User talk:FlatLanguage

Tech News: 2026-34

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 Worklist feature for the Event Registration tool is now live on all Wikimedia wikis. With Worklist, event organizers can add the articles their event will focus on directly to the event page. The Worklist also powers Event Pathways which notifies other editors of the upcoming or ongoing event when they edit an article featured in the event's Worklist. This is the minimum viable version (MVP), and feedback is welcome. Organizers are encouraged to try the feature. A hands-on Worklist Setup Workshop will take place on 18 August at 16:00 UTC and 19 August at 11:00 UTC.

Updates for editors

• Special:ShortPages displays short pages by their size, but in many cases it gets filled with disambiguations and soft redirects, making it harder to find the short articles themselves. Starting this weekend, you will be able to choose not to include an article in the special page by adding the magic word __EXPECTSHORTPAGE__.
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Bole (w:bol:)
• Starting the week of August 17, the page toolbar will wrap onto two lines when there is not enough horizontal space for all the buttons. This is a fully merged patch from the Reader Experience team which aims to reduce crowding in the Vector 2022 toolbar, that may occur on some language Wikipedias at certain screen widths.
• View all 16 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, uploading large files to Wikimedia Commons has become more stable and less prone to failure following some fixes related to the “Could not acquire lock” upload error.

Updates for technical contributors

• Debian Bullseye will reach the end of its Long Term Support on 31 August 2026. Some Cloud VPS projects still have instances running Debian Bullseye. Maintainers of those projects are encouraged to migrate to Debian Bookworm or Debian Trixie. A migration guide is available to help with the process, and users may also want to consider whether their workload is better suited to Toolforge. If you need help or cannot complete the migration by 31 August, please contact the Cloud VPS admins as soon as possible. Read more.
• 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 21:01, 17 August 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-35

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 Special:CreateAccount page has been simplified as part of ongoing work to modernize the account creation experience. The panel showing project statistics no longer appears next to the form on desktop and mobile web. Multiple account creation experiments show that a simpler form helps newcomers complete registration.
• In order to improve page performance, images now load when they are viewed. This means images lower down an article will not load if a reader never scrolls to that part of the page, which may affect some image-related metrics.

• View all 42 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where image thumbnails in Abstract Wikipedia could fail to display after the corresponding file was moved on Wikimedia Commons, has now been fixed. Thumbnails will now update correctly when files are moved.

Updates for technical contributors

• User Info card is a feature that helps patrollers see information about user accounts. So far, it has been available only in places such as page history, logs and recent changes. Now, it's possible to place it in the page content as well, using the {{#uic:}} parser function. It can be particularly useful in templates like {{Userlinks}} (or their specialized variants), as it will make it easier to see the context about a user on various noticeboard pages. The card will be displayed only to users who have it enabled in their preferences.
• Due to user security and privacy risks, we have disabled access to Special:MyPage URLs when specifically using action=raw. If you are impacted by this, consider whether you can use an alternative approach. Special:MyPage URLs can still be accessed and used without action=raw. Specified user page URLs (e.g. User:Myusername) can still be used with action=raw.
• Due to an update, the thumbnailing software has been improved. This includes upgrading librsvg to 2.60 and ImageMagick to 7, as well as resolving a number of long-standing thumbnailing bugs like rendering errors.

• 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 20:43, 24 August 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-36

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

• A new format for the Community Wishlist is open for feedback. You can read the proposed ideas on Meta. This new process plans to improve how wishes are triaged, voted on, and prioritized in a way that is transparent and balanced across project families and language editions. This consultation is open for two weeks.

Updates for editors

• The latest release of the Wikipedia Android app includes updates to the Saved feature, bringing the app’s saving experience closer to iOS and Web. The update redesigns the Saved tab with an “All articles” view, removes the default “Saved” reading list, renames reading lists to “Collections,” and modernizes the article-saving experience.
• The Reading Lists feature was enabled for all logged-in users on Bengali, Chinese, Czech and Vietnamese Wikipedias on August 25, after several months as a beta feature. Reading Lists will be available to all logged-in users on Arabic, French and Indonesian Wikipedias on September 1, followed by English Wikipedia on September 14, and all other Wikipedia wikis on September 28.
• At the end of the month, some logged-out readers on Bengali, Czech, Persian, English, and Polish Wikipedias using the Minerva skin on mobile will see an updated navigation bar in an A/B test. The test will compare the current navigation bar with a new version designed to make it easier to find information more quickly. The goal is to determine whether these changes encourage readers to return more often. This experiment will not change the experience for logged-in readers and/or editors.
• Editors who maintain redirects, templates, and categories used on redirect pages now have improved ways for finding and curating redirects. Previously, redirects pages could not be searched. Two new search keywords, onlyredirects: and withredirects:, now allow redirects to be searched directly and can be combined with existing keywords such as incategory:, intitle:, and insource:.
• The ISBN lookup tools for generating citations were recently not working because of external service problems. Developers are working on solutions.
• View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where searching for pages by category using deepcat could return no results or unrelated results has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The domain of URLs for thumbnails is changing from upload.wikimedia.org to thumb.wikimedia.org. The old URLs will continue to work for the foreseeable future but MediaWiki will advertise the new domain instead. URLs to other types of media such as original files, videos and transcodes will still be served from upload.wikimedia.org.
• The Wikimedia Math API is now deprecated. These endpoints will be fully sunset by the end of September 2026. Developers who call these endpoints should transition to alternative math rendering solutions, such as the native MathML or MathJax. Third-party MediaWiki installations that utilize the Math extension for formula rendering are required to upgrade to v1.43+ to avoid disruption of service.

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• Read more about TextMatch in a Diff post titled, Custom edit suggestions for every wiki: How communities are shaping Suggestion Mode with TextMatch.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:51, 31 August 2026 (UTC)