Latest *tech news https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News* from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2025/38 are available.

*Updates for editors*

- References lists that are made using the <references/> tag https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Help:Cite#references-tag will now automatically display with columns in Vector 2022 when readers are using its 'standard' settings for text-size and page-width. [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T334941 - Starting in the week of October 6, on small wikis https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/operations/mediawiki-config/%2B/a2d2aaab9ace84280dd2f4c70a33bb69cd73850f/dblists/small.dblist and medium wikis https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/operations/mediawiki-config/%2B/a2d2aaab9ace84280dd2f4c70a33bb69cd73850f/dblists/medium.dblist that have the CampaignEvents extension https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Help:Extension:CampaignEvents enabled, all autoconfirmed users will be able to use Event Registration https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Event_Center/Registration as an organizer. No changes will be made for large wikis https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/operations/mediawiki-config/%2B/a2d2aaab9ace84280dd2f4c70a33bb69cd73850f/dblists/large.dblist unless requested in Phabricator. This change is being made to make it easier for more people to use Event Registration, especially on wikis that are less likely to have policies related to the Event Organizer right. Learn more https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/CampaignEvents/Proposal_to_grant_autoconfirmed_users_on_small_and_medium_wikis_the_organizer_access_to_the_event_registration_tool . - Users that search using regular expressions (regex) can now use additional features including: - for the intitle: keyword: metacharacters https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Help:CirrusSearch#Metacharacters for start-of-line (^) and end-of-line ($) anchors [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T317599 - for both intitle: and insource: keywords: shorthand character classes https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Help:CirrusSearch#Character_Classes for digits (\d), whitespace (\s), and word characters (\w); and escape codes https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Help:CirrusSearch#Escape_codes for line feed (\r), newline (\n), tab (\t), and unicode (e.g. \uHHHH). [3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T403212 - When you search for text that looks like an IP, the system will now show search results. It used to take you to the contributions for that IP instead of showing search results. [4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T306325 - All wikis will be read-only https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/Server_switch for a few minutes on September 24. This is planned at 15:00 UTC https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1758726000. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests which happen twice a year. You can read more about the background and details of this process on the Diff blog https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/03/12/hear-that-the-wikis-go-silent-twice-a-year/ . - View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/Recently_resolved_community_tasks. For example, a bug was fixed that affected users who used the page-tabs to switch from wikitext editing of a section into the visualeditor. [5] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T401043

*Updates for technical contributors*

- The MediaWiki Interfaces team is redesigning the Wikimedia REST API Sandbox with Codex. If you have feedback on improvements for the API documentation or what makes developer experiences smooth (or frustrating), you’re invited to join an upcoming discovery interview https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/appointments/schedules/AcZssZ2aZzbXeQvjOF7gB1fJXiwAYemQjKf4sXNaRODPA7_obFyNBwkzNkoVCoTF-aeov89kIjXHbCQm, or leave feedback onwiki https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Interfaces_Team/Developer_Feedback/Wikimedia_Web_APIs. Learn more https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/C4FBAOA57PH6G5ORVMAUF5TGYBLZDU5Q/ . - Edits to Wikidata aliases (an alternative name for an item or a property) will now be shown in RecentChanges and Watchlist entries on other wikis less often, reducing unnecessary notifications. This will reduce the overall quantity of 'noisy' entries. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. Learn more https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata_For_Wikimedia_Projects/Reduce_change_propagation_noise#Phase_1:_More_granular_Alias_tracking. [6] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T401288 - The new Unicode 17.0 https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode17.0.0/ version has been released. The datasets on Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Unicode_Module_Datasets for the Module:Unicode data https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q39301585 have been updated. Wikipedias that do not use the Commons datasets should either update their own data or switch to the Commons datasets. - Users of the Wikimedia Enterprise https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Enterprise Structured Contents endpoints can now access Parsed Tables https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/blog/parsed-wikipedia-tables/. The new Parsed Tables feature extracts and represents Wikipedia tables in structured JSON. This improves machine accessibility as part of the Structured Contents initiative https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/api/structured-contents/. Structured Contents output is freely available through the On-demand API https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/docs/on-demand/#article-structured-contents-beta, or through Wikimedia Cloud Services. - A dataset of English Wikipedia biographical information https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/wikimedia-foundation/english-wikipedia-people-dataset from Wikimedia Enterprise https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Enterprise has been published on Kaggle, for evaluation and research. This provides structured data from more than 1.5 million biographies, including birth and death dates, education, affiliations, careers, awards, and more (from a June 2024 snapshot). - Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.45/wmf.19

*Meetings and events*

- Scholarship applications https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/2026:Scholarships for Wikimania 2026 in Paris, France, are open until October 31.

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