Hello everyone!
We're excited to announce that the next Language Community Meeting is
happening soon - on November 28th at 16:00 UTC! If you’d like to join,
simply sign up on the wiki page
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_and_Product_Localization/…>
.
This is a participant-driven meeting where we share updates on
language-related projects, discuss technical challenges in language wikis,
and collaborate on solutions. For example, in our upcoming meeting, we plan
to hear from contributors of the Wikitongues project and Fante
Wikimedia Community.
Got a topic to share? Whether it’s a technical update from your project, a
challenge you need help with, or a request for interpretation support, we’d
love to hear from you! Feel free to reply to this message or add agenda
items to the document here
<https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/language-community-meeting-nov-2025>.
Also, we’d like to highlight that the 9th edition of the Language &
Internationalization Newsletter (October 2025)
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_and_Product_Localization/…>
is
now available. This newsletter provides updates from the July–September
2025 quarter on new feature development, improvements in various
language-related technical projects and support efforts, details about
community meetings, and ideas for contributing to projects. To stay
updated, you can subscribe to the newsletter
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Newsletter:Language_and_Internationalization…>
on
its wiki page.
Are you interested in contributing to the technical work around language
development? See a curated list of technical contribution tasks here:
T407935 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T407935>.
We look forward to your ideas and participation at the Language Community
Meeting. See you there!
Cheers,
Srishti
*Srishti Sethi*
Senior Developer Advocate
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
The WMF makes available a dump of the search indices from CirrusSearch (the
MediaWiki extension that provides search functionality on WMF wikis) on a
weekly basis. These have been running for many years, but sadly have been
getting slower and slower over time as the relevant datasets have grown. A
few months ago we got to the point where sometimes a weekly dump takes more
than a week to generate. As such we've reworked these dumps to generate in
a slightly different manner.
You can reach out to us if there are difficulties migrating to the
replacement dumps. The best place to provide feedback will be in
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T366248.
Changes:
* Old dumps location: https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/cirrussearch/
* New dumps location: https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/cirrus_search_index/
* The new dumps are bzip2 compressed, while the old ones were gzip.
* Old dumps were one file per search index. New dumps are one directory per
search index. A directory may have one or more files.
* The content of the files is exactly the same. It's just split across
multiple files for ease of generation.
* The old files can be recreated locally, if needed, by concatenating the
decompressed versions. Something like `bzcat *.json.bz2 > full-dump.json`
We will continue producing the old dumps through November, expecting to
shut them off before the end of the year.
Erik Bernhardson
Search Platform
Hey all,
This is a quick note to highlight that we've created the REL1_45 branch for
MediaWiki core and each of the extensions and skins in Wikimedia git [0].
This is the first step in the release process for MediaWiki 1.45.0, which
should be out in late November 2025, approximately six months after
MediaWiki 1.44.0.
The branches reflect the code as of the last 'alpha' branch for the
release, 1.45.0-wmf.25, which was deployed to Wikimedia wikis on Tuesday,
28 October 2025, for MediaWiki itself and those extensions and skins
available there.
From now on, patches that land in the main development branch of MediaWiki
and its bundled extensions and skins will be slated for the MediaWiki 1.46
release, unless specifically backported [1].
If you are working on a critical bug fix that will affect the code in the
release, once the patch has been merged into the development branch, you
should propose it for backporting by cherry-picking to the REL1_45 branch.
If you are working on a new feature, that should now not be backported. If
you have an urgent case where the work should block release for everyone
else, please file a task against the `mw 1.45-release` project on
Phabricator [2].
If you have tickets that are tagged for `mw-1.45-release`, please finish
them, untag them, or reach out to get them resolved in the next few days.
We hope to issue the first release candidate, 1.45.0-rc.0, in two weeks'
time, and if all goes well, to then release MediaWiki 1.45.0 a few weeks
after that.
[0]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bundled_extensions_and_skins
[1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Backporting_fixes
[2]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/mw-1.45-release/
Best regards,
--
Mateus Santos (he/him)
Product Manager MediaWiki Engineering Group
Hello everyone,
The Chinese Wikipedia is holding a discussion [1][2] about wiping out tofus when displaying rare Chinese characters. During the discussion, one option turned out to be serving a webfont covering all CJK planes, which was the practice on Chinese Wikipedia more than a decade ago before it was disabled for security reasons. Since the reasons are still valid and ULS is no longer accepting new font additions, so the only feasible way to achieve this is to serve the webfont via a Toolforge domain.
Due to potential impacts of this proposal, I'm writing to ask:
- Is it acceptable to serve a webfont (conditionally or not conditionally) via Toolforge by default, policy-wise?
- And is it acceptable in terms of performance (since Toolforge is not using Wikimedia's CDN)?
[1] https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E4%BA%92%E5%8A%A9%E5%AE%A2%E6%A0%8…
[2] https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E4%BA%92%E5%8A%A9%E5%AE%A2%E6%A0%8…
Best regards,
diskdance
Hi Community Metrics team,
This is your automatic monthly Phabricator statistics mail.
Accounts created in (2025-10): 373
Active Maniphest users (any activity) in (2025-10): 1184
Task authors in (2025-10): 633
Users who have closed tasks in (2025-10): 319
Projects which had at least one task moved from one column to another on
their workboard in (2025-10): 347
Tasks created in (2025-10): 2861
Tasks closed in (2025-10): 2459
Open and stalled tasks in total: 55765
* Only open tasks in total: 54697
* Only stalled tasks in total: 1068
Median age in days of open tasks by priority:
Unbreak now: 114
Needs Triage: 1159
High: 1422
Normal: 2252
Low: 2773
Lowest: 3634
(How long tasks have been open, not how long they have had that priority)
To see the names of the most active task authors:
* Go to https://wikimedia.biterg.io/
* Choose "Phabricator > Overview" from the top bar
* Adjust the time frame in the upper right corner to your needs
* See the author names in the "Submitters" panel
TODO: Numbers which refer to closed tasks might not be correct, as
described in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T1003 .
Yours sincerely,
Fab Rick Aytor
(via community_metrics.sh on phab1004 at Sat 01 Nov 2025 12:00:39 AM UTC)
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