Benison is busy and is going to be on Wikipedia in off-and-on doses, and he may not respond swiftly to queries.
You are going to leave a message in my talk page?: Go ahead (by clicking HERE) and do it but don't ping me (for the new-bies). Yeh, please be good enough to check back for my reply. I may not notify you always. Cheers!!
Contentious topics alerts
This user is aware of the designation of the following as contentious topics:
the region of South Asia (India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal), including but not limited to history, politics, ethnicity, and social groups
living or recently deceased subjects of biographical content on Wikipedia articles
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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome! --BatteryIncluded (talk) 13:40, 14 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 9 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
July, August, and the first half of September focused on learning from some of the major experiences launched earlier in the year while continuing to build new ways for people to read, discover, listen to, and contribute to Wikipedia.
Results from the Explore Feed Refresh and Reading Challenge are helping the team understand how personalization, content discovery, and lightweight participation can encourage readers to return to Wikipedia.
At the same time, work is continuing to bring the new Home experience to iOS, experiment with new content types on Android, test listening experiences through text-to-speech, develop the 2026 Year in Review, improve search across both apps, and make editing more accessible through the VisualEditor journey.
Latest comment: 4 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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
An experiment launched on September 29 is testing article recommendations for new account holders who also identify as readers. By suggesting articles to read, similar to recommendations in the Wikipedia app for logged-in readers, the experiment aims to encourage new account holders to read and return to the website regularly, with the goal of increasing internal referrals by 1%. See the related Community Wishlist proposal.
Several Wikimedia services were taken offline last week because of a security vulnerability in PHP. This is because they need to be updated before they are safe to put back online. This is not a problem just for the Wikimedia movement but affects a lot of websites. You can follow updates on Wikitech. Cloud VPS and Toolforge will take longer to bring back online. This is to make sure that applications which run on Cloud VPS or Toolforge are not affected. Tool developers can see updates and more information on the Cloud-announce mailing list.
Last week we shared that to measure the impact of incorporating some community-requested features on logged-out reader retention, a test for the Image Carousel feature would be pushed to logged-out readers. Due to an issue, we will be restarting the test, but it will be live on October 26, not November 20 as initially announced.
Updates for editors
A new bot detection system to better identify automated traffic that disguises itself as human visitors, is coming to the Wikimedia wikis. This might cause sudden changes to visitor statistics starting from 26 October, going back to 20 June 2026.
The Score extension which renders musical notation inside wiki pages, has been temporarily disabled on all wikis due to a security issue. Affected pages will display a notice instead of musical scores, but the underlying code remains intact. No action is needed from editors, and a fix is in progress. A separate announcement will follow when the extension is re-enabled. Read more on Phabricator.
View all formatnum:18 community-submitted PLURAL:18 that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where CodeMirror syntax highlighter appears to have been enabled in error for existing editors has been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday, October 28 2026 at 15:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests, which happen twice a year. During the switchover, all Wikimedia website traffic is shifted from one primary data center to the backup data center to test availability and prevent service disruption even in emergencies.
Scholarship and sponsorship applications for the 2027 Wikimedia Hackathon will close on Friday, October 30th. Submit your application through Pretix before the deadline!
