User talk:Quiddity (WMF)/sandbox
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2025 Issue 5
editUpcoming and current events and conversations
Let's Talk continues
- Wikimania 2025: Program submission is still open until March 31. Apply now to speak at Wikimania 2025.
- Research Fund: The 2025 Wikimedia Research Fund is launching, inviting proposals from researchers aiming to advance free knowledge through Wikimedia projects. Submit your proposal before April 16.
- Central Notice Training: Learn more about updates to the Central Notice Guidelines by joining a Central Notice Requester training on March 26 at 14:00 UTC.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Research · Web · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Design System: Learn more about Wikimedia’s Codex design system and how to use it while designing for Wikimedia projects.
- Tech News: The improved Content Translation tool dashboard is now available in 10 Wikipedias and will be available for all Wikipedias soon; on Wikimedia Commons, a new system to select the appropriate file categories has been introduced. More updates from tech news week 11 and 12.
- P&T Annual Planning: The Product & Technology department publishes its plans early in the annual planning process, which is on Meta-Wiki and open for feedback. These objectives and key results are not a list of projects, but instead, a set of directions for problems to solve and impacts to achieve over the course of the year. We look forward to engaging with the community on this plan.
Annual Goals Progress on Knowledge Equity
See also a list of all movement events: on Meta-Wiki
- Resource Support Pilot: The pilot project on English Wikipedia to fund small resource requests (like books) to support editors in improving content has moved to the next phases of the discussion.
- Wikisource Conference: Some highlights from the Wikisource Conference 2025 in Bali.
- ESEAP Hub: Future plans for the ESEAP Hub one-year pilot project.
Annual Goals Progress on Safety & Integrity
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog
- Litigation review: Read key points of the Wikimedia Foundation's legal work last year to protect free and open knowledge broadly, and the Wikimedia volunteers and projects in particular.
Board and Board committee updates
See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- Affiliations Committee: Announcement of the 2025 Affiliations Committee Appointments.
- Wikimedia MKD: Recognition of Wikimedia MKD User Group.
- Wikimedia Community User Group Burundi: Recognition of Wikimedia Community User Group Burundi.
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!
Tech News: 2025-13
editLatest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking your feedback on the drafts of the objectives and key results that will shape the Foundation's Product and Technology priorities for the next fiscal year (starting in July). The objectives are broad high-level areas, and the key-results are measurable ways to track the success of their objectives. Please share your feedback on the talkpage, in any language, ideally before the end of April.
Updates for editors
- The CampaignEvents extension will be released to multiple wikis (see deployment plan for details) in April 2025, and the team has begun the process of engaging communities on the identified wikis. The extension provides tools to organize, manage, and promote collaborative activities (like events, edit-a-thons, and WikiProjects) on the wikis. The extension has three tools: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation Lists. It is currently on 13 Wikipedias, including English Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia, as well as Wikidata. Questions or requests can be directed to the extension talk page or in Phabricator (with #campaigns-product-team tag).
- Starting the week of March 31st, wikis will be able to set which user groups can view private registrants in Event Registration, as part of the CampaignEvents extension. By default, event organizers and the local wiki admins will be able to see private registrants. This is a change from the current behavior, in which only event organizers can see private registrants. Wikis can change the default setup by requesting a configuration change in Phabricator (and adding the #campaigns-product-team tag). Participants of past events can cancel their registration at any time.
- Administrators at wikis that have a customized MediaWiki:Sidebar should check that it contains an entry for the Special pages listing. If it does not, they should add it using
* specialpages-url|specialpages
. Wikis with a default sidebar will see the link moved from the page toolbox into the sidebar menu in April. [1] - The Minerva skin (mobile web) combines both Notice and Alert notifications within the bell icon ( ). There was a long-standing bug where an indication for new notifications was only shown if you had unseen Alerts. This bug is now fixed. In the future, Minerva users will notice a counter atop the bell icon when you have 1 or more unseen Notices and/or Alerts. [2]
- View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- VisualEditor has introduced a new client-side hook for developers to use when integrating with the VisualEditor target lifecycle. This hook should replace the existing lifecycle-related hooks, and be more consistent between different platforms. In addition, the new hook will apply to uses of VisualEditor outside of just full article editing, allowing gadgets to interact with the editor in DiscussionTools as well. The Editing Team intends to deprecate and eventually remove the old lifecycle hooks, so any use cases that this new hook does not cover would be of interest to them and can be shared in the task.
- Developers who use the
mw.Api
JavaScript library, can now identify the tool using it with theuserAgent
parameter:var api = new mw.Api( { userAgent: 'GadgetNameHere/1.0.1' } );
. If you maintain a gadget or user script, please set a user agent, because it helps with library and server maintenance and with differentiating between legitimate and illegitimate traffic. [3][4] - 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: 2025-14
editLatest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- The Editing team is working on a new Edit check: Peacock check. This check's goal is to identify non-neutral terms while a user is editing a wikipage, so that they can be informed that their edit should perhaps be changed before they publish it. This project is at the early stages, and the team is looking for communities' input: in this Phabricator task, they are gathering on-wiki policies, templates used to tag non-neutral articles, and the terms (jargon and keywords) used in edit summaries for the languages they are currently researching. You can participate by editing the table on Phabricator, commenting on the task, or directly messaging Trizek (WMF).
- Single User Login has now been updated on all wikis to move login and account creation to a central domain. This makes user login compatible with browser restrictions on cross-domain cookies, which have prevented users of some browsers from staying logged in.
- View all 35 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Starting on March 31st, the MediaWiki Interfaces team will begin a limited release of generated OpenAPI specs and a SwaggerUI-based sandbox experience for MediaWiki REST APIs. They invite developers from a limited group of non-English Wikipedia communities (Arabic, German, French, Hebrew, Interlingua, Dutch, Chinese) to review the documentation and experiment with the sandbox in their preferred language. In addition to these specific Wikipedia projects, the sandbox and OpenAPI spec will be available on the on the test wiki REST Sandbox special page for developers with English as their preferred language. During the preview period, the MediaWiki Interfaces Team also invites developers to share feedback about your experience. The preview will last for approximately 2 weeks, after which the sandbox and OpenAPI specs will be made available across all wiki projects.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- Sometimes a small, one line code change can have great significance: in this case, it means that for the first time in years we're able to run all of the stack serving maps.wikimedia.org - a host dedicated to serving our wikis and their multi-lingual maps needs - from a single core datacenter, something we test every time we perform a datacenter switchover. This is important because it means that in case one of our datacenters is affected by a catastrophe, we'll still be able to serve the site. This change is the result of extensive work by two developers on porting the last component of the maps stack over to kubernetes, where we can allocate resources more efficiently than before, thus we're able to withstand more traffic in a single datacenter. This work involved a lot of complicated steps because this software, and the software libraries it uses, required many long overdue upgrades. This type of work makes the Wikimedia infrastructure more sustainable.
Meetings and events
- MediaWiki Users and Developers Workshop Spring 2025 is happening in Sandusky, USA, and online, from 14–16 May 2025. The workshop will feature discussions around the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies in different industries and will inspire and onboard new users. Registration and presentation signup is now available at the workshop's website.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Final proposed modifications to the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines and U4C Charter now posted
editThe proposed modifications to the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines and the U4C Charter are now on Meta-wiki for community notice in advance of the voting period. This final draft was developed from the previous two rounds of community review. Community members will be able to vote on these modifications starting on 17 April 2025. The vote will close on 1 May 2025, and results will be announced no later than 12 May 2025. The U4C election period, starting with a call for candidates, will open immediately following the announcement of the review results. More information will be posted on the election wiki page soon.
Please be advised that this process will require more messages to be sent here over the next two months.
The Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is a global group dedicated to providing an equitable and consistent implementation of the UCoC. This annual review was planned and implemented by the U4C. For more information and the responsibilities of the U4C, you may review the U4C Charter.
Please share this message with members of your community so they can participate as well.
-- In cooperation with the U4C, Keegan (WMF) (talk) 02:01, 4 April 2025 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2025 Issue 6
editUpcoming and current events and conversations
Let's Talk continues
- Progress on the Annual Plan: Six-Month Snapshot.
- Global Trends: A message from Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees on global trends and strengthening Wikipedia’s neutral point of view.
- Wikimedia Hackathon: The registration to attend the Wikimedia Hackathon is still open until midnight April 13.
- Central Asia Wikicon: The Central Asian WikiCon 2025 will take place on April 19–20 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Research · Web · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Infrastructure: How crawlers impact the operations of the Wikimedia projects.
- Tech News: The CampaignEvents extension will be released to multiple wikis (see deployment plan for details) in April 2025; The Editing team is working on a new Edit check: Peacock check. This check’s goal is to identify non-neutral terms while a user is editing a wikipage. More updates from tech news week 13 and 14.
- Wikifunctions: Read the latest status updates.
Annual Goals Progress on Knowledge Equity
See also a list of all movement events: on Meta-Wiki
- Wikipedia Library: What’s new from January to March 2025.
- Let's Connect Learning Clinic: Missed the last Learning Clinic on "Safe Spaces, Strong Voices: Advancing Inclusion through the UCoC"? Recording is now available.
Annual Goals Progress on Safety & Integrity
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog
- Transparency report: The Wikimedia Foundation’s publishes its latest Transparency Report covering the period from July to December 2024. View highlights from the report.
- Global Advocacy: Read the latest developments on public policy advocacy from Wikimedia Foundation's Global Advocacy team.
Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness
See also: quarterly Metrics Reports
- Wikimedia Enterprise: Wikimedia Enterprise Partners with ProRata.ai to Champion Sustainable Search Engine Practices.
Board and Board committee updates
See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- Elections Committee: Wikimedia Foundation Governance Committee has appointed a new Elections Committee.
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!
Tech News: 2025-15
editLatest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- From now on, interface admins and centralnotice admins are technically required to enable two-factor authentication before they can use their privileges. In the future this might be expanded to more groups with advanced user-rights. [5]
- View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- The Design System Team is preparing to release the next major version of Codex (v2.0.0) on April 29. Editors and developers who use CSS from Codex should see the 2.0 overview documentation, which includes guidance related to a few of the breaking changes such as
font-size
,line-height
, andsize-icon
. - The results of the Developer Satisfaction Survey (2025) are now available. Thank you to all participants. These results help the Foundation decide what to work on next and to review what they recently worked on.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- The 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon will take place in Istanbul, Turkey, between 2–4 May. Registration for attending the in-person event will close on 13 April. Before registering, please note the potential need for a visa or e-visa to enter the country.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Tech News: 2025-16
editLatest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- Later this week, the default thumbnail size will be increased from 220px to 250px. This changes how pages are shown in all wikis and has been requested by some communities for many years, but wasn't previously possible due to technical limitations. [6]
- File thumbnails are now stored in discrete sizes. If a page specifies a thumbnail size that's not among the standard sizes (20, 40, 60, 120, 250, 330, 500, 960), then MediaWiki will pick the closest larger thumbnail size but will tell the browser to downscale it to the requested size. In these cases, nothing will change visually but users might load slightly larger images. If it doesn't matter which thumbnail size is used in a page, please pick one of the standard sizes to avoid the extra in-browser down-scaling step. [7][8]
Updates for editors
- The Wikimedia Foundation are working on a system called Edge Uniques which will enable A/B testing, help protect against Distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks), and make it easier to understand how many visitors the Wikimedia sites have. This is so that they can more efficiently build tools which help readers, and make it easier for readers to find what they are looking for.
- To improve security for users, a small percentage of logins will now require that the account owner input a one-time password emailed to their account. It is recommended that you check that the email address on your account is set correctly, and that it has been confirmed, and that you have an email set for this purpose. [9]
- "Are you interested in taking a short survey to improve tools used for reviewing or reverting edits on your Wiki?" This question will be asked at 7 wikis starting next week, on Recent Changes and Watchlist pages. The Moderator Tools team wants to know more about activities that involve looking at new edits made to your Wikimedia project, and determining whether they adhere to your project's policies.
- On April 15, the full Wikidata graph will no longer be supported on query.wikidata.org. After this date, scholarly articles will be available through query-scholarly.wikidata.org, while the rest of the data hosted on Wikidata will be available through the query.wikidata.org endpoint. This is part of the scheduled split of the Wikidata Graph, which was announced in September 2024. More information is available on Wikidata.
- The latest quarterly Wikimedia Apps Newsletter is now available. It covers updates, experiments, and improvements made to the Wikipedia mobile apps.
- View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: an invitation for tool maintainers to attend the Toolforge UI Community Feedback Session on April 15th; recent community metrics; and recent technical blog posts.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Vote now on the revised UCoC Enforcement Guidelines and U4C Charter
editThe voting period for the revisions to the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines ("UCoC EG") and the UCoC's Coordinating Committee Charter is open now through the end of 1 May (UTC) (find in your time zone). Read the information on how to participate and read over the proposal before voting on the UCoC page on Meta-wiki.
The Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is a global group dedicated to providing an equitable and consistent implementation of the UCoC. This annual review was planned and implemented by the U4C. For more information and the responsibilities of the U4C, you may review the U4C Charter.
Please share this message with members of your community in your language, as appropriate, so they can participate as well.
In cooperation with the U4C -- User:Keegan (talk) 00:30, 17 April 2025 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2025 Issue 7
editUpcoming and current events and conversations
Let's Talk continues
- Annual Planning and global trends: Join one of the many conversations happening over April and May about how Wikimedians around the world are responding to global trends and help shape the Foundation's annual plan.
- CEE Catchup: Join the upcoming global trends workshop for the CEE communities organized together with the CEE Hub on April 23 at 16:00 UTC, to discuss AI, NPOV, Wikimedia communities and more.
- Neutral point of view: More information and an update about the work to strengthen Wikipedia's neutral point of view.
- Wiki Workshop 2025: Register for the 12th annual Wiki Workshop taking place on May 21–22. It brings together researchers and scholars from around the globe who are interested in or actively engaged in research and development on Wikimedia projects.
- Learning Clinic: The upcoming Let’s Connect Learning Clinic is focusing on "Understanding and Navigating Conflict in Wikimedia Projects (Part 1)" and will take place on April 29 at 14:30 UTC.
- Community Resilience and Sustainability: Quarterly Conversation hour taking place on April 24 at 18:00 UTC to discuss Trust and Safety, the Universal Code of Conduct, Committee Support, and Human Rights.
- Wikimedia Hackathon: The Wikimedia Hackathon 2025 will take place on May 2–4.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Research · Web · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Wikifunctions: Wikifunctions is now integrated with Dagbani Wikipedia. It is the first Wikimedia project that will be able to call and integrate functions directly into Wikipedia articles. Read more weekly updates on Wikifunctions.
- Edge Uniques: Introducing Edge Uniques, a technical approach which consists of privacy-preserving first-party cookies that will enable usability testing of features through A/B testing, more accurate counting of site visits, and a way to stop distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) with better precision.
- Tech News: The Design System Team is preparing to release the next major version of Codex (v2.0.0) on April 29; Last week, the default thumbnail size was increased from 220px to 250px. This changes how pages are shown in all wikis and has been requested by some communities for many years, but wasn’t previously possible due to technical limitations. More updates from Tech News week 15 and 16.
- Outreachy: Celebrating the excellent contributions from both interns and mentors in Round 29 of the Outreachy internship program.
- Developer Satisfaction Survey: The results of the Developer Satisfaction Survey (2025) are available. Thank you to all participants. These results help the Foundation decide what to work on next and to review what they recently worked on.
Annual Goals Progress on Knowledge Equity
See also a list of all movement events: on Meta-Wiki · WikiLearn
- Wiki Loves Monuments: Celebrating the winners of Wiki Loves Monuments 2024.
- Wikimedia Research Showcase: Watch the latest research showcase featuring the theme of "Motivation of Wikipedia Editors".
Annual Goals Progress on Safety & Integrity
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog
- Digital Rights: Wikimedians leading conversations at the Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum 2025 (DRIF25).
- Community Resilience: To better support community members when they are facing challenges while contributing to Wikimedia projects, the Trust and Safety team worked with the Arbitration Committees to create Project Maps of communities.
- RightsCon 2025: Key takeaways on advocacy and inclusion.
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!
Tech News: 2025-17
editLatest 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
- Wikifunctions is now integrated with Dagbani Wikipedia since April 15. It is the first project that will be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in articles. A function is something that takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, such as adding up two numbers, converting miles into metres, calculating how much time has passed since an event, or declining a word into a case. Wikifunctions will allow users to do that through a simple call of a stable and global function, rather than via a local template. [10]
- A new type of lint error has been created: Empty headings (documentation). The Linter extension's purpose is to identify wikitext patterns that must or can be fixed in pages and provide some guidance about what the problems are with those patterns and how to fix them. [11]
- View all 37 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Following its publication on HuggingFace, the "Structured Contents" dataset, developed by Wikimedia Enterprise, is now also available on Kaggle. This Beta initiative is focused on making Wikimedia data more machine-readable for high-volume reusers. They are releasing this beta version in a location that open dataset communities already use, in order to seek feedback, to help improve the product for a future wider release. You can read more about the overall Structured Contents project, and about the first release that's freely usable.
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings and events
- The Editing and Machine Learning Teams invite interested volunteers to a video meeting to discuss Peacock check, which is the latest Edit check that will detect "peacock" or "overly-promotional" or "non-neutral" language whilst an editor is typing. Editors who work with newcomers, or help to fix this kind of writing, or are interested in how we use artificial intelligence in our projects are encouraged to attend. The meeting will be on April 28, 2025 at 18:00–19:00 UTC and hosted on Zoom.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Tech News: 2025-18
editLatest 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
- Event organizers who host collaborative activities on multiple wikis, including Bengali, Japanese, and Korean Wikipedias, will have access to the CampaignEvents extension this week. Also, admins in the Wikipedia where the extension is enabled will automatically be granted the event organizer right soon. They won't have to manually grant themselves the right before they can manage events as requested by a community.
- View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- The release of the next major version of Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, is scheduled for 29 April 2025. Technical editors will have access to the release by the week of 5 May 2025. This update will include a number of breaking changes and minor visual changes. Instructions on handling the breaking and visual changes are documented on this page. Pre-release testing is reported in T386298, with post-release issues tracked in T392379 and T392390.
- Users of Wiki Replicas will notice that the database views of
ipblocks
,ipblocks_ipindex
, andipblocks_compat
are now deprecated. Users can query theblock
andblock_target
new views that mirror the new tables in the production database instead. The deprecated views will be removed entirely from Wiki Replicas in June, 2025. - Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization Newsletter is now available. This edition includes an overview of the improved Content Translation Dashboard Tool, support for new languages, highlights from the Wiki Loves Ramadan campaign, results from the Language Onboarding Experiment, an analysis of topic diversity in articles, and information on upcoming community meetings and events.
Meetings and events
- The Let's Connect Learning Clinic will take place on April 29 at 14:30 UTC. This edition will focus on "Understanding and Navigating Conflict in Wikimedia Projects". You can register now to attend.
- The 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which brings the global technical community together to connect, brainstorm, and hack existing projects, will take place from May 2 to 4th, 2025, at Istanbul, Turkey.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Tech News: 2025-18
editLatest 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
- Event organizers who host collaborative activities on multiple wikis, including Bengali, Japanese, and Korean Wikipedias, will have access to the CampaignEvents extension this week. Also, admins in the Wikipedia where the extension is enabled will automatically be granted the event organizer right soon. They won't have to manually grant themselves the right before they can manage events as requested by a community.
- View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- The release of the next major version of Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, is scheduled for 29 April 2025. Technical editors will have access to the release by the week of 5 May 2025. This update will include a number of breaking changes and minor visual changes. Instructions on handling the breaking and visual changes are documented on this page. Pre-release testing is reported in T386298, with post-release issues tracked in T392379 and T392390.
- Users of Wiki Replicas will notice that the database views of
ipblocks
,ipblocks_ipindex
, andipblocks_compat
are now deprecated. Users can query theblock
andblock_target
new views that mirror the new tables in the production database instead. The deprecated views will be removed entirely from Wiki Replicas in June, 2025. - Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization Newsletter is now available. This edition includes an overview of the improved Content Translation Dashboard Tool, support for new languages, highlights from the Wiki Loves Ramadan campaign, results from the Language Onboarding Experiment, an analysis of topic diversity in articles, and information on upcoming community meetings and events.
Meetings and events
- The Let's Connect Learning Clinic will take place on April 29 at 14:30 UTC. This edition will focus on "Understanding and Navigating Conflict in Wikimedia Projects". You can register now to attend.
- The 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which brings the global technical community together to connect, brainstorm, and hack existing projects, will take place from May 2 to 4th, 2025, at Istanbul, Turkey.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Vote on proposed modifications to the UCoC Enforcement Guidelines and U4C Charter
editThe voting period for the revisions to the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines and U4C Charter closes on 1 May 2025 at 23:59 UTC (find in your time zone). Read the information on how to participate and read over the proposal before voting on the UCoC page on Meta-wiki.
The Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is a global group dedicated to providing an equitable and consistent implementation of the UCoC. This annual review was planned and implemented by the U4C. For more information and the responsibilities of the U4C, you may review the U4C Charter.
Please share this message with members of your community in your language, as appropriate, so they can participate as well.
In cooperation with the U4C --
Vote on proposed modifications to the UCoC Enforcement Guidelines and U4C Charter
editThe voting period for the revisions to the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines and U4C Charter closes on 1 May 2025 at 23:59 UTC (find in your time zone). Read the information on how to participate and read over the proposal before voting on the UCoC page on Meta-wiki.
The Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is a global group dedicated to providing an equitable and consistent implementation of the UCoC. This annual review was planned and implemented by the U4C. For more information and the responsibilities of the U4C, you may review the U4C Charter.
Please share this message with members of your community in your language, as appropriate, so they can participate as well.
In cooperation with the U4C --
Tech News: 2025-19
editLatest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- The Wikimedia Foundation has shared the latest draft update to their annual plan for next year (July 2025–June 2026). This includes an executive summary (also on Diff), details about the three main goals (Infrastructure, Volunteer Support, and Effectiveness), global trends, and the budget and financial model. Feedback and questions are welcome on the talk page until the end of May.
Updates for editors
- For wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled, two new feature improvements have been released:
- Admins can now choose which namespaces are permitted for Event Registration via Community Configuration (documentation). The default setup is for event registration to be permitted in the Event namespace, but other namespaces (such as the project namespace or WikiProject namespace) can now be added. With this change, communities like WikiProjects can now more easily use Event Registration for their collaborative activities.
- Editors can now transclude the Collaboration List on a wiki page (documentation). The Collaboration List is an automated list of events and WikiProjects on the wikis, accessed via Special:AllEvents (example). Now, the Collaboration List can be added to all sorts of wiki pages, such as: a wiki mainpage, a WikiProject page, an affiliate page, an event page, or even a user page.
- View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Developers who use the
moment
library in gadgets and user scripts should revise their code to use alternatives like theIntl
library or the newmediawiki.DateFormatter
library. Themoment
library has been deprecated and will begin to log messages in the developer console. You can see a global search for current uses, and ask related questions in this Phabricator task. - Developers who maintain a tool that queries the Wikidata term store tables (
wbt_*
) need to update their code to connect to a separate database cluster. These tables are being split into a separate database cluster. Tools that query those tables via the wiki replicas must be adapted to connect to the new cluster instead. Documentation and related links are available. [12] - Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The latest Chart Project newsletter is available. It includes updates on preparing to expand the deployment to additional wikis as soon as this week (starting May 6) and scaling up over the following weeks, plus exploring filtering and transforming source data.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2025 Issue 8
editUpcoming and current events and conversations
Let's Talk continues
- Marking a transition at the Wikimedia Foundation: update from CEO Maryana Iskander.
- Annual Planning: We published the draft Annual Plan for the coming fiscal year (2025-2026) which prioritizes work to respond to global trends. Feedback welcome on the talk page and many other places.
- WikiForHumanRights: Join the information session for the 2025 WikiForHumanRights Campaign on May 9 at 16:00 UTC.
- Youth Conference: Wikimedia Youth Conference 2025 will take place on May 16-18 in Prague.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Research · Web · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- AI Strategy: Our new AI strategy puts Wikipedia's humans first.
- Tech News: Event organizers who host collaborative activities on multiple wikis, including Bengali, Japanese, and Korean Wikipedias, now have access to the CampaignEvents extension. Also, admins in the Wikipedia where the extension is enabled will automatically be granted the event organizer right soon. More updates from Tech News week 17 and 18.
- Abstract Wikipedia selected as a grant finalist: Abstract Wikipedia has been selected by the MacArthur Foundation as one of five finalists for their 100&Change competition. The winner will be announced in late 2025.
- Language and Internationalization: Read some key highlights from the April 2025 edition of the Language and internationalization newsletter.
Annual Goals Progress on Knowledge Equity
See also: list of movement events · WikiLearn News
- Wikimania: Wikimania 2025 will be held in the Nairobi neighborhood of Gigiri and will host a special one-off preconference day for users with extended rights.
- Learning Clinic: The recent Let's Connect Learning Clinic was about "Exploring Diff Blog: Sharing your story, & understanding Technical Implementation" and took place on May 6 at 12:00 UTC.
Annual Goals Progress on Safety & Integrity
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog
- Data privacy: Arguing for data privacy and safety of internet users worldwide: Our amicus brief in the Snap v. Pina lawsuit.
- World Press Freedom Day: We will be advocating for Wikimedia's model and speaking about "Information as a Public Good in the Age of AI" for UNESCO's World Press Freedom Day event in Brussels.
Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness
See also: quarterly Metrics Reports
- Risk preparedness: We shared the Foundation's approach to risk preparedness as part of the annual plan.
- Financial Report: Takeaways from the Wikimedia Foundation's Form 990 for fiscal year 2023-2024.
- Annual Report: The Foundation published the Annual Reports for both the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia Endowment. These reports highlight the impact of work done by our global community of volunteers, staff, and donors over the past year.
Board and Board committee updates
See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- Board and Board committee updates: The Board met in in March to hold its quarterly business meeting and joined other meetings as part of the Wikimedia Foundation's annual strategic planning. See the most recent actions and updates on the Board Noticeboard.
- Wikimedians of Chicago User Group: Recognition of Wikimedians of Chicago User Group.
- Affcom News: Read the latest issue of AffCom News (January-March 2025), the newsletter that distributes relevant news and events about the work of Wikimedia's Affiliations Committee.
- Elections Committee update: Review and comment on the 2025 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees selection rules for the upcoming 2025 selection process. The deadline is May 15 at 23:59 AoE.
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!
Tech News: 2025-20
editLatest 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 "Get shortened URL" link on the sidebar now includes a QR code. Wikimedia site users can now use it by scanning or downloading it to quickly share and access shared content from Wikimedia sites, conveniently.
Updates for editors
- The Wikimedia Foundation is working on a system called Edge Uniques, which will enable A/B testing, help protect against distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks), and make it easier to understand how many visitors the Wikimedia sites have. This is to help more efficiently build tools which help readers, and make it easier for readers to find what they are looking for. Tech News has previously written about this. The deployment will be gradual. Some might see the Edge Uniques cookie the week of 19 May. You can discuss this on the talk page.
- Starting May 19, 2025, Event organisers in wikis with the CampaignEvents extension enabled can use Event Registration in the project namespace (e.g., Wikipedia namespace, Wikidata namespace). With this change, communities don't need admins to use the feature. However, wikis that don't want this change can remove and add the permitted namespaces at Special:CommunityConfiguration/CampaignEvents.
- The Wikipedia project now has a Wikipedia in Nupe (
w:nup:
). This is a language primarily spoken in the North Central region of Nigeria. Speakers of this language are invited to contribute to new Wikipedia. - View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Developers can now access pre-parsed Dutch Wikipedia, amongst others (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese) through the Structured Contents snapshots (beta). The content includes parsed Wikipedia abstracts, descriptions, main images, infoboxes, article sections, and references.
- The
/page/data-parsoid
REST API endpoint is no longer in use and will be deprecated. It is scheduled to be turned off on June 7, 2025. - Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The IPv6 support is a newly introduced Cloud virtual network that significantly boosts Wikimedia platforms' scalability, security, and readiness for the future. If you are a technical contributor eager to learn more, check out this blog post for an in-depth look at the journey to IPv6.
Meetings and events
- The 2nd edition of 2025 of Afrika Baraza, a virtual platform for African Wikimedians to connect, will take place on May 15 at 17:00 UTC. This edition will focus on discussions regarding Wikimedia Annual planning and progress.
- The MENA Connect Community Call, a virtual meeting for MENA Wikimedians to connect, will take place on May 17 at 17:00 UTC. You can register now to attend.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Call for Candidates for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C)
edit
The results of voting on the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines and Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) Charter is available on Meta-wiki.
You may now submit your candidacy to serve on the U4C through 29 May 2025 at 12:00 UTC. Information about eligibility, process, and the timeline are on Meta-wiki. Voting on candidates will open on 1 June 2025 and run for two weeks, closing on 15 June 2025 at 12:00 UTC.
If you have any questions, you can ask on the discussion page for the election. -- in cooperation with the U4C, Keegan (WMF) (talk)
21:56, 15 May 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-21
editLatest 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 Editing Team and the Machine Learning Team are working on a new check for newcomers: Peacock check. Using a prediction model, this check will encourage editors to improve the tone of their edits, using artificial intelligence. We invite volunteers to review the first version of the Peacock language model for the following languages: Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Japanese. Users from these wikis interested in reviewing this model are invited to sign up at MediaWiki.org. The deadline to sign up is on May 23, which will be the start date of the test.
Updates for editors
- From May 20, 2025, oversighters and checkusers will need to have their accounts secured with two-factor authentication (2FA) to be able to use their advanced rights. All users who belong to these two groups and do not have 2FA enabled have been informed. In the future, this requirement may be extended to other users with advanced rights. Learn more.
- Multiblocks will begin mass deployment by the end of the month: all non-Wikipedia projects plus Catalan Wikipedia will adopt Multiblocks in the week of May 26, while all other Wikipedias will adopt it in the week of June 2. Please contact the team if you have concerns. Administrators can test the new user interface now on your own wiki by browsing to Special:Block?usecodex=1, and can test the full multiblocks functionality on testwiki. Multiblocks is the feature that makes it possible for administrators to impose different types of blocks on the same user at the same time. See the help page for more information. [13]
- Later this week, the Special:SpecialPages listing of almost all special pages will be updated with a new design. This page has been redesigned to improve the user experience in a few ways, including: The ability to search for names and aliases of the special pages, sorting, more visible marking of restricted special pages, and a more mobile-friendly look. The new version can be previewed at Beta Cluster now, and feedback shared in the task. [14]
- The Chart extension is being enabled on more wikis. For a detailed list of when the extension will be enabled on your wiki, please read the deployment timeline.
- Wikifunctions will be deployed on May 27 on five Wiktionaries: Hausa, Igbo, Bengali, Malayalam, and Dhivehi/Maldivian. This is the second batch of deployment planned for the project. After deployment, the projects will be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in their pages. A function is something that takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, such as adding up two numbers, converting miles into metres, calculating how much time has passed since an event, or declining a word into a case. Wikifunctions will allow users to do that through a simple call of a stable and global function, rather than via a local template.
- Later this week, the Wikimedia Foundation will publish a hub for experiments. This is to showcase and get user feedback on product experiments. The experiments help the Wikimedia movement understand new users, how they interact with the internet and how it could affect the Wikimedia movement. Some examples are generated video, the Wikipedia Roblox speedrun game and the Discord bot.
- View all 29 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a bug with creating an account using the API, which has now been fixed. [15]
Updates for technical contributors
- Gadgets and user scripts that interact with Special:Block may need to be updated to work with the new manage blocks interface. Please review the developer guide for more information. If you need help or are unable to adapt your script to the new interface, please let the team know on the talk page. [16]
- The
mw.title
object allows you to get information about a specific wiki page in the Lua programming language. Starting this week, a new property will be added to the object, namedisDisambiguationPage
. This property allows you to check if a page is a disambiguation page, without the need to write a custom function. [17] - User script developers can use a new reverse proxy tool to load javascript and css from gitlab.wikimedia.org with
mw.loader.load
. The tool's author hopes this will enable collaborative development workflows for user scripts including linting, unit tests, code generation, and code review on gitlab.wikimedia.org without a separate copy-and-paste step to publish scripts to a Wikimedia wiki for integration and acceptance testing. See Tool:Gitlab-content on Wikitech for more information. - Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- The 12th edition of Wiki Workshop 2025, a forum that brings together researchers that explore all aspects of Wikimedia projects, will be held virtually on 21-22 May. Researchers can register now.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2025 Issue 9
editUpcoming and current events and conversations
Let's Talk continues
- Global Trends Community Workshop: Join Foundation staff and trustees on May 28th from 16:00 UTC for an online community workshop about global trends impacting Wikimedia. This workshop is part of continuous conversations aimed at connecting the movement and collaborating on the Foundation's annual plan.
- Wiki Causerie: Wiki Causerie call with a focus on discussing the global trends to help shape the Foundation's annual plan will be held on May 23.
- ESEAP Summit: The ESEAP Strategy Summit 2025 will take place in Manila, Philippines on May 23–25.
- EduWiki Conference 2025: The EduWiki Conference 2025 will take place in Bogotá, Colombia on May 30–June 1.
- Wiki Workshop 2025: The 12th annual Wiki Workshop will take place online on May 21–22.
- U4C Call for Candidates: The Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee 2025 elections are accepting candidates until May 28.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Research · Web · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Content Translation: A decade of consistent improvements to the Content Translation tool yields over two million Wikipedia articles.
- Charts Extension: After successfully deploying the extension on Italian, Swedish, and Hebrew Wikipedia, we are moving forward with the next phase of deployment. Please consult our page to discover when the new Charts extension will be deployed on your wiki.
- Abstract Wikipedia: Where Abstract Wikipedia fits into the new Wikimedia AI strategy.
- Tech News: The “Get shortened URL” link on the sidebar now includes a QR code. Wikimedia site users can now use it by scanning or downloading it to quickly share and access shared content from Wikimedia sites, conveniently. More updates from Tech News week 19 and 20.
- Topical Lists: Read about the important role of topical lists in supporting campaigns and editing, as well as strategies for the future development, implementation, and sustainment of list-building support.
- Two-factor Authentication: From May 20, 2025, oversighters and checkusers will need to have their accounts secured with two-factor authentication (2FA) to be able to use their advanced rights. In the future, this requirement may be extended to other users with advanced rights. Read the announcement.
- Mobile Apps: The iOS app team is experimenting with an "Activity Tab" on Turkish, Spanish, French, and Chinese Wikipedias to see if inviting new editors to add images through Suggested Edits increases engagement. This insight will guide future improvements to the app experience.
Annual Goals Progress on Knowledge Equity
See also: list of movement events · WikiLearn News
- Learning Clinic: The next Let's Connect Learning Clinic will be about "Communication and Cultural Sensitivity in Conflict Resolution - Best practices (Part 2)" and will take place on May 27 at 13:00 UTC.
- The Wikipedia Library: An important milestone for The Wikipedia Library (TWL) has been reached. More than a million links have been added to Wikimedia projects by Library users.
- Wikisource: Watch the video celebrating the global Wikisource community in safeguarding our cultural heritage for future generations.
Annual Goals Progress on Safety & Integrity
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog
- India Legal Update: Good news from our legal team, the Supreme Court of India set aside the Delhi High Court’s order directing the takedown of the Asian News International v. Wikimedia Foundation English Wikipedia article. The Supreme Court’s verdict upholds the right to report and share information on matters of public interest, including legal proceedings in open courts.
- UK Legal Challenge: Wikimedia Foundation brings legal challenge to new UK Online Safety Act requirements.
- UCoC Updates: The Universal Code of Conduct 2025 annual review concluded, with community voting approving the proposed changes to the UCoC Enforcement Guidelines and U4C Charter.
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!
RfC ongoing regarding Abstract Wikipedia (and your project)
editHello all! We opened a discussion on Meta about a very delicate issue for the development of Abstract Wikipedia: where to store the abstract content that will be developed through functions from Wikifunctions and data from Wikidata. Since some of the hypothesis involve your project, we wanted to hear your thoughts too.
We want to make the decision process clear: we do not yet know which option we want to use, which is why we are consulting here. We will take the arguments from the Wikimedia communities into account, and we want to consult with the different communities and hear arguments that will help us with the decision. The decision will be made and communicated after the consultation period by the Foundation.
You can read the various hypothesis and have your say at Abstract Wikipedia/Location of Abstract Content. Thank you in advance! -- Sannita (WMF) (talk) 15:22, 22 May 2025 (UTC)