King George VI
Sorry, I didn’t realise lung cancer had already been linked earlier in the article — my mistake. Thank you for the explanation on the revert, I appreciate the clarification.
In appreciation
|
The Completionist Barnstar | |
| Realised I haven't seen you around in a while. Hope you're doing alright. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 11:56, 20 January 2026 (UTC) |
- Likewise Kowal2701 (talk) 08:37, 7 February 2026 (UTC)
Your draft article, Draft:Grapholinguistics
Hello, Remsense. This message concerns the Articles for Creation submission or draft page you started, "Grapholinguistics".
Drafts that go unedited for six months are eligible for deletion, in accordance with our draftspace policy, and this one has been nominated for deletion. If you plan on working on it further, or editing it to address the issues raised if it was declined, simply , and remove the {{db-afc}}, {{db-draft}}, or {{db-g13}} code.
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Thank you for your submission to Wikipedia! DreamRimmer bot II (talk) 23:23, 1 February 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-06
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- The "Page information" feature, which gives validating information about a page (example), now automatically includes a table of contents. If there is a local MediaWiki:Pageinfo-header page created by individual users, it can now be removed. [1]
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, VisualEditor previously added bold or italic formatting inside link descriptions, making the wikicode complex. This has now been fixed. [2]
Updates for technical contributors
- There was no XML dump on 20 January. Additionally, from now on, dumps will be generated once per month only. [3]
- The MediaWiki Interfaces team removed support for all transform endpoints containing a trailing slash from the MediaWiki REST API. All API users currently calling those endpoints are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. If you have questions or encounter any problems, please file a ticket in phabricator to the #MW-Interfaces-Team board.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Weekly highlight
- Users are reminded that the Wikimedia Foundation has shared some guiding questions for the July 2026–June 2027 Annual Plan on Meta and Diff. These focus on global trends, faster and healthier experimentation, better support for newcomers, strengthening editors and advanced users, improving collaboration across projects, and growing and retaining readership. Feedback and ideas are welcome on the talk page.
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MediaWiki message delivery 17:41, 2 February 2026 (UTC)
Feedback requests from the Feedback Request Service
Your feedback is requested at Talk:North Africa and Talk:Battle of Kasserine Pass on "History and geography" request for comments, and at Talk:Ladislav Zgusta and Talk:Half of a Yellow Sun on "Language and literature" Good Article nominations, and at Talk:Kazakh–Dzungar War (1635–1658) and Talk:Carlos Meléndez (politician) on "History" Good Article nominations, and at Talk:The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction on a "Language and literature" Good Article nomination, and at Talk:Theodor Schultze on a "Philosophy and religion" Good Article nomination, and at Talk:This Monster Wants to Eat Me on a "Language and literature" Good Article nomination, and at Talk:Truth on a "Philosophy and religion" Good Article nomination, and at Talk:Warriors (novel series) on a "Language and literature" Good Article nomination. Thank you for helping out!
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(replacing Yapperbot) SodiumBot (botop|talk) 23:35, 7 February 2026 (UTC)
Sub-referencing: Update
Greetings from WMDE Technical Wishes! In September 2025 we deployed sub-referencing to German Wikipedia to make re-using references with different details easier. Thanks for piloting and helping to improve the feature!
We recently published our insights and next steps in our report. Some highlights:
- Over 6,000 Wikipedia articles use the new feature, with a total of over 15,000 sub-references created to date.
- There are both experienced editors in featured articles (e.g. de:Explosion des Oppauer Stickstoffwerkes) and relatively inexperienced VisualEditor users (e.g. in de:Schmerzhafte Muttergottes (Guido Cagnacci)) using the feature. The majority of all sub-references (approx. 90%) are created in wikitext, yet over 300 editors have used the function in VisualEditor alone.
- Workarounds like
<ref name="Miller" /><sup>p. 44</sup>(in the reader view [1] p. 44) have been replaced entirely by sub-referencing, which means that the complete reference information – including the page number – is now visible in both the reference list and in Reference Previews. - Sub-referencing is used with lots of different citation details – predominantly page numbers, but also details such as chapters, paragraphs, quotes or video / audio timestamps.
What has happened since September?
- We ensured that re-used sub-references actually appear as re-used in the reader view and in VisualEditor.
- We've made some cosmetic changes to the reference list: Initially, multi-line sub-references (e.g. quotations) were not displayed ideally, and two-digit sub-reference numbers were not indented correctly.
- In VisualEditor, we have provided a feature to choose whether changes to re-used sub-references should affect all uses of the same sub-reference or only the one currently edited.
What's next?
- We will deploy sub-referencing to additional pilot wikis next week: Polish Wikipedia, Swedish Wikipdia and seven smaller wikis (phab:T414094). All of these projects have been notified in advance.
- We are working on technical adjustments to make sub-referencing usable in all wikis that use variants of the {{Reflist}} template.
- We are continuing to address community feedback: Among other things, we are currently exploring various ideas for visually improving reference lists with lots sub-references (e.g. de:Liste der Straßen in Bad Honnef#Einzelnachweise und Anmerkungen).
- In addition to sub-referencing, we are looking at other reference-related improvements: We are considering general improvements to Reference Previews or solving issues with automatically created reference names in VisualEditor – there will be announcements and community consultations on this in the near future.
More information about sub-referencing on our project page, more about our learnings and next steps in our report. All the best from WMDE Technical Wishes!
PS: You've recieved this message because you subscribed to our newsletter. Remove your name from the sign-up list if you don't want to receive further updates.--Johannes Richter (WMDE) (talk) 15:35, 9 February 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-07
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Logged-in contributors who manage large or complex watchlists can now organise and filter watched pages in ways that improve their workflows with the new Watchlist labels feature. By adding custom labels (for example: pages you created, pages being monitored for vandalism, or discussion pages) users can more quickly identify what needs attention, reduce cognitive load, and respond more efficiently. This improves watchlist usability, especially for highly active editors.- A new feature available on Special:Contributions shows temporary accounts that are likely operated by the same person, and so makes patrolling less time-consuming. Upon checking contributions of a temporary account, users with access to temporary account IP addresses can now see a view of contributions from the related temporary accounts. The feature looks up all the IPs associated with a given temporary account within the data retention period and shows all the contributions of all temporary accounts that have used these IPs. Learn more. [4]
- When editors preview a wikitext edit, the reminder box that they are only seeing a preview (which is shown at the top), now has a grey/neutral background instead of a yellow/warning background. This makes it easier to distinguish preview notes from actual warnings (for example, edit conflicts or problematic redirect targets), which will now be shown in separate warning or error boxes. [5]
- The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension continues to improve — it now properly supports more than one Wikibase site, for example both Wikidata and testwikidata. In addition, issues regarding text direction have been fixed for users who prefer Wikidata or other Wikibase sites in right-to-left (RTL) languages. [6][7]
- The automatic "magic links" for ISBN, RFC, and PMID numbers have been deprecated in wikitext since 2021 due to inflexibility and difficulties with localization. Several wikis have successfully replaced RFC and PMID magic links with equivalent external links, but a template was often required to replace the functionality of the ISBN magic link. There is now a new built-in parser function
{{#isbn}}available to replace the basic functionality of the ISBN magic link. This makes it easier for wikis who wish to migrate off of the deprecated magic link functionality to do so. [8] - Two new wikis have been created:
- View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- A new global user group has been created: Local bots. It will be used internally by the software to allow community bots to bypass rate limits that are applied to abusive web scrapers. Accounts that are approved as bots on at least one Wikimedia wiki will be automatically added to this group. It will not change what user permissions the bot has. [11]
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- The MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference, Spring 2026 will be held March 25–27 in Salt Lake City, USA. This event is organized by and for the third-party MediaWiki community. You can propose sessions and register to attend. [12]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:28, 9 February 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-08
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- The SRE Team will be performing a cleanup of Wikimedia's 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. [13]
Updates for editors
- The Information Retrieval team will be launching an Android mobile app experiment 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 on Diff blog. [14]
- The Reader Growth team will run an experiment 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 and 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. [15][16] - View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue on 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. [17]
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. [18]
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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MediaWiki message delivery 19:15, 16 February 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-09
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- Reference Check has been deployed to English Wikipedia, completing its rollout across all Wikipedias. The feature prompts newcomers to add a citation before publishing new content, helping reduce common citation-related reverts and improve verifiability. In A/B testing, the impact was substantial: newcomers shown Reference Check were approximately 2.2 times more likely to include a reference on desktop and about 17.5 times more likely on mobile web. [19]
Updates for editors
- The InterwikiSorting extension, which allowed for the sorting of interwiki links, has been undeployed from Wikipedia. As a result, editors who had enabled interwiki link sorting in non-compact mode (full list format) will now see links reordered. The links moving forward will be listed in the alphabetical order of language code. [20]
- Later this week, people who are editing a page-section using the mobile visual editor, will notice a new "Edit full page" button. When tapped, you will be able to edit the entire article. This helps when the change you want to make is outside the section you initially opened. [21][22]
- The Reader Experience team is inviting editors to assess whether dark mode should still be considered "beta" on their wiki, based on their experience of how well it functions on desktop and mobile. If the feature is deemed mature, editors can update the interface messages in
MediaWiki:skin-theme-descriptionandMediaWiki:Vector-night-mode-beta-tagto indicate that dark mode is ready and no longer considered beta. - The improved Activity tab which displays user-insights is now available to all users of the Wikipedia iOS app (version 7.9.0 and later). Following earlier A/B testing that showed higher account creation among users with access to the feature, it has been rolled out to 100% of users along with some updates. The Activity tab now shows your edited articles in the timeline, offers editing impact insights like contribution counts and article view trends, and customization options to improve in-app experience for users.
- View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug that prevented DiscussionTools from working on mobile has now been fixed, restoring full functionality. [23]
Updates for technical contributors
- The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension that makes this possible continues to improve. The latest upgrade is the inclusion of a new hook,
ext.globalwatchlist.rebuild, which fires after each watchlist rebuild. This allows you to run gadgets and user scripts for the Special page. [24] - Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
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