.
Updates for editors
- The latest release of the Wikipedia Android app includes updates to the Saved feature, bringing the app’s saving experience closer to iOS and Web. The update redesigns the Saved tab with an “All articles” view, removes the default “Saved” reading list, renames reading lists to “Collections,” and modernizes the article-saving experience.
- The Reading Lists feature was enabled for all logged-in users on Bengali, Chinese, Czech and Vietnamese Wikipedias on August 25, after several months as a beta feature. Reading Lists will be available to all logged-in users on Arabic, French and Indonesian Wikipedias on September 1, followed by English Wikipedia on September 14, and all other Wikipedia wikis on September 28.
- At the end of the month, some logged-out readers on Bengali, Czech, Persian, English, and Polish Wikipedias using the Minerva skin on mobile will see an updated navigation bar in an A/B test. The test will compare the current navigation bar with a new version designed to make it easier to find information more quickly. The goal is to determine whether these changes encourage readers to return more often. This experiment will not change the experience for logged-in readers and/or editors.
- Editors who maintain redirects, templates, and categories used on redirect pages now have improved ways for finding and curating redirects. Previously, redirects pages could not be searched. Two new search keywords,
onlyredirects:andwithredirects:, now allow redirects to be searched directly and can be combined with existing keywords such asincategory:,intitle:, andinsource:. - The ISBN lookup tools for generating citations were recently not working because of external service problems. Developers are working on solutions.
- View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where searching for pages by category using
deepcatcould return no results or unrelated results has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- The domain of URLs for thumbnails is changing from upload.wikimedia.org to thumb.wikimedia.org. The old URLs will continue to work for the foreseeable future but MediaWiki will advertise the new domain instead. URLs to other types of media such as original files, videos and transcodes will still be served from upload.wikimedia.org.
- The Wikimedia Math API is now deprecated. These endpoints will be fully sunset by the end of September 2026. Developers who call these endpoints should transition to alternative math rendering solutions, such as the native MathML or MathJax. Third-party MediaWiki installations that utilize the Math extension for formula rendering are required to upgrade to v1.43+ to avoid disruption of service.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- Read more about TextMatch in a Diff post titled, Custom edit suggestions for every wiki: How communities are shaping Suggestion Mode with TextMatch.
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