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Administrators' newsletter – October 2026
[edit]News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2026).
Administrator changes
Oversight changes
Guideline and policy news
- Following an RfC, the good article criteria have been amended to add accessibility requirements.
- Following an RfC, late signatures added to administrator recall petitions after 720 hours from opening are reverted or struck and do not count towards the threshold, even if the petition has not yet been formally closed.
- The post-May 2026 administrator elections RfCs concluded with consensus for election monitors to curate blatantly inappropriate questions after posting, and to remove or merge true duplicates, clearly marking merged questions. Calls for candidates will include advisory guidance that users with less than one year’s experience or 5,000 edits generally lack a realistic chance of success.
Technical news
- Interface administrators no longer need to specify the
ResourceLoaderoption in the definitions for gadgets on MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition as gadgets are always loaded throughResourceLoader. (T298199) - The
list=abusefiltersAPI module now supportsformatversion=2and includes breaking changes to its responses. In particular, theactionsproperty is now a JSON array rather than a string, regardless of the format version. Maintainers of user scripts and other code using this module should check compatibility and update their code as needed. (T435828)
Arbitration
- The arbitration case Gun control 2 has been closed.
Obituaries
- Doug Weller passed away on 30 September 2026. Doug Weller began editing Wikipedia in 2006 and became an administrator in 2008, making nearly 275,000 edits over two decades. He served on the Arbitration Committee from 2015 through 2018 and was also a longtime CheckUser and Oversighter.
Miscellaneous
- The October 2026 administrator elections are scheduled to run from September 29 to October 19. The call for candidates ends October 5.
- Self-nominations for the electoral commission for the 2026 Arbitration Committee elections is opened and closes on 8 October.
- The Good Article Nominations backlog drive has begun and is scheduled to end on November 3.
Tech News: 2026-41
[edit]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 process for this year’s Community Wishlist has been published, incorporating community feedback. The wish submission process will end on November 8. This year, a working group (open for volunteering) that includes community members familiar with the technical aspect of our wikis alongside Wikimedia Foundation staff, will take care of the triage process. The triage is expected to be completed by late November. Votes for wishes will start in January.
Updates for editors
- Editors using the visual editor will now see a warning when they paste text that is likely to have initially been copied from one of five external generative AI chatbots into Wikipedia. This feature is known as LLM Paste Check. It is a type of Edit Check that is community configurable. The check looks for markers in the copied HTML and is not using content watermark detection. Edits will also be tagged so that patrollers can review them more closely. The feature helps newcomers add content that respects Wikipedia’s policies and makes it easier for experienced editors to identify problematic edits. Communities with local policies about LLM usage can adjust the wording and policy that is linked. The team apologizes that this was rolled out without a delay for translations.
- Editors can now easily access the web visual editor directly from the iOS and Android apps. When opening the editor, users will be given a choice between visual editing and source editing. If they choose visual editing, they will be sent to a mobile web window in their phone's browser. After completing their edit, a banner will give them the option to return to the app. This enables readers to make quick contributions while casually reading.
- Users of the Wikipedia Android and iOS apps will now see a one-time account creation prompt after they have used the app for two consecutive weeks. This prompt explains the benefits of having an account. It is intended to help more casual readers become logged-in users who return to the apps regularly.
- Editors on group1 wikis, including Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikivoyage, and Wikisource, will no longer see notifications on Recent Changes and Watchlist when a link to another language version of a page is added, removed, or changed in its Wikidata item. This change will begin on October 5 at 07:00 UTC as a two-week trial to reduce high-volume, low-value notifications and make important changes easier to identify. Editors who rely on these notifications can read more on the project page and share feedback or concerns on the talk page.
View all 36 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where mentors who removed themselves from the mentorship program could still have mentees assigned to them and receive questions, has now been fixed. Mentees will now be reassigned when a mentor leaves the program.
Updates for technical contributors
- Wikimedia Brasil has published its Development Best Practices Framework (ABPD). It is a guide for staff, contractors and volunteers building technical tools and projects. It covers the project lifecycle, security, accessibility, personal data protection and responsible AI use, and explains how movement-wide guidelines were adapted to a local context. They encourage other affiliates to reuse it and adapt it. Read more in the Diff post.
- A new, canonical base URL for Wikimedia APIs will soon be introduced. The new canonical route follows a
{projectName}/api/pattern and will act as an alternative path for current REST APIs (for example:{projectName}/w/rest.php/). Both versions will be callable for all existing APIs, but the new structure will be the preferred path for newly created API modules. This change will be non-breaking for most users. The existing pathways will remain available for all existing endpoint requests. However, some endpoints may return URLs following the new pattern in response bodies. Changes will be available on test wiki first, with the rollout expected to cover all wikis by the end of October. - 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.
18:49, 5 October 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-42
[edit]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
- Starting October 13, wikis can change the default pattern for auto-generated reference names in VisualEditor (currently
<ref name=":1" />). They will be able to use human-readable, content-based reference names that are more helpful to contributors using the source editor (e.g.<ref name="Miller2026-1" />). VisualEditor reference name patterns can be defined using MediaWiki system messages, JSON, templates and modules (more information). Admins can enable these changes via community configuration. This is a community wish implemented by WMDE Technical Wishes. - Sub-referencing is a new MediaWiki feature that allows editors to reuse references with different details. It will be deployed to English Wikipedia on October 14 and to remaining Wikimedia Foundation wikis by end of October (likely October 21). The FAQ lists possible actions to take on your wiki to support the deployment. This is a long-standing community wish implemented by WMDE Technical Wishes.
Updates for editors
- Moderator Tools will be removing the list view of the Watchlist and defaulting everyone to the changelog view. Previously, there were two versions of how the Watchlist is shown to mobile web users: the list view, where editors could see watched articles in a list format, and the changelog view, where editors could see changes to watched articles in a log format, controlled by a user's Advanced Mobile Control settings. This has created issues for code-base maintenance: two different displays means two sets of code to manage. By defaulting to the changelog view, we are simplifying the codebase and avoiding the likelihood of missing bugs.
- The Wikipedia Android app is testing a way to listen to article introductions in the “For you” feed. A text-to-speech model reads the existing article text aloud without rewriting it or adding any content. The 30-day experiment will begin in the Wikipedia Beta app during the third week of September, then move to the regular Wikipedia Android app in October for a limited group of eligible users. A small portion of app users (those with English feeds and at least one topic interest) will have access to the feature. This experiment is part of broader efforts to give app readers options in how they consume content in order to deepen engagement and user retention. Learn more and share feedback.
- CodeMirror syntax highlighting was enabled by default for all logged out and newly registered users on the English Wikipedia on September 14. With no signs of adverse effects, the same change is being proposed to be made globally across all wikis in a few weeks. If you have concerns or feedback, or if your wiki would like to opt out, please see the help page.
- Wikidata mobile statement editing of all datatypes will be officially launched on October 13, when it will be removed from Wikidata beta features and become available to all editors. Users can report bugs and share feedback.
- Last week, language link changes were removed from Recent Changes and Watchlist feeds on Wikivoyage, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikiquote and Wiktionary. As no adverse effects have been observed, the Wikidata For Wikimedia Projects plans to roll out this change globally to all Wikipedias. This is scheduled for October 13 at 07:00 UTC, after which editors will no longer see when a link to another language version of a page is added, removed, or changed in its Wikidata item. Editors who rely on these notifications can read more on the project page and share feedback or ask to opt out their wiki on the talk page.
- View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where accidentally touching the graph while scrolling on the Pageviews tool on mobile could unintentionally zoom in has now been fixed. Click-and-drag zoom is now disabled on touch devices.
Updates for technical contributors
- There are three major changes coming to dumps: the legacy content dumps deprecated in January 2026 will now be sunset, the replacement MediaWiki Content File Exports will be delayed to implement a “safety buffer”, and they are now also available as 7zip-compressed files. Users will need to switch the URL they download their dump from. For more information, timeline and migration instructions, see Legacy content dumps sunset.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The Wikimedia Foundation discovered unauthorized activity by OpenAI agents on Wikimedia projects, including edits to wikis, attempts to exploit a public note-taking tool, and heavy automated traffic. Read the blog post on Diff for more details about the activity and the Foundation’s response.
Meetings and events
- Save the date for the next Wikimedia Hackathon! We’ll be meeting in lovely Tirana, Albania for the 2027 Wikimedia Hackathon from April 9–11, 2027. Scholarship and staff sponsorship applications are currently being accepted through Pretix and will close on October 30, 2026. General registration will open in January 2027.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
The Signpost: 13 October 2026
[edit]- News and notes: AELECT returns, Jimbo gives a union update, VisualEditor is now default
Plus a survey for North Americans, proposed changes to BoT elections, and developments in the Puerto Rican editing community.
- Serendipity: From a rare portrait of a female millionaire in Nancy to a Japanese painter in Lyon
Images from Leuven Libraries popular on Wiki.
- Obituary: Doug Weller
Twenty-year editor, long-term admin, dearly missed.
- In the media: A(I)pocalypses afoot
Cannibals, freeloaders, rogue agents, scams ... the usual.
- WikiConference Report: WikiConference 2026 & the importance of in-person community
Celebrating 12 years of WikiConference North America.
- By the numbers: Does the country of birth affect the likelihood of having a Wikipedia biography?
A cross-country and cross-wikipedia comparison of the likelihood of having a biography in Wikipedia.
- News from Diff: OpenAI "rogue" agent activities found on Wikimedia projects
CPO/CTO Selena Deckelmann explains the recent detection of AI agent activities on Wikimedia projects.
- On the bright side: Good people
Nice comments and real-life rescuers.
- Op-ed: Who are our readers?
The movement makes progress when we know what our scope is.
- Traffic report: This world is big and wild and half insane
Criminals, 9/11 25 years later, artists expelled for politics... we lived in troubled times.
- Comix: Fudging the numbers
Take 'em away, officers!
Tech News: 2026-43
[edit]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
- To measure the impact of incorporating some community-requested features on logged-out reader retention, a test for Image Carousel will be pushed to logged-out readers. With the Image Carousel feature, readers browse community-uploaded images, selected by editors as relevant to specific articles. The test starts on November 20.
- An experimental notice will be pushed to 0.5% of logged-out mobile readers who come to English Wikipedia from Google, asking them to add Wikipedia as a Google Preferred Source. The test is to see if this notice increases reader retention and encourages people who use Google Search to visit Wikipedia more often. It will run from October 15–29 and will be assessed for its impact on retention and referrals.
- View all 26 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where Quarry returned an “Access denied” error when users tried to run SQL queries, preventing queries from running normally, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
Due to a long-standing bug, applications that use the OAuth 2 client credentials flow to act on their owners’ behalf are treated as if they are logged out. This will be fixed for new applications registered on or after Monday, October 19. Some affected applications need to re-register. - Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- A proposal to hold the Wikimedia Hackathon every three years, with regional hackathons in between, has been shared. It explores making the event more accessible to technical communities in different regions. Share your feedback on the proposal’s talk page before November 6.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Wikimedia Apps Newsletter – Third Quarter of 2026
[edit]Hello, and welcome to the third Wikimedia Apps newsletter of 2026!
In this edition, we’ll walk you through the main updates, experiments, results, and improvements in the Wikipedia mobile apps during July, August, and through mid-September.
Following the rollout of the redesigned Home experience on Android, the team continued work to bring the Explore Feed Refresh to iOS.
Development focused on building the foundations of the new experience, including the shared card structure and navigation for the For You feed.
The team also developed a new onboarding experience that allows users to:
- Choose their preferred feed experience.
- Select topics and articles they are interested in.
- Confirm or update the Wikipedia languages they want to read.
- Learn how the new Home and For You experiences work.
The team also built article recommendations based on users’ selected interests and introduced a one-time explanation of the new Home experience for existing users.
Additional work focused on improving the reliability of the experience, including resolving an issue that prevented the For You feed from loading in non-English languages.
Following the launch of “Which Came First?” in June, the team continued improving the game and analyzing how people were using it.
Additional work during this period included:
- Updated App Store screenshots to better reflect the app’s current design and functionality, with localized versions for different regions.
- Replaced the Reading Challenge widget with Random Article following the end of the challenge.
- Improved VoiceOver navigation in Search history by identifying dated groups as headers.
- Added autofill support to the login form to improve compatibility with password managers.
- Improved Find in Page behavior on iOS 26.
- Continued preparation for iOS 26 and iPadOS 26.
Saved and Collections
[edit]A major area of work on Android was redesigning Reading Lists to create a clearer and more consistent Saved experience.
The redesign aligns Android more closely with the current iOS experience and proposed Web experience.
The team:
- Renamed Reading Lists to Collections.
- Added an “All articles” view so users can see their saved articles together regardless of collection.
- Removed the default Saved collection and introduced guidance for existing users.
- Added a “Not in a collection” filter.
- Updated saving and unsaving menus to make collection management clearer.
- Updated search within collections to match the overall Saved experience.
- Migrated the Reading Lists screen to Jetpack Compose as part of the app’s ongoing technical modernization.
Following the launch of the redesigned Home experience, the Android team moved into the next phase of Explore Feed experimentation.
Research showed that new articles personalized around users’ interests were among the content types participants found most interesting and most likely to encourage them to return.
Based on these findings, the team designed and began an A/B test of a new Articles by Topic module in the For You feed.
The team also continued exploring other potential content types, including Creator Videos and Trending by Country, while investigating ways to surface new articles across different Wikipedia languages and account for differences in quality and moderation between Wikimedia projects.
The Apps team has also been working with the Web and Machine Learning teams on Listening to Wikipedia, an initiative exploring how text-to-speech can help readers listen to Wikipedia content.
Research found a strong preference for natural, human-sounding speech over the more robotic on-device voices currently available. Based on these findings, the teams have been exploring an experience using the open-weight Kokoro text-to-speech model.
For the first Apps experiment, the Android team is preparing a limited test that allows selected users to listen to English Wikipedia article introductions directly from the For You feed.
The experiment starts with a limited collection of pre-generated audio rather than generating audio for every article. The audio reads existing Wikipedia article text without rewriting or adding content.
The goal of this initial experiment is to understand whether readers return to listening and learn more about what they would want from a future listening experience.
The team also recognizes the Wikimedia movement’s existing work around spoken content, including Wikispeech and volunteer-recorded Spoken Wikipedia, and is approaching this experiment as complementary to those efforts.
Cross-Platform
[edit]Following the conclusion of the Wikipedia 25th Birthday Reading Challenge, the team completed an analysis of the experiment.
The results showed that the challenge encouraged more frequent app use, increased account creation, and supported the wider app marketing campaign.
Users who completed the challenge continued to show retention rates 20–30% above their pre-challenge baseline after streak tracking ended.
The experiment showed that installing the widget and participating in the challenge helped users build a daily reading habit and that users were willing to create an account to participate.
The team will continue evaluating whether these retention gains persist and explore opportunities for future reading challenges and permanent streak tracking.
The Apps teams continued preparing a new VisualEditor journey designed to make it easier for app users to edit Wikipedia using the visual editing experience available on the web.
User testing was completed for the proposed journey, with a static banner selected as the preferred approach for helping users return to the app after editing.
On Android, the team completed development of an editing entry point that allows users to choose between the native source editor and VisualEditor and remember their preference.
Editing preferences were also added across Android and iOS so users can choose their preferred editing experience when starting an edit.
Following the first phase of the Hybrid Search experiment, work continued on the next generation of Wikipedia search.
During July, the team explored how search results could more clearly communicate that Wikipedia content is human-authored. Designs experimented with trust signals including contributor counts, references, and quoted passages.
Research included surveys and qualitative interviews using realistic multilingual search content. Early findings suggested that the redesigned trust signals improved perceptions of human authorship, while also showing that some participants associated the broader search experience with AI.
In August, the team completed Android and iOS wireframes for the next phase of search. The proposed experience introduces a single search interface that routes queries behind the scenes while making the source of results clearer.
Work on the next Wikipedia Year in Review began across both apps.
The team explored a more immersive design after research participants indicated that they expected a full-screen, slide-based experience similar to experiences they encounter on other platforms.
The team continued defining the overall user journey and preparing the experience for implementation, while working with Communications, Fundraising, and Design on product marketing, feature copy, donor messaging, and connections to Wikipedia’s 25th Birthday.
The team focused on encouraging earlier account creation through a new prompt in the Activity tab and defining the end-to-end Year in Review experience.
Work also included:
- Validating immersive full-screen interactions across Android and iOS.
- Establishing success metrics and experimentation plans.
- Implementing topic identification for articles in iOS and Android reading history.
- Adding Topics metadata to mobile HTML responses to support topic-based Year in Review insights.
- Continuing collaboration on product marketing, donor messaging, and Wikipedia 25th Birthday integration.
Looking Ahead
[edit]July, August, and the first half of September focused on learning from some of the major experiences launched earlier in the year while continuing to build new ways for people to read, discover, listen to, and contribute to Wikipedia.
Results from the Explore Feed Refresh and Reading Challenge are helping the team understand how personalization, content discovery, and lightweight participation can encourage readers to return to Wikipedia.
At the same time, work is continuing to bring the new Home experience to iOS, experiment with new content types on Android, test listening experiences through text-to-speech, develop the 2026 Year in Review, improve search across both apps, and make editing more accessible through the VisualEditor journey.
Thank you for reading!
Tech News: 2026-44
[edit]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
- An experiment launched on September 29 is testing article recommendations for new account holders who also identify as readers. By suggesting articles to read, similar to recommendations in the Wikipedia app for logged-in readers, the experiment aims to encourage new account holders to read and return to the website regularly, with the goal of increasing internal referrals by 1%. See the related Community Wishlist proposal.
- Several Wikimedia services were taken offline last week because of a security vulnerability in PHP. This is because they need to be updated before they are safe to put back online. This is not a problem just for the Wikimedia movement but affects a lot of websites. You can follow updates on Wikitech. Cloud VPS and Toolforge will take longer to bring back online. This is to make sure that applications which run on Cloud VPS or Toolforge are not affected. Tool developers can see updates and more information on the Cloud-announce mailing list.
- Last week we shared that to measure the impact of incorporating some community-requested features on logged-out reader retention, a test for the Image Carousel feature would be pushed to logged-out readers. Due to an issue, we will be restarting the test, but it will be live on October 26, not November 20 as initially announced.
Updates for editors
- A new bot detection system to better identify automated traffic that disguises itself as human visitors, is coming to the Wikimedia wikis. This might cause sudden changes to visitor statistics starting from 26 October, going back to 20 June 2026.
- The Score extension which renders musical notation inside wiki pages, has been temporarily disabled on all wikis due to a security issue. Affected pages will display a notice instead of musical scores, but the underlying code remains intact. No action is needed from editors, and a fix is in progress. A separate announcement will follow when the extension is re-enabled. Read more on Phabricator.
- View all 18 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where CodeMirror syntax highlighter appears to have been enabled in error for existing editors has been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday, October 28 2026 at 15:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests, which happen twice a year. During the switchover, all Wikimedia website traffic is shifted from one primary data center to the backup data center to test availability and prevent service disruption even in emergencies.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- Scholarship and sponsorship applications for the 2027 Wikimedia Hackathon will close on Friday, October 30th. Submit your application through Pretix before the deadline!
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
The Signpost: 1 November 2026
[edit]- News and notes: AELECT5 concludes, a Wikimedian arrested for treason, and updates to GANs and FARs
Nine new admins, three arrests, and a lot of GAN RFCs.
- Recent research: How Wikipedians use (or don't use) LLMs; experienced editors contribute more to "underproduced" articles than newbies
And other new research findings.
- Disinformation report: Better bots or bothersome baby borgs?
Have the Borg landed on Wikipedia?
- In the media: Stop the internet, I was deleted
Can toeing the line stop the apocalypse?
- News from Diff: Why Wikimedia Is Speaking Up in a Major AI Copyright Case
When AI companies use copyrighted information, does it qualify as fair use?
- By the numbers: Wikipedian Nobel Prize 2026
Which language versions of Wikipedia had biographies of laureates before Nobel announcements?
- On the bright side: Gone fishing
Touring Thailand, exploring iridescence, and translating prairie dog.
- Traffic report: October, and the articles are stripped bare
Lots of deaths, Indian movies, and monsters. Happy Halloween!
- In focus: Two Roles, One Wikimedia Education Ecosystem
What happens when different approaches to Wikimedia education connect?
- Comix: Inactivity
Zounds!
Administrators' newsletter – November 2026
[edit]News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2026).
Administrator changes
Guideline and policy news
- Following an RfC, election to ArbCom now requires at least 60% support. Successful candidates normally serve two-year terms, with one-year terms retained for filling vacancies. Proposals to change the election rules may now be added throughout the year and discussed on the talk page; formal discussion remains in September.
- Following an RfC, first-time reviewers’ reviews require an experienced reviewer’s check, and GA requirements now include alt text and accessible tables. Featured articles may receive GA status during removal discussions if they meet GA criteria. Backlog drives will run every five months, with a points leaderboard and awards for the top five participants.
Miscellaneous
- Self-nominations for the Arbitration Committee are open until 11 November 2026.
- Ongoing backlog drives: Copy editing, Unreference articles
