User talk:Sohom Datta

Tech News: 2026-12

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 ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽ beta feature, also known as CodeMirror 6, has been used for wikitext syntax highlighting since November 2024. It will be promoted out of beta by May 2026 in order to bring improvements and new features to all editors who use the standard syntax highlighter. If you have any questions or concerns about promoting the feature out of beta, please share.
• Some changes to local user groups are performed by stewards on Meta-Wiki and logged there only. Now, interwiki rights changes will be logged both on Meta-Wiki and the wiki of the target user to make it easier to access a full record of user's rights changes on a local wiki. Past log entries for such changes will be backfilled in the coming weeks.
• On wikis using Flagged Revisions, the number of pending changes shown on Special:PendingChanges previously counted pages which were no longer pending review, because they have been removed from the system without being reviewed, e.g. due to being deleted, moved to a different namespace, or due to wiki configuration changes. The count will be correct now. On some wikis the number shown will be much smaller than before. There should be no change to the list of pages itself.
• Wikifunctions composition language has been rewritten, resulting in a new version of the language. This change aims to increase service stability by reducing the orchestrator's memory consumption. This rewrite also enables substantial latency reduction, code simplification, and better abstractions, which will open the door to later feature additions. Read more about the changes.
• Users can now sort search results alphabetically by page title. The update gives an additional option to finding pages more easily and quickly. Previously, results could be sorted by Edit date, Creation date, or Relevance. To use the new option, open 'Advanced Search' on the search results page and select 'Alphabetically' under 'Sorting Order'.
• View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the bug that prevented UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons from importing files from Flickr has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• A new special page, Special:LintTemplateErrors, has been created to list transcluded pages that are flagged as containing lint errors to help users discover them easily. The list is sorted by the number of transclusions with errors. For example: Special:LintTemplateErrors/night-mode-unaware-background-color.
• Users of the ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽ beta feature have been using CodeMirror instead of CodeEditor for syntax highlighting when editing JavaScript, CSS, JSON, Vue and Lua content pages, for some time now. Along with promoting CodeMirror 6 out of beta, the plan is to replace CodeEditor as the standard editor for these content models by May 2026. Feedback or concerns are welcome.
• The CodeMirror JavaScript modules will soon be upgraded to CodeMirror 6. Leading up to the upgrade, loading the ext.CodeMirror or ext.CodeMirror.lib modules from gadgets and user scripts was deprecated in July 2025. The use of the ext.CodeMirror.switch hook was also deprecated in March 2025. Contributors can now make their scripts or gadgets compatible with CodeMirror 6. See the migration guide for more information.
• The MediaWiki Interfaces team is expanding coverage of REST API module definitions to include extension APIs. REST API modules are groups of related endpoints that can be independently managed and versioned. Modules now exist for GrowthExperiments and Wikifunctions APIs. As we migrate extension APIs to this structure, documentation will move out of the main MediaWiki OpenAPI spec and REST Sandbox view, and will instead be accessible via module-specific options in the dropdown on the REST Sandbox (i.e., Special:RestSandbox, available on all wiki projects).
• The Scribunto extension provides different pieces of information about the wiki where the module is being used via the mw.site library. Starting last week, the library also provides a way of accessing the wiki ID that can be used to facilitate cross-wiki module maintenance.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The 2026 Coolest Tool Award celebrating outstanding community tools, is now open for nominations! Nominate your favorite tool using the nomination survey form by 23 March 2026. For more information on privacy and data handling, please see the survey privacy statement.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:34, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

Notification of administrators without tools

	Greetings, Sohom Datta. You are receiving this notification because you've agreed to consider endorsing prospective admin candidates identified by the process outlined at Administrators without tools. Recently, the following editor(s) received this distinction and the associated endearing title: Fifteen thousand two hundred twenty four
Thank you for supporting this effort. Your contributions are an integral part of overall success, and an example for others to follow. To stop receiving these notifications, remove your name from the list.

TolBot (talk) 21:00, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

Notification of administrators without tools

	Greetings, Sohom Datta. You are receiving this notification because you've agreed to consider endorsing prospective admin candidates identified by the process outlined at Administrators without tools. Recently, the following editor(s) received this distinction and the associated endearing title: GreenLipstickLesbian
Thank you for supporting this effort. Your contributions are an integral part of overall success, and an example for others to follow. To stop receiving these notifications, remove your name from the list.

TolBot (talk) 21:00, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

March thanks

story · music · places

Thank you for improving article quality in March! -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:45, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

on Bach's birthday, a story about my joy --Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:49, 21 March 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-13

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

• Wikimedia site users can now log in without a password using passkeys. This is a secure method supported by fingerprint, facial recognition, or PIN. With this change, all users who opt for passwordless login will find it easier, faster, and more secure to log in to their accounts using any device. The new passkey login option currently appears as an autofill suggestion in the username field. An additional "Log in with passkey" button will soon be available for users who have already registered a passkey. This update will improve security and user experience. The screen recording demonstrates the passwordless login process step by step.
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday, 25 March 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.

Updates for editors

• Wikimedia site users can now export their notifications older than 5 years using a new Toolforge tool. This will ensure that users retain their important notifications and avoid them being lost based on the planned change to delete notifications older than 5 years, as previously announced.
• Wikipedia editors in Indonesian, Thai, Turkish, and Simple English now have access to Special:PersonalDashboard. This is an early version of an experience that introduces newer editors to patrolling workflows, making it easier for them to move from making edits to participating in more advanced moderation work on their project.
• The Special:Block now has two minor interface changes. Administrators can now easily perform indefinite blocks through a dedicated radio button in the expiry section. Also, choosing an indefinite expiry provides a different set of common reasons to select from, which can be changed at: MediaWiki:Ipbreason-indef-dropdown.
• Mobile editors at several wikis can now see an improved logged-out edit warning, thanks to the recent updates from the Growth team. These changes released last week are part of ongoing efforts and tests to enhance account creation experience on mobile and then increase participation.
• View all 36 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the bug that prevented mobile web users from seeing the block information when affected by multiple blocks has been fixed. They can now see messages of all the blocks currently affecting them when they access Wikipedia.

Updates for technical contributors

• Images built using Toolforge will soon get the upgraded buildpacks version, bringing support for newer language versions and other upstream improvements and fixes. If you use Toolforge Build Service, review the recent cloud-announce email and update your build configuration as necessary to ensure your tools are compatible.

• The API Portal documentation wiki will shut down in June 2026. API keys created on the API Portal will continue to work normally. api.wikimedia.org endpoints will be deprecated gradually starting in July 2026. Documentation on the API Portal is moving to mediawiki.org. Learn more on the project page.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• WMDE Technical Wishes is considering improvements to automatically generated reference names in VisualEditor. Please check out the proposed solutions and participate in the request for comment.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 16:49, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

Permissions review

Mindful of WP:MMORPG, I thought the best way to revive a request to restore an autopatrolled bit would be to ask you directly if you could review 13 redirects replaced with a sourced article and 8 new articles started, 6 new redirects added since your first assessment. Articles are added in the interest of filling a gap in coverage in the encyclopedia. You said the AP standards had ballooned, so I will echo that to say I think my ability to launch new articles has improved since the permission was first granted. It appears the revocation came during a total of 1,234 done that morning, and that I am one of the very few in that list who is in fact actively editing in 2026. Please comment, and restore the bit if I have addressed your concerns. Sswonk (talk) 21:54, 25 March 2026 (UTC)

@Sswonk I haven't looked too deeply through you contributions but based on what I looked at, I was somewhat puzzled by the inclusion of this wordpress blog in West Cross Timbers. Could you explain why you used that as a a source? Sohom (talk) 02:42, 27 March 2026 (UTC)

Citing the Wordpress-hosted site The Rocking Magpie is related to the subject matter, album releases by Americana music artists early in their career. There is limited coverage in main stream or industry media. I do run into other blogs when finding out about the artists' early releases, and following logic and WP guidance I don't use them as sources. The Rocking Magpie is an exception, as the founder Alan Harrison has a history of reviewing for No Depression (magazine) and other publications. He is now suspending that work on his site, but that he publishes his reviews and those of others on Wordpress is the only drawback. The stance for his part is in solidarity with independent musicians, I think that is obvious from reading his opening on the home page of the site.

Hoping not to offend anyone, I feel first hand the futility of writing about something you love rather than something that corporate publications love, and the people who are dedicated to roots and Americana music often are making that conscious choice to eschew wealth and the values associated with it for doing what they love with meaning and authenticity.

Harrison and other writers on that site interview artists, and that particular interview Amanda Shires gives her statement on why what MusicBrainz and Discogs list as her first album is not her "debut" album. She didn't work on the songs on her first CD with the idea of building a solo career, as where her contemporaries would have a "debut" album, she has a technical demonstration of her skills to provide to venues and other musicians. Her albums beginning with West Cross Timbers represent her singer-songwriter work, what her career has become, while Being Brave does not. I found that to be important information for not only people who are studying or want to learn about her career, but also for learning about performers in general on the Texas music circuit.

Although it is hosted by the platform it is, reading The Rocking Magpie is actually good for learning about the element of self-reliance found in Americana music. It is part of the story, I don't think Wikipedia should restrict or ban Harrison et. al references because the site is on Wordpress; he knows his subject. Sswonk (talk) 14:05, 27 March 2026 (UTC)

@Sswonk So, I looked through your contributions in detail and I currently still don't have the confidence to grant autopatrolled to you. I can take your word that the wordpress blog was written by a subject matter expert but there are similar problems across your newer creations (such as the fact that despite going back and forth with myself, I don't see significant coverage of Boundary County (album) in terms of proving it's notability). You can appeal this decision to other admins or at WP:PERM/AP or at WP:AN but I cannot at this time justify granting AP.

One thing I will note though, is that this lack of confidence is not a reflection of the fact that you are doing bad work, I do recognize that you are doing excellent work in terms of documenting Americana music, some of which can be hard to find sources at times -- it's just that WP:AP tends to work better/is much easier granted to folks who often document obviously notable/demonstrate notability from the get-go. (The bar for which is typically WP:THREE) Sohom (talk) 03:15, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

Reasonable, thank you. Sswonk (talk) 12:39, 30 March 2026 (UTC) Sswonk (talk) 12:39, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

Test

Here's an edit to thank to see who it notifies, per our discussion about technical quirks. Clevermoss (talk) 20:12, 29 March 2026 (UTC)

Test #2. Let me know if the signature needs to be different from what I did. Clevermoss (talk) 21:15, 29 March 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-14

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 Beta version of Abstract Wikipedia a new Wikimedia project which is language-independent, was launched last week. The project allows communities to build Wikipedia articles in their native language, which can be readily accessed by other users in their own languages. The wiki is powered by instructions from Wikifunctions and also based on structured content from Wikidata. Read more.

Updates for editors

• The Growth team is running an A/B test to evaluate a clearer, more user-friendly message that promotes account creation on wikis. Currently when logged-out mobile users begin editing, they see a jarring warning message that can feel abrupt and discouraging. This also presents temporary account editing as the default rather than encouraging account creation. The test is running on ten Wikipedias, including Arabic, French, Spanish and German. Read more.
• The Wikimedia Apps team is inviting feedback on how editing should work on the Wikipedia mobile apps. The discussion focuses on improving how users access editing tools when they tap "Edit". This is part of a broader effort to convert readers who develop an interest in editing, to access a more user-friendly pathway to start contributing.
• View all 45 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where citation fetching from the large newspaper archive Newspapers.com was no longer working, due to a block in Citoid requests, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• 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 19:24, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 March 2026

• News and notes: Entirety of Wikinews to be shut down
  All languages to be shut down in May; first AI agent blocked; new name for AfD?

• In the media: AI ban, newspapers disrupt archiving; and antisemitism complaints
  Perennial challenges with AI, demographic representation, and attacks from people buying media influence.

• Community view: Videos from WikiConference North America 2025 in NYC
  In attendees' own words.

• Disinformation report: Cleaning up after Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Nygard, and Mohamed Al-Fayed
  Countering the edits of the rich and dangerous.

• WikiConference report: WikiConference North America 2025 in NYC review
  About the conference series, and this conference particularly.

• Obituary: Dr. Subas Chandra Rout
  Rest in peace.

• Traffic report: Call in the dogs of war, soldier of fortune
  Though of course the picture needs to be Chuck Norris...

• Gallery: Canadian Rangers participate in Operation Enduring Encyclopedia
  Analogies between how Wikipedia works and how Canada works.

• Comix: n00bsitting
  ...!

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:06, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

Notice

Hi Sohom, here is the notice the AN/I page asks be given on your talk page, I am posting there about your interactions on my request in a few minutes, not much just seeking an apology. Sswonk (talk) 14:13, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

The close you just did

Just wondering; was the close saying that it's specifically just an "essay", as in not an explanatory essay, or was it just saying there is consensus that it should be classed as some kind of an essay? ⹃Maltazarian ^{ᚾparley$\lor$investigateᛅ} 18:38, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

The latter, not the former Sohom (talk) 19:17, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – April 2026

News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2026).

Administrator changes

• ARandomName123

• Biblioworm
• Causa sui
• Djsasso
• Espresso Addict
• Fenix down
• Firefangledfeathers
• GeneralNotability
• NawlinWiki
• Northamerica1000
• Smalljim

Checkuser changes

Giraffer

Oversight changes

Kj cheetham

Giraffer

Guideline and policy news

• The content of Wikipedia:Writing articles with large language models has been updated following a request for comment. It now prohibits using LLMs to generate content, with exceptions for translation and copy-editing.

Arbitration

• Following a motion, the GSCASTE extended-confirmed restriction in the Indian military history case has been narrowed. It now applies to caste-related topics in South Asia, and the preemptive protection remedy has been amended accordingly.
• The arbitration case Pbsouthwood has been closed.
• The arbitration case Maghreb has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case will close on 7 April.

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• Discuss this newsletter
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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:19, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-15

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 CampaignEvents extension now includes a new group goal-setting feature, enabling organizers to set and track event goals such as the number of articles created and participating contributors in real time. Similarly, participants can work toward shared targets and see their collective impact as the event unfolds. The feature is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. Learn more in the documentation.
• The new watchlist labels feature (announced in Tech News 2026-07) is now available via VisualEditor, the source editor, and the 'watchstar' (or watch link, for skins that don't have a star icon). Previously it was only possible to assign labels via EditWatchlist. In all three places it is a new field following the expiry field.
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where talk pages on mobile with Parsoid are unusable after empty section headers, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The sub-referencing feature, which lets editors add details to an existing reference without duplicating it, will be gradually rolled out to more wikis later this year. Wikis using the Reference Tooltips gadget are encouraged to update their version (typically at MediaWiki:Gadget-ReferenceTooltips.js as shown here) to ensure compatibility. Other reference-related gadgets may also be affected.
• All Wikinews editions will be closed and switched to read-only mode on 4 May 2026. Content will remain accessible, but no new edits or articles can be added. This closure was approved by the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation following extended discussions. Read more.
• The Action API has had several formats for requested output. One of them, format=php, is being removed soon. Please ensure your scripts or bots use the JSON format. This removal should affect very few scripts and bots.
• The Special:NamespaceInfo page now includes namespace aliases. For example "WP" for the "Project" ("Wikipedia") namespace on the German Wikipedia.
• 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 16:17, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

Notification of administrators without tools

	Greetings, Sohom Datta. You are receiving this notification because you've agreed to consider endorsing prospective admin candidates identified by the process outlined at Administrators without tools. Recently, the following editor(s) received this distinction and the associated endearing title: MCE89
Thank you for supporting this effort. Your contributions are an integral part of overall success, and an example for others to follow. To stop receiving these notifications, remove your name from the list.

TolBot (talk) 21:01, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

Notification of administrators without tools

	Greetings, Sohom Datta. You are receiving this notification because you've agreed to consider endorsing prospective admin candidates identified by the process outlined at Administrators without tools. Recently, the following editor(s) received this distinction and the associated endearing title: Annh07
Thank you for supporting this effort. Your contributions are an integral part of overall success, and an example for others to follow. To stop receiving these notifications, remove your name from the list.

TolBot (talk) 21:00, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-16

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

• Experienced editors are invited to test the Article guidance feature, designed to help less-experienced editors create well-structured, policy-compliant Wikipedia articles. Testing instructions are available. Also, after reviewing the outlines, please provide feedback on the project talk page. Based on your input, the feature will be refined and transferred to the pilot Wikipedias to translate and adapt. Check out the video explaining the feature.

Updates for editors

• On most wikis, all autoconfirmed users can now use Special:ChangeContentModel page to create new pages with custom content models, such as mass message lists, making custom page formats more accessible. Check Special:ListGroupRights for the status of your wiki.
• The Growth team has launched an account creation experiment to evaluate whether adding an account creation button to the mobile web header increases new account registrations and encourages more mobile users to contribute to the wikis. The experiment is currently live on Hindi, Indonesian, Bengali, Thai, and Hebrew Wikipedia, and targets 10% of logged-out mobile web users.
• View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where VisualEditor could get stuck loading on Windows devices with animations turned off, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• Starting later this week, Edit filter managers who have the ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽ beta feature enabled will have CodeMirror instead of CodeEditor as the editor at Special:AbuseFilter. This is part of the broader effort to make the user experience more consistent across all editors.
• Tools and bots that access the Notifications API (action=query&meta=notifications) will need to update their OAuth or BotPassword grants to also include access to private notifications.
• Due to a library upgrade, listings on category pages may be displayed out of order starting on Monday, 20th April. A migration script will be run to correct this, and will take hours to days depending on the size of the wiki (up to a week for English Wikipedia).
• 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 15:17, 13 April 2026 (UTC)

WikiSignals

Hi!

I heard from Clovermoss that you had feedback about WikiSignals. I'm one of the developers and would be delighted to hear your feedback on how we can improve. Feel free to share on the project talk page.

Thank you for your time! Localmotion127 (talk) 14:29, 17 April 2026 (UTC)

@Localmotion127 I guess the question I have is "who/what are you building for". I was genuinely puzzled at the methodology y'all have chosen (i.e. say Tranco-metrics in the older version of the tool) and who y'all were targeting (my understanding is that the editor community isn't that interested in the Tranco-ranking of the site) ? I was playing around with the newer version and I'm still very much struggling to understand what these scores actually mean and how I should interpret them/how they can be significant to say WP:NPP folks or even other content creators. Sohom (talk) 01:09, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

Good question. We envisioned two use cases to start: Wiki editors wanting to know whether a source that they plan to cite could be considered as reliable, and Wiki editors examining citations already in a Wiki article to determine their reliability.

From personal experience, if I find a source I've never heard of before, I want to learn more about it. I would want to know, for example, if it's in lists of sources known to be unreliable (such as from the Perennial Sources list or Media Bias Fact Check), or how popular that source is, or when its website was registered. But I would need to do several separate searches to get this info, so it would be nice to have it all in one place. This is what WikiSignals is meant to be, an OSINT aggregator of publicly-available info about sources.

Regarding Tranco, we chose it as an open source alternative to the now-deprecated Alexa for measuring web traffic. How useful it would be depends on the situation. A spam source that's impersonating a well-known reliable source could be registered very recently and have low web traffic. These data points strongly hurt that source's credibility. On the other hand, Facebook is over two decades old and highly popular, but neither of those points are enough for it to be a reliable source.

I'm not too familiar with WP:NPP, so I'll hold off on making a usability judgment for now.

To your point, we can definitely revise the intro/methodology to make this all more clear. Hope this is helpful, and if there's anything else we can clarify, feel free to let us know anytime! Localmotion127 (talk) 12:35, 24 April 2026 (UTC)

@Sohom Datta, I'm another WikiSignal-er, your questions are helpful. We are building it, at first, to help Wikipedia editors evaluate reference reliability. But soon we expect it will be used by mis-disinfo researchers (as have our other projects, from which WikiSignals grew), and by journalists and the public. Our data is freely available as HTML pages and JSON via a REST API.

We have info on 70K+ domains, broken down into two general categories: domain data (e.g., Tranco, Wayback Machine captures, registration date, etc.) and credibility indicators (e.g., from ratings agencies and Wikimedia RSP/Spam/Fake-news lists). The former, like Tranco, do not factor into cred-estimates, but are still informative for users. The latter we use to estimate domain-level source credibility, the scoring of which we are just starting to dev, and is as yet undocumented. (Thus your struggle to understand: We apologize, docs coming soon.)

The original cred-scores come from Media Bias/Fact Check and Domain Quality. But we now have other enough data to generate our own WikiSignal score, via weighted averages of all a domain's cred-signals, including new ones like press-associations and inclusion in vetted media indices, which we can statistically demonstrate are accurate cred-signals. That's where we are now. Please continue to quiz and question us. Hearvox (talk) 20:05, 23 April 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-17

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

• After two years of development, ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽, also known as CodeMirror 6, is to be promoted out of beta on Tuesday, April 21. It brings better code and wikitext readability, reduction in typing errors, and other benefits to all users of the standard syntax highlighter. A huge thank you to volunteer Bhsd who developed many of the new features, including code folding, autocompletion, and linting.
• A major update to the Wikipedia app for iOS is now rolling out, redesigning the interface to align with Apple's latest "Liquid Glass" visual design. Download the latest version and explore the update.

Updates for editors

• Reading lists is a feature which allows readers to save articles to a list for reading later. This feature is now in beta on Arabic, French, Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Chinese Wikipedias and by default for all new accounts on all Wikipedias.
• An experiment which explores extending Page Previews to mobile web will be launched in the week of April 20 on Arabic, English, French, Italian, Polish, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. Page Previews are pop-ups that display a thumbnail, lead paragraph, and a link to open the full article of a blue link, thereby improving content discovery. The feature is already available on desktop and in the apps. Read more about this experiment and others.
• On several wikis, logged-in editors who haven't confirmed their email addresses can now see a banner encouraging them to do so. Having the email address confirmed allows a user to restore access to the account if they lose it. Learn more.
• View all 15 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where editing very large wiki pages in the 2017 wikitext editor caused slow loading, preview and scrolling lag, and performance issues when selecting, cutting, or pasting content, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• As part of the promotion of CodeMirror from a beta feature, all users will use CodeMirror instead of CodeEditor for syntax highlighting when editing JavaScript, CSS, JSON, Vue and Lua content pages.
• The mirrors.wikimedia.org service for Debian and Ubuntu users will sunset and stop working on May 15. The resources for the service will be replaced with new and better options. Some users may need to switch to a different server which should take about a minute. You can read more.
• The image and oldimage table will be removed from wikireplicas. If your tools or queries access image or oldimage directly, please update them to use the file and filerevision table before 28 May.
• Following the recent implementation of global API rate limits on unidentified traffic, the Wikimedia Foundation will continue efforts to ensure fair use of infrastructure by applying global limits to identified API traffic beginning the last week of April. These limits are intentionally set as high as possible to minimise impact on the community. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits and Frequently Asked Questions.
• The Attribution API is now available as a beta. The API fetches information for crediting Wikimedia articles and media files wherever they are used. Reference documentation is available through the REST Sandbox special page available on all Wikimedia wikis (such as the REST sandbox on English Wikipedia). Share your feedback on the project talk page.
• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 14:59, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

April thanks

story · music · places

Thank you for improving article quality in April! -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:18, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

Not a lot but Tray Wellington might be a interesting read for you! Sohom (talk) 16:48, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

Yes, it is, thank you! - Today's story is about one of three bios I brought to today's main page: look and listen, an extraordinary woman in many respects. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:58, 30 April 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 21 April 2026

• News and notes: Six Serbian Wikipedia editors banned following controversy about political bias
  Plus, new bans for AI-generated content in place, a new drop in active admins, pranks on pranks, May admin election, and other news from the Wikimedia world.

• In the media: Could Wikipedia be involved in Massachusetts' proposed social media ban for minors?
  Another regulate-the-internet attempt casts a wide net.

• Gallery: March equinox
  The progression of seasons in March.

• Traffic report: Time to change my galaxy in case, we outta space!
  What catches the reader's eye? Death and film, per usual, and a loop around the moon per unusual.

• Comix: Of skirts and articles
  When significant coverage is only skin deep.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:48, 21 April 2026 (UTC)

May 2026 Administrator Elections – Schedule

• The May 2026 administrator elections are set to proceed.
• We plan to use the following schedule:
  • April 29–May 5: Candidate sign-up
  • May 8–May 12: Discussion phase
  • May 13–May 19: SecurePoll voting phase
• If you have any questions, concerns, or thoughts before we get started, please ask at Wikipedia talk:Administrator elections.

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:04, 22 April 2026 (UTC)

Notification of administrators without tools

	Greetings, Sohom Datta. You are receiving this notification because you've agreed to consider endorsing prospective admin candidates identified by the process outlined at Administrators without tools. Recently, the following editor(s) received this distinction and the associated endearing title: Blue-Sonnet
Thank you for supporting this effort. Your contributions are an integral part of overall success, and an example for others to follow. To stop receiving these notifications, remove your name from the list.

TolBot (talk) 21:00, 24 April 2026 (UTC)

Notification of administrators without tools

	Greetings, Sohom Datta. You are receiving this notification because you've agreed to consider endorsing prospective admin candidates identified by the process outlined at Administrators without tools. Recently, the following editor(s) received this distinction and the associated endearing title: Blue-Sonnet
Thank you for supporting this effort. Your contributions are an integral part of overall success, and an example for others to follow. To stop receiving these notifications, remove your name from the list.

TolBot (talk) 21:00, 25 April 2026 (UTC)

Notification of administrators without tools

	Greetings, Sohom Datta. You are receiving this notification because you've agreed to consider endorsing prospective admin candidates identified by the process outlined at Administrators without tools. Recently, the following editor(s) received this distinction and the associated endearing title: Gnomingstuff
Thank you for supporting this effort. Your contributions are an integral part of overall success, and an example for others to follow. To stop receiving these notifications, remove your name from the list.

TolBot (talk) 21:00, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

Good Article Gazette, Issue 13

Logo: Good Article Gazette - the official GAN newsletter

Issue 13, 27 April 2026

Ongoing discussions	News	Current statistics
Proposed topic split Election consequences criticized as WP:COATRACK 41 likely LLM-generated GAs	The Good Article Gazette is back after a two month break!	Number of GAs: 43,784 (+338) Number of nominations: 951 (+110) GAs for reassessment: 64 (+18)

• Subscribe to the newsletter
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:00, 27 April 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-18

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

• There is a change in how new users are autoconfirmed that will improve anti-vandalism protection. Currently, users who have had an account for a few days and made a few edits are automatically added to the Autoconfirmed users group. This configuration tends to be exploited by some vandals, who create accounts and start to use them only after some time. To mitigate this, the configuration will be updated next week so that – for the purpose of becoming autoconfirmed – the account age will be counted from their first edit, instead of registration date. The numeric value of the age threshold will remain the same. This change will be deployed only to wikis which require at least one edit as part of the autoconfirmation conditions.
• All Wikipedia users with new accounts and those who activated the "automatically enable most beta features" option in their preference can now use the reading lists beta feature to save articles for later reading. This helps organize reading interests in one place for convenient access.
• View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where infobox images have huge padding in Firefox, has been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• As a reminder, the global API rate limits will be applied this week to identified API traffic. This is to help ensure fair use of infrastructure. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, including the actual rate limits, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits and Frequently Asked Questions.
• 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 18:04, 27 April 2026 (UTC)

May 2026 Administrator Election – Call for Candidates

The administrator elections process has officially started! Interested editors are encouraged to self-nominate or arrange to be nominated by reviewing the instructions at Wikipedia:Administrator elections/May 2026/Candidates.

Here is the schedule:

• April 29 – May 5: Call for candidates
• May 8–12: Discussion phase
• May 13–19: SecurePoll voting phase

Please note the following:

• The requirements to run are identical to RFA—a prospective candidate must be extended confirmed.
• Prospective candidates are advised to become familiar with the community's expectations of administrators, which are much higher than the minimum requirement of having extended confirmed status. This includes reviewing successful and unsuccessful RFAs, reading the essay Wikipedia:Advice for admin elections candidates, and possibly requesting an optional poll on their chances of passing.
• The process will have a seven day call for candidates phase, a two day pause, a five day discussion phase, and a seven day private vote using SecurePoll. Discussion and questions are only allowed on the candidate pages during the discussion phase.
• The outcome of this process is identical to making a request for adminship. There is no official difference between an administrator appointed through RFA versus administrator elections.
• Administrator elections are also a valid means of regaining adminship for de-sysopped editors.

Ask any questions about the process at the talk page. Later, a user talk message will be sent to official candidates with additional information about the process.

If you are interested in the process, please make sure to watchlist the appropriate pages. A watchlist notice will be added when the discussion phase opens, and again when the voting phase opens.

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:31, 29 April 2026 (UTC)

New pages patrol May 2026 Backlog drive

May 2026 Backlog Drive | New pages patrol
On 1 May 2026, a one-month backlog drive for New Page Patrol will begin. Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles patrolled. Barnstars will also be granted for re-reviewing articles previously reviewed by other patrollers during the drive. Each review will earn 1 point. Interested in taking part? Sign up here.
You're receiving this message because you are a new page patroller. To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:24, 29 April 2026 (UTC)

WikiCup 2026 May newsletter

The second round of the 2026 WikiCup ended on 28 April. As a reminder for contestants who just joined or are unaware of recent changes to our round-points system, good article nomination reviews now receive 10 points, an increase from 5 points in the previous year, as per a consensus at WT:CUP. Peer reviews, which continue to be worth 5 points, are now listed in the same section as featured article candidate reviews, rather than with good article reviews. Everyone who competed in round 2 will advance to round 3 unless they have withdrawn or been banned. No other changes to the round-point system have been made for this year.

Round 2 was competitive. Three contestants scored more than 1,000 round points; nine scored over 500; and fourteen scored over 300. The top seven contestants had at least one featured article (two of them with two apiece). The following competitors scored more than 800 round points:

• MCE89 (submissions) with 1,333 points, mainly from good and featured articles about Australian people and geography
• Generalissima (submissions) with 1,169 points, mainly from good and featured articles related to shipping ethics controversy in fanfiction, waterways, and Gu Yanwu
• Bgsu98 (submissions) with 1,149 points, mainly from good articles, featured articles, and featured lists about figure skating, along with many article reviews and two good topics
• Olliefant (submissions) with 830 points, mainly from good and featured articles about television shows, episodes and media, along with nearly four dozen good and featured article reviews
• Gommeh (submissions) with 827 points, mainly from good and featured articles related to Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail

The full scores for round 2 can be seen here. During this round, contestants have claimed 12 featured articles, 13 featured lists, 2 featured-topic articles, 106 good articles, 22 good-topic articles and more than 40 Did You Know articles. In addition, competitors have worked on 3 In the News articles, and they have conducted over 200 reviews. The tournament points table has been updated.

Remember that any content promoted after 28 April but before the start of Round 3 can be claimed in Round 3. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. If you want to help out with the WikiCup, feel free to review one of the nominations listed on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:49, 29 April 2026 (UTC)

Case Closed

Hi @Sohom Datta:, thank you for taking the time to look at my case. I strongly suspect those accounts are sockpuppetry or meatpuppetry, but I see that I didnt properly submitted the case. It was my first case ever. Would it be appropriate to open another one? Thank you! diff RevivedCicero (talk) 03:19, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

@RevivedCicero You submitted diffs from 2007 and compared them to behavior in 2026, 20 years later. Also, only one of the edits are from the person you accused every other edit is from a different editor who does not appear to be related? Sohom (talk) 03:58, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

@Sohom Datta Yeah, I see. I did it wrong. Thanks for your time! RevivedCicero (talk) 05:34, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

Hi @Sohom Datta:, I appreciate you work but I have clearly explained it to you several times that there is no AI invloved in my submission. I am not quite sure why do you keep insisting that it is AI generated? I know that this is my first submission and it might not be perfect but I guaranty you that there is no AI involved in it. All you do is copy the link, paste, and put it in the brackets [(paste the link)diff] give the explanation, evidence, so why would I need AI to do that? It might not be perfect because it is my first submission, and I use my Iphone to do that, but it is not AI generated.

I will work on the weekend to respond to the submission, so please keep it on hold if you do not mind. Thanks! RevivedCicero (talk) 03:54, 12 May 2026 (UTC)

@RevivedCicero: I don't think either me or @Vanjagenije have any problems with waiting. My justification in the SPI was purely in relation to why I at that time thought it was AI. While I'm willing to concede that it might not be AI, as I've said in the SPI, I'm skeptical that there is anything significant here, since based on a cursory look the report appeared to be a extension of this dispute thread where you were already told that your suspicions didn't make sense. However, I'm willing to WP:AGF and let you have a week to figure your way out here and provide evidence to the contrary/disprove me and actually prove a association here. Sohom (talk) 04:39, 12 May 2026 (UTC)

Turns out I did not actually say what I was skeptical about in my SPI comment, so apologies on not being clear enough, but per above, what I meant to say in the SPI was: It is possible that there was no actual AI involved and this is just an artifact of a newbie being newbie but I [still] am sceptical [of the filing]. [sic] Sohom (talk) 04:45, 12 May 2026 (UTC)

spihelper user agent

Hi,

re: this edit, the syntax is new mw.Api({userAgent: 'GNs SPIHelper userscript'}). Passing a string won't break the script (since a string is a kind of object, so it will more or less be interpreted as new mw.Api({})) but won't do anything useful either. Tgr (WMF) (talk) 11:16, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

{{fixed}}, thanks for raising this! Sohom (talk) 13:59, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – May 2026

News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2026).

Administrator changes

• Deepfriedokra

• EvanProdromou
• Wouterstomp

Interface administrator changes

L235

Chaotic Enby

CheckUser changes

• TheresNoTime
• Versageek

Oversight changes

Moneytrees

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

• Changes to user permissions made from Meta are now included in the local user permissions log (T6055).
• The autoconfirmed user group will soon be modified such that the four-day account age requirement begins when an account makes its first edit (T418484).

Arbitration

• The arbitration case SchroCat has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case closed on 15 April.
• Per a recent motion, appeals of blocks from the conflict-of-interest VRT queue are, by default, appealed on-wiki through the normal unblock process. However, they may be heard by the Committee if COIVRTers disagree on the interpretation of the evidence or believe ArbCom would be better suited to hear the appeal. Administrators are also advised that loosening or lifting such blocks without the consent of someone with access to the queue or ArbCom can be grounds for desysopping.
• Per a recent motion, restrictions issued directly by the Committee may now be enforced with blocks which work exactly like contentious topic blocks.
• The arbitration case Maghreb has been closed.

Miscellaneous

• The May 2026 administrator elections are scheduled to run from April 29 to May 19. The call for candidates ends May 5.
• The 2026 Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) election is scheduled to run from April 25 to June 1. Candidacy submissions close on May 10.
• A new noticeboard for non-urgent, batch page protection requests has been created, primarily for the enforcement of contentious topic restrictions.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:30, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-19

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 Article guidance team invites experienced editors of pilot Wikipedias—Arabic, Bangla, Japanese, Portuguese, Persian, Turkish, Simple English, Spanish, and French—to help translate and adapt sample outlines. These outlines will guide editors in creating clear, well-structured, and policy-compliant articles when using the feature once it is launched in May 2026. Simple instructions on how to translate and adapt the outlines are available.

Updates for editors

• The Product and Technology Advisory Council has published draft recommendations on a model that affiliates can follow when contributing to the technical space. Community members are invited to provide feedback on the recommendation until May 8th on the talk page.
• The number of available thumbnail size preferences in MediaWiki is being reduced to three standardized options—Small (180px), Regular (250px), and Large (400px), as part of ongoing efforts to improve performance and reduce strain on thumbnail services. As a result, existing preferences will be mapped to the nearest new size (for example, smaller selections like 120px or 150px will render at 180px, while larger ones like 300px or 360px will render at 400px). The preferences interface will soon be updated to reflect these changes, and users who wish to opt out or provide feedback can do so.
• From now on, even when a permission expires automatically, users will receive an Echo notification similar to the standard notification for permission changes. There is a difference between this and Global reminder bot in that the latter reminds users a week before the rights are due to expire, so that they can renew the rights.
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the problem where the ULS language selector in Special:Translate would scroll vertically when it shouldn't, has been resolved. Previously, when users opened the "Translate to English" dropdown and typed certain inputs, the dialog would scroll vertically by a few pixels even when there was enough space to display all results. The dropdown no longer shifts unnecessarily when filtering languages.
• The Global Watchlist, which lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on a single page, continues to improve. For example, watchlists for Wikibase sites such as Wikidata now support EntitySchema elements for better tracking. The Live Updates mode now refreshes the special page every 60 seconds to comply with the updated global API rate limits for improved real-time responsiveness. Additionally, a directionality bug that displayed links as "changes 3" instead of "3 changes" in mixed-direction lists has been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The second phase of global API rate limits has been rolled out to reduce the impact of AI crawlers and ensure fair, sustainable access to Wikimedia resources, prioritising human and mission-aligned traffic. Limits have been shifted from per-hour to per-minute, producing smoother traffic patterns and more predictable API load. Community users are not expected to be affected, and no action is required. Early indications show some User-Agent-based requestors are adjusting behaviour, and around 64% of automated API traffic has been identified. Monitoring continues, and Wikimedia Enterprise remains available for commercial support.
• 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 20:42, 4 May 2026 (UTC)

Request to reconsider partial block (User:Ramb70)

Hello Sohom, I am writing this to apologize for the use of LLM/AI tools in my previous edits. I am a student and a new editor on Wikipedia, and I honestly did not realize that using AI-generated text was against the community's policies.

I have spent the last few days learning how to find reliable independent sources manually. I have found multiple news reports from Dainik Jagran, Dainik Bhaskar, and Zee News for my draft on "Brihaspati Dham, Jaipur". I am committed to writing all my future contributions in my own words and following the Manual of Style.

Could you please consider lifting the partial block? I would like to show that I can be a constructive editor without using AI. Thank you for your time and guidance. Ramb70 (talk) 16:54, 5 May 2026 (UTC)

ccing what I've said on your talk page: You can improve drafts without a unblock. My position here is that you need to show a positive track record to be unblocked. I do not see that in your current draft submission -- Sohom (talk) 23:09, 5 May 2026 (UTC)

I understand your point. I have just submitted the draft with significant improvements to demonstrate my commitment to the platform's standards. Please review it whenever you have a moment. Ramb70 (talk) 04:49, 8 May 2026 (UTC)

I understand your point. I have just submitted the draft with significant improvements to demonstrate my commitment to the platform's standards. Please review it whenever you have a moment. Ramb70 (talk) 15:51, 9 May 2026 (UTC)

May 2026 Administrator Elections – Discussion Phase

The discussion phase of the May 2026 administrator elections is officially open. As a reminder, the schedule of the election is:

• May 8–12: Discussion phase (we are here)
• May 13–19: SecurePoll voting phase
• Scrutineering phase

We are currently in the discussion phase. The candidate subpages are open to questions and comments from everyone, in the same style as a request for adminship. You may discuss the candidates at Wikipedia:Administrator elections/May 2026/Discussion phase.

On 13 May, we will start the voting phase. The candidate subpages will close to public questions and discussion, and everyone will have a week to use the SecurePoll software to vote, which uses a secret ballot. You can see who voted, but not who they voted for.

Any questions or issues can be asked on the election talk page. Thank you for your participation. Happy electing.

You're receiving this message because you signed up for the mailing list. To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself from the list.

-- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:22, 8 May 2026 (UTC)

PROD in PageTriageUserspaceLogger

Hi Sohom, this came up again today and it's possible you missed the question as it's on a subpage: User talk:Sohom Datta/PageTriageUserspaceLogger#PROD logged to XfD log ClaudineChionh (she/her · talk · email · global) 07:21, 11 May 2026 (UTC)

I will take a look, I know the last time I took a look at this, my reaction was "PageTriage itself has a race condition somewhere" in which case, it's time to open a ticket. Sohom (talk) 09:58, 11 May 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-20

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

• Community Tech has published new guidance explaining how wishes on Community Wishlist are triaged and prioritized. The documentation is intended to help contributors write stronger proposals by clarifying the factors that influence prioritization decisions. Beyond vote counts, the guidance highlights considerations such as potential impact on the community when determining which wishes move forward.

Updates for editors

• The Reader Growth team is launching an experiment to test a new Share Card feature that allows readers to create visually engaging cards from Wikipedia articles or selected article sections and share them online, with each card linking back to the original article to help expand readership and article discovery. The mobile-only A/B test will be available to a portion of readers on Arabic, Chinese, French, Vietnamese, and English Wikipedia to better understand reading and sharing habits, and is scheduled to begin the week of May 18 and run for four weeks.
• The Android and iOS Wikipedia apps recently released the 25-day reading challenge into Beta, as part of efforts to drive reader engagement by encouraging users to complete reading milestones. To track their reading streak during the challenge, App users can add a widget featuring Baby Globe to their home screen. The challenge officially begins May 11.
• View all 17 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the global preference for enabling syntax highlighting in wikitext could unexpectedly disable itself after being turned on, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The ResourceLoader module mediawiki.ui.input, deprecated since September 2023, will be removed this week. There is a guide for migrating from MediaWiki UI to Codex for any tools that use it.
• 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 19:19, 11 May 2026 (UTC)

May 2026 Administrator Elections – Voting Phase

The voting phase of the May 2026 administrator elections has started and will continue until 19 May 2026 at 23:59 UTC. You can participate in the voting phase at Wikipedia:Administrator elections/May 2026/Voting phase.

As a reminder, the schedule of the election is:

• May 13–19: SecurePoll voting phase (we are here)
• Scrutineering phase

In the voting phase, the candidate subpages close to public questions and discussion, and everyone who qualifies to vote has a week to use the SecurePoll software to vote, which uses a secret ballot. You can see who voted, but not who they voted for. Please note that the vote totals cannot be made public until after voting has ended and as such, it will not be possible for you to see an individual candidate's vote total during the election. The suffrage requirements are similar to those at RFA.

Once voting concludes, we will begin the scrutineering phase, which will last for a few days, perhaps longer. Once everything is certified, the results will be posted on the results page (this is a good page to watchlist), and transcluded to the main election page. In order to be granted adminship, a non-recall candidate must have received at least 70.0% support, calculated as Support / (Support + Oppose), and a minimum of 20 support votes. Recall candidates must achieve 55.0% support. Because this is a vote and not a consensus, there are no bureaucrat discussions ("crat chats").

Any questions or issues can be asked on the election talk page. Thank you for your participation. Happy electing.

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:11, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

New Page Patrol Newsletter - May 2026

Hello Sohom Datta,

New Page Review queue November 2025 - May 2026

Backlog update

At the time of this message, there are 15,282 articles and 32,951 redirects awaiting review.

After the January–February drive the article backlog was reduced to 15,179 articles and the redirect backlog to 19,053 respectively. Great job! However, both queues are growing rapidly and any additional reviews are highly appreciated.

2024 and 2025 NPP Awards

JTtheOG was selected as the NPP reviewer of the year for both 2024 and 2025, for reviewing the most articles amongst all reviewers.

Hey man im josh and MPGuy2824 won the Redirect Ninja Master Award for 2024 and 2025 respectively, for reviewing the most redirects.

Overall in 2024, one Platinum, two Gold, eight Silver, 12 Bronze and 45 Iron Barnstars were awarded. Additionally, 66 reviewers got the NPP barnstar for doing more than 100 reviews through the year. In 2025, one Platinum, ten Silver, 13 Bronze and 38 Iron Barnstars were awarded. Additionally, 38 reviewers got the NPP barnstar for doing more than 100 reviews through the year.

BoyTheKingCanDance, Rosiestep, SunDawn, and Vanderwaalforces were inducted into the NPP Hall of Fame for having two separate years of 2,000+ article reviews.

January–February backlog drive

The experimental two-month long backlog drive concluded with 183 reviewers patrolling over 27,761 articles and 35,309 redirects, earning over 36,836 points. Congratulations to JTtheOG, who achieved first place with 6,484.6 points in this drive.

May backlog drive

An article-only backlog drive is currently underway. We are hoping to make a big dent in the backlog. You can read more about it or join at Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Backlog drives/May 2026.

PageTriage

An attempt was made to get the New Pages Feed to sort by date marked as reviewed instead of date created. However we had to revert it due to bugs. We may try again in the future. You can subscribe to the Phabricator ticket if you're interested in following along.

Reminders:

• You can access live chat with patrollers on the New Page Patrol Discord.
• Consider adding the project discussion page to your watchlist.
• To opt out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:38, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

DYK for Tray Wellington

On 17 May 2026, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Tray Wellington, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that Tray Wellington was a part of the black reclamation of banjo music? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Tray Wellington. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, Tray Wellington), and the hook may be added to the statistics page after its run on the Main Page has completed. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to nominate it.

Cwmhiraeth (talk) 00:02, 17 May 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-21

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 Abstract Wikipedia team has identified five potential pilot wikis to assess their interest in adopting abstract articles on their wikis. The pilots are Malayalam, Bengali, Dagbani, Arabic, and Indonesian Wikipedia. The feedback period will be open until May 22. If your community is interested in becoming a pilot, let us know on Meta.

Updates for editors

• An experiment to show Reading Lists to logged-out readers on mobile web will launch on May 18 across German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, and Urdu Wikipedias, and will run for one month. The effort supports broader goals of helping readers save and organize articles for later reading, while encouraging habits that could lead to future Wikipedia contributions.
• To support a bookmark button in the Reading List beta feature, the "Tools > Action" menu has been updated to display icons, including the watch star indicator that helps editors identify temporarily watched articles. The icons now also match those used on mobile, improving consistency across platforms. The change is currently limited to the actions menu and mainly affects editors with privileged user rights.
• Suggestion Mode was released as an A/B test for newcomer editors on the mobile website at ~15 Wikipedias. The experiment will measure the impact that Suggestion Mode has on the proportion of newcomer mobile web edit sessions that result in constructive (un-reverted) article edits. The experiment will also evaluate the feature's impact on editor retention, and monitor changes in revert and block rates.
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue in the Wikipedia Android app where images could sometimes fail to load after opening a recommended reading list notification, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The Wikidata Platform team has published its backend replacement recommendation and accompanying technical architecture for the migration of the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) away from Blazegraph. Feedback is invited until May 25th 2026, especially on potential gaps and impacts on advanced use cases. Wikidata community members and WDQS users are also encouraged to help identify high-impact tools and workflows that may need attention on this page. Feedback can be shared on the Migration talk page or during the next office hour. See the WDP team newsletter for more details.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• On English, French, Japanese, and a few other Wikipedias, there was a trial of hCaptcha, a third-party bot detection service. The trial showed that hCaptcha effectively detects and deters some bad-faith automated activity, on its own and by giving checkusers and stewards signals to look into. Because the results were positive, hCaptcha will be rolled out across all wikis over the next few weeks. See the hCaptcha project page for technical information about the implementation and privacy protections. Learn more.
• The latest Community Tech update is now available, with progress across several Community Wishlist initiatives, including Reading Lists expansion from the mobile app to the website, new language support for "Who Wrote That" and the Personal Dashboard, improvements to 3D rendering and Charts, and upcoming work on talk page sorting, audio playback, and editing workflows. The update also shares current priorities, wishlist status trends, and opportunities for community feedback on future focus areas and the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2026–2027 Annual Plan. Read the full newsletter for details.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:20, 18 May 2026 (UTC)

Notification of administrators without tools

	Greetings, Sohom Datta. You are receiving this notification because you've agreed to consider endorsing prospective admin candidates identified by the process outlined at Administrators without tools. Recently, the following editor(s) received this distinction and the associated endearing title: Staraction
Thank you for supporting this effort. Your contributions are an integral part of overall success, and an example for others to follow. To stop receiving these notifications, remove your name from the list.

TolBot (talk) 21:00, 18 May 2026 (UTC)

Good Article Gazette, Issue 14

Logo: Good Article Gazette - the official GAN newsletter

Issue 14, 18 May 2026

Ongoing discussions	News	Current statistics
LLM-generated GAs at GAR Old reviews that need a second opinion	The next GAN backlog drive will be held in June and will be co-ordinated by four editors. It will be mainly targeted towards those who are new to reviewing.	Number of GAs: 43,883 (+99) Number of nominations: 980 (+29) GAs for reassessment: 74 (+10)

• Subscribe to the newsletter
• Review an article!
• Participate in review circles
• Acquire a mentor

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:56, 18 May 2026 (UTC)

May thanks

story · music · places

Thank you for improving article quality in May! - Today: Felicity Lott. If you have little time, just give me a click ;) - If you have more, see her story. If you have more, listen to her singing Friendly Vision. If you have more, listen until she sings the word "peace" (Frieden), floating up high, serenely. -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:56, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 22 May 2026

• News and notes: Offline: Osama Khalid still in prison
  He has been imprisoned since 2020 for his Wikipedia edits. A fresh campaign is calling for his release.

• In the media: Indonesian editors, you shall return!
  And lawspam, may you be away.

• Disinformation report: Who is a typical paid editor? Who are their typical clients?
  Remember the golden rule!

• Recent research: WikiLambda the Ultimate
  Does Abstract Wikipedia help fight "One ring to rule them all" solutions for knowledge access - or does it implement one itself?

• Traffic report: This is where I'll be, so heavenly, so come and dance with me Michael!
  A real off the wall thriller, invincible, can't beat it, or is it dangerous and just bad?

• Forum: WikiAnnotate: help us build a dataset of article quality evaluations
  A research project to build better automated article assessment tools.

• In focus: Demystifying the 2026-27 Annual Plan
  A guide to WMF's Tech Annual Plan for the next year.

• Opinion: Wikipedia isn't a battleground. So why does it feel like one?
  Do we really have to fight?

• Serendipity: Wikinews: Into the Wikiverse
  The early suggestions for what the wiki could have been.

• Special report: Wikimedia Foundation closes Wikinews after 21 years
  Displaces 700 active editors among 31 language editions.

• Community view: Wikipedia's traffic drop: more on languages and freshness
  Which topics are dropping, and is the pattern the same everywhere?

• Gallery: Earth Day and Mother's Day
  Earth Day was on 22 April, and Mother's Day was on 10 May (in the US and many other countries).

• Comix: Brother, can you spare a page?
  What would you say?

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:17, 22 May 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-22

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

• Following a successful account creation experiment, an improved logged-out edit warning message will be deployed to all Wikimedia wikis in the first week of June. The change will only affect logged-out users on mobile web who open an editing session. The updated experience is designed to encourage account creation more clearly, while still allowing users to edit with temporary accounts. Results from the experiment showed a significant increase in account creation, with a 27% relative lift among users shown the updated message. As expected, as more people funnel into account creation, temporary accounts decreased by a relative 16%. The experiment did not show any significant changes in constructive edit rates or other monitored contributor metrics.

Updates for editors

• For security reasons, members of certain user groups are required to have two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled. Members of these groups will be unable to disable the last 2FA method on their account, and it will be impossible to add users without 2FA to these groups. Users will still be able to add new authentication methods or remove them, as long as at least one method is continuously enabled. In the next few weeks, users without 2FA will be removed from these groups. Notably, this applies to bureaucrats. See the linked tasks for deployment schedules.
• WMDE Technical Wishes will run an A/B test on 10 wikis, testing potential improvements for Reference Previews. The experiment will run for ~2 weeks at the end of May / beginning of June and will affect 10% of desktop readers on the participating wikis.
• After two successful experiments, the Reader Growth team is rolling out an Image Browsing beta feature for all Wikipedias on mobile on May 25. This means that anyone who has all beta features on by default will start to see this feature, and others can check the box to turn it on in their preferences. The beta feature will include a carousel of all an article's images at the top of the article, with controls for editors to exclude images from the article's carousel or to exclude an article from the feature entirely.
• View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, three dimensional STL files were being rendered incorrectly by the media viewer 3D extension which is now fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The legacy CSS classes tleft and tright have been replaced with floatleft and floatright as the former do not work consistently across all MediaWiki platforms, notably mobile web and mobile apps. Projects relying on these classes are encouraged to review related usage and plan for migration. Please note that floatleft and floatright may also be deprecated in future, although there are currently no plans to do so. 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 21:51, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

June 2026 GAN Backlog Drive

Good article nominations | June 2026 Backlog Drive
June 2026 Backlog Drive: Do you want to become more experienced in the GA process? On 1 June, a one-month backlog drive for good article nominations will begin. Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles reviewed. Mentors are available, and new reviewers (<6 reviews) get bonus points! Interested in taking part? You can sign up here.
Other ways to participate: Join the conversations on our talk page.
You're receiving this message because you have participated in a good article review this year or participated in the previous backlog drive.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:59, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

Triple negative

Regarding this edit: I'm not quite sure, but I think you might have one negative too many in I do not think W205 is not a negative behavioral example in terms of collaboration. Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding your intent. isaacl (talk) 20:59, 28 May 2026 (UTC)

Yep, too many negatives (I think it is a good example). Sohom (talk) 21:03, 28 May 2026 (UTC)

Teamwork barnstar

Teamwork barnstar

For the impressive collective quantity of content in Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Archives/2026-05-22 generated by a large number of people for a single Signpost issue, and which was published on time. ↠Pine (✉) 04:31, 30 May 2026 (UTC)

Request

I would request you to take a look at SPI Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Rahil1610 which you handled earlier. This SPI has been languishing a while now. Thanks. Orientls (talk) 14:15, 31 May 2026 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – June 2026

News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2026).

Administrator changes

• Asukite
• Bobby Cohn
• Bonadea
• Ca
• Drm310
• Reconrabbit
• Sammi Brie

• Tamzin
• TonyBallioni

• Ezhiki
• Queen of Hearts

Bureaucrat changes

• WereSpielChequers

Guideline and policy news

• Following an RfC, the "persistent usage of large language models" has been included as a common reason for a block.

Technical news

• Mandatory 2FA for bureaucrats: Bureaucrats without two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled have already lost access to their advanced rights on 26 May. Those who do not enable 2FA may be automatically removed from the groups in mid-June 2026, and from that point onward, new members must have 2FA enabled before they can be added. (T423119, T423120)

Arbitration

• The arbitration case SchroCat has been closed.
• The arbitration case Michael Jackson has opened. Evidence submissions in this case closes on 1 June.

Miscellaneous

• Voting for the 2026 Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) election closes on 1 June.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:15, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

Good Article Gazette, Issue 15

Logo: Good Article Gazette - the official GAN newsletter

Issue 15, 1 June 2026

Ongoing discussions	News	Current statistics
Numerous source-to-text issues = QF? Resuming my project of organising the good article lists Lengthy articles	The GAN backlog drive is live! New and experienced reviewers are welcome.	Number of GAs: 43,915 (+32) Number of nominations: 1033 (+53) GAs for reassessment: 42 (–32)

• Subscribe to the newsletter
• Review an article!
• Participate in review circles
• Acquire a mentor

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:03, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-23

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 Reader Experience team is conducting an experiment to show the reading lists feature, which is still in development, to logged-out mobile readers to test whether it encourages account creation at a higher rate compared to the watchstar button. The experiment was launched on May 18th on German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, and Urdu wikis, and it will run for a month.
• The Wikimedia Apps team released Phase 1 of the redesigned Home Feed to the Android Beta app. The new Home Feed includes a refreshed "Community" tab and a personalized "For You" tab featuring daily updated reading recommendations. The redesign is part of a broader effort to improve content discovery and create more engaging learning experiences in the Wikipedia apps.
• View all 18 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where images could fail to load for some suggested edits on Special:Homepage, leaving the thumbnail stuck in a loading state, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• 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 21:07, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

DCWC call for coordinators

The Developing Countries WikiContest Gold Belt Buckle

Hey Sohom Datta, it's almost that time again! The Developing Countries WikiContest will be returning for its third year, and the coordinator team is looking for experienced content contributors willing to volunteer. The coordinators are responsible for keeping the contest running and its pages‍—‌including participants' submissions, the points leaderboard, and the list of eligible articles‍—‌updated.

If you would like to apply, please contact one of the coordinators; you may choose to do so privately if you wish: Arconning (talk · email), sawyer777 (talk · email), or TechnoSquirrel69 (talk · email). (To unsubscribe from these updates, remove yourself from this list.) Sent via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 22:25, 3 June 2026 (UTC)

You have been pruned from a list

Hi Sohom Datta! You're receiving this notification because you were previously listed at User:SodiumBot/mms test, but you haven't made any edits to the English Wikipedia in over 1 day.

Because of your inactivity, you have been removed from the list. If you would like to resubscribe, you can do so at any time by visiting User:SodiumBot/mms test.

Thank you!

(replacing Yapperbot) SodiumBot (botop|talk|contribs) 18:01, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-24

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

• Wikimedia Enterprise has increased the free usage limits for its API offerings. The monthly request limit for the On-demand API has increased from 5,000 to 50,000 requests, while the Snapshot API limit has increased from 15 to 30 requests per month. In addition, Structured Contents snapshots are now available for free accounts. These changes expand access to Wikimedia Enterprise data for developers, researchers, and organizations using Wikimedia content.

Updates for editors

• The refreshed Explore Feed, now called the Home Feed, is rolling out to 50% of users of the Wikipedia Android app. The Home Feed helps readers discover relevant content through two new tabs: Community and For You. The Community tab provides a scrollable feed of curated content and updates from the broader Wikimedia community and movement, while the For You tab offers a full-screen, swipeable experience that shows content tailored to a user's interests. The redesign is part of a broader effort to improve discovery and enhance the learning experience in the Wikipedia app.
• The Which came first? daily trivia game is now available in the beta version of the Wikipedia iOS app in English, German, French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Turkish. The game uses historical events from Wikipedia's "On This Day" content and challenges readers to guess which of two events happened first. The game was previously released on Android. Communities interested in making the game available in their languages can read the instructions and requirements.
• Sub-referencing, a new MediaWiki feature that allows editors to reuse references with different details, will begin rolling out to Wikimedia wikis following a successful pilot phase. Deployment will start on 8 June for most Group 1 wikis and French Wikipedia, with additional Wikipedia language editions receiving the feature over the coming months. Communities are encouraged to prepare by checking for untranslated Cite extension messages in their language and reviewing any use of Reference Tooltips, which may require updates to support the new functionality. Wikis using Reference Previews do not need to take any action. Communities may also wish to create the cite-tracking-category-ref-details tracking category as a hidden category using __HIDDENCAT__ (or a dedicated template), and connect it to the corresponding Wikidata item d:Q129764848.
• The Page Previews experiment on mobile web has concluded. The team decided not to roll out the feature after the results showed no statistically significant impact on reader retention, as the primary success metric was retention improvement. Page Previews, which are already available on desktop and in the apps, display a thumbnail, lead paragraph, and link to the full article when readers tap a blue link. The experiment tested this experience on mobile web across six Wikipedias.
• The user interface icon library will be updated later this week or next week. Most of the ~300 icons have been slightly refined and ~30 new icons have been added. These changes improve the icons to make them more consistent and comprehensible, and provide more visual balance when they are used in groups.
• The Universal Language Selector (ULS) interface in MediaWiki, which helps users select content in other languages, has been updated. The new version improves speed and accessibility, and users of Wikimedia projects can now pin languages for quicker language switching. The deployment to Wikimedia sites will happen gradually in the coming weeks. You can test it now as a beta feature by selecting beta features in your profile preferences and share your feedback on the project page.
• View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the Pageviews Analysis dashboard on pageviews.wmcloud.org stopped updating graph data in May 2026, affecting all users, has been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The function signature for mw.util.addPortletLink() has been simplified. Developers can now pass a configuration object instead of a list of positional parameters when creating portlet links. The previous function signature remains supported for backwards compatibility. For example, instead of: mw.util.addPortletLink('p-cactions', '#', 'Stub', 'ca-stubtag', 'Add a stub tag to this page'); use mw.util.addPortletLink('p-cactions', { href: '#', text: 'Stub', id: 'ca-stubtag', tooltip: 'Add a stub tag to this page' });. Script maintainers are encouraged to review existing uses of addPortletLink() and update them where appropriate. This change will be available on all wikis from 11 June. Thanks to community volunteer Gerges for contributing this improvement.
• Community Wishlist discussion: Product & Technology introduced changes meant to increase the number and complexity of wishes fulfilled, including the disbanding of the Community Tech team. They are engaging in discussions about a proposed direction for the wishlist from community members. Includes ways to structure annual voting, better tracking of wishes, removing focus areas, and staffing updates.
• 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 21:28, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

Why Block Until September

Why until September? Bit harsh for someone who didn’t know they couldn’t actually talk on their talk page. Also, I am unable to use my talk page even though I thought I was doing good, but now I’m fully blocked from it. I had to use an alternative account to ask why. I do not want a punishment following this. ~2026-34962-91 (talk) 16:29, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-25

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 Reader Growth team has launched an Image Browsing beta feature on the mobile web version of all Wikipedias. The feature shows an image carousel at the top of articles with 3 or more images. Editors can configure this feature with the following controls: to hide a specific image from a page, either use class=notpageimage excluding it from thumbnail previews, or class=noviewer excluding it from MediaViewer. The carousel can also be disabled from a page entirely, with the magic word __NOMEDIAVIEWERCAROUSEL__. To submit feedback or flag bugs, please visit the project page.
• Wikitables can now be sorted in descending order on the first click by adding data-sort-order="desc" to the header cell. Previously, by default, clicking a column header for the first time sorts it in ascending order. This addition to a Wikitable gives it more control and flexibility, while the default behavior for subsequent clicks remains unchanged.

Updates for editors

• The Article guidance feature is currently being tested with some editors creating new articles on the Simple English, French, and Turkish Wikipedias. The experiment will soon begin on the Arabic and Bangla Wikipedias as well. This feature gives editors community-curated guidance to help them create articles that follow community standards. Experienced editors can continue creating or adapting outlines for specific article types that are commonly created by less experienced contributors. The outlines guide less experienced editors in creating high-quality articles. A quick guide to markups used in outlines can be found on this page. Example outlines that can be adapted and instructions for how to adapt them are on this section of the project page.
• Wikis that wish to replace the "indefinitely" button in Special:Block for temporary accounts (for example, wikis that block temporary users only until account expiration) will be able to do so by creating MediaWiki:ipb-indefinite-expiry-temporary-account with the block duration they want.
• View all 41 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• By the end of June, a valid user-agent string will be required for automated dumps downloads from the dumps.wikimedia.org website. Automated requests that provide a generic or empty user-agent will be blocked. This extends enforcement of the long standing user-agent policy. Access to dumps through Wikimedia Cloud Services will not change.
• The roll out of global API rate limits is now complete, with limits enforced across all APIs and at the documented levels for all groups. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki remain exempt. All bots should continue to follow the documented best practices to avoid being rate limited.
• The API Portal wiki will be read only starting this week (June 15-18). The following week (June 22-25), all API Portal wiki URLs will redirect to Wikimedia APIs on mediawiki.org. Learn more on the project page.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• On June 17th at 6pm UTC the WMF will be holding Discord call focused on a code review. We've heard through the Developer Satisfaction Survey that volunteers are struggling with code review and we'd like to discuss these experiences with the goal of surfacing workable solutions. You can join the call via the Wikimedia Community Discord server.
• The Latin American Wikimedia Conference will host a regional hackathon that will bring together the Wikimedia movement’s technical community including developers, system administrators, data scientists, and users with extended rights. Interested technical contributors can apply for a scholarship to participate until June 21 at midnight (Bolivia time, UTC-4).
• Sign up for Wikimania Team Challenges to join this special event. The Team challenges will take place online and in person from July 21 to 22, before Wikimania conference. Everyone is welcome, regardless of skills or Wikimania registration. Teams will work on 10 important challenges supporting the Wikimedia community. For details, visit the Team Challenges page and register there. Registration closes on June 20th at 11pm UTC.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 16:47, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

The DCWC is back!

The Developing Countries WikiContest Gold Belt Buckle

Hey Sohom Datta, the Developing Countries WikiContest is back for a third year, and sign-ups are now open! The contest will run from 1 July to 30 September, and the objective remains the same: improve as many articles relating to developing countries as you can to help fight systemic bias on Wikipedia.

Thanks to everyone who answered the call for coordinators, and please welcome the new faces on the coordinator team: the 2024 Gold Belt Buckle winner Generalissima (talk · contribs); and the record-holder for most India-related submissions in 2024, Magentic Manifestations (talk · contribs)! Following feedback from last year, adjustments have been made to the scoring rules; discussion can be found on the contest talk page.

If you have any questions, please leave a message on the contest talk page or contact one of the coordinators: Arconning (talk · contribs), Generalissima (talk · contribs), Magentic Manifestations (talk · contribs), sawyer777 (talk · contribs), or TechnoSquirrel69 (talk · contribs). (To unsubscribe from these updates, remove yourself from this list. Sent via MediaWiki message delivery.) —TechnoSquirrel69 (talk) 16:00, 20 June 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 21 June 2026

• From the editors: Ways for beginners to support The Signpost community journalism
  Pointing the way to your contribution to The Signpost!

• News and notes: Community Tech development team disbanded
  And English Wikipedia reaches a milestone in number of highly active editors.

• Disinformation report: PR for the people?
  Or, "PR using PR for PR"?

• Recent research: Proposed tagging system for AI involvement; successful and unsuccessful AI tools for contributors
  And other new research publications.

• In the media: Who won a 14th century battle and who won the 2026 Iran war?
  Media take issue with portrayals of recent and medieval history on Wikipedia. Plus a team supporting Wikipedians gets dissolved, and a few other things.

• Community view: Putting the Wish into the Wishlist
  A history of the Wikimedia community's request process to Foundation developers.

• In focus: A global standard for Neutral Point of View
  Wikipedians are commenting on a proposed global standard for neutral point of view.

• On the bright side: Flowers, blue helmets, reefs, pride, and Juneteenth
  Nice things around the world.

• Op-ed: Breathe, Don’t Panic, there is a different story about Wikimedia + AI futures
  We can build a strategy about AI that doesn't just center on readers; there are still plenty of humans to write the encyclopedia and work on diverse global knowledge.

• Opinion: Wikimedia Foundation staff develop union and Wikimedia user community reacts
  Why should editors support the Wiki Workers United union drive? Lessons the Wikimedia movement can learn from other labor struggles.

• Technology report: Community Tech team is disbanded, controversy erupts
  WMF disbands Community Tech, sparking community backlash over the future of the Wishlist and concerns about unionization.

• Traffic report: 'Cause this is thriller, thriller night
  Horror movies and Michael Jackson dominate theaters in the lead-up to the World Cup.

• WikiConference report: Report of Volunteer Supporters Network Annual Meeting 2026
  Outreach staff of Wikimedia chapters host a global discussion.

• Comix: Take your turn
  In a maze of twisty little edits, all alike.

• Humour: Group of banned T-shirt makers comes out of hiding to sell new Wikipedia-themed merchandise
  It ain't WikiProject United Nations, but you will find some PUNs.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:19, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

June music

story · music · places

Thank you for improving article quality in June! -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:00, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-26

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

• Growth features are now available at Wikidata. This update enables access to Mentorship (if configured), Impact module, the Help Panel, and a simplified Newcomer Homepage (without Suggested Edits). Wikidata administrators are still configuring the features through Community Configuration.

Updates for editors

• The special page Special:RangeCalculator has been created. It allows users to find an IP range without needing to rely on external tools. Until now, this tool was only available to CheckUsers.
• Sub-referencing is a new MediaWiki feature that allows editors to reuse references with different details. It will be deployed to most small and medium-sized Wikipedia language versions on June 23. The FAQ lists possible actions to take on your wiki to support the deployment. Check the rollout plan for the next deployment steps.
• Starting next week, users will get a notification when they are blocked or unblocked from editing, or if this block changes.
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Starting next week, abuse filters that are set to "require CAPTCHA verification" will begin to also affect users with the skipcaptcha right, which includes most autoconfirmed users. Bots are exempted. This change only affects edits that trigger an abuse filter. The skipcaptcha right will continue to exempt users from having to solve CAPTCHAs in the ordinary course of using the wikis.
• Reference documentation for the Lift Wing API has moved from the API Portal to the interactive REST Sandbox.
• The API Portal wiki is now closed. For API documentation, see Wikimedia APIs on mediawiki.org. All API Portal wiki URLs (https://api.wikimedia.org/wiki/) will redirect to the mediawiki.org page starting June 22.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• Join an online call on 25 June at 2:30pm UTC to meet the current Wikimedia interns for Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. Interns will provide an overview of their projects and a brief demo of their work so far. Attendees are encouraged to share ideas and connections in their community.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 13:03, 23 June 2026 (UTC)

Small improvement

Could your remove the (replacing Yapperbot) text from SodiumBot's messages, such as those about RfC feedback requests? i think it's been there for long enough. FaviFake (talk) 09:49, 28 June 2026 (UTC)

 Done Sohom (talk) 21:05, 28 June 2026 (UTC)

Why was User:Yapperbot killed from pruning?

It hasn't pruned Wikipedia:WikiProject_Actors_and_Filmmakers#Participants for a good while now, I see many indeffed users who have not edited in years. On the userpage, it says it's been killed from this purpose. Why? jolielover♥talk 11:26, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

@Jolielover, Yapperbot's pruner function is run through User:SodiumBot now since the previous maintainer was unresponsive and the old bot required percussive maintenance to keep working. Re that specific page, I've fixed one of the params that was incorrectly set which should allow SodiumBot to prune the list on their next pruner run. Sohom (talk) 13:16, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

Thanks! jolielover♥talk 13:26, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-27

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

• As part of the Account Creation Experiments, the Growth team tested adding a user account icon in the mobile web header for logged-out users, providing direct access to "Create account" and "Log in" actions. The experiment increased account creation by about 20% without negatively affecting edit quality or constructive edit rates. The feature will now be rolled out to all Wikimedia Foundation wikis on mobile web in the first week of July.
• After a successful experiment, logged-in users who did not confirm their email address when their account was created see a new banner asking them to complete that process. This helps reduce the risk that users get locked out of their account, and makes account email addresses overall more reliable. This is part of the Account Security project.
• An update to Search is refining how the -prefix: behaves when used to exclude results. Previously, using -prefix: with negation could unintentionally broaden search results by adding the namespaces included in the search scope, leading to confusing behavior for users expecting a straightforward exclusion filter. With the update, -prefix: will now strictly exclude matching page titles as intended and may display a warning if the relevant namespace has not been explicitly selected. The behavior of prefix: without negation however remains unchanged.
• View all 33 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where reviewers using the Page Curation toolbar were not automatically subscribed to talk page discussions they started has now been fixed. Reviewers will now receive notifications when someone replies to those discussions.

Updates for technical contributors

• Starting June 29th, automated downloads from the dumps.wikimedia.org website will be subject to the user-agent policy. Automated requests that provide a generic or empty user-agent will be blocked. Access to dumps through Wikimedia Cloud Services remains unaffected. This is a follow up to the announcement made in the 2026/25 issue of Tech News.
• 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 11:46, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

WikiCup 2026 July newsletter

The third round of the 2026 WikiCup ended on 28 June at 23:59 (UTC). As a reminder, good article nomination reviews now receive 10 points, while peer reviews, which continue to be worth 5 points, are now listed in the same section as featured article candidate reviews, rather than with good article reviews. Everyone who competed in round 3 will advance to round 4 unless they have withdrawn or been banned. No other changes to the round-point system have been made for this year.

Round 3 was competitive. Three contestants scored more than 1,000 round points; eight scored over 500; and thirteen scored over 300. The top three contestants had at least one featured article (two of them with two apiece). The following competitors scored more than 800 round points:

• MCE89 (submissions) with 1567 points, mainly from good and featured articles about Australian people and geography, as well as some article reviews
• Bgsu98 (submissions) with 1547 points, mainly from good articles, featured articles, featured lists, and a good topic about figure skating, along with 20 article reviews
• Reconrabbit (submissions) with 1004 points, mainly from a high-multiplier featured article on European rabbit and several good articles, DYKs, and reviews
• A.Cython (submissions) with 1004 points, mainly from good articles about warfare, along with 22 article reviews
• Generalissima (submissions) with 859 points, mainly from good and featured articles about rivers and East Asian topics

The full scores for round 3 can be seen here. During this round, contestants have claimed 12 featured articles, 12 featured lists, 7 featured-topic articles, 117 good articles, 74 good-topic articles and more than 30 Did You Know articles. In addition, competitors have worked on 13 In the News articles, and they have conducted nearly 180 reviews. The tournament points table has been updated.

Remember that any content promoted after 28 June but before the start of Round 4 can be claimed in Round 4. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. If you want to help out with the WikiCup, feel free to review one of the nominations listed on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:49, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

The DCWC is open!

See a    "developing" or    "least developed" country? Write about it to earn points!

Hey Sohom Datta, the third annual Developing Countries WikiContest is now open for submissions. The coordinators have addressed some of the queries at the last contest and we are hopeful that it'll turn out great! If you haven't done so already, please review the following:

• New to Wikipedia? Many experienced editors are part of this contest and willing to help; feel free to ask questions on the talk page.
• Got open nominations? List them at the review requests sidebar.
• Looking for a topic to work on? Check out suggested articles and eligible reviews.
• Not sure if your article qualifies? See the scoring rules for more information or contact a coordinator.
• Know someone else who might be interested? Sign-ups remain open throughout the contest, so don't hesitate to invite other editors!

On behalf of the coordinators, we hope you enjoy participating and wish you the best of luck! If you have any questions, please leave a message on the contest talk page or ask one of the coordinators: Arconning (talk · contribs), Generalissima (talk · contribs), Magentic Manifestations (talk · contribs), sawyer777 (talk · contribs), or TechnoSquirrel69 (talk · contribs). (To unsubscribe from these updates, remove yourself from this list. Sent via MediaWiki message delivery.) —TechnoSquirrel69 (talk) 00:00, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – July 2026

News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2026).

Administrator changes

• Chipmunkdavis
• TechnoSquirrel69

• Mlaffs
• SpuriousQ
• Lectonar
• Dennis Brown
• Hog Farm

CheckUser changes

• Giraffer
• TonyBallioni

• Dbeef
• EdJohnston

Oversight changes

• Giraffer
• TonyBallioni

L235

Guideline and policy news

• A request for comment asks whether the criteria for autoconfirmed and extended confirmed should be modified.
• A request for comment proposes an addendum for the Real name section of the Username policy.

Technical news

• The special page Special:RangeCalculator has been created for any users to use to find an IP range. (phab:T268429)
• The "indefinitely" button in Special:Block for temporary accounts can be replaced with a preferred block duration stated on MediaWiki:ipb-indefinite-expiry-temporary-account. (phab:T427125)

Arbitration

• Following a series of motions, changes to the contentious topics procedure to restructure awareness have been implemented.
• The arbitration case Michael Jackson has been closed.

Miscellaneous

• The 2026 Developing Countries WikiContest will run from 1 July to 30 September. Sign up now!
• 10 candidates have been appointed to the U4C.

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• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:08, 2 July 2026 (UTC)

You're invited to the Mentorship noticeboard

Hi, Sohom Datta. You are cordially invited to the brand new Wikipedia:Mentorship noticeboard. I get the impression sometimes that we mentors are each toiling in our own cubbyhole or hamster wheel, quietly answering mentee questions with little to no interaction with other mentors. I think we have a lot to share and learn from each other, and I know it will make me feel better just having the opportunity to interact with you and other mentors there, and I hope it will for you, too. Looking forward to hearing your feedback. Please take the § Survey when you get there! Mathglot (talk) 00:42, 5 July 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-28

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

• View all 34 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the search bar results on Wikidata, showed English results instead of using the correct language fallback for users of language variants, has now been fixed. Search suggestions will now follow the expected language fallback chain.

Updates for technical contributors

• In preparation for Celebrate Women campaign planned for March 2027, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Content Enablement team has launched a 22-question survey to better understand technical contributions by women+ (anyone who identifies as a woman) across Wikimedia projects. The survey takes approximately 15–20 minutes to complete and will remain open until 20 July 2026. The questions are also available on-wiki for review in advance.
• The Score extension now supports rendering music scores as SVG images in addition to PNG, addressing a long-standing feature request and resolving historical image quality issues. Both formats are now provided to clients, with PNG in the src attribute and SVG in the srcset attribute.
• The new Parsoid parser continues to be deployed to additional wikis, making it easier to introduce new reading and editing features. It was enabled on French Wikipedia, bringing total progress to covering 78.9% of Wikipedia page views. Rollout to English Wikipedia desktop will progress through this week.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The Wikimedia Hackathon 2026 recap blog post is now live. It highlights the projects, sessions, and social activities from this year’s event, and shares initial plans for the 2027 Wikimedia Hackathon.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 13:55, 6 July 2026 (UTC)

Good Article Gazette, Issue 16

Logo: Good Article Gazette - the official GAN newsletter

Issue 16, 7 July 2026

Ongoing discussions	News	Current statistics
One year of review pledges GAN (user) talk page clutter Questions for new reviewers	The 100th GA Review Circle begins The June Backlog Drive concludes. Kiddush levana hits the 1.5 year mark in the queue.	Number of GAs: 44,338 (+423) Number of nominations: 906 (-127) GAs for reassessment: 34 (-8)

• Subscribe to the newsletter
• Review an article!
• Participate in review circles
• Acquire a mentor

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:23, 7 July 2026 (UTC)

Lakers96 has a sockpuppet account

Lakers96 is socking more accounts and it's @Frenchfry1203. Please block his account. ~2026-39263-46 (talk) 23:01, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

You forgot another TA of Lakers96 to block.

Also block ~2026-26101-43. This user is also still Lakers96. ~2026-39263-46 (talk) 21:48, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 13 July 2026

• News and notes: An exclusive club
  Wikipedia Co-Founder Larry Sanger gets a community ban for canvassing.

• In the media: Battle for a soul – who won?
  Commissars, winners and losers, blocks or bans, a Wiki red card, social engineering on wikis, and Swift action!

• Opinion: We need to innovate with Wikimedia decision-making
  Rules we can actually read, trust and change!

• Recent research: LLMs and NPOV, 20 years of user blocks, Esperanto and Volapük Wikipedias
  And other research findings.

• News from Diff: How to host Wikicurious in your own community
  The Wikicurious team shares their approach to Wiki-event organizing.

• Community view: CUNY Newmark Wikimedian-in-Residence Quarterly Brief – April to June 2026
  Quarterly update on the activities of the City University of New York's Wikimedian-in-Residence, Richard Knipel.

• Special report: Wikipedia escapes Category 1 designation under the UK Online Safety Act – for now
  A possible future recategorization by the UK Government remains an existential threat to Wikipedia.

• On the bright side: Fatherhood, weather, and diplomacy
  Father's Day, Canada Day, and the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence.

• Op-ed: A Layup Easy Proposal for Wikimedia at 25: Spend 25% of Donations on the Community
  If strategy priority 1.1 is supporting the community, can we not increase the support to the community? Increasing grantmaking to 25% of the budget would be a move toward equality in the movement.

• Traffic report: The grass was greener, the light was brighter
  We reached the dizzy heights of that dreamed of World Cup.

• Comix: schnozzed
  on lollerskates

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:24, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-29

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

• Revise Tone helps newcomers identify passages in Wikipedia articles that may contain non-encyclopedic language and encourages them to consider revising the tone. The feature was A/B tested on the Arabic, English, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias, where newcomer task completion rates increased by 38.7% compared to the default Copyedit task, with no decrease in edit quality. The test ended on July 9, and the feature is now available for everyone on these wikis, configurable via Community Configuration. The plan is to release Revise Tone to more wikis.
• The community configuration that allows automatic removal of inactive mentors based on configurable criteria will be enabled on Thursday 16, on some wikis to keep mentor lists up to date. Mentors are experienced contributors who opt in to help new users on-wiki through the Growth Features. Administrators can now prepare the settings via Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship; they will take effect starting Thursday.
• View all 38 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where some users of the Wikipedia Android app were logged out immediately after signing in, preventing them from staying logged in and editing pages, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• Editing a page via user scripts or gadgets was causing watchlist labels that the user had assigned to that page to reset. This has now been fixed.
• To work around a Safari bug (see phab:T425211), on Parsoid-enabled wikis, wikilink hrefs now use absolute urls instead of protocol-relative urls. REST API output remains unchanged and continue to use protocol-relative urls. Gadgets, user scripts, bots, and CSS might need to be adapted if they relied on the presence of protocol-relative urls in wikilink hrefs.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The Wikimedia Foundation’s Experiment Platform Team has published a blog post reflecting on its first year of structured experimentation. It highlights successful experiments such as Paste Check, Reference Check, and Tone Check, which improved editing outcomes and have been rolled out to more users, as well as experiments that did not lead to product changes. Read more.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 16:09, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Lakers96 is block evading again.

Lakers is back to his sockpuppetry and keeps vandalising templates. He has another TA named ~2026-40003-83 Please block his account. ~2026-39922-13 (talk) 13:40, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

Articles for Creation backlog drive

Hello Sohom Datta:

WikiProject Articles for creation is holding a month long Backlog Drive in August!
The goal of this drive is to reduce the backlog of unreviewed drafts to less than a month of outstanding reviews from the current 3+ months. Bonus points will be given for reviewing drafts that have been waiting more than 30 days. The drive is running from 1 August 2026 through 31 August 2026.

You may find Category:AfC pending submissions by age or other categories and sorting helpful.

Barnstars will be given out as awards at the end of the drive.
There is a backlog of over 5000 pages, so start reviewing drafts. We're looking forward to your help! MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:38, 19 July 2026 (UTC)

• If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself from the mailing list or alternatively to opt-out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.

May 2026 Administrator Elections – RFC Phase

Administrator Elections | RFC phase

The RFC phase of the May 2026 administrator elections has started. There are 20 RFCs for consideration. You can participate in the RFC phase at Wikipedia:Administrator elections/May 2026/RFC phase.

Any questions or issues can be asked on the election talk page. Thank you for your participation. Happy electing.

You're receiving this message because you signed up for the mailing list. To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself from the list.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:02, 20 July 2026 (UTC)

Good Article Gazette, Issue 17

Logo: Good Article Gazette - the official GAN newsletter

Issue 17, 21 July 2026

Ongoing discussions	News	Current statistics
Spot checking at GA Available depth of information on vs. around subject People not adding newly-promoted good articles to the list Suggestion for future drives Add the Good Topic/Featured Topic symbols next to the GA/FA symbols on articles	Good articles get a navbox Survey of new reviewers begins	Number of GAs: 44,471 (+133) Number of nominations: 921 (+15) GAs for reassessment: 26 (-8)

• Subscribe to the newsletter
• Review an article!
• Participate in review circles
• Acquire a mentor

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:11, 21 July 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-30

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 Reader Experience team has incorporated community feedback around the placement of watchstar and watchlist buttons for the Reading Lists beta feature, which would allow for saving articles for later reading – a wishlist item to bring the functionality to web. Editors are invited to enable the beta feature to test it out and share their thoughts.
• Suggestion Mode offers edit suggestions within the VisualEditor for improving Wikipedia articles. All suggestions are community-configurable. The TextMatch feature is a way for volunteers to create custom local suggestions. The feature searches in articles for strings of text, and now includes support for regular expressions. This gives volunteers greater precision and flexibility over the kinds of local suggestions they can create. Note: Suggestions can be targeted based on the edit count of the person editing as well as other aspects of the page. You can find examples from other communities for inspiration, including TextMatches that detect: typos, grammar-errors, potential advertisements, clichés, incorrect dash or hyphen usage, non-specific time keywords, outdated names, and more. Any feedback is appreciated.
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the SVG Translate tool could use an outdated version of a file, causing existing translations to be overwritten when new ones were uploaded, has now been fixed. Overall, in the last quarter from April – June 2026 about 337 community tasks were resolved by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Updates for technical contributors

• On Parsoid-enabled wikis, Parsoid now renders a maximum of 1,250 images per page. A new tracking category, "media-limit-reached", will be soon made available to identify pages where this limit is reached, making it easier to find content whose media output may have been restricted during rendering. See phab:T430854 for more information and to provide feedback.
• 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 05:44, 21 July 2026 (UTC)

Help regarding Tool

Hi Sohom, recently I have granted afc participants. While I am reviewing draft, I am facing problem of reviewing ai content. Is there any tool through which I can detect ai content effortlessly? Nomadwikiholic1 (talk) 14:30, 21 July 2026 (UTC)

@Nomadwikiholic1 There really isn't WP:AISIGNS is what I'll recommend you read to get better at detecting AI-gen content. Sohom (talk) 04:03, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

Categorization of AE protection actions needed (21 July 2026)

Hello Sohom Datta,

I'm a bot that helps log arbitration enforcement (AE) protection actions on behalf of the Arbitration Committee. As a result of a September 2025 motion by the Arbitration Committee, administrators are no longer required to manually log AE protection actions. Instead, this bot is responsible for logging AE protections to the AE protection log.

While logging AE protections, this bot detected that you recently took the following page protection actions. These action(s) seemed to be AE actions based on the edit summaries, but the bot wasn't able to tell which arbitration case they related to:

• 09:09, 21 July 2026 (UTC) (Stop The Game)

If these were AE actions, please take a moment to log the appropriate topic code at the AE protection log. If they were not, feel free to remove the actions from the AE protection log, and optionally let the bot operator know about the false positives.

Going forward, in order to help this bot categorize AE actions, please include a link to the contentious topic under which the action was taken in the protection edit summary (for example, [[WP:CT/BLP]] or [[Wikipedia:Contentious topics/Biographies of Living Persons]]).

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to the bot operator or to the arbitration clerks at the arbitration clerks' noticeboard.

Thank you! ClerkBot (talk) 23:56, 21 July 2026 (UTC)

Sockpuppetry

This has been a sockpuppet of Huynhthiminhngoc99! ~2026-41431-88 (talk) 09:58, 24 July 2026 (UTC)

Listing for discussion of Template:LLM prompt and response

Template:LLM prompt and response has been listed for discussion, which may result in the template being merged or deleted by consensus. You are invited to comment on the proposed action at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. CapnZapp (talk) 10:03, 24 July 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-31

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

• Content Translation now supports dark mode, fulfilling a Community Wishlist request. This brings the tool in line with the accessibility features available in the Vector 2022 and Minerva skins, helping reduce visual fatigue for users translating content.
• DiscussionTools' source mode and the 2017 wikitext editor will now offer autocomplete for links ([[), templates ({{), HTML and parser tags (<), and magic words (__), making it quicker and easier to insert links, templates, and other wiki markup while editing.
• The Readers Growth team has concluded its experiment with mobile page previews and will not roll out the feature. Page Previews are a pop-up bottom sheet that appears when readers tap a blue link, showing a thumbnail, lead paragraph, and an option to open the article. The experiment showed flat retention and negative indicator metrics, suggesting that mobile web readers preferred navigating directly to linked articles rather than using page previews.
• The Reader Experience team has seen encouraging early results from the Reading Lists feature, with 93% of participating users reporting that it was useful. Reading Lists help active readers save articles for future reading and support their learning goals on Wikimedia projects. The team plans further improvements before expanding the feature to more users.
• The Explore Feed Refresh initiative was tested with new and casual Wikipedia app readers. The refreshed feed helps readers discover new and relevant content. After a 10.5% increase in engagement with the feed, Wikimedia Apps team has decided to scale the Home Feed redesign to iOS with the learnings from the Android release applied.
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where subject names in the Article Guidance feature were displayed with incorrect capitalization on French Wikipedia, has now been fixed. Subject names will now follow the correct capitalization rules for the language.

Updates for technical contributors

• After running several Account Creation Experiments to improve registration completion rates, a new version of the username field on Create Account has been rolled out. It includes a popover summarizing the username policy to provide clearer guidance during account creation. As part of this change, the messages createacct-helpusername and createacct-username-help that several communities have configured will no longer be used. If communities want to customize the guidance shown in the new popover, they can instead edit the following messages: createacct-username-policy-popover-bullet1, createacct-username-policy-popover-bullet2, and createacct-username-policy-popover-bullet3.
• Later this week, the CodeMirror syntax highlighter will offer themes. The themes can be picked from a dropdown menu in the full CodeMirror preferences dialog. For wikitext, available themes are default, colorblind-friendly (previously the colorblind preference option on Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing) and no-highlighting. For code languages (i.e., CSS/JavaScript/JSON/Vue/Lua), there are several themes available. These same themes will eventually be available for wikitext, too.
• From now on, wikis can restrict editing in the "User" namespace to only the page owner and certain user groups. Read the configuration documentation to learn 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 18:47, 27 July 2026 (UTC)

Good Article Gazette, Special issue

Logo: Good Article Gazette - the official GAN newsletter

Special issue - 28 July 2026

With several major discussions underway

Ongoing discussions		Current statistics
Likely invalid GAN review on Brewing Potential extra requirements for new reviewers Making WP:Good article reviewing guide a guideline instead of WP:Reviewing good articles Making the instructions more accessible Making the review closing tool easier to use How to handle inappropriate reviews	Handling a potentially biased review Model reviews Time for GAN QPQ (sort of) Proposed system for upgrading B-class articles to GA without formal review Time for an RfC on changes to GA Contribute at the August 2026 RfC page	Number of GAs: 44,523 (+52) Number of nominations: 954 (+33) GAs for reassessment: 26 (-8)

• Subscribe to the newsletter
• Review an article!
• Participate in review circles
• Acquire a mentor

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:05, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

DCWC August update

The 2026 Developing Countries WikiContest has been running for a month now, so let's check in with the competition so far!

As of the time of writing, our top contestants are:

1. Vanderwaalforces (submissions) ahead of the pack with 715 points, with two FAs and many GAs on the monarchs of the Kingdom of Benin;
2. Simongraham (submissions) with 291 points, mostly with GAs on jumping spiders, alongside various GAN and FAC reviews;
3. Jaguarnik (submissions) with 240 points, mostly from an FA on the 1945 film Ivan the Terrible;
4. Grnrchst (submissions) with 215 points, mostly from GAs on anarchist history in various countries, alongside many GA reviews, and;
6. Vestrian24Bio (submissions) tied for 4th with 215 points, with an FL and four GAs on Indian cricket!

These competitors are in the lead, but if past experience is any indication, big shake-ups might still await us in the contest. If you're looking for a way to boost your position, we got a table of review requests from fellow participants—you can rack up a lot of points through reviews, and it might just convince others to review your own nominations! You can also look through the eligible reviews page to find other articles to review, with highlights for articles eligible for the 1.5× multiplier. The coordinators would like to thank Jaguarnik (submissions) for his work to keep this page up to date.

Thank you so much for all your work in the contest so far, dear participants, and keep on the good fight against systemic bias on our wiki! Have any questions? Leave a message on the contest talk page or send it to one of our wonderful coordinators: Arconning (talk · contribs), Generalissima (talk · contribs), Magentic Manifestations (talk · contribs), sawyer777 (talk · contribs), and TechnoSquirrel69 (talk · contribs). (To unsubscribe from these updates, remove yourself from this list. Sent via MediaWiki message delivery.) Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 05:25, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 2 August 2026

• In the media: Union drive, most prolific editor make headlines
  AI's impact on Wikipedia, World Cup editing, and encyclopedia's place in public life.

• News and notes: Foundation rejects voluntary recognition of union, proposed board eligibility rules sharply restrict candidates
  Further: harassment allegations at Wikimania, and new RfC for Abstract Wikipedia.

• WikiConference: "Kurier, Signpost, wikipress: You can be a Wikimedia journalist" - Wikimania presentation by User:Noé Recap
  A recap of Noé Gasparini's Wikimania 2026 presentation on the variety of wikipress outlets

• In focus: Is Larry Sanger the co-founder of Wikipedia?
  A look over the years.

• Arbitration report: Think, and not just about content
  ArbCom continues business.

• News from Diff: Meet the Wikimedians of the Year 2026!
  Wikimedians of the Year 2026 announced at Wikimania 2026 - Paris

• On the bright side: The beautiful game
  2026 Men's FIFA World Cup, Wikimania music, and wikipress.

• Traffic report: Odyssey and Oyarzabal
  To take you in the sun to (Ithaca), to show you the World Cup, it's the time of the season for editing!

• Comix: Well-spotted
  You dasherdly—dash–dash−dash-dash!

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:15, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

Notification of administrators without tools

	Greetings, Sohom Datta. You are receiving this notification because you've agreed to consider endorsing prospective admin candidates identified by the process outlined at Administrators without tools. Recently, the following editor(s) received this distinction and the associated endearing title: TonySt Lynch44
Thank you for supporting this effort. Your contributions are an integral part of overall success, and an example for others to follow. To stop receiving these notifications, remove your name from the list.

TolBot (talk) 21:00, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-32

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 Reader Experience team has developed a patch demo that wraps the page toolbar onto two lines when there is not enough horizontal space for all the buttons. This aims to reduce crowding in the Vector 2022 toolbar, which can occur on some language Wikipedias at certain screen widths.
• The Reader Experience team is planning to launch Reading Lists, a Community Wishlist item, which is currently available to try in beta, as a full feature in September. Before then, volunteer translator help is needed for string translations into a number of languages. The feature supports reading and learning goals on Wikipedia.
• Next week, the table of contents on Wikimedia Commons file pages will be improved by consolidating the file page table of contents with the page table of contents. This will make it easier to understand a file page’s structure, navigate to specific sections, and share links to individual sections.
• View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where some TIFF images failed to load after clicking their thumbnail, causing a broken image to be displayed instead of the full-size image, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The variable and function selector in AbuseFilter has been updated to support search and autocomplete. It will allow filter maintainers to find the desired variable or function more quickly.
• The MJPEG and VP8 formats are removed from the video player. The MP4 format (MPEG-4 Part 2) is added instead, which provides higher quality videos to older iPhone devices. It may take a few weeks to retroactively update all existing videos. The default format for modern devices stays the same (VP9/WebM).
• 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 19:44, 3 August 2026 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Teamwork Barnstar
Cheers to joining the outspoken Wikipedians club. Our words matter more than we think, even when we're dismissed. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 21:26, 6 August 2026 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – August 2026

News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2026).

Administrator changes

• MCE89
• Staraction

• Danaman5

CheckUser changes

• dbeef

Guideline and policy news

• Following an RfC, the 30-day requirement for extended-confirmed status now begins after an account's first edit instead of its registration (T431060).

Technical news

• Inactive editors can now be removed as mentors at Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship automatically.
• The Suggested Edits' Revise Tone feature is now enabled. It encourages editors to identify and revise non-neutral language in articles.

Miscellaneous

• The Unreferenced articles August 2026 backlog drive is underway. Help to add references to 47,000 articles.
• The Articles for creation August 2026 backlog drive is under way. Help to review 4,500+ drafts.

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• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:52, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-33

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

• A new ChartWizard is now available on Wikimedia Commons for users interested in creating charts from their own data. The wizard makes the Chart extension more beginner-friendly by allowing editors to create charts, such as bar and pie charts, without needing to use JSON. Users can still switch to the JSON editor if they prefer. Feedback on the new tool is welcome on the wish talk page.
• View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the Wikipedia iOS app’s Picture of the Day widget displayed the same image every day instead of updating daily, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• Math formula SVG images will soon be generated in the browser instead of on the server. MathML continues to be generated on the server and renders in the browser without JavaScript. Wikibooks will see this change on 12 August, Wikisource on 19 August and Wikipedia from 20-27 August. You can try this by selecting "MathML with SVG image (client side MathJax rendering)" in your preferences. This change is part of deprecating RESTBase and deprecating Mathoid.
• Category pages will soon support sorting entries by the time they are added to a category. This will make it easier to find recently or long-standing categorized pages. It will also improve workflows for maintenance categories such as deletion backlogs and other time-based review tasks. You can use cldsort=timestamp URL argument in category view to sort the entries.
• Gadgets and user scripts on Wikimedia wikis may now use ES2018 features and ES2019 features in JavaScript code. Previously, the platform only allowed up to ES2017. MediaWiki validates the source code to protect functionality from syntax errors and to ensure scripts are valid in all supported browsers.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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MediaWiki message delivery 20:43, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Good article nominations RfC

Hi Sohom Datta,

There is an ongoing Request for Comment (RfC) at Wikipedia:Good article nominations/August 2026 RfC, which you may be interested in because in the past year, you have nominated or reviewed more than one good article nomination. This message has also been sent to all subscribers to the Good Article Gazette. The RfC contains many proposals (33 at the time of writing), which are split into the following categories: nominators, reviewers, reviews, volunteer roles, reviewing initiatives, and others. However, you are more than welcome to add any proposals of your own that you wish to put to the community.

By the end of September, all the proposals will have been closed by an uninvolved editor, either as a consensus for one of the options or with no consensus. At this point, editors will be invited again to develop these proposals into coherent policy and implement them.

Thank you for your contributions to the good articles project, and I look forward to your input! (in solidarity), JacobTheRox^{(talk|contributions)} 16:03, 11 August 2026 (UTC)