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/2026/08 are available.

*Weekly highlight*

- The SRE Team https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Site_Reliability_Engineering will be performing a cleanup of Wikimedia's Etherpad https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Etherpad instance, the web-based editor for real-time collaborative document editing. All pads will be permanently deleted after 30 April, 2026 – if there are still migration projects in progress at that point the team can revisit the date on a case by case basis. Please create local backups of any content you wish to keep, as deleted data cannot be recovered. This cleanup helps reduce database size and minimize infrastructure footprint. Etherpad will continue to support real-time collaboration, but long-term storage should not be expected. Additional cleanups may occur in the future without prior notice. [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T415237

*Updates for editors*

- The Information Retrieval team will be launching an Android mobile app experiment https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Readers/Information_Retrieval/Phase_1 that tests hybrid search capabilities which can handle both semantic and keyword queries. The improvement of on-platform search will enable readers to find what they’re looking for directly on Wikipedia more easily. The experiment will first be launched on Greek Wikipedia in late February, followed by English, French, and Portuguese in March. Read more https://diff.wikimedia.org/2026/01/08/semantic-search-making-it-easier-to-find-the-information-readers-want/ on Diff blog. [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Readers/Information_Retrieval - The Reader Growth team will run an experiment https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Readers/Reader_Growth/WE3.10.2_Mobile_Table_of_Contents for mobile web users, that adds a table of contents and automatically expands all article sections, to learn more about navigation issues they face. The test will be available on Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. - Previously, site notices (MediaWiki:Sitenotice https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Sitenotice and MediaWiki:Anonnotice https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Anonnotice) would only render on the desktop site. Now, they will render on all platforms. Users on mobile web will now see these notices and be informed. Site administrators should be prepared to test and fix notices on mobile devices to avoid interference with articles. To opt out, interface admins can add #siteNotice { display: none; } to MediaWiki:Minerva.css https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Minerva.css. [3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T138572[4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T416644 - View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/Recently_resolved_community_tasks. For example, an issue on Special:RecentChanges https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges has been fixed. Previously, clicking hide in the active filters caused the "view new changes since…" button to disappear, though it should have remained visible. The button now behaves as expected. [5] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T406339

*Updates for technical contributors*

- New documentation is now available to help editors debug on-site search features. It supports troubleshooting when pages do not appear in results, when ranking seems unexpected, and when you need to inspect what content is being indexed, helping make search behavior easier to understand and analyze. Learn more https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:CirrusSearch/Debug. [6] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T411169 - Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.46/wmf.16

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