Wikisource:Scriptorium/Archives/2025

Request to enable the AI recognition of further diacritic letters

Dear Wikisource Community & Tech Experts,

I am a contributor of the Northern Min language and the current AI software is unable to recognize several of the diacritic letters of the pages, for example, THIS PAGE.

(Index page is here).

At present contributors of the Northern Min language are needing to manually type out this text and each page takes approximately thirty minutes to complete. This means it would take 19,500 minutes (325 hours) to type out the entire New Testament of this language (650 pages approx).

If the AI can be enhanced to correctly recognize those texts, then each page would only take 5 seconds to complete and therefore the entire New Testament could be completed in 3,250 seconds (54 minutes), thus a time saving of 99%.

The AI software only needs to recognize these additional Special Characters (the ones highlighted in Red are currently unrecognizable by the AI software):

Acute: á í ú é ó á̤ é̤ ó̤ ṳ́ Á Í Ú É Ó Á̤ É̤ Ó̤ Ṳ́

Circumflex: â î û ê ô â̤ ê̤ ô̤ ṳ̂ Â Î Û Ê Ô Â̤ Ê̤ Ô̤ Ṳ̂

Double macron: a̿ i̿ u̿ e̿ o̿ a̤̿ e̤̿ o̤̿ ṳ̿ A̿ I̿ U̿ E̿ O̿ A̤̿ E̤̿ O̤̿ Ṳ̿

Macron: ā ī ū ē ō ā̤ ē̤ ō̤ ṳ̄ Ā Ī Ū Ē Ō Ā̤ Ē̤ Ō̤ Ṳ̄

Breve: ă ĭ ŭ ĕ ŏ ă̤ ĕ̤ ṳ̆ ŏ̤ Ă Ĭ Ŭ Ĕ Ŏ Ă̤ Ĕ̤ Ṳ̆ Ŏ̤

Grave: à ì ù è ò à̤ è̤ ṳ̀ ò̤ À Ì Ù È Ò À̤ È̤ Ṳ̀ Ò̤

Where does Wikisource derive its AI letter recognistion software from?

Which organization is responsible for developing/updating/enhancing this AI Recognition software?

How can they be contacted on this matter?

Any feedback would be welcome. --DaveZ123 (talk) 22:49, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I may be too ignorant here, but the software is optical character recognition (OCR), which I don't think uses AI. There are multiple OCR scanning solutions here at Wikisource. If you open up a page to edit (e.g.), then you should see a button that says "Transcribe text" which has a drop-down menu that allows you to use three different OCR tools, which will yield different results. Are all of them equally bad at transcribing Northern Min? One thing that could help is changing the page's information so that the language is mnp (note that only admins can do this). Unfortunately, mnp is not on the list currently. So I think step one is to file a bug at phab: asking for mnp to be added to the list of languages available here. Then change the page information on various pages to mnp and see if that helps with the OCR scans. If it does, then the solution is more language changes to make transcription more efficient. If it does not, then we may need to come up with another solution. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 11:17, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I tried to transcribe using all three OCR Egnines (Google Cloud Vision OCR, Tesseract OCR, and Transkribus OCR). Of the three, Google Cloud Vision OCR is the most accurate and can transcribe macrons: ā ī ū ē ō Ā Ī Ū Ē Ō and also Breves: ă ĭ ŭ ĕ ŏ Ă Ĭ Ŭ Ĕ Ŏ.

However Double Macrons and diacritics with diaresis below, namely:

a̿ i̿ u̿ e̿ o̿ A̿ I̿ U̿ E̿ O̿

ā̤ ē̤ ō̤ ṳ̄ A̤̿ E̤̿ O̤̿ Ṳ̿

á̤ é̤ ó̤ ṳ́ Á̤ É̤ Ó̤ Ṳ́

ă̤ ĕ̤ ṳ̆ ŏ̤ Ă̤ Ĕ̤ Ṳ̆ Ŏ̤

à̤ è̤ ṳ̀ ò̤ À̤ È̤ Ṳ̀ Ò̤

â̤ ê̤ ô̤ ṳ̂ Â̤ Ê̤ Ô̤ Ṳ̂

a̤̿ e̤̿ o̤̿ ṳ̿ A̤̿ E̤̿ O̤̿ Ṳ̿

are still unable to be transcribed. The letters highlighted in red above are the letters that all three OCR's are currently unable to transcribe. --DaveZ123 (talk) 01:57, 5 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I have now added Phabricator Bug Request T383001 to request "mnp" to be added to the list of language drop down options.

Phabricator Bug Request T383002 is requesting for fifty eight new letters to be added to Google OCR. --DaveZ123 (talk) 02:31, 5 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-03

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 Single User Login system is being updated over the next few months. This is the system which allows users to fill out the login form on one Wikimedia site and get logged in on all others at the same time. It needs to be updated because of the ways that browsers are increasingly restricting cross-domain cookies. To accommodate these restrictions, login and account creation pages will move to a central domain, but it will still appear to the user as if they are on the originating wiki. The updated code will be enabled this week for users on test wikis. This change is planned to roll out to all users during February and March. See the SUL3 project page for more details and a timeline.

Updates for editors

On wikis with PageAssessments installed, you can now filter search results to pages in a given WikiProject by using the inproject: keyword. (These wikis: Arabic Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage, French Wikipedia, Hungarian Wikipedia, Nepali Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia) [1]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Tigre (w:tig:) [2]
View all 35 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a bug with updating a user's edit-count after making a rollback edit, which is now fixed. [3]

Updates for technical contributors

Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. Starting the week of January 13, we will begin rerouting some page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newer MediaWiki REST API endpoints for all wiki projects. This change was previously available on testwiki and should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints may raise issues directly to the MediaWiki Interfaces Team in Phabricator if they arise.
Toolforge tool maintainers can now share their feedback on Toolforge UI, an initiative to provide a web platform that allows creating and managing Toolforge tools through a graphic interface, in addition to existing command-line workflows. This project aims to streamline active maintainers’ tasks, as well as make registration and deployment processes more accessible for new tool creators. The initiative is still at a very early stage, and the Cloud Services team is in the process of collecting feedback from the Toolforge community to help shape the solution to their needs. Read more and share your thoughts about Toolforge UI.
For tool and library developers who use the OAuth system: The identity endpoint used for OAuth 1 and OAuth 2 returned a JSON object with an integer in its sub field, which was incorrect (the field must always be a string). This has been fixed; the fix will be deployed to Wikimedia wikis on the week of January 13. [4]
Many wikis currently use Cite CSS to render custom footnote markers in Parsoid output. Starting January 20 these rules will be disabled, but the developers ask you to not clean up your MediaWiki:Common.css until February 20 to avoid issues during the migration. Your wikis might experience some small changes to footnote markers in Visual Editor and when using experimental Parsoid read mode, but if there are changes these are expected to bring the rendering in line with the legacy parser output. [5]

Meetings and events

The next meeting in the series of Wikimedia Foundation Community Conversations with the Wikimedia Commons community will take place on January 15 at 8:00 UTC and at 16:00 UTC. The topic of this call is defining the priorities in tool investment for Commons. Contributors from all wikis, especially users who are maintaining tools for Commons, are welcome to attend.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:42, 14 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Launching! Join Us for Wiki Loves Ramadan 2025!

Dear All,

We’re happy to announce the launch of Wiki Loves Ramadan 2025, an annual international campaign dedicated to celebrating and preserving Islamic cultures and history through the power of Wikipedia. As an active contributor to the Local Wikipedia, you are specially invited to participate in the launch.

This year’s campaign will be launched for you to join us write, edit, and improve articles that showcase the richness and diversity of Islamic traditions, history, and culture.

Topic: Wiki Loves Ramadan 2025 Campaign Launch
When: Jan 19, 2025
Time: 16:00 Universal Time UTC and runs throughout Ramadan (starting February 25, 2025).
Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88420056597?pwd=NdrpqIhrwAVPeWB8FNb258n7qngqqo.1
Zoom meeting hosted by Wikimedia Bangladesh

To get started, visit the campaign page for details, resources, and guidelines: Wiki Loves Ramadan 2025.

Add your community here, and organized Wiki Loves Ramadan 2025 in your local language.

Whether you’re a first-time editor or an experienced Wikipedian, your contributions matter. Together, we can ensure Islamic cultures and traditions are well-represented and accessible to all.

Feel free to invite your community and friends too. Kindly reach out if you have any questions or need support as you prepare to participate.

Let’s make Wiki Loves Ramadan 2025 a success!

For the International Team 12:08, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

AbuseFilter

Hi, I just ran into an abuse filter while trying to blank some user talk page vandalism [6][7]. Please either blank the talk page yourself or speedy delete it (no meaningful content). I didn't ask for speedy deletion right away, because many projects never delete user talk pages.

Additionally I would suggest some changes to Special:AbuseFilter/13:

Going by the filter title, the action should just be "create" instead of "edit" (or you should change the title).
I recommend using user_rights instead of user_groups, that way you avoid false positives with crosswiki patrollers with global permissions.
If you want to keep the action "edit" instead of just page creations, I recommend adding namespace 2 and probably also 3 to the exempted name space, in order to avoid false positives like these [8][9]. Users should be allowed to blank their own user page or anything else in their own user space [10][11]

Pinging @Koavf because you appear to be the admin who did most abuse filter changes in the last ~2 years. Johannnes89 (talk) 07:22, 20 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Johannnes89 Imagine my face while waking up to that notification PhilBrvni (talk) 09:01, 20 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. For what it's worth, the page is deleted now. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 16:39, 20 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Done https://wikisource.org/wiki/Special:AbuseFilter/history/13/diff/prev/cur —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 16:40, 20 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-04

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

Administrators can mass-delete multiple pages created by a user or IP address using Extension:Nuke. It previously only allowed deletion of pages created in the last 30 days. It can now delete pages from the last 90 days, provided it is targeting a specific user or IP address. [12]
On wikis that use the Patrolled edits feature, when the rollback feature is used to revert an unpatrolled page revision, that revision will now be marked as "manually patrolled" instead of "autopatrolled", which is more accurate. Some editors that use filters on Recent Changes may need to update their filter settings. [13]
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the Visual Editor's "Insert link" feature did not always suggest existing pages properly when an editor started typing, which has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

The Structured Discussion extension (also known as Flow) is being progressively removed from the wikis. This extension is unmaintained and causes issues. It will be replaced by DiscussionTools, which is used on any regular talk page. The last group of wikis (Catalan Wikiquote, Wikimedia Finland, Goan Konkani Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikibooks, Wikimedia Sweden) will soon be contacted. If you have questions about this process, please ping Trizek (WMF) at your wiki. [14]
The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: updates about services from the Data Platform Engineering teams, information about Codex from the Design System team, and more.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:36, 21 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Universal Code of Conduct annual review: provide your comments on the UCoC and Enforcement Guidelines

Please help translate to your language.

I am writing to you to let you know the annual review period for the Universal Code of Conduct and Enforcement Guidelines is open now. You can make suggestions for changes through 3 February 2025. This is the first step of several to be taken for the annual review. Read more information and find a conversation to join on the UCoC page on Meta.

The Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is a global group dedicated to providing an equitable and consistent implementation of the UCoC. This annual review was planned and implemented by the U4C. For more information and the responsibilities of the U4C, you may review the U4C Charter.

Please share this information with other members in your community wherever else might be appropriate.

-- In cooperation with the U4C, Keegan (WMF) (talk) 01:11, 24 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-05

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

Patrollers and admins - what information or context about edits or users could help you to make patroller or admin decisions more quickly or easily? The Wikimedia Foundation wants to hear from you to help guide its upcoming annual plan. Please consider sharing your thoughts on this and 13 other questions to shape the technical direction for next year.

Updates for editors

iOS Wikipedia App users worldwide can now access a personalized Year in Review feature, which provides insights based on their reading and editing history on Wikipedia. This project is part of a broader effort to help welcome new readers as they discover and interact with encyclopedic content.
Edit patrollers now have a new feature available that can highlight potentially problematic new pages. When a page is created with the same title as a page which was previously deleted, a tag ('Recreated') will now be added, which users can filter for in Special:RecentChanges and Special:NewPages. [15]
Later this week, there will be a new warning for editors if they attempt to create a redirect that links to another redirect (a double redirect). The feature will recommend that they link directly to the second redirect's target page. Thanks to the user SomeRandomDeveloper for this improvement. [16]
Wikimedia wikis allow WebAuthn-based second factor checks (such as hardware tokens) during login, but the feature is fragile and has very few users. The MediaWiki Platform team is temporarily disabling adding new WebAuthn keys, to avoid interfering with the rollout of SUL3 (single user login version 3). Existing keys are unaffected. [17]
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

For developers that use the MediaWiki History dumps: The Data Platform Engineering team has added a couple of new fields to these dumps, to support the Temporary Accounts initiative. If you maintain software that reads those dumps, please review your code and the updated documentation, since the order of the fields in the row will change. There will also be one field rename: in the mediawiki_user_history dump, the anonymous field will be renamed to is_anonymous. The changes will take effect with the next release of the dumps in February. [18]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:14, 27 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

new Scriptorium head

hi everyone, i just created Template:Scriptorium Header for the head part. kindly let me know how can we improve it further or use it here -- KuldeepBurjBhalaike ^(Talk) 06:37, 2 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Courtesy link to the current template: Template:Scriptoriumhead. I'm fine either way, but please don't abuse the small tag and once we've decided on a final layout, please redirect one template to the other. Thanks. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 09:29, 2 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

thanks for the quick response @Koavf, i'll update the header and will redirect old template when we are ready. -- KuldeepBurjBhalaike ^(Talk) 09:53, 2 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

update: i have redirected the old template to new template KuldeepBurjBhalaike ^(Talk) 12:13, 16 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Global ban proposal for Shāntián Tàiláng

Hello. This is to notify the community that there is an ongoing global ban proposal for User:Shāntián Tàiláng who has been active on this wiki. You are invited to participate at m:Requests for comment/Global ban for Shāntián Tàiláng. Wüstenspringmaus (talk) 12:52, 2 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Reminder: first part of the annual UCoC review closes soon

Please help translate to your language.

This is a reminder that the first phase of the annual review period for the Universal Code of Conduct and Enforcement Guidelines will be closing soon. You can make suggestions for changes through the end of day, 3 February 2025. This is the first step of several to be taken for the annual review. Read more information and find a conversation to join on the UCoC page on Meta. After review of the feedback, proposals for updated text will be published on Meta in March for another round of community review.

Please share this information with other members in your community wherever else might be appropriate.

-- In cooperation with the U4C, Keegan (WMF) (talk) 00:49, 3 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-06

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

Editors who use the "Special characters" editing-toolbar menu can now see the 32 special characters you have used most recently, across editing sessions on that wiki. This change should help make it easier to find the characters you use most often. The feature is in both the 2010 wikitext editor and VisualEditor. [19]
Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor can now create sublists with correct indentation by selecting the line(s) you want to indent and then clicking the toolbar buttons.[20] You can now also insert <code> tags using a new toolbar button.[21] Thanks to user stjn for these improvements.
Help is needed to ensure the citation generator works properly on each wiki.
- (1) Administrators should update the local versions of the page MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json to include entries for preprint, standard, and dataset; Here are example diffs to replicate for 'preprint' and for 'standard' and 'dataset'.
- (2.1) If the citoid map in the citation template used for these types of references is missing, one will need to be added. (2.2) If the citoid map does exist, the TemplateData will need to be updated to include new field names. Here are example updates for 'preprint' and for 'standard' and 'dataset'. The new fields that may need to be supported are archiveID, identifier, repository, organization, repositoryLocation, committee, and versionNumber. [22]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Central Kanuri (w:knc:) [23]
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the OCR (optical character recognition) tool used for Wikisource now supports a new language, Church Slavonic. [24]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:08, 4 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-07

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 Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) has published a draft of their recommendations for the Wikimedia Foundation's Product and Technology department. They have recommended focusing on mobile experiences, particularly contributions. They request community feedback at the talk page by 21 February.

Updates for editors

The "Special pages" portlet link will be moved from the "Toolbox" into the "Navigation" section of the main menu's sidebar by default. This change is because the Toolbox is intended for tools relating to the current page, not tools relating to the site, so the link will be more logically and consistently located. To modify this behavior and update CSS styling, administrators can follow the instructions at T385346. [25]
As part of this year's work around improving the ways readers discover content on the wikis, the Web team will be running an experiment with a small number of readers that displays some suggestions for related or interesting articles within the search bar. Please check out the project page for more information.
Template editors who use TemplateStyles can now customize output for users with specific accessibility needs by using accessibility related media queries (prefers-reduced-motion, prefers-reduced-transparency, prefers-contrast, and forced-colors). Thanks to user Bawolff for these improvements. [26]
View all 22 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the global blocks log will now be shown directly on the Special:CentralAuth page, similarly to global locks, to simplify the workflows for stewards. [27]

Updates for technical contributors

Wikidata now supports a special language as a "default for all languages" for labels and aliases. This is to avoid excessive duplication of the same information across many languages. If your Wikidata queries use labels, you may need to update them as some existing labels are getting removed. [28]
The function getDescription was invoked on every Wiki page read and accounts for ~2.5% of a page's total load time. The calculated value will now be cached, reducing load on Wikimedia servers. [29]
As part of the RESTBase deprecation effort, the /page/related endpoint has been blocked as of February 6, 2025, and will be removed soon. This timeline was chosen to align with the deprecation schedules for older Android and iOS versions. The stable alternative is the "morelike" action API in MediaWiki, and a migration example is available. The MediaWiki Interfaces team can be contacted for any questions. [30]

In depth

The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: Updates about the "Contribute" menu; details on some of the newest language editions of Wikipedia; details on new languages supported by the MediaWiki interface; updates on the Community-defined lists feature; and more.
The latest Chart Project newsletter is available. It includes updates on the progress towards bringing better visibility into global charts usage and support for categorizing pages in the Data namespace on Commons.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:11, 11 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Template:New texs

Hello everyone! Sometime ago I found the Template:New texts that was created years ago, but never used in this project. Would the community believe that it would be interesting to add this template in the main page? Inspired by @Koavf:, I've experimented a little at the Sandbox, but I bet that someone here could create a more interesting visual for this template in the main page. Thanks, Erick Soares3 (talk) 22:17, 11 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Vandalism

Good evening! Please block the user Drochun. Vandalism. 1nter pares (talk) 19:13, 13 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Courtesy link: User:Drochun. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:19, 13 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Done —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:20, 13 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you! 1nter pares (talk) 19:23, 13 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-08

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

Communities using growth tools can now showcase one event on the Special:Homepage for newcomers. This feature will help newcomers to be informed about editing activities they can participate in. Administrators can create a new event to showcase at Special:CommunityConfiguration. To learn more about this feature, please read the Diff post, have a look at the documentation, or contact the Growth team.

Updates for editors

Starting next week, talk pages at these wikis – Spanish Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia – will get a new design. This change was extensively tested as a Beta feature and is the last step of talk pages improvements. [31]
You can now navigate to view a redirect page directly from its action pages, such as the history page. Previously, you were forced to first go to the redirect target. This change should help editors who work with redirects a lot. Thanks to user stjn for this improvement. [32]
When a Cite reference is reused many times, wikis currently show either numbers like "1.23" or localized alphabetic markers like "a b c" in the reference list. Previously, if there were so many reuses that the alphabetic markers were all used, an error message was displayed. As part of the work to modernize Cite customization, these errors will no longer be shown and instead the backlinks will fall back to showing numeric markers like "1.23" once the alphabetic markers are all used.
The log entries for each change to an editor's user-groups are now clearer by specifying exactly what has changed, instead of the plain before and after listings. Translators can help to update the localized versions. Thanks to user Msz2001 for these improvements.
A new filter has been added to the Special:Nuke tool, which allows administrators to mass delete pages, to enable users to filter for pages in a range of page sizes (in bytes). This allows, for example, deleting pages only of a certain size or below. [33]
Non-administrators can now check which pages are able to be deleted using the Special:Nuke tool. Thanks to user MolecularPilot for this and the previous improvements. [34]
View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed in the configuration for the AV1 video file format, which enables these files to play again. [35]

Updates for technical contributors

Parsoid Read Views is going to be rolling out to most Wiktionaries over the next few weeks, following the successful transition of Wikivoyage to Parsoid Read Views last year. For more information, see the Parsoid/Parser Unification project page. [36][37]
Developers of tools that run on-wiki should note that mw.Uri is deprecated. Tools requiring mw.Uri must explicitly declare mediawiki.Uri as a ResourceLoader dependency, and should migrate to the browser native URL API soon. [38]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 21:16, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Upcoming Language Community Meeting (Feb 28th, 14:00 UTC) and Newsletter

Hello everyone!

We’re excited to announce that the next Language Community Meeting is happening soon, February 28th at 14:00 UTC! If you’d like to join, simply sign up on the wiki page.

This is a participant-driven meeting where we share updates on language-related projects, discuss technical challenges in language wikis, and collaborate on solutions. In our last meeting, we covered topics like developing language keyboards, creating the Moore Wikipedia, and updates from the language support track at Wiki Indaba.

Got a topic to share? Whether it’s a technical update from your project, a challenge you need help with, or a request for interpretation support, we’d love to hear from you! Feel free to reply to this message or add agenda items to the document here.

Also, we wanted to highlight that the sixth edition of the Language & Internationalization newsletter (January 2025) is available here: Wikimedia Language and Product Localization/Newsletter/2025/January. This newsletter provides updates from the October–December 2024 quarter on new feature development, improvements in various language-related technical projects and support efforts, details about community meetings, and ideas for contributing to projects. To stay updated, you can subscribe to the newsletter on its wiki page: Wikimedia Language and Product Localization/Newsletter.

We look forward to your ideas and participation at the language community meeting, see you there!

MediaWiki message delivery 08:29, 22 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-09

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

Administrators can now customize how the Babel feature creates categories using Special:CommunityConfiguration/Babel. They can rename language categories, choose whether they should be auto-created, and adjust other settings. [39]
The wikimedia.org portal has been updated – and is receiving some ongoing improvements – to modernize and improve the accessibility of our portal pages. It now has better support for mobile layouts, updated wording and links, and better language support. Additionally, all of the Wikimedia project portals, such as wikibooks.org, now support dark mode when a reader is using that system setting. [40][41][42]
One new wiki has been created: a Wiktionary in Santali (wikt:sat:) [43]
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that prevented clicking on search results in the web-interface for some Firefox for Android phone configurations. [44]

Meetings and events

The next Language Community Meeting is happening soon, February 28th at 14:00 UTC. This week's meeting will cover: highlights and technical updates on keyboard and tools for the Sámi languages, Translatewiki.net contributions from the Bahasa Lampung community in Indonesia, and technical Q&A. If you'd like to join, simply sign up on the wiki page.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:41, 25 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-10

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

All logged-in editors using the mobile view can now edit a full page. The "Edit full page" link is accessible from the "More" menu in the toolbar. This was previously only available to editors using the Advanced mobile contributions setting. [45]
Interface administrators can now help to remove the deprecated Cite CSS code matching "mw-ref" from their local MediaWiki:Common.css. The list of wikis in need of cleanup, and the code to remove, can be found with this global search and in this example, and you can learn more about how to help on the CSS migration project page. The Cite footnote markers ("[1]") are now rendered by Parsoid, and the deprecated CSS is no longer needed. The CSS for backlinks ("mw:referencedBy") should remain in place for now. This cleanup is expected to cause no visible changes for readers. Please help to remove this code before March 20, after which the development team will do it for you.
When editors embed a file (e.g. [[File:MediaWiki.png]]) on a page that is protected with cascading protection, the software will no longer restrict edits to the file description page, only to new file uploads.[46] In contrast, transcluding a file description page (e.g. {{:File:MediaWiki.png}}) will now restrict edits to the page.[47]
When editors revert a file to an earlier version it will now require the same permissions as ordinarily uploading a new version of the file. The software now checks for 'reupload' or 'reupload-own' rights,[48] and respects cascading protection.[49]
When administrators are listing pages for deletion with the Nuke tool, they can now also list associated talk pages and redirects for deletion, alongside pages created by the target, rather than needing to manually delete these pages afterwards. [50]
The previously noted update to Single User Login, which will accommodate browser restrictions on cross-domain cookies by moving login and account creation to a central domain, will now roll out to all users during March and April. The team plans to enable it for all new account creation on Group0 wikis this week. See the SUL3 project page for more details and an updated timeline.
Since last week there has been a bug that shows some interface icons as black squares until the page has fully loaded. It will be fixed this week. [51]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Sylheti (w:syl:) [52]
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed with loading images in very old versions of the Firefox browser on mobile. [53]

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 02:30, 4 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Universal Code of Conduct annual review: proposed changes are available for comment

Please help translate to your language.

I am writing to you to let you know that proposed changes to the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC) Enforcement Guidelines and Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) Charter are open for review. You can provide feedback on suggested changes through the end of day on Tuesday, 18 March 2025. This is the second step in the annual review process, the final step will be community voting on the proposed changes. Read more information and find relevant links about the process on the UCoC annual review page on Meta.

The Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is a global group dedicated to providing an equitable and consistent implementation of the UCoC. This annual review was planned and implemented by the U4C. For more information and the responsibilities of the U4C, you may review the U4C Charter.

Please share this information with other members in your community wherever else might be appropriate.

-- In cooperation with the U4C, Keegan (WMF) 18:51, 7 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wikisource:Administrators backlogs

@-jkb-, Ooswesthoesbes: This wiki may or may not need bureaucrats while not very big, so in order to keep them, please clear the backlogs and consider more nominations while I am open to this role with past experience on Commons. Or collective resignations of all bureaucrats? Either way, please act on.--Jusjih (talk) 03:54, 8 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the ping. I'd be more than happy if you join the team, so be free to nominate yourself. --Ooswesthoesbes (talk) 06:50, 8 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You are very welcome and I just nominated myself per your encouragement.--Jusjih (talk) 17:40, 8 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Please archive finished ones as many closed cases clutter the page.--Jusjih (talk) 02:33, 19 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Done myself as the newest bureaucrat.--Jusjih (talk) 00:33, 22 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-11

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

Editors who use password managers at multiple wikis may notice changes in the future. The way that our wikis provide information to password managers about reusing passwords across domains has recently been updated, so some password managers might now offer you login credentials that you saved for a different Wikimedia site. Some password managers already did this, and are now doing it for more Wikimedia domains. This is part of the SUL3 project which aims to improve how our unified login works, and to keep it compatible with ongoing changes to the web-browsers we use. [54][55]
The Wikipedia Apps Team is inviting interested users to help improve Wikipedia’s offline and limited internet use. After discussions in Afrika Baraza and the last ESEAP call, key challenges like search, editing, and offline access are being explored, with upcoming focus groups to dive deeper into these topics. All languages are welcome, and interpretation will be available. Want to share your thoughts? Join the discussion or email aramadan@wikimedia.org!
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 19. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: the launch of the Community Updates module, the most recent changes in Community Configuration, and the upcoming test of in-article suggestions for first-time editors.
An old API that was previously used in the Android Wikipedia app is being removed at the end of March. There are no current software uses, but users of the app with a version that is older than 6 months by the time of removal (2025-03-31), will no longer have access to the Suggested Edits feature, until they update their app. You can read more details about this change.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:09, 10 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

FYI: Wikisource and Wikidata together: lessons from the Wikisource Conference

https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/03/12/wikisource-and-wikidata-together-lessons-from-the-wikisource-conference/ —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 07:50, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Gaelic pages to import from enws

Hi there! Could someone with importer rights take in en:Index:Gille dubh ciar-dhubh.pdf and its pages through Special:Import? Coming here because I believe there's no gaelic ws to host it. We're at some point in the near future going to delete that as out of scope (not in english), but we're waiting to see if first we can bring it where it belongs. (I'm an admin on enws.) Cheers, — Alien 3
3 3 12:58, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Done —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:16, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Also en:Index:Ioram na truaighe, le Issachari M'Aula do Thighearna Assinn.pdf, please. Same situation. -- Beardo (talk) 04:14, 13 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Done and proposed for deletion at en.ws. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:49, 13 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]