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Tech News: 2026-08
[edit]Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- The SRE Team will be performing a cleanup of Wikimedia's Etherpad instance, the web-based editor for real-time collaborative document editing. All pads will be permanently deleted after 30 April, 2026 – if there are still migration projects in progress at that point the team can revisit the date on a case by case basis. Please create local backups of any content you wish to keep, as deleted data cannot be recovered. This cleanup helps reduce database size and minimize infrastructure footprint. Etherpad will continue to support real-time collaboration, but long-term storage should not be expected. Additional cleanups may occur in the future without prior notice. [1]
Updates for editors
- The Information Retrieval team will be launching an Android mobile app experiment that tests hybrid search capabilities which can handle both semantic and keyword queries. The improvement of on-platform search will enable readers to find what they’re looking for directly on Wikipedia more easily. The experiment will first be launched on Greek Wikipedia in late February, followed by English, French, and Portuguese in March. Read more on Diff blog. [2]
- The Reader Growth team will run an experiment for mobile web users, that adds a table of contents and automatically expands all article sections, to learn more about navigation issues they face. The test will be available on Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
- Previously, site notices (MediaWiki:Sitenotice and MediaWiki:Anonnotice) would only render on the desktop site. Now, they will render on all platforms. Users on mobile web will now see these notices and be informed. Site administrators should be prepared to test and fix notices on mobile devices to avoid interference with articles. To opt out, interface admins can add
#siteNotice { display: none; }to MediaWiki:Minerva.css. [3][4] 
View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue on Special:RecentChanges has been fixed. Previously, clicking hide in the active filters caused the "view new changes since…" button to disappear, though it should have remained visible. The button now behaves as expected. [5]
Updates for technical contributors
- New documentation is now available to help editors debug on-site search features. It supports troubleshooting when pages do not appear in results, when ranking seems unexpected, and when you need to inspect what content is being indexed, helping make search behavior easier to understand and analyze. Learn more. [6]
- 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 19:17, 16 February 2026 (UTC)
The Signpost: 17 February 2026
[edit]
- News and notes: Discussions open for the next WMF Annual Plan
- Disinformation report: Epstein's obsessions
- Technology report: Wikidata Graph Split and how we address major challenges
- Traffic report: Deaths, killings, films, and the Olympics
- Opinion: Incoming Incurables
- Crossword: Pop quiz
- Comix: herculean
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Archive links
[edit]I think you might be interested in m:Archive.today incident. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:54, 23 February 2026 (UTC)
- Interesting, thanks for the link – I've vaguely heard about this issue in passing conversations, but I didn't really expect this issue to be this bad (and thank goodness we don't actively use archive urls unless absolutely necessary here for that to significantly impact this project :)). //shb (t | c | m) 03:58, 23 February 2026 (UTC)
- Yes, this project's in pretty good shape, though a quick check through all the various .tld variations would be warranted. Special:LinkSearch shows that there's one on a User: page. Do we care about talk pages? Purchasing a kimono has a lot of archived links, but mostly to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:12, 23 February 2026 (UTC)
- BTW, I would not be surprised if this ends up on the global blacklist. AFAIK no such discussion has even started, and probably not until most of the clean-up work is done, but sentiments are running high. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:14, 23 February 2026 (UTC)
- Easily – I expect a global RfC to be started sometime, and I also expect that to garner plenty of opposes; I still think most people will be supportive of that idea as this isn't an issue that targets a specific project. //shb (t | c | m) 04:17, 23 February 2026 (UTC)
- I think user pages and talk pages are fine (if they were already present), though not a bad idea to add it to our local blacklist (or maybe a public abuse filter). //shb (t | c | m) 04:16, 23 February 2026 (UTC)
- btw I've created Special:AbuseFilter/89 (public filter), though set to tag only. I think it should eventually be set to disallow (plus the fact that we don't normally use archive links), but we'd probably need more community input for that. //shb (t | c | m) 04:30, 23 February 2026 (UTC)
- BTW, I would not be surprised if this ends up on the global blacklist. AFAIK no such discussion has even started, and probably not until most of the clean-up work is done, but sentiments are running high. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:14, 23 February 2026 (UTC)
- Yes, this project's in pretty good shape, though a quick check through all the various .tld variations would be warranted. Special:LinkSearch shows that there's one on a User: page. Do we care about talk pages? Purchasing a kimono has a lot of archived links, but mostly to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:12, 23 February 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-09
[edit]Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- Reference Check has been deployed to English Wikipedia, completing its rollout across all Wikipedias. The feature prompts newcomers to add a citation before publishing new content, helping reduce common citation-related reverts and improve verifiability. In A/B testing, the impact was substantial: newcomers shown Reference Check were approximately 2.2 times more likely to include a reference on desktop and about 17.5 times more likely on mobile web. [7]
Updates for editors
- The InterwikiSorting extension, which allowed for the sorting of interwiki links, has been undeployed from Wikipedia. As a result, editors who had enabled interwiki link sorting in non-compact mode (full list format) will now see links reordered. The links moving forward will be listed in the alphabetical order of language code. [8]
- Later this week, people who are editing a page-section using the mobile visual editor, will notice a new "Edit full page" button. When tapped, you will be able to edit the entire article. This helps when the change you want to make is outside the section you initially opened. [9][10]
- The Reader Experience team is inviting editors to assess whether dark mode should still be considered "beta" on their wiki, based on their experience of how well it functions on desktop and mobile. If the feature is deemed mature, editors can update the interface messages in
MediaWiki:skin-theme-descriptionandMediaWiki:Vector-night-mode-beta-tagto indicate that dark mode is ready and no longer considered beta. - The improved Activity tab which displays user-insights is now available to all users of the Wikipedia iOS app (version 7.9.0 and later). Following earlier A/B testing that showed higher account creation among users with access to the feature, it has been rolled out to 100% of users along with some updates. The Activity tab now shows your edited articles in the timeline, offers editing impact insights like contribution counts and article view trends, and customization options to improve in-app experience for users.
- View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug that prevented DiscussionTools from working on mobile has now been fixed, restoring full functionality. [11]
Updates for technical contributors
- The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension that makes this possible continues to improve. The latest upgrade is the inclusion of a new hook,
ext.globalwatchlist.rebuild, which fires after each watchlist rebuild. This allows you to run gadgets and user scripts for the Special page. [12] - 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 19:04, 23 February 2026 (UTC)
WV Server administrator
[edit]Hi @SHB2000. By any chance, do you know who I could contact regarding changes to the server configuration? I'd like to allow uploading .json files, which is done in LocalSettings.php. Maybe it's global/the same for all wikipedia projects, in which case it's not possible I guess. Cheers, -- andree 14:19, 27 February 2026 (UTC)
- Do you need to upload them locally? Changing the settings will require some local discussion before submitting for approval. Otherwise, see c:Commons:File types#Data files. –LPfi (talk) 14:47, 27 February 2026 (UTC)
- Basically I "need" database of POIs we have around here, and it's about 6MB (compressed), something like User:Andree.sk/Listings0.js. It can be almost any format, I could probably hack it and put (=hide) it into a big-ish JPEG file, but I think it would be better to make it not obscure :-) Putting it on wiki commons doesn't seem like a good fit, noone would probably need this for anything outside WV... Also, I foresee, if this catches on, it'd be updated e.g. monthly. So keeping it in the main space as a 'regular article' also isn't the best idea. -- andree 16:36, 27 February 2026 (UTC)
- I think it should be discussed in the Pub, although few will have any clear opinion on it. Of course, having people at Commons discuss our jsons is less than ideal. Probably the same configuration as on Commons would suit us (perhaps with more limited upload access), but does anybody know how the Commons data namespace works? –LPfi (talk) 17:36, 27 February 2026 (UTC)
- Another problem is that, I think, ultimately (if the feature works + is voted for) write access to the respective data "file" would have to be limited (e.g. to our interface admins)... So that, too, wouldn't probably work with Commons. -- andree 18:02, 27 February 2026 (UTC)
- Yeah I think so too – I'm not really familiar with .json file uploads, unfortunately. @WhatamIdoing, Andyrom75, Jdlrobson: might have a better insight than me. //shb (t | c | m) 18:43, 27 February 2026 (UTC)
- My experience with JSON is limited to knowing that the formatting is very, very picky. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:49, 28 February 2026 (UTC)
- I think it should be discussed in the Pub, although few will have any clear opinion on it. Of course, having people at Commons discuss our jsons is less than ideal. Probably the same configuration as on Commons would suit us (perhaps with more limited upload access), but does anybody know how the Commons data namespace works? –LPfi (talk) 17:36, 27 February 2026 (UTC)
- Basically I "need" database of POIs we have around here, and it's about 6MB (compressed), something like User:Andree.sk/Listings0.js. It can be almost any format, I could probably hack it and put (=hide) it into a big-ish JPEG file, but I think it would be better to make it not obscure :-) Putting it on wiki commons doesn't seem like a good fit, noone would probably need this for anything outside WV... Also, I foresee, if this catches on, it'd be updated e.g. monthly. So keeping it in the main space as a 'regular article' also isn't the best idea. -- andree 16:36, 27 February 2026 (UTC)
- @Andree.sk, if all you need is a config change, then see m:Requesting wiki configuration changes for the process. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:14, 28 February 2026 (UTC)