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/2025/40 are available.

*Weekly highlight*

- A major software upgrade has been made to Phabricator https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/. The update introduces performance improvements, a refreshed search interface, enhancements to Maniphest task search, updates to user profile pages and project workboards, new Herald automation features, as well as general text input, mobile experience improvements and more. [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/post/view/321/iterative_improvements_september_2025/

*Updates for editors*

- The Community Tech team will release the new Community Wishlist extension on October 1, that will improve the way wishes will be submitted. The new extension will allow users to add tags to their wishes to better categorise them, and (in a future iteration) to filter them by status, tags and focus areas. It will also be possible to support individual wishes again, as requested by the community in many instances. The old system will be retired. There will be a brief period of downtime while the extension is deployed and wishes are migrated to the new system. You can read more about this in the latest update https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Community_Wishlist/Updates or you can consult the current documentation on MediaWiki https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Help:Extension:CommunityRequests . - As announced on Diff blog https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/09/02/better-detecting-bots-and-replacing-our-captcha/, the production trial of the hCaptcha https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Product_Safety_and_Integrity/Anti-abuse_signals/hCaptcha service for bot detection has begun. The trial is currently using hCaptcha to protect account creation on Chinese, Persian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, and Turkish Wikipedias, where it will replace our existing CAPTCHA https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Extension:ConfirmEdit#FancyCaptcha (FancyCaptcha). The goal with the trial is to better block bots while also improving usability and accessibility for users who encounter CAPTCHA challenges. - The CampaignEvents https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Extension:CampaignEvents extension has been deployed https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/CampaignEvents/Deployment_status to Wikimedia Commons. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. On Commons, anyone who is a registered user can use it as an event participant. To use it as an organizer, someone needs to have the event organizer right https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Commons:Event_organizers . - Sub-referencing https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Sub-referencing, a new feature to re-use references with different details has been released to German Wikipedia. You can test the feature https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Sub-referencing#test on testwiki or on betawiki https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmcloud.org/wiki/Sub-referencing as well. Please share your thoughts on using templates in sub-references https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Sub-referencing#Templates_used_in_sub-references or volunteer to become a pilot wiki https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Sub-referencing#Pilot_wikis . - On wikis using the Mentorship https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Help:Growth/Mentorship system, communities can now opt experienced editors out of Mentorship through Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship. Within this setting, communities may define thresholds, based on edit count and account age, to decide when an editor is considered experienced enough to no longer receive Mentorship. [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T403563 - The Editing Team and the Machine Learning Team are working on a new check for newcomers: Tone check https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Edit_check/Tone_Check. Using a prediction model, this check will encourage editors to improve the tone of their edits, using artificial intelligence. We invite volunteers to review the first version of the Tone language model for the following languages: Arabic, Czech, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Farsi, Italian, Norwegian, Romanian and Latvian. Users from these wikis interested in reviewing this model are invited to sign up at MediaWiki.org https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Edit_check/Tone_Check/Model_evaluation. The deadline to sign up is on October 3, which will be the start date of the test. - The rollout of multiblocks https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Help:Manage_blocks had the side effect that non-active block logs may have been shown on Special:Contributions and on blocked users' user and user_talk pages. This issue will be fully resolved in a few days. As part of the fix, messages prefixed with sp-contributions-blocked-notice https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Allmessages&prefix=sp-contributions-blocked-notice will be removed and replaced with those prefixed with blocked-notice-logextract https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Allmessages&prefix=blocked-notice-logextract in a few weeks. Please help translate the new messages and update any local overrides if needed. - There was a bug with links added using visual editor if they included characters such as [ ] | after the fragment identifier (#). They were not encoded properly creating an incorrect link. This has been fixed. [3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T404823 - One new wiki has been created: a Wikiquote in Malay https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q9237 (q:ms: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/ms:) [4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T404698 - [image: Recurrent item] View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/Recently_resolved_community_tasks. For example, the User Info Card https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Product_Safety_and_Integrity/Anti-abuse_signals/User_Info now displays currently active global lock/blocks. [5] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T401128

*Updates for technical contributors*

- Later this week, editors using Lua modules will be able to use the mw.title.newBatch https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Extension:Scribunto/Lua_reference_manual#mw.title.newBatch function to look up the existence of up to 25 pages at once, in a way that only increases the expensive function https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Manual:Parser_functions#Expensive_parser_functions count once. - A new Unsupported Tools Working Group https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Product_and_Technology_Advisory_Council/Unsupported_Tools_Working_Group has been formed as part of ongoing efforts to collectively determine technical work priorities, similar to the Product & Technology Advisory Council https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Product_and_Technology_Advisory_Council (PTAC). The working group will help prioritize and review requests for support of unmaintained extensions, gadgets, bots, and tools. For the first cycle, the group will be prioritizing an unsupported Wikimedia Commons tool. - [image: Recurrent item] Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.45/wmf.21

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