Wikipedia:Tech news#Tech News: 2022-02

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 community-wide discussion about a very delicate issue for the development of Abstract Wikipedia is now open on Meta: where to store the abstract content that will be developed through functions from Wikifunctions and data from Wikidata. The discussion is open until June 12 at Abstract Wikipedia/Location of Abstract Content, and every opinion is welcomed. The decision will be made and communicated after the consultation period by the Foundation.

Updates for editors

• Since last week, on all wikis except the largest 20, people using the mobile visual editor will have additional tools in the menu bar, accessed using the new + toolbar button. To start, the new menu will include options to add: citations, hieroglyphs, and code blocks. Deployment to the remaining wikis is scheduled to happen in June.
• File:Octicons-tools.svg The #ifexist parser function will no longer register a link to its target page. This will improve the usefulness of {{#special:WantedPages}}, which will eventually only list pages that are the target of an actual red link. This change will happen gradually as the source pages are updated. [https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T14019]
• This week, the Moderator Tools team will launch a new filter to Recent Changes, starting at Indonesian Wikipedia. This new filter highlights edits that are likely to be reverted. The goal is to help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic edits. Other wikis will benefit from this filter in the future.
• Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users will see suggestions of articles for further reading. The feature will be available on both desktop and mobile. Readers of Catalan, Hebrew, and Italian Wikipedias and some sister projects will receive the change between May 21 and mid-June. Readers of other wikis will receive the change later. The goal is to encourage users to read the wikis more. Learn more.
• Some users of the Wikipedia Android app can use a new feature for readers, WikiGames, a daily trivia game based on real historical events. The release has started as an A/B test, available to 50% of users in the following languages: English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Turkish.
• The Newsletter extension that is available on MediaWiki.org allows the creation of various newsletters for global users. The extension can now publish new issues as section links on an existing page, instead of requiring a new page for each issue. [https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T393844]
• File:Octicons-sync.svg View all {{formatnum:32}} community-submitted {{PLURAL:32|task|tasks}} that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• The previously deprecated ipblocks views in Wiki Replicas will be removed in the beginning of June. Users are encouraged to query the new block and block_target views instead.
• File:Octicons-sync.svg Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• Wikidata and Sister Projects is a multi-day online event that will focus on how Wikidata is integrated to Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects. The event runs from May 29 – June 1. You can read the Program schedule and register.

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

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 Chart extension is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. Editors can use this new extension to create interactive data visualizations like bar, line, area, and pie charts. Charts are designed to replace many of the uses of the legacy Graph extension.

Updates for editors

• It is now easier to configure automatic citations for your wiki within the visual editor's citation generator. Administrators can now set a default template by using the _default key in the local MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json page (example diff). Setting this default will also help to future-proof your existing configurations when new item types are added in the future. You can still set templates for individual item types as they will be preferred to the default template. [https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T384709]
• File:Octicons-sync.svg View all {{formatnum:20}} community-submitted {{PLURAL:20|task|tasks}} that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Starting the week of June 2, bots logging in using action=login or action=clientlogin will fail more often. This is because of stronger protections against suspicious logins. Bots using bot passwords or using a loginless authentication method such as OAuth are not affected. If your bot is not using one of those, you should update it; using action=login without a bot password was deprecated in 2016. For most bots, this only requires changing what password the bot uses. [https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T395205]
• From this week, Wikimedia wikis will allow ES2017 features in JavaScript code for official code, gadgets, and user scripts. The most visible feature of ES2017 is async/await syntax, allowing for easier-to-read code. Until this week, the platform only allowed up to ES2016, and a few months before that, up to ES2015. [https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T381537]
• File:Octicons-sync.svg Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• Scholarship applications to participate in the GLAM Wiki Conference 2025 are now open. The conference will take place from 30 October to 1 November, in Lisbon, Portugal. GLAM contributors who lack the means to support their participation can apply here. Scholarship applications close on June 7th.

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

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 Trust and Safety Product team is finalizing work needed to roll out temporary accounts on large Wikipedias later this month. The team has worked with stewards and other users with extended rights to predict and address many use cases that may arise on larger wikis, so that community members can continue to effectively moderate and patrol temporary accounts. This will be the second of three phases of deployment – the last one will take place in September at the earliest. For more information about the recent developments on the project, see this update. If you have any comments or questions, write on the talk page, and join a CEE Catch Up this Tuesday.

Updates for editors

• File:Octicons-gift.svg The watchlist expiry feature allows editors to watch pages for a limited period of time. After that period, the page is automatically removed from your watchlist. Starting this week, you can set a preference for the default period of time to watch pages. The preferences also allow you to set different default watch periods for editing existing pages, pages you create, and when using rollback. [https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T265716]

File:Talk pages default look (April 2023).jpg

• The appearance of talk pages will change at almost all Wikipedias (some have already received this design change, a few will get these changes later). You can read details about the changes on Diff. It is possible to opt out of these changes in user preferences ("{{int:discussiontools-preference-visualenhancements}}"). [https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T319146][https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T392121]
• Users with specific extended rights (including administrators, bureaucrats, checkusers, oversighters, and stewards) can now have IP addresses of all temporary accounts revealed automatically during time-limited periods where they need to combat high-speed account-hopping vandalism. This feature was requested by stewards. [https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T386492]
• This week, the Moderator Tools and Machine Learning teams will continue the rollout of a new filter to Recent Changes, releasing it to several more Wikipedias. This filter utilizes the Revert Risk model, which was created by the Research team, to highlight edits that are likely to be reverted and help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic contributions. The feature will be rolled out to the following Wikipedias: {{int:project-localized-name-afwiki/en}}{{int:comma-separator/en}}{{int:project-localized-name-bewiki/en}}{{int:comma-separator/en}}{{int:project-localized-name-bnwiki/en}}{{int:comma-separator/en}}{{int:project-localized-name-cywiki/en}}{{int:comma-separator/en}}{{int:project-localized-name-hawwiki/en}}{{int:comma-separator/en}}{{int:project-localized-name-iswiki/en}}{{int:comma-separator/en}}{{int:project-localized-name-kkwiki/en}}{{int:comma-separator/en}}{{int:project-localized-name-simplewiki/en}}{{int:comma-separator/en}}{{int:project-localized-name-trwiki/en}}. The rollout will continue in the coming weeks to include the rest of the Wikipedias in this project. [https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T391964]
• File:Octicons-sync.svg View all {{formatnum:27}} community-submitted {{PLURAL:27|task|tasks}} that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• AbuseFilter editors active on Meta-Wiki and large Wikipedias are kindly asked to update AbuseFilter to make it compatible with temporary accounts. A link to the instructions and the private lists of filters needing verification are available on Phabricator.
• Lua modules now have access to the name of a page's associated thumbnail image, and on [https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/operations/mediawiki-config/+/2e4ab14aa15bb95568f9c07dd777065901eb2126/wmf-config/InitialiseSettings.php#10849 some wikis] to the WikiProject assessment information. This is possible using two new properties on mw.title objects, named pageImage and pageAssessments. [https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T131911][https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T380122]
• File:Octicons-sync.svg 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.

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

• You can [https://wikimediafoundation.limesurvey.net/359761?lang=en nominate your favorite tools] for the sixth edition of the Coolest Tool Award. Nominations are anonymous and will be open until June 25. You can re-use the survey to nominate multiple tools.
• File:Octicons-sync.svg View all {{formatnum:33}} community-submitted {{PLURAL:33|task|tasks}} that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• File:Octicons-sync.svg Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• Foundation staff and technical volunteers use Wikimedia APIs to build the tools, applications, features, and integrations that enhance user experiences. Over the coming years, the MediaWiki Interfaces team will be investing in Wikimedia web (HTTP) APIs to better serve technical volunteer needs and protect Wikimedia infrastructure from potential abuse. You can [https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2025/06/12/apis-as-a-product-investing-in-the-current-and-next-generation-of-technical-contributors/ read more about their plans to evolve the APIs in this Techblog post].

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