An RfC is open on whether use of emojis with no encyclopedic value in mainspace and draftspace (e.g., at the start of paragraphs or in place of bullet points) should be added as a criterion under G15.
An RfC is in progress to amend the structure, rules, and procedures of the Arbitration Committee election and resolve any issues not covered by existing rules.
The WikiCite 2025 conference took place in Berne, Switzerland. It showcased WikiCite-related efforts across multiple wikis, disciplines, languages and countries. Most of it was both streamed and recorded, and the videos are currently being processed.
Wikidata's 13th Birthday update: Funding applications are now closed, and the review process is underway. Applicants will be notified about the status of their submissions shortly. Are you planning to organize an event for the birthday but haven’t added it to the calendar yet? You can do so here: Wikidata:Thirteenth Birthday/Calendar 🎉
The deadline for the Fall 2025 MediaWiki Users & Developers Conference CfP is extended until September 15th. The conference will be held on October 28 - 30th, and hosted by the TIB Leibniz Centre in Hanover, Germany.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs: Past, Present and Future: a Wikimedian-in-Residence at the Biodiversity Heritage Library: TiagoLubiana reflects on their tenure at the BHL (Q172266), integrating the biodiversity collections into the Wikimedia projects. Read on Diff Blog
Papers: Revealing hidden figures within natural history collections by empowering students with data sleuthing skills - Mabry et al.,(2025) Read here
Videos:
WiLES Wikidata Lexicographical Event Semantics modeling for natural languages (LD4 2025) YouTube
Wikidata presentations and lightning talks (LD4 2025) YouTube
On Wikiskills 1st Wikidata Training (Africa Wiki Women) YouTube
(French) Lors de la 1ère formation Wikidata de Wikiskills YouTube
Plugging into the WikiVerse: A Plug for a Wikidata Plug-in for ArchivesSpace YouTube
Dacit is a listening-training app for cochlear implant users, built as part of a Master's Thesis for LMU Munich, it is powered by Wikidata-lexicographical data. Practice with 3 different excercises; identify (German-language) speakers, words and minimal pairs in your browser or as an android app
LexToWiktonaryis a userscript that adds a Wiktionary links button on Wikidata Lexeme pages. It checks the lemmas of a lexeme, finds matching entries across different Wiktionary language editions, and shows them in a popup for quick access, with an option to expand to all Wiktionaries.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The submission deadline for WikidataCon proposals has passed. Proposals that were submitted in time can still be edited until Sep 9. Proposals are hidden by default, but a page for sharing submissions is available and can facilitate coordination.
Help Panel has been deployed on Wikidata Beta.🎉 This is a feature designed to guide contributors with quick links to relevant help pages. It currently appears in read mode across most pages and can be configured by admins. You can enable it in your Beta preferences under "Newcomer features". To help shape its future on Wikidata, we're inviting you to test it and share feedback on this talk page.
Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject ASBS 2025 - Aims to Engage the botanical community at the 2025 ASBS Conference to promote and enhance contributions to Wikidata, Wikipedia, and Wikimedia Commons.
Showcase Lexemes: PC (L739282) - English noun (ˌpiːˈsiː) meaning "Personal Computer", "Printed Circuit", or "Peace Corps"
Development
We're investigate options for improving information saved while publishing (phab:T403149)
Mobile Editing Experience: we added multi-language support (T402630)
Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are continuing to look into reducing the number of changes that show up on Wikipedia and co's Recent changes and Watchlist from edits to aliases (phab:T401288), more info
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 Editing team is working on a new check: Paste check. This check informs newcomers who paste text into Wikipedia that the content might not be accepted. This check is an effort to increase the likelihood that the new content people are adding to Wikipedia is aligned with the Movement's commitment to offering information under a free content license. This check will soon be tested at a few wikis. If your community is interested in this test, please tell us in this task, or contact the team.
When browsing a wiki (like en.wikipedia.org), the software responds in one of two ways: a desktop page, or a redirect to a mobile version on an "m" domain (like en.m.wikipedia.org). Over the next three weeks, MediaWiki will start displaying the mobile version to mobile devices directly on the standard domain, without this redirect. This change does not affect existing m-dot URLs, or the "Desktop view" opt-out. Learn more. [2]
When an edit changes the categories of a page, the changes to the category membership counts are now happening asynchronously. This improves the speed of saving edits, especially when moving many pages to or from the same category, and reduces the risk of site outages, but it means that the counts can show outdated information for a few minutes. [3]
Edits on Wikidata to qualifiers (properties and values) and references (properties and values) in a Wikidata item statement will now not add entries to the RecentChanges or Watchlist pages on all other Wikis. This is a temporary change to improve performance while other solutions are created. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. Learn more. [4][5]
Japanese-language wikis have had a major upgrade to the way that search works. The new search should generally give more accurate and more relevant search results. [6]
The New Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series introduces participants to Wikidata/EMCO. The session guides attendees through creating a project and project page, followed by an open working hour for creating and editing in Wikidata and asking questions. Join on Tuesday, September 16th at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 16:00 UTC / 6pm CEST. More details and Zoom links are on the project page.
Virtual course: Wikidata and public domain (in Spanish). On September 25th start this online course until March 26, 2026. Registration open on this form.
WikidataCon 2025 proposal reviews are about to end. We are currently building an initial programme and will soon inform Speakers before publishing a first Schedule!
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs: GLAM Newsletter: Biodiversity Heritage Library update, harvesting Wikidata identifiers and improving the BHL2Wiki Tool - Read the article
Wikidata Lab XLVI: Wikidata and Semantic Memory, don't miss the workshop! (scheduled: 18.09.25, 1700 UTC) - YouTube
WikiCite 2025 Presentations:
Extracting citation relations from legacy publications, by David Lindeman - watch on Commons
A proposal for managing personal collections in Wikidata, by Tania Maio - watch on Commons
Tool of the week
Paulina is a Wikidata-based tool for the GLAM community that facilitates searching for authors and works, helps identify their copyright status in different countries, and provides access to works when available.
The Wikimedia Foundation launched a new team, the Wikidata Platform Team, to lead development and maintenance of query services, aiming for stable, scalable data access in collaboration with WMDE and the community.
Showcase Lexemes:blow (L4476) - English verb (bloʊ) meaning "to push air", "to explode", or "to perform fellatio"
Development
Scalability/sustainability: We have rolled out changes to minimize the number of entries stored in the recent changes tables of Wikipedia and co that are edits coming from Wikidata. This also reduces the number of changes from Wikidata you will see showing up in Recent changes and watchlist on Wikipedia and co further.
MCP for Wikidata: We are getting it ready for first testing.
Dumps: We are continuing to investigate how to provide smaller/subset dumps.
Mobile statement editing: We are continuing the work on making statements editable, especially qualifiers and multiple references.
Anubis (Q134301689) anti-bot software was deployed on Wikibase Cloud and XTools to prevent site outages caused by bot traffic. (T399851, T400229)
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
References lists that are made using the <references/>tag will now automatically display with columns in Vector 2022 when readers are using its 'standard' settings for text-size and page-width. [7]
Starting in the week of October 6, on small wikis and medium wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled, all autoconfirmed users will be able to use Event Registration as an organizer. No changes will be made for large wikis unless requested in Phabricator. This change is being made to make it easier for more people to use Event Registration, especially on wikis that are less likely to have policies related to the Event Organizer right. Learn more.
Users that search using regular expressions (regex) can now use additional features including:
for the intitle: keyword: metacharacters for start-of-line (^) and end-of-line ($) anchors [8]
for both intitle: and insource: keywords: shorthand character classes for digits (\d), whitespace (\s), and word characters (\w); and escape codes for line feed (\r), newline (\n), tab (\t), and unicode (e.g. \uHHHH). [9]
When you search for text that looks like an IP, the system will now show search results. It used to take you to the contributions for that IP instead of showing search results. [10]
View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that affected users who used the page-tabs to switch from wikitext editing of a section into the visualeditor. [11]
Updates for technical contributors
The MediaWiki Interfaces team is redesigning the Wikimedia REST API Sandbox with Codex. If you have feedback on improvements for the API documentation or what makes developer experiences smooth (or frustrating), you’re invited to join an upcoming discovery interview, or leave feedback onwiki. Learn more.
Edits to Wikidata aliases (an alternative name for an item or a property) will now be shown in RecentChanges and Watchlist entries on other wikis less often, reducing unnecessary notifications. This will reduce the overall quantity of 'noisy' entries. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. Learn more. [12]
The new Unicode 17.0 version has been released. The datasets on Commons for the Module:Unicode data have been updated. Wikipedias that do not use the Commons datasets should either update their own data or switch to the Commons datasets.
Users of the Wikimedia Enterprise Structured Contents endpoints can now access Parsed Tables. The new Parsed Tables feature extracts and represents Wikipedia tables in structured JSON. This improves machine accessibility as part of the Structured Contents initiative. Structured Contents output is freely available through the On-demand API, or through Wikimedia Cloud Services.
A dataset of English Wikipedia biographical information from Wikimedia Enterprise has been published on Kaggle, for evaluation and research. This provides structured data from more than 1.5 million biographies, including birth and death dates, education, affiliations, careers, awards, and more (from a June 2024 snapshot).
Wikimedia Research Showcase: "Readers and Readership Research" will be the featured theme for the next research showcase taking place on September 24 at 16:30 UTC.
Update to banner and logo policies: Feedback is requested on proposed policy and documentation updates regarding the use of banners and logos for advocacy purposes.
Temporary Accounts: Temporary accounts are now deployed to almost all wikis except the last 11.
User Info: This new feature displays data related to a user account when you tap or click on the "user avatar" icon button next to a username. It's meant to be useful for different users with extended rights as well as newcomers.
Newsletter highlights: The latest Readers Newsletter is now available. It includes considerations about Wikipedia's declining pageviews in the recent years, how the Foundation and communities may work on addressing this together, and the formation of two new teams — Reader Growth and Reader Experience.
Activity Tab Experiment: The Foundation launched an experiment testing a new Activity tab in the Wikipedia Android app to our beta testers. Instead of only showing editing activity, this tab also surfaces insights about reading and donation behavior.
Search Suggestions: To make it easier for users to find articles, logged-out users on both desktop and mobile will see suggestions of articles for further reading on English Wikipedia beginning the week of September 22. All non-English wikis received this update in June and July.
Paste Check: The Foundation is working on a new check: Paste check. This check informs newcomers who paste text into Wikipedia that the content might not be accepted to ensure it is aligned with the Movement's values. This check will soon be tested at a few wikis.
CampaignEvents extension: The CampaignEvents extension has been enabled for all Wikisources. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. To request the extension for your wiki, visit the information page.
Structured Task: The Add a Link Structured Task has been fully released at English Wikipedia. This release is an important step in making editing more accessible for new contributors, especially on mobile.
Tech News: Read more updates from Tech News week 36 and 37.
Multilingual Contributors: The Language and Product Localisation team is launching a CentralNotice campaign to attract multilingual contributors to specific Wikipedias. The campaign will feature regionally targeted banners to reach potential native speakers.
Open Indonesia: Reflections on Open Indonesia, an event in Bandung gathering communities dedicated to advancing open knowledge to build the country's Open Knowledge Roadmap.
UK Online Safety Act: The Wikimedia Foundation will not appeal the UK High Court’s decision to dismiss our challenge to the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) Categorisation Regulations.
August board meeting: Updates on board appointments and selection, CEO search, work to strengthen Wikipedia's approach to neutral point of view and updates on three pilots around more shared decision-making and shared accountability across the movement.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Exploring Seediq: A Journey through Translation and Linked Data Documentation 25 October .This event will showcase the Seediq communities’ translation of the OCLC white paper on Wikibase, followed by an overview of the full paper. It will conclude with an open discussion on the lessons learned during the translation project and broader reflections on linked data.
FREE virtual 1hr Wiki webinar focusing on plant biodiversity. Open to anyone wanting to improve their digital outreach skills by enriching Wikidata. Tuesday 14th of October at 3pm NZST. Register to get link.
Wikidata’s 13th Birthday is just around the corner! Are you planning to host a celebration but haven’t added it to the calendar yet? Join the party! Thirty-nine (39) events are already scheduled, and yours can be too: Birthday Calendar. It’s also the perfect time to contribute a birthday present or message to this list. Gifts can be anything that celebrates Wikidata and its amazing community like a script you’ve written, a tool improvement, a visual, a poem... 🎉
Duplicity This tool can pick a random article on a wiki without associated Wikidata item, and offer some possible matches on Wikidata, so you can add it to an existing item, or create a new one.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Call for Projects and Mentors for Outreachy Round 31! If you have some ideas for coding or non-coding (design, documentation, translation, outreach, research) projects, share them by Sept. 26, 2025, at 4 pm UTC
Showcase Lexemes: Waage (L37547) – German noun (‘ˈvaːɡə’) meaning "scale (device for measuring mass)", "Libra constellation", or "equilibrium"
Development
Mobile statement editing: We are working more on the editing state of statements, especially qualifiers and progress indicators during saving (phab:T402620)
Dumps: We fixed an issue with some of the dumps (phab:T403882) and are improving the monitoring
GraphQL: We are working on making it easier to get labels of linked entities in an API response, starting with Items (phab:T404692)
Sustainability: We have now rolled out improvements to the tracking of Wikidata changes on the other Wikimedia projects on all projects in order to decrease the size of the database table that tracks these changes (phab:T401288)
Bug fixes: Tacsipacsi submitted fixes for two issues in error messages on Special:SetSiteLink. Thank you! (phab:T404499, phab:T404500)
Greetings from WMDE's Technical Wishes team. Today we've deployed sub-referencing to German Wikipedia, our first pilot wiki. A great milestone after so many years of work!
We'll continue to improve the feature based on community feedback and want to deploy to other pilot wikis in the upcoming months, once we've solved a couple of issues affecting many non-dewiki projects. You are invited to try sub-referencing on betawiki in the meantime.
We are currently thinking about how we could improve VisualEditor support for templates in sub-references if that's desired by the community. Read more about it on our talk page and share your feedback!
As always thank you very much for your support!
PS: You are receiving this message, because you signed-up to our sub-referencing newsletter. If you don't want to receive further updates, just remove your name from the list.
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
On September 24th at 15:00 UTC, all Wikimedia sites users will experience a brief read-only period due to a scheduled datacenter server switchover. The Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team will redirect all traffic from one primary server to its backup. You can listen to the switchover using the "Listen to Wikipedia" tool, where you will hear edits stop for a few minutes during the read-only phase, then resume. This twice-yearly datacenter server switchover ensures reliability by testing the backup datacenter, so that our sites can stay online even if the primary datacenter fails. You can read more about the process on the Diff blog.
Updates for editors
Editors of 60 more Wiktionaries will soon be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them into their pages. A function takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, like adding numbers, converting miles to meters, calculating elapsed time, or declining a word into a case. They will join the other 65 Wiktionary language editions, which already have access to embedded Wikifunctions calls. Later this year, plans are in place to expand to more Wiktionaries and the Incubator.
A new parser function has been added: {{#contentmodel}}. Template editors and admins can use it to get the localized or canonical name of the content model of a specific page. The function makes it easier to create and edit system messages, such as MediaWiki:editinginterface, even when you switch types of pages, like wiki, JavaScript, CSS or JSON page. [13]
Adding or editing a DISPLAYTITLE for an article using VisualEditor will no longer be broken. Editors who use VisualEditor mode to modify the {{DISPLAYTITLE}} would no longer have the literal text "DISPLAYTITLE" or its localized variant added to their articles. A list of pages that may have been affected and might need cleanup is documented in this ticket.
Beta users of the Wikipedia Android app can now try the redesigned Activity tab, which replaces the Edits tab. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging.
Wikifunctions users can now import many essential facts involving geo-coordinates, quantities and time values from Wikidata. This is made possible by the creation of Wikifunctions types for these values, which makes them available for use by functions in Wikifunctions. Learn more about how this works in this video and Wikifunctions' August 1 newsletter (for quantities) and August 22 newsletter (for geo-coordinates).
New Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series! Mark your calendars for our first session of our WikiProject Personal Pronouns event series, which will provide a high-level overview of WikiProject Personal Pronouns' goals, past work, and implementation plans. The session will also serve as a practical orientation to the implementation work for this project, ending with a demonstration of the workflow to be used in subsequent sessions. No previous Wikidata experience is needed to participate. This session will be recorded. Slides and recordings will be found on the project page after the session. Join us Tuesday, September 30th at 9am PT/ 12pm ET/ 16:00 UTC / 6pm CEST (Time zone converter). Please see our project page for more information and Zoom links.
Wikidata are hosting a webinar on the Embedding Project: AI/ML Project Manager Philippe Saadé (WMDE) will introduce the project, including early experiences, wins and pitfalls, and open up the floor to your questions.
🎁 Countdown to 13!🎁 Wikidata's 13th Birthday is fast approaching and this week marks the start of the first Birthday Events! For a full rundown of all Birthday Events, please see the Birthday Calendar.
Starting the month of celebrations this week include: Wali Wikimedians Community, Latin America in Wikidata 2025, Hausa Wikipedians User Group and the language communities of Zambia, Twi and Kinyarwanda and regional celebrations from the Northern Nigerian, Dagbani and Ghanaians Wikimedian communities!
Wikidata Workflows: with ORCiD and OpenRefine - a Binghamton University Case Study By Sasha Frizzell - This lightning talk outlines Binghamton University Libraries’ pilot project to convert ORCID faculty data into Wikidata entries, showcasing linked data integration, data cleaning workflows, and strategies for enhancing institutional research visibility.
Showcase Lexemes:Knoten (L298686) - German noun (ˈknoːtn̩) meaning "tied fastening of ropes/strings", "speed unit in aviation/shipping", or "tangled clump of hair"
Development
Mobile statement editing: We continue to make good progress, which you can check out on beta Wikidata. Specifically it is now possible to
save changes to edits made to string Properties on statements (without losing qualifier / reference information) (phab:T401405)
GraphQL: We are continuing to make labels of linked entities accessible in the GraphQL endpoint (phab:T404692)
Wikidata in Wikipedia and co: We are continuing to work on improvements to how we technically track the use of Wikidata in the other Wikimedia projects in order to reduce the amount of changes from Wikidata in the watchlist and recent changes on Wikipedia and co.
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 major software upgrade has been made to Phabricator. The update introduces performance improvements, a refreshed search interface, enhancements to Maniphest task search, updates to user profile pages and project workboards, new Herald automation features, as well as general text input, mobile experience improvements and more. [14]
Updates for editors
The Community Tech team will release the new Community Wishlist extension on October 1, that will improve the way wishes will be submitted. The new extension will allow users to add tags to their wishes to better categorise them, and (in a future iteration) to filter them by status, tags and focus areas. It will also be possible to support individual wishes again, as requested by the community in many instances. The old system will be retired. There will be a brief period of downtime while the extension is deployed and wishes are migrated to the new system. You can read more about this in the latest update or you can consult the current documentation on MediaWiki.
As announced on Diff blog, the production trial of the hCaptcha service for bot detection has begun. The trial is currently using hCaptcha to protect account creation on Chinese, Persian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, and Turkish Wikipedias, where it will replace our existing CAPTCHA (FancyCaptcha). The goal with the trial is to better block bots while also improving usability and accessibility for users who encounter CAPTCHA challenges.
The CampaignEvents extension has been deployed to Wikimedia Commons. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. On Commons, anyone who is a registered user can use it as an event participant. To use it as an organizer, someone needs to have the event organizer right.
On wikis using the Mentorship system, communities can now opt experienced editors out of Mentorship through Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship. Within this setting, communities may define thresholds, based on edit count and account age, to decide when an editor is considered experienced enough to no longer receive Mentorship. [15]
The Editing Team and the Machine Learning Team are working on a new check for newcomers: Tone 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 Tone language model for the following languages: Arabic, Czech, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Farsi, Italian, Norwegian, Romanian and Latvian. Users from these wikis interested in reviewing this model are invited to sign up at MediaWiki.org. The deadline to sign up is on October 3, which will be the start date of the test.
The rollout of multiblocks had the side effect that non-active block logs may have been shown on Special:Contributions and on blocked users' user and user_talk pages. This issue will be fully resolved in a few days. As part of the fix, messages prefixed with sp-contributions-blocked-notice will be removed and replaced with those prefixed with blocked-notice-logextract in a few weeks. Please help translate the new messages and update any local overrides if needed.
There was a bug with links added using visual editor if they included characters such as [ ] | after the fragment identifier (#). They were not encoded properly creating an incorrect link. This has been fixed. [16]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikiquote in Malay (q:ms:) [17]
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the User Info Card now displays currently active global lock/blocks. [18]
Updates for technical contributors
Later this week, editors using Lua modules will be able to use the mw.title.newBatch function to look up the existence of up to 25 pages at once, in a way that only increases the expensive function count once.
A new Unsupported Tools Working Group has been formed as part of ongoing efforts to collectively determine technical work priorities, similar to the Product & Technology Advisory Council (PTAC). The working group will help prioritize and review requests for support of unmaintained extensions, gadgets, bots, and tools. For the first cycle, the group will be prioritizing an unsupported Wikimedia Commons tool.
Learning Clinic: The next Let's Connect Learning Clinic will talk about "Mastering the Capacity Exchange (CapX) Tool" and will take place on September 30 at 13:00 UTC.
Big Fat Brussels Meeting: The tenth in-person gathering of Wikimedians enthusiastic in free knowledge advocacy, Big Fat Brussels Meeting, will take place on October 3-4.
Wikimedia Research Showcase: "Celebrating 13 Years: Wikidata’s Role in Learning and Culture" will be the featured theme for the next research showcase taking place on October 15 at 16:30 UTC.
Search Suggestions: Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users now see suggestions of articles for further reading on all Wikipedias, in order to make it easier for users to find articles.
Activity Tab now on Android: Beta users of the Wikipedia Android app can now try the redesigned Activity tab, which replaces the Edits tab. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging.
Wikipedia 25: Wikimedia Foundation is creating playful, celebratory interventions on the Wikipedia portal page, the Wikipedia app, and potentially any interested Wikipedias to celebrate Wikipedia’s 25th birthday. Please share your inputs and add your username on the Talk page if you think your community would be interested in participating.
National award: Wikipedian and current chair of Wikimedia Deutschland, Alice Wiegand, receives the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for her voluntary commitment to Wikipedia and the global Wikimedia movement.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
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