Let's chat 
Click here to message me. I will reply as soon as I can. All replies will be made directly underneath your message on this page. If we started a conversation on your page, let's keep the conversation on your page.
Please create your message with a subject/headline and sign your message using four tildes (~~~~) at the end.
/Archives 2025 |
| Table of contents |
|---|
Tech News: 2026-27
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
- As part of the Account Creation Experiments, the Growth team tested adding a user account icon in the mobile web header for logged-out users, providing direct access to "Create account" and "Log in" actions. The experiment increased account creation by about 20% without negatively affecting edit quality or constructive edit rates. The feature will now be rolled out to all Wikimedia Foundation wikis on mobile web in the first week of July. [1]
- After a successful experiment, logged-in users who did not confirm their email address when their account was created see a new banner asking them to complete that process. This helps reduce the risk that users get locked out of their account, and makes account email addresses overall more reliable. This is part of the Account Security project. [2]
- An update to Search is refining how the
-prefix:behaves when used to exclude results. Previously, using-prefix:with negation could unintentionally broaden search results by adding the namespaces included in the search scope, leading to confusing behavior for users expecting a straightforward exclusion filter. With the update,-prefix:will now strictly exclude matching page titles as intended and may display a warning if the relevant namespace has not been explicitly selected. The behavior ofprefix:without negation however remains unchanged. [3] 
View all 33 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where reviewers using the Page Curation toolbar were not automatically subscribed to talk page discussions they started has now been fixed. Reviewers will now receive notifications when someone replies to those discussions. [4]
Updates for technical contributors
- Starting June 29th, automated downloads from the dumps.wikimedia.org website will be subject to the user-agent policy. Automated requests that provide a generic or empty user-agent will be blocked. Access to dumps through Wikimedia Cloud Services remains unaffected. This is a follow up to the announcement made in the 2026/25 issue of Tech News.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.