Wikipedia:Tech news
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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.
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.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Tech News: 2026-37
[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
- Add a Link has been upgraded for English Wikipedia users with improved detection of links that have different capitalization. This will help reduce ambiguous suggestions caused by differences in capitalization in article titles, including articles about cultural goods. A second phase of improvements is planned, which will also prepare the feature for release in other languages.
- The Article guidance feature will be enabled by default for junior editors on Simple English and Turkish Wikipedia starting 10 September 2026 following an experiment. Junior editors with 0 to 99 edits will automatically see the feature when they click a red link or use the "" option on Turkish Wikipedia to create a new article. The change is intended to help junior editors create higher-quality articles that meet each Wikipedia’s standards. Additional improvements will continue based on the experiment results and community feedback.
- The Pageviews Analysis tool which allows users to compare pageviews across multiple pages, turns 10 years old this year and several new features have been added. They include WikiNav which provides insights into how readers of Wikipedia explore the content, editing stats in Siteviews, the ability to lookup articles belonging to a WikiProject, and support for dark mode.
- A visually simplified Minerva navigation bar is being tested for logged-out readers using mobile web on the Bengali, Czech, English, Farsi, and Polish Wikipedias. The experiment aims to determine whether simplifying the navigation improves reader retention. The test will run from August 31 to September 28, and no action is required from users.
- WMDE Technical Wishes is working on improving auto-generated reference names in VisualEditor. Editors will only notice a slight change starting this week. When adding automatic reference names the numbering will start at
:1instead of:0. Read more on the project page. - All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 23. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
- View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where Parsoid could mishandle nested nowiki tags, causing content to be lost and displaying unwanted text has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- Interface administrators can configure gadgets from MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition. The definition format has been updated and no longer requires the
ResourceLoaderoption, as gadgets are always loaded throughResourceLoader. This simplifies gadget configuration by removing an option that is no longer necessary, making gadget definitions easier for administrators. - 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: 2026-38
[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 Future Audiences team has started a discussion on English Wikipedia about a proposed new experiment to show a temporary notice about the new Google Preferred Sources feature to Wikipedia readers coming from Google. The experiment is to test whether this notice makes visitors come back to Wikipedia more often. Preferred Sources feature lets users choose websites they trust so Google can highlight content from those sources more prominently in Search and AI experiences. We are interested in testing this on other languages that Google supports and would welcome assistance with starting conversations on other wikis. If interested, please reach out to Future Audiences on the talk page.
Updates for editors
- The chat platform Discord is releasing a new self-service framework that websites can use to specify how their links should look when shared on Discord. The Future Audiences team is planning to start using this new framework to improve how Wikipedia links look when shared on Discord, giving better attribution and credit to contributors. The link appearance and behavior won't change in the first phase of this project as we want to first collect some baseline data to assess the impact of future changes. However, if community members who are active on Discord spot any issues, they can reach out on Phabricator or Metawiki.
- The Reader Growth team will be running an experiment to test whether compacting article lead sections on mobiles with the addition of a "read more" button improves reader retention. The test will begin on September 17 on Arabic, Spanish, French, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Vietnamese, and Chinese Wikipedias and will run for four weeks.
- All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 23. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming week.
- View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where Wikistats for Wikipedias was returning an HTTP 500 error and could not be reached, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- Developers who maintain a tool that queries the Wikimedia Commons links tables need to update their code to connect to the new x4 database cluster. The links tables have been moved from the s4 cluster to x4, and will no longer receive updates on s4. The page and redirect tables remain available on both clusters. A wiki replica for the x4 cluster will be set up afterwards. The change is being made because the s4 cluster has grown too large to operate efficiently. You can 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.