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/2024/39 are available.

*Weekly highlight*

- All wikis will be read-only https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/Server_switch for a few minutes on Wednesday September 25 at 15:00 UTC https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1727276400. Reading the wikis will not be interrupted, but editing will be paused. These twice-yearly processes allow WMF's site reliability engineering teams to remain prepared to keep the wikis functioning even in the event of a major interruption to one of our data centers.

*Updates for editors*

- Editors who use the iOS Wikipedia app in Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Chinese, may see the Alt Text suggested-edit experiment https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Apps/iOS_Suggested_edits_project/Alt_Text_Experiment after editing an article, or completing a suggested edit using "Add an image https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Apps/iOS_Suggested_edits_project#Hypothesis_2_Add_an_Image_Suggested_Edit". Alt-text helps people with visual impairments to read Wikipedia articles. The team aims to learn if adding alt-text to images is a task that editors can be successful with. Please share any feedback on the discussion page https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Apps/iOS_Suggested_edits_project/Alt_Text_Experiment . - The Codex color palette has been updated with new and revised colors for the MediaWiki user interfaces. The most noticeable changes https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Design_System_Team/Color/Design_documentation#Updates for editors include updates for: dark mode colors for Links and for quiet Buttons (progressive and destructive), visited Link colors for both light and dark modes, and background colors for system-messages in both light and dark modes. - [image: Advanced item] It is now possible to include clickable wikilinks and external links inside code blocks. This includes links that are used within <syntaxhighlight> tags and on code pages (JavaScript, CSS, Scribunto and Sanitized CSS). Uses of template syntax {{…}} are also linked to the template page. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements. [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T368166 - Two bugs were fixed in the GlobalVanishRequest https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Account_vanishing system by improving the logging and by removing an incorrect placeholder message. [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T370595[3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T372223 - View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/Recently_resolved_community_tasks .

*Updates for technical contributors*

- [image: Advanced item] From Wikimedia Enterprise https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Enterprise:

- The API now enables 5,000 on-demand API requests per month and twice-monthly HTML snapshots freely (gratis and libre). More information on the updates and also improvements to the software development kits (SDK) are explained on the project's blog post https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/blog/enhanced-free-api/. While Wikimedia Enterprise APIs are designed for high-volume commercial reusers, this change enables many more community use-cases to be built on the service too. - The Snapshot API (html dumps) have added beta Structured Contents endpoints (blog post on that https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/blog/structured-contents-snapshot-api/) as well as released two beta datasets (English and French Wikipedia) from that endpoint to Hugging Face for public use and feedback (blog post on that https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/blog/hugging-face-dataset/). These pre-parsed data sets enable new options for researchers, developers, and data scientists to use and study the content.

*In depth*

- [image: Advanced item] The Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) is used to get answers to questions using the Wikidata data set. As Wikidata grows, we had to make a major architectural change so that WDQS could remain performant. As part of the WDQS Graph Split project https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikidata:SPARQL_query_service/WDQS_graph_split, we have new SPARQL endpoints available for serving the "scholarly https://query-scholarly.wikidata.org" and "main https://query-main.wikidata.org" subgraphs of Wikidata. The query.wikidata.org endpoint https://query.wikidata.org will continue to serve the full Wikidata graph until March 2025. After this date, it will only serve the main graph. For more information, please see the announcement on Wikidata https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikidata:SPARQL_query_service/WDQS_backend_update/September_2024_scaling_update .

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