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. [1]
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. [2]
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. [3]
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. [4]
Hello Grumpylawnchair, and thanks for patrolling new pages! I am just letting you know that I declined the speedy deletion of File:Eduard Kazmierski low res.tif, a page you tagged for speedy deletion, because of the following concern: File is on commons. F1 does not apply. You may wish to review the Criteria for Speedy Deletion before tagging further pages. Thank you. Whpq (talk) 01:13, 29 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
No worries. I would have deleted it as F8 instead, but I am not sure that the PD status noted on Commons is correct without a bit of resaerch which would be helped if I knew any Polish. -- Whpq (talk) 04:54, 29 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It probably is in the public domain in Poland because any image published without a clear copyright notice before March 1994 is assumed to be in the public domain. This is from a Polish work from 1984. Grumpylawnchair (talk)05:02, 29 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Copyvio revel A Rózsa énekei
Thank you for identifying the copyright violation. I hid the affected revisions. I did want to point out that the revisions you listed for revdel wasn’t correct. It should span from the first occurrence of the problem to the edit prior to the one that deleted the infringing content. In this case, you only marked a few of the edits involved and included the deleting edit. I changed the range to cover the correct ones. See A Rózsa énekei to see. — rsjaffe🗣️06:02, 30 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
