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Thank you! :-) R'n'B (call me Russ) 21:20, 6 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
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 WikiEditor toolbar now includes its keyboard shortcuts in the tooltips for its buttons. This will help to improve the discoverability of this feature. [1]
- The Product and Technology Advisory Council published a set of proposed experiments the Wikimedia Foundation can try to improve communication with community. Feedback on the proposals are welcomed until August 22 on this talk page.
- The search bar on the Minerva skin (mobile) has been updated to use the same type-ahead search component that is used on the Vector 2022 skin. There are no changes in search functionality but there are minor visual changes. Specifically, the close-search button has been changed from an "X" to a back arrow. This helps to distinguish it from the other "X" button that is used to clear any text. [2]
- Editors on some wikis will see a new toggle for "Group results by page" on watchlist, related changes, and recent changes pages. This is an A/B experiment that is planned to start on August 11, and will run for 3–6 weeks on the Bengali, Chinese, Czech, French, Greek, Portuguese, and Urdu Wikipedias. The experiment will examine how making this feature more discoverable might affect editors' ability to find the edits they are looking for. [3]
 View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- The multiwiki datasets of Unicode data have been moved to Category:Unicode Module Datasets on Wikimedia Commons, to follow the idea of "One common data source, multiple local wikis". Most wikis have been updated to use the Commons version. You can ask questions at the talkpage. [4]
- Lua code can add warnings when something is wrong, by using the
mw.addWarning() function. It is now possible to add more than one warning, instead of new warnings replacing old ones. If you maintain a Lua module that used warnings, you should check it still works as expected. [5]
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:26, 11 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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
- Later this week, people who are logged-in and have the "Discussion tools" Beta Feature enabled will gain the ability to "Thank" individual comments directly from talk pages, rather than needing to navigate to page history. Learn more about this feature. [6]
- An A/B test comparing two versions of the desktop donate link launched on testwiki on 12 August and on English Wikipedia 14 August for 0.1% of logged out users on the desktop site. The experiment will run for three weeks, ending on 12 September. [7]
- An A/A test to measure the baseline for reader retention was launched 12 August using Experimentation Lab. This measures the percentage of users who revisit a wiki after their initial visit over a 14-day period. No visual changes are expected. The experiment will run through 31 August. [8]
- Five new wikis have been created:
- View all 46 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 00:34, 19 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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
  Template authors can now use additional CSS properties, since the CSS sanitizer used by TemplateStyles was updated. For example: width: fit-content; ruby-align; relative units such as lh; and custom strings in list-style-type. These improvements are a Community Wishlist wish. [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]- On large wikis, the default time period to display edits from, within the Special:RecentChanges page, has been changed from 7 days to 1 day. This is part of a performance improvement project. This should have no user-facing impact due to the quantity of edits on these wikis. [24]
- Administrators can now access the Special:BlockedExternalDomains page from the Special:CommunityConfiguration list page. This makes it easier to find. [25]
- Wikimedia Commons videos were not shown in the Videos tab in Google Search. The problem was investigated and reported to Google who have now fixed the issue. [26][27]
- One new wiki has been created: a Wiktionary in Betawi (
wikt:bew:) [28]
- View all 39 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Two fields of the recentchanges database table are being removed.
rc_new and rc_type are being removed in favor of rc_source. Queries to these older fields will start to fail starting this week and developers should use rc_source instead. These older fields were deprecated over 10 years ago and should not be in use. This is part of work to improve the performance and stability of queries to the recentchanges table. [29]
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: support for new languages in MediaWiki and translatewiki; the start of the Language Onboarding and Development project to help support the growth of new and small wikis; updates on research projects; and more.
Meetings and events
- The next Language Community Meeting is happening soon, August 29th at 15:00 UTC. This week's meeting will cover: the Avro keyboard developers from Wikimedia Bangladesh, who were recently awarded a national award for their contributions to this keyboard; and other topics.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 00:08, 26 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hi. A page you have contributed to, Berkhamsted, has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:25, 28 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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 wants to compile a list of templates, jargon terms, and policies used in edit summaries when a copyright violation is removed. This will help them identify the number of edits reverted due to copyright issues. We invite community members from the following Wikis to list these terms in T402601, or to share their list with Trizek_(WMF): Arabic Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, Persian Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Vietnamese Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia. This project is open until September 9th 2025.
Updates for editors
- 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. The extension has three features: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List. To request the extension for your wiki, visit the Deployment information page. [30]
- The lists in the footer of the editing interface, such as "Templates used on this page," will now be organized into columns when there is enough space. This enhancement minimizes scrolling when editing lengthy articles on Wikipedia. [31]
- On September 3rd, 2025 we will increase the sampling percentages of our group by toggle experiment of the
Special:RecentChanges, Special:Watchlist, and Special:RelatedChanges pages on the Chinese, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias to 100 percent, allowing more editors to be part of this experiment. This adjustment is intended to ensure we have sufficient data to make informed decisions when evaluating the experiment results. [32][33]
- Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users will see suggestions of articles for further reading on English Wikipedia beginning the week of September 22. The feature will be available on both desktop and mobile. All non-English wikis received this change in June and July. The goal is to make it easier for users to find articles. Learn more.
- View all 37 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- Wikifunctions now has a new capability called "lightweight enumeration types", an enumeration type is simply a fixed set of values that's in the type's definition. This capability makes it quick and easy to define such a type, and allows for the reuse of values that are already present in Wikidata. Here is a newsletter to learn more.
- The latest Readers Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: the formation of two new teams — Reader Growth and Reader Experience; insights into declining pageviews and account creations; highlights from the Wikimania Nairobi panel on improving the reading experience; upcoming experiments to engage new and existing readers; and more.
Meetings and events
- Spotlight on some Wikimania 2025 Sessions:
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 20:46, 1 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, hope you are doing well. I've been getting into disambiguation into the past couple of months on Wikipedia, and I wanted to ask for some advice on a specific matter.
But first, thank you for all of your invaluable tools for disambiguation! I don't know how to give out barnstars (or if I'm even allowed to do so as a beginner) but I hope this will do.
As you may have noticed, there has been an issue with the soft coral disambiguation page over the past few months. I got a bit fed up with seeing it every day and contacted the researcher that produced that paper that created the reclassification. I now am able to fix all of the disambig links accurately thanks to her help, but over the past few months other editors have been clawing at that field, and based on my anecdotal spot checks, they appear to be somewhat incorrect good faith redirects.
What is the best way to perhaps revert all of those changes and redirect the pages to the appropriate orders?
3602kiva (talk) 14:10, 5 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
- Hi. You can use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChangesLinked?hidecategorization=1&hideWikibase=1&target=Soft_coral&showlinkedto=1&namespace=0&limit=500&days=30&enhanced=1&urlversion=2 to find edits that might have disambiguated links to Soft coral, and then you can check them manually and see if they need to be changed. Unfortunately, I don't have anything more efficient to suggest off the top of my head; at least not without more context. I don't know what particular edits might be problematic, so I can't suggest how to identify them. But I appreciate your efforts and hope it goes well. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 14:51, 5 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
- @R'n'B Thanks. Hopefully I'll get around to doing so in the near future.
- In any case, I wanted to follow up because I noticed that you are also working on cleaning up disambiguation links using DisamAssist. For me, it is a bit annoying having to click the skip button when choosing to pass over certain links, so I just made a user script that allows you to use the space bar to skip the current disambiguation page instead of the button itself.
- Just wanted to share with you in case that's a pain point for you as well!
importScript('User:3602kiva/DisamAssist-Skip.js'); is the line of code to add onto the Special:MyPage/common.js page. It should not interfere with anything else.- 3602kiva (talk) 05:15, 7 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2025).
 Guideline and policy news
- 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.
Technical news
 Arbitration
- The arbitration case Article titles and capitalisation 2 has been closed.
- 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.
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.
Updates for editors
- Later this week, users of the "Improved Syntax Highlighting" beta feature will be able to use a linting tool to see errors or other potential problems in wikitext in real time. See the help page for more information. [34]
- 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. [35]
- 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. [36]
- 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. [37][38]
- 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. [39]
- View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 01:11, 9 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hiya. I noticed RussBot resolving a redirected Category on a userpage, which resulted in the page being added to a WP:CONTAINERCAT (I have removed it). I think this is not ideal and leave it to you to address it however you deem fit :) Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 18:13, 9 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
- I assume by this that you think Category:Wikipedia user pages should not be redirected to Category:Wikipedians. Neither I nor the bot created that redirect (which has existed as long as the category page itself has), and I have no opinion about whether it should or should not be changed. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 19:14, 9 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
- Nope. I think that the result of edits is the responsibility of those (or their bots) making them, and that adding any page to a container category is not appropriate. I suggest that the bot should check the redirect target category for such a condition before resolving the redirect, and if it finds this condition, it either removes the inappropriate category it was about to add, messages you about it, messages the user in the case that the category is on a user page or does nothing. As for existence of the redirect: if any use of it should be resolved to the target, why not just delete it?
Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 19:35, 9 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
You have to delete invalid entries, ragter than create redlinks X (surname) with no evidence that such surname exists. --Altenmann >talk 16:16, 12 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
- What enwiki policy requires this? --R'n'B (call me Russ) 16:18, 12 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
- WP:NOTRED, MOS:DABRED. Some time ago a couple of zealous wikignomes worked hard to delete even reasonable redlinks (and BTW links to dab pages) from surname templates. I added them in order not to forget to create the corresponding surname pages, but eventually dgaf. BTW dab pages in navboxen do create problem and some bot will generate warning, kinda "this dab page is linked from a huge number of pages. Please get your act straight.", annoying the dabpage "owner" profusely. --Altenmann >talk 09:36, 13 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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