Wikipedia:Tech news
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Tech News: 2025-16
[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
- Later this week, the default thumbnail size will be increased from 220px to 250px. This changes how pages are shown in all wikis and has been requested by some communities for many years, but wasn't previously possible due to technical limitations. [1]
- File thumbnails are now stored in discrete sizes. If a page specifies a thumbnail size that's not among the standard sizes (20, 40, 60, 120, 250, 330, 500, 960), then MediaWiki will pick the closest larger thumbnail size but will tell the browser to downscale it to the requested size. In these cases, nothing will change visually but users might load slightly larger images. If it doesn't matter which thumbnail size is used in a page, please pick one of the standard sizes to avoid the extra in-browser down-scaling step. [2][3]
Updates for editors
- The Wikimedia Foundation are working on a system called Edge Uniques which will enable A/B testing, help protect against Distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks), and make it easier to understand how many visitors the Wikimedia sites have. This is so that they can more efficiently build tools which help readers, and make it easier for readers to find what they are looking for.
- To improve security for users, a small percentage of logins will now require that the account owner input a one-time password emailed to their account. It is recommended that you check that the email address on your account is set correctly, and that it has been confirmed, and that you have an email set for this purpose. [4]
- "Are you interested in taking a short survey to improve tools used for reviewing or reverting edits on your Wiki?" This question will be asked at 7 wikis starting next week, on Recent Changes and Watchlist pages. The Moderator Tools team wants to know more about activities that involve looking at new edits made to your Wikimedia project, and determining whether they adhere to your project's policies.
- On April 15, the full Wikidata graph will no longer be supported on query.wikidata.org. After this date, scholarly articles will be available through query-scholarly.wikidata.org, while the rest of the data hosted on Wikidata will be available through the query.wikidata.org endpoint. This is part of the scheduled split of the Wikidata Graph, which was announced in September 2024. More information is available on Wikidata.
- The latest quarterly Wikimedia Apps Newsletter is now available. It covers updates, experiments, and improvements made to the Wikipedia mobile apps.
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: an invitation for tool maintainers to attend the Toolforge UI Community Feedback Session on April 15th; recent community metrics; and recent technical blog posts.
- 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 00:21, 15 April 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-17
[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.
Updates for editors
- Wikifunctions is now integrated with Dagbani Wikipedia since April 15. It is the first project that will be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in articles. A function is something that takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, such as adding up two numbers, converting miles into metres, calculating how much time has passed since an event, or declining a word into a case. Wikifunctions will allow users to do that through a simple call of a stable and global function, rather than via a local template. [5]
- A new type of lint error has been created: Empty headings (documentation). The Linter extension's purpose is to identify wikitext patterns that must or can be fixed in pages and provide some guidance about what the problems are with those patterns and how to fix them. [6]
- View all 37 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Following its publication on HuggingFace, the "Structured Contents" dataset, developed by Wikimedia Enterprise, is now also available on Kaggle. This Beta initiative is focused on making Wikimedia data more machine-readable for high-volume reusers. They are releasing this beta version in a location that open dataset communities already use, in order to seek feedback, to help improve the product for a future wider release. You can read more about the overall Structured Contents project, and about the first release that's freely usable.
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings and events
- The Editing and Machine Learning Teams invite interested volunteers to a video meeting to discuss Peacock check, which is the latest Edit check that will detect "peacock" or "overly-promotional" or "non-neutral" language whilst an editor is typing. Editors who work with newcomers, or help to fix this kind of writing, or are interested in how we use artificial intelligence in our projects are encouraged to attend. The meeting will be on April 28, 2025 at 18:00–19:00 UTC and hosted on Zoom.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 20:57, 21 April 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-18
[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.
Updates for editors
- Event organizers who host collaborative activities on multiple wikis, including Bengali, Japanese, and Korean Wikipedias, will have access to the CampaignEvents extension this week. Also, admins in the Wikipedia where the extension is enabled will automatically be granted the event organizer right soon. They won't have to manually grant themselves the right before they can manage events as requested by a community.
- View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- The release of the next major version of Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, is scheduled for 29 April 2025. Technical editors will have access to the release by the week of 5 May 2025. This update will include a number of breaking changes and minor visual changes. Instructions on handling the breaking and visual changes are documented on this page. Pre-release testing is reported in T386298, with post-release issues tracked in T392379 and T392390.
- Users of Wiki Replicas will notice that the database views of
ipblocks,ipblocks_ipindex, andipblocks_compatare now deprecated. Users can query theblockandblock_targetnew views that mirror the new tables in the production database instead. The deprecated views will be removed entirely from Wiki Replicas in June, 2025. - Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization Newsletter is now available. This edition includes an overview of the improved Content Translation Dashboard Tool, support for new languages, highlights from the Wiki Loves Ramadan campaign, results from the Language Onboarding Experiment, an analysis of topic diversity in articles, and information on upcoming community meetings and events.
Meetings and events
- The Let's Connect Learning Clinic will take place on April 29 at 14:30 UTC. This edition will focus on "Understanding and Navigating Conflict in Wikimedia Projects". You can register now to attend.
- The 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which brings the global technical community together to connect, brainstorm, and hack existing projects, will take place from May 2 to 4th, 2025, at Istanbul, Turkey.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 19:28, 28 April 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-19
[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 Wikimedia Foundation has shared the latest draft update to their annual plan for next year (July 2025–June 2026). This includes an executive summary (also on Diff), details about the three main goals (Infrastructure, Volunteer Support, and Effectiveness), global trends, and the budget and financial model. Feedback and questions are welcome on the talk page until the end of May.
Updates for editors
- For wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled, two new feature improvements have been released:
- Admins can now choose which namespaces are permitted for Event Registration via Community Configuration (documentation). The default setup is for event registration to be permitted in the Event namespace, but other namespaces (such as the project namespace or WikiProject namespace) can now be added. With this change, communities like WikiProjects can now more easily use Event Registration for their collaborative activities.
- Editors can now transclude the Collaboration List on a wiki page (documentation). The Collaboration List is an automated list of events and WikiProjects on the wikis, accessed via Special:AllEvents (example). Now, the Collaboration List can be added to all sorts of wiki pages, such as: a wiki mainpage, a WikiProject page, an affiliate page, an event page, or even a user page.
- View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Developers who use the
momentlibrary in gadgets and user scripts should revise their code to use alternatives like theIntllibrary or the newmediawiki.DateFormatterlibrary. Themomentlibrary has been deprecated and will begin to log messages in the developer console. You can see a global search for current uses, and ask related questions in this Phabricator task. - Developers who maintain a tool that queries the Wikidata term store tables (
wbt_*) need to update their code to connect to a separate database cluster. These tables are being split into a separate database cluster. Tools that query those tables via the wiki replicas must be adapted to connect to the new cluster instead. Documentation and related links are available. [7] - Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The latest Chart Project newsletter is available. It includes updates on preparing to expand the deployment to additional wikis as soon as this week (starting May 6) and scaling up over the following weeks, plus exploring filtering and transforming source data.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.