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Tech News: 2026-39

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

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday, 23 September 2026 at 14:00 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.

Updates for editors

• The Growth team tested a new post-edit notice designed to encourage Temporary Account holders to register for a permanent account. The new notice replaced multiple dialogs and a simultaneous welcome notification with a single message highlighting the benefits of creating an account. The experiment increased permanent account creation from 1.94% to 3.66%, an 87% relative increase. The change will now be released to all wikis.
• For Wikipedia editors using the "Suggestion mode" Beta Feature, there is a new opt-in user preference for showing "experimental" edit checks and suggestions. These types are listed at Special:EditChecks, and are intended for early developer-testing and for gathering feedback from experienced users. Administrators can change the configuration details for each suggestion as usual. Administrators can also use this feature to help test their community's ideas for locally created checks and suggestions. Experimental types will have a more distinct visual style later this week. Feedback is welcome.
• The CEE Technical Village Pump has been launched as a space for technical discussions and collaboration among Wikimedia communities in Central and Eastern Europe.
• A new tool, Starter Kit, is now available for new and small language Wikipedia communities. It brings together guided tasks, tools, and resources to help communities get started, monitor their progress, and collaborate with the broader Wikimedia community. Starter Kit is hosted on Wikimedia Toolforge and is designed for Wikipedias with fewer than 50,000 articles. Learn more about how Starter Kit works and how communities have been using it in this Diff blog post.
• The Reader Growth team is launching a retest of the image carousel experiment. The retest will use three new versions of the design, updated based on community feedback. The team will assess results and determine with communities whether or not to proceed with the feature. The experiment will begin the week of September 28 and will run on Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Czech, English, Farsi, French, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
• After successful rollouts to Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Czech, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias, the Reading Lists feature from the Reader Experience team will be available to all logged-in users on all Wikipedia wikis starting September 28.
• View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the mentor status script repeatedly updated mentors’ status even when nothing had changed, creating unnecessary Recent Changes entries, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The abusefilters list query API, used to retrieve specific details about active or historical abuse filters configured on a wiki, has been updated to support the formatversion=2 configuration parameter, thereby leading to breaking changes to the API response. All users who maintain user-scripts or other code need to check if they use the abusefilters list query API, and respond to any breaking changes.
• 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 11:54, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-40

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

• Users of default skins on desktop and mobile web (Vector 2022 and Minerva respectively) will now be informed if the search suggestions displayed as they type into Search come from page redirects. Previously, users could get confused when the top search suggestions did not match exactly what they had typed. The new redirect notice clarifies that these suggestions are not random, but related to the search. The suggested pages may be redirects to the most relevant destination articles being searched for.
• Logged-out Wikipedia users on mobile web will begin to see a bookmark button for saving articles to their reading lists instead of the current Watchstar button. When clicked, the bookmark button prompts users to log in or create an account to save an article for later. An earlier experiment found that the bookmark icon was four times more likely than the Watchstar button to encourage logged-out users to create an account. This change is part of efforts to encourage more readers to become account holders and use features that help them save and return to content.
• An experiment will begin on September 29 on Spanish, Arabic, English, and French Wikipedias to simplify the experience users encounter immediately after account creation. The test will explore whether removing friction from the current Welcome Survey helps new users understand what to do next more easily. The experiment will run through the end of October.

• The Product and Technology Advisory Council has put out a call for the community to suggest topics that it should consider and discuss with the Wikimedia Foundation. Editors and technical contributors are invited to add topics to the council's talk page.
• Later this week, it will be possible for communities to configure Edit Checks and Suggestions so that they are shown within additional namespaces, such as a Draft: namespace. Feedback is welcome.
• A bug in the Global Watchlist is causing the page to fail to load for users that have unseen changes on Wikimedia Commons. Developers are working on a fix. Until then, affected users can follow the workarounds described in the relevant help section.
• New magic words {{CATEGORYSORT:TIMESTAMP}} and {{CATEGORYSORT:RTIMESTAMP}} are now available for use. They are able to change the default sorting of categories to be based on timestamp of categorization.
• View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where Wikistats for Wikipedias was not reachable has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The datacenter switchover, scheduled on September 23, has been postponed. The equinox exercise revealed capacity issues, preventing the switch of all services to the other datacenter. The process has been paused, prioritizing investigating that issue, to ensure that we continue to be able to serve our users reliably. A new exercise will be scheduled. Meanwhile, all traffic and edits continue to work as usual.
• On September 23, a power loss briefly affected all wikis, creating intermittent issues on both reading and editing modes. This also affected Gerrit. This is unrelated to the datacenter switchover postponement.
• Produnto has been deployed to mediawiki.org and some Indic language wikis. We want to hear your feedback on this experimental product. Produnto allows users to use Lua modules hosted in Wikimedia's GitLab. It simplifies the sharing of Lua code between wikis. Instead of copying each individual Lua module from one wiki to another, users will be able to easily share packages across all wikis.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• A Cross-wiki code collaboration workshop will be held online on October 2 at 12:30 UTC, bringing together South Asian technical contributors to learn about Produnto and begin piloting it on Hindi, Punjabi, Odia, Telugu, and Malayalam Wikipedias. Produnto is a package manager for deploying Lua modules hosted on GitLab to Wikimedia wikis, and was recently deployed on some pilot wikis.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 10:47, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #751

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2026-09-28. Missed the previous one? See issue #750.

Discussions

• New requests for permissions/Bot:
  • MamouriBot, Task/s: Add census demographics — population, male population, female population, and no. of households — to existing Iranian settlement items identified by Iran statistics ID (P1010), from the Statistical Center of Iran censuses of 1385 (2006) and 1395 (2016).

Events

• Upcoming events:
  • The program for the Wikidata Query Service Days (October 17-23) is now published, covering the migration from Blazegraph to QLever with sessions for editors, reusers, and tool builders; see the event page for details and schedule.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs:
  • From University Research to Free Knowledge: Academics Discover Wikimedia by User:Osps7
  • WM Enterprise: Wikidata Bulk snapshots
  • Wiki OTO 2026: Wiki Loves Women and Africa Wiki Women join forces!
  • Making African Restitution Efforts More Visible
• Papers: CodeGraph: Open-Taxonomy Knowledge Graph for Source Code with Wikidata Grounding by Pennino et al., (2026).
• Videos:
  • When the Old Constraints Disappear: Work and Creativity in the Age of AI (Wikipedia->Wikidata->Wikifunctions->Abstract Wikipedia), John Samuel, Mindstone AI Meetup, September 22, 2026, Lyon, France (Video, Slides)
  • AI BRIDGES Open Forum meeting - September 2026

Tool of the week

• HumansMap Gallery - The site offers various type of visualizations, and offers the possibility to navigate through connections between people and organizations, based on your interests, powered by Wikidata.
• 📚 Wikidata Book Itemizer It is a simple tool to catalog books on Wikidata! Creating work and edition items manually on Wikidata with proper metadata and multilingual labels can often be tedious and error-prone. Wikidata Book Itemizer automates this entire process with a simple form!

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• Wikimedia Deutschland is researching how to improve interoperability between Wikidata, Wikibase Cloud, and Wikibase Suite. If you've worked with data imports or staging, or even if you haven't, your input would be valuable. The survey takes 5 to 10 minutes and is anonymous. More information on the background of the questions: Wikidata:Requests for comment/Mass-editing policy#Context

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest properties:
  • General datatypes: none
  • External identifiers: Union Catalogue Database of Japanese Texts ID, ‎Siwar entry ID, Kunaicho Shoryobu Shuzo Kanseki Shuran ID, ‎Emulation General Wiki article ID, Digital Momijiyama Bunko ID, Raras disease ID
• New property proposals to review:
  • General datatypes:
    • Writers at Risk database ID (Identifier in the PEN America Writers at Risk database, cataloging writers threatened, imprisoned, and jailed worldwide)
  • External identifiers: Ohio Entity Number, NZPCN legacy ID, Žmonės.lt topic ID, Jersey HER Reference, Identifiant d'un(e) auteurice dans le Maitron, Google Search profile handle, Leipziger Biographie ID, LEO-BW person ID, Biopsa ID, Isle of Man Registered Building No., Waymark code, Identifiant dans OrthodoxWiki en français, WE League player ID, WE League manager ID, Delfi.lt topic ID, Lrytas.lt topic ID, Baidu Baike article

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples: Latin American Cinema / Films with an English or Portuguese Wikipedia page, but not Spanish
• Schema examples: (E422) 'Golden age of illustration' book from the Maastricht University Library collection.
• Newest WikiProjects:
  • Project Schlaraffia - for enriching items about the German-language fraternity Schlaraffia (Q1305789) and its international and local associations.
  • Project Tamil Nadu dedicated to creating and improving Wikidata content related to Tamil Nadu (Q1445) and Tamil (Q5885).
• WikiProject Highlights: Project PCC EMCO Wikidata CoP added a subpage for listing Properties normally associated with Corporate bodies.

Development

• Mobile statement editing: We are continuing with UX fixes. This is primarily visual polish and consistency as well as fixing bugs related to RTL display.
• Wikibase REST API:
  • We are finishing the support for creating Lexemes and the statements on them.
  • We are continuing working on support for adding Forms to a Lexeme.
• Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects:
  • We are going to stop sending language link changes to the first few wikis. An initial deployment to group1 wikis is now planned for Monday, 05.10.2026. (Click group1 on this Toolforge page to see which Wikis are included.) This will help reduce noise in Watchlists and Recent changes and help reduce the size of the database table holding recent changes on these wikis.
  • Connecting a newly created Wiki to Wikidata is a manual task, we are automating that and optimising the SitesTable at the same time, making a 'single source of truth' that all wikis point to, rather than a table per Wiki that are all clones of each other.
  • We are experimenting with raising the entity usage limit on wikis. If this is feasible, we can reduce the amount of bundled changes. This would reduce the quantity of Wikidata-triggered Recent Changes rows being created.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

• Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Govdirectory weekly focus country: The Gambia
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!

· Previous issue · Full report · Unsubscribe . JosefAnthony talk ·MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:38, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #752

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2026-10-05. Missed the previous one? See issue #751.

Discussions

• New requests for permissions/Bot:
  • SaadBot - Task/s: A read-only (no edits) entity lookups for an academic research project building a relation triplet extraction (RTE) dataset from web text.
  • OKA bot - Tasks: Improve Wikidata items using authoritative open datasets, e.g., national mapping data and reference works: add sources, fill gaps, create missing items and report conflicts from the Swisstopo dataset and its subsets.
  • FoxfindingBot - Task/s: Passively enrich existing Wikidata games with gog.com metadata
  • Wahl.de Bot - Task/s: Keep mandate data of German parliamentary members current. Edits to end date (P582), successor/replaced by (P1366), start time (P580), parliamentary term (P2937)retrieved and sourced from official sources.
• New request for comments: Wikidata:Requests for comment/Split needed from Q4167836: Split Wikimedia category (Q4167836) into two items, because one is for MediaWiki non-main namespace (Q35252665) and the other is for Wikimedia project page (Q14204246)

Events

• Upcoming events:
  • On October 9 ends up the early-bird registration with its reduced fees for MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2026, November 11-13, at Jožef Stefan Institute (Q5918873). The program is already set up!
  • Wikidata's 14th birthday (Q139103554) in Taiwan: Wikidata Cross-Domain Forum 2026, 24 Oct 2026.
  • (Deutsch) Wikidata Writing Workshop, takes place Saturday, 31 October, 10:00 to 13:00 CEST at the Aargauer Kantonsbibliothek, Obere Vorstadt 6, 5000 Aarau.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs:
  • (Deutsch) Domus – an open data project on the history of houses - Wikidata and FactGrid Wikibase combine to help build a map visualiser.
  • WikiNusantara 2026: a second chance in Makassar
  • N-RICH: a new Wikimedia Project to explore Wikidata as a connective layer for UK cultural heritage infrastructure
• Videos:
  • (Short) Schomburg Center’s 2026 Wikidata Edit-a-thon during the New York Black and African Literature Festival
  • RLUK DSF | Linked data and the research library - explores how libraries are engaging with linked data (including Wikidata) and what this means for metadata creation, management, and discovery.
  • Wikidata 14th Birthday Celebration stream with Africa Wiki Women.
  • AI BRIDGES Open Forum meeting, the September 2026 meeting, showcasing updates from the DARIAH’s DHWiki working group on Wikibase.
  • Exploring networks of artists and scientists with the Wikidata Query Service.
  • (Spanish) What does Wikidata contribute to open library data? with Elena Sánchez Nogales.
• LD4 Conference streams:
  • Sessions 1 / Building more complete and linked GLAM datasets: The Smithsonian’s (In)Visible Women’s Project
  • Sessions 2, incl.
    • EMCO: Entity management for everyone
    • Using Wikidata to identify duplicates in the Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF)
    • From Wikidata to Our Collection Management System: Automating GIS Import for Cultural Heritage Data
  • Sessions 4 including Finding where to contribute on Wikidata with Dustpan and Broomstick. Wikidata is mentioned throughout the stream.
  • Sessions 5 / Reduced Fuzziness in Semantic Kompakkt 3D Object Viewer through Extensive Data Modelling in Wikibase
  • Sessions 9 / Using Wikidata to Improve the Visibility of African Women in Open Knowledge
  • Sessions 10 / From Sounds to Solidarity: Jazz, Student Protests, and Wikidata
  • Wikidata Affinity Group: Working with Corporate Bodies for EMCO

Tool of the week

• Mergers & Acquisitions: A Wikidata Merge Assistant, a new web app that surfaces possible duplicate items from Wikidata and provides a simple interface for evaluating the candidate pairs and merging them together or marking them as different.

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest properties:
  • General datatypes:
    • disjoint with (instances of this type cannot be simultaneously instances of that type)
    • ‎contribution URL (URL of a page explaining how to participate in or contribute to a project or organization)
    • atomic radius (measured or calculated radius of an atom of a chemical element)
    • covalent radius (radius of an atom of a chemical element when covalently bonded)
    • Van der Waals radius (radius of an imaginary hard sphere representing the distance of closest approach for a non-bonded atom)
  • External identifiers: Tric Trac game ID, Techniques de l'Ingénieur author ID, Stereo Ve Mono release ID, ‎Sky programme ID, ‎Sky series ID, Scent Base perfumes ID, ‎Register of British Slave Traders person ID, ‎Onderwijstermen Taalunie ID, ‎NZPCN legacy ID, Biopsa ID, ‎Writers at Risk database ID, LEO-BW person (GND) ID, Leipziger Biographie ID, Jersey HER Reference, Isle of Man Registered Building No., ‎Holy See cardinal biography ID, ‎Google Search profile handle, Filmbaze people ID, ‎China Railway Pinyin code, belarusenc.by ID, ‎BLL-Ontology concept ID, ‎IFWiki article, Brussels ‎Inventory of Movable Heritage designer ID, Eldoblatge original actor ID, Eldoblatge original dub actor ID, Drag France directory ID, OrthodoxWiki ID (French), Le Maitron author ID, ‎Brussels Inventory of Architectural Heritage glossary ID, ‎Brussels Inventory of Movable Heritage material ID, ‎Brussels Inventory of Movable Heritage object type ID, ‎Brussels Inventory of Movable Heritage technique ID, ‎Brussels Inventory of Natural Heritage taxon ID, ‎WE League manager ID, ‎WE League player ID, ‎ArchaMap ID, Womens German Basketball Bundesliga Player ID
• New property proposals to review:
  • General datatypes:
    • has language or spelling variant (the (multilingual) label of the linked item is a a language, spelling or etymological variation of the label of this item)
    • school of martial arts (school or style of martial arts this person studied)
  • External identifiers: YouSaid person ID, Demko ID, Niconico Pedia article ID, Scholastica scholar ID, Hannah Arendt edition person ID, AbeBooks author ID (2), Identifiant dans Calames, identifiant d'un(e) auteurice dans le catalogue du Centre Delavouët

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Schema examples: ICH item(E379) - schema for a Unesco Intangible Cultural Heritage item in the international lists or national inventories.
• Newest WikiProjects: EastEnders (TV series) - a project for the BBC soap opera.
• Newest database reports: The EntitySchema Directory

Development

• REST API: Continuing the work on adding support for lexicographical data, specifically creating a statement, Form and Sense on a Lexeme
• Wikidata integration in the Wikimedia projects: We are continuing to look into raising the entity usage limit. We are setting up monitoring to see how much it can reduce the amount of Recent Changes entries triggered from Wikidata.
• Mobile editing of statements: We continued addressing the remaining UX issues, including RTL and Kartographer issues
• hCaptcha: We are planning the support for it to Wikibase-specific pages like Special:New Item

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

• Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Govdirectory weekly focus country: Tanzania
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!

· Previous issue · Full report · Unsubscribe . JosefAnthony talk ·MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:58, 5 October 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-41

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 process for this year’s Community Wishlist has been published, incorporating community feedback. The wish submission process will end on November 8. This year, a working group (open for volunteering) that includes community members familiar with the technical aspect of our wikis alongside Wikimedia Foundation staff, will take care of the triage process. The triage is expected to be completed by late November. Votes for wishes will start in January.

Updates for editors

• Editors using the visual editor will now see a warning when they paste text that is likely to have initially been copied from one of five external generative AI chatbots into Wikipedia. This feature is known as LLM Paste Check. It is a type of Edit Check that is community configurable. The check looks for markers in the copied HTML and is not using content watermark detection. Edits will also be tagged so that patrollers can review them more closely. The feature helps newcomers add content that respects Wikipedia’s policies and makes it easier for experienced editors to identify problematic edits. Communities with local policies about LLM usage can adjust the wording and policy that is linked. The team apologizes that this was rolled out without a delay for translations.
• Editors can now easily access the web visual editor directly from the iOS and Android apps. When opening the editor, users will be given a choice between visual editing and source editing. If they choose visual editing, they will be sent to a mobile web window in their phone's browser. After completing their edit, a banner will give them the option to return to the app. This enables readers to make quick contributions while casually reading.
• Users of the Wikipedia Android and iOS apps will now see a one-time account creation prompt after they have used the app for two consecutive weeks. This prompt explains the benefits of having an account. It is intended to help more casual readers become logged-in users who return to the apps regularly.
• Editors on group1 wikis, including Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikivoyage, and Wikisource, will no longer see notifications on Recent Changes and Watchlist when a link to another language version of a page is added, removed, or changed in its Wikidata item. This change will begin on October 5 at 07:00 UTC as a two-week trial to reduce high-volume, low-value notifications and make important changes easier to identify. Editors who rely on these notifications can read more on the project page and share feedback or concerns on the talk page.
• View all 36 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where mentors who removed themselves from the mentorship program could still have mentees assigned to them and receive questions, has now been fixed. Mentees will now be reassigned when a mentor leaves the program.

Updates for technical contributors

• Wikimedia Brasil has published its Development Best Practices Framework (ABPD). It is a guide for staff, contractors and volunteers building technical tools and projects. It covers the project lifecycle, security, accessibility, personal data protection and responsible AI use, and explains how movement-wide guidelines were adapted to a local context. They encourage other affiliates to reuse it and adapt it. Read more in the Diff post.
• A new, canonical base URL for Wikimedia APIs will soon be introduced. The new canonical route follows a {projectName}/api/ pattern and will act as an alternative path for current REST APIs (for example: {projectName}/w/rest.php/). Both versions will be callable for all existing APIs, but the new structure will be the preferred path for newly created API modules. This change will be non-breaking for most users. The existing pathways will remain available for all existing endpoint requests. However, some endpoints may return URLs following the new pattern in response bodies. Changes will be available on test wiki first, with the rollout expected to cover all wikis by the end of October.
• 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.

18:50, 5 October 2026 (UTC)