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TWAFI coming to the Main Page soon

Hello! Articles for improvement is almost ready to implement the addition of this week's article for improvement on the Main Page. Our target is this Sunday at the earliest, with the article "Confectionery store". The section can be previewed at Wikipedia:Main Page/sandbox, which is transcluding {{Article for improvement}}. Feel free to suggest changes and give feedback below.

Courtesy pings: FaviFake, 7amithorn, Chaotic Enby, Hason-LEK-SIN, InfernoHues, fifteen thousand two hundred twenty four, NewAccount7295, ScienceD90, Wil540 art who all participated in the discussions. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 04:52, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

FYI: For best results preview the Main Page sandbox in wide view (on Vector 2022), since that's what the actual Main Page is displayed in. In any case, happy we all worked on putting this together! :) Hason-LEK-SIN ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 06:25, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

Interesting. It looks good, but as an ITN editor it does make me sad to see the section be pushed down “below the fold”, so to speak. On a similar note, how will this affect MPBALANCE? It seems like we’d need to either expand TFA and DYK, or cut down on entries in ITN and OTD. I certainly hope it’s not the latter. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 11:55, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

That's kind of an unanswered question at the moment. I believe there were discussions at ITN and DYK related to this. The DYK one especially said they didn't have the ability to do more daily hooks than are already done. I think for now we should just have an imbalance, and if all goes well with the new section different ideas to fix it can be discussed. InfernoHues (talk) 13:30, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

That's a shame. At ITN we've always wanted to have more room to be able to run either more detailed RDs, more Ongoings, or something like that. If TWAFI had gone on the other side, that could have been possible while still following MPBALANCE. But with it being on the right, we are left with no opportunity to expand other sections, and an ugly, off-balance Main Page. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 13:33, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

Nothing is set in stone yet. We need to add the TWAFI to the main page, and for that we're using the placement chosen at the RfC, but its position can always be changed in a future discussion. As is often the case with new proposals, not everything is perfect in the first attempt. FaviFake (talk) 14:29, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

Also noting that the Main Page is historically skewed in terms of section widths (with the left side being 55% of the width, and the right side being 45%), and this offers us an opportunity to rebalance it. If there's support to move TWAFI on the left side after seeing how it performs in practice, it can absolutely be reconsidered! Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 15:07, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

That's good to hear. We'll just have to see how it turns out in practice. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 15:21, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

I want to make sure it's on someone's radar to also add this to Wikipedia:Main Page/Tomorrow and similar pages (e.g. the queue) given that this is week-based and not day like everything else? I think it would be good to do it before it "tomorrow" as staging.

I bring this up because /Tomorrow is used to implement cascading protection 1-day ahead of time (including for Commons images) so people can't e.g. sneak in vandalism right before midnight. Legoktm (talk) 18:03, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

@Chaotic Enby If Sunday is the start date the template should go up on the Main Page at about 00:00 18 October UTC. So you or another administrator will need to add it then. NewAccount7295 (talk) 22:52, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

Well if the goal is to have it go live at exactly midnight UTC I would suggest putting in the code ahead of time, just conditionally wrapped by a parser function. But it wasn't clear to me that was what was desired. Legoktm (talk) 23:28, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

I've added it to Wikipedia:Main Page/Tomorrow. I'm okay with putting in the code ahead of time (the condition can then safely be removed tomorrow), although it won't be in sync with the width rebalancing (a minor issue all things considered). Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 23:29, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

Pardon if this is an ignorant question, but isn't Main Page/Tomorrow the 17 Oct edition? I thought the intention was for it to go live on 18 Oct. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 23:33, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

Main Page/Tomorrow is mostly there to cascade-protect things in advance (meaning, everything transcluded on it gets automatically protected before it moves on to the Main Page). However, content on that page doesn't automatically replace the current Main Page at midnight, so there isn't a risk of AFI going live one day too soon because it was placed there before midnight UTC. In a few minutes, both the Main Page and Wikipedia:Main Page/Tomorrow will be updated automatically thanks to the templates they invoke, and the latter will have AFI alongside the rest of the 18 Oct content. Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 23:44, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

Ah, thank you very much for the explanation. I see, that it is just to preempt its posting and to protect it early. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 23:53, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

And also, the AFI article isn't the one that is protected, because that would defeat the purpose of AFI. WP:AGF is really showing here. Hason-LEK-SIN ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 01:26, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

Yeah. The technical reason for why it's not protected is because it will not be transcluded into the main page. FaviFake (talk) 01:27, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

AIUI {{#time:W}} will change on Mondays and not Sundays; is that what y'all want?

I checked the sandbox on as many devices/browsers as I have access to and it looks reasonable enough. This is exciting :) Legoktm (talk) 05:40, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

Great catch! I did not realize that, but yes, ISO 8601's weeks start on Monday. I think this would be fine (we might want to push back deployment by a day then?), but pinging @Chaotic Enby for their thoughts. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 05:45, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

I can't find any documentation about if {{CURRENTWEEK}} (which TWAFI currently uses for its automation) follows ISO 6801 at all. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 05:54, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

{{CURRENTWEEK}} seems to be implemented as $ts->format( 'W' ) so it would follow the same ISO 8601 week logic unless I am misreading something. taavi (talk!) 07:25, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

Nice catch! I assumed that it worked the same way as {{CURRENTDOW}} (which starts anew on Sunday and not Monday). The discrepancy is surprisingly resolved by looking at #time, which output the ISO 8601 week (W) and weekday (N), cycling from 1 to 7, alongside the {{CURRENTDOW}} weekday (w), cycling from 0 to 6.

Note that these only update alongside the page cache, with a maximum interval of 3600 seconds (one hour) between updates, so they might not make for the smoothest of transitions. Not sure how often the Main Page's cache is purged? Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 14:12, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

My understanding is that there are bots/scripts that'll purge the main page at midnight, in addition to the normal cache purges that come with DYK rotation. If that was what you were asking. Legoktm (talk) 14:37, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

Where is all this information about changing the Main Page documented? FaviFake (talk) 14:39, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

Great to hear! Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 16:48, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

@Chaotic Enby Is it specifically set to go up on the Main Page at the beginning of tomorrow? NewAccount7295 (talk) 15:08, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

For now, it's not set up to go anywhere as far as I know, but the plan is to set it up on the Main Page itself Sunday in the evening with code that activates to display it at midnight on Monday. Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 16:49, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

I think it would be best to actually delay the deployment until Monday. Looking at the AFI pages, it looks like it also starts weeks on Monday, so I think that instead of starting AFI on Sunday we should start it on Monday. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 16:20, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

(commment moved at 14:53, 19 October 2026 (UTC))

Can we please keep this thread focused on the technical implementation and instead make comments about (lack of) notification elsewhere? Legoktm (talk) 14:46, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

I just want to add my support for TWAFI being added to the Main Page. I somehow missed the RfC, but I think this is a great idea and an easy way to get casual readers interested in editing Wikipedia. The implementation might need some UI tweaks but overall congrats to the editors involved for changing such an important part of the site for the better qcne (talk) 10:35, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

 Done, they have been ...

Moved to #Complaints about the RfC itself

 – FaviFake (talk) 14:52, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Complaints about the RfC itself

Moved from the section above

 – FaviFake (talk) 14:51, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

I love that this is coming to the main page. However, even as a long-time editor, I think the main page should be oriented to readers more than us editors. The encyclopedia here is for the readership, after all. So, I would suggest putting this block beneath "In the news" and "On this day". the Stefen 𝕋ower 05:02, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

The position seems to be pretty set-in-stone per the RfC linked above, as that position had the most support. That isn't to say that it can't be changed, but doing so would likely involve more discussion. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 05:24, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

Hmmm, then my next suggestion is for Wikipedians to be better informed about current RfCs, but I'm not the first to whine about that. :) At any rate, I'm glad to see this coming to the main page. the Stefen 𝕋ower 05:27, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

You can subscribe to the Feedback request service to receive a notification when a new RfC about a topic you are interested is created. Alternatively, you can add {{cent}} to your watchlist. FaviFake (talk) 12:06, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

On further consideration, having read much of the RfC, and realizing a lot of nominated articles (including one I nominated) have been summarily removed from consideration, I am withdrawing my above support for this effort. Slapping the faces of many editors to build this new feature is frankly repulsive. the Stefen 𝕋ower 08:01, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

If TWAFI isn’t performing well on the main page (e.g. few new accounts are actually editing the week’s article) then its placement could always be reconsidered at a later date. Maybe after 10 weeks? Some1 (talk) 09:33, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

As the person who implemented that change, I'd like to point out that the project has few active participants, so I made practically all my changes under WP:BOLD. If anyone wants to WP:BRD my changes, feel free - we do have more than a week before we need another article. 7amiþ = reform(solidarity).__init__(t, c) 15:46, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

The issue is that the criteria is getting stricter and stricter. I understand how you feel, but the entire project shouldn't have to go because of that. This does need to be resolved though. NewAccount7295 (talk) 16:05, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

Two questions: where was the width rebalancing discussed? And, on this confectionary TWAFI specifically, why do we have a bullet point for re-ordering the already chronological history section to be chronological? Putting an encouragement at useless edits to 6 million people (I would have put the latter at errors but there is no section for TWAFI). 1brianm7 (talk) 03:04, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

For your first question: It is true that changing the balancing percentages wasn't discussed, although I think it was necessary to resolve the imbalance at least partially. Compare the current imbalance to how it looks with the old percentages, and it won't look very good.

For your second question: Good idea to add a section at Errors for this. I'm not a sysop so I can't change the wording. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 03:12, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

Whose idea even was this? I use wikipedia fairly regularly and this came out of nowhere; if there was some sort of comment period, it wasn't well displayed to the average user. Also, I have some reservations about it displacing ITN and OTD to explicitly show off a less-than-perfect article on the main page. Joseph Zadeh (talk) 02:05, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Adding this week's article for improvement to the Main page. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 02:08, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

The discussion is very, very scant in comparison to a major change on the front page visited millions of times a day. wound theology◈ 05:35, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

This was overall a bad idea. Not that creating an AFI box was a bad idea, but implementing it with very little input from the userbase in proportion to the importance of the article was a bad idea. We get notifications and such for admin requests, so why not a major change to the front page? I for one do not like that the news has been pushed down for what is ostensibly a reverse featured article. I and many other people read the news blurbs when I first log on to Wikipedia. This sort of action is why new editors feel like there is a WP:CABAL. wound theology◈ 05:39, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

We tried to implement it as close as possible to the RfC result. The closer found that consensus was to place it above ITN, so that's where we placed it. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 05:50, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Of course, the consensus was weak for that spot. However, it seemed most logical to put it in the place that the RfC had the most support for, and then once it was there for a bit and people gave feedback, we could revisit it. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 05:53, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

There were what, 100 people or so who participated in the RfC, which includes B votes and non-voters? To change a page which receives 6 million views daily, and has 130,193 page watchers? It's just insane to me that so little input could so drastically change the very face of our project. wound theology◈ 06:46, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

The discussion was open for more than a month, and advertised on channels such as {{centralized discussion}}. However, the low participation in the discussion was acknowledged, with the closing statement specifying that the decisions reached in this RfC may be ripe for revisiting in a few months for that reason.

At some point, when there just isn't as much input as we'd like in a widely advertised discussion, we have to bite the bullet and make a first change, which in turn may attract more people into a follow-up discussion on how to reposition ourselves and make adjustments to the original findings. Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 07:50, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Again, I get a notification for administrator elections and proposals all the time, which are a routine and necessary part of the wiki's function. The fact that we can't do something similar for something far more impactful to everyday editors and daily readers is insane. wound theology◈ 08:00, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

But it did send centralized discussion notifications (not sure about watchlist notifications though)? However, these notifications were sent back in July, when the change was discussed, and the implementation lagged by a few months. Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 08:27, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

There were no watchlist notices. But TBH, would using that be overkill? Then again we are making changes to the very visible Main Page, so... Hason-LEK-SIN ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 12:36, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

​There are dozens of similarly significant changes being proposed every month. For the TWAFI proposal, every possible venue was used (including RFC, CENT, VPP, and WT:MAIN). If you are not set up to receive notifications from any of these, then we can't really do anything about it. FaviFake (talk) 08:44, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

If that is the case, then it shows a major problem with the way that editors are informed of significant changes. Clearly we have the infrastructure to do better than this. wound theology◈ 09:22, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

> every possible venue was used

The editor in question mentioned getting pings for administration elections. Clearly, not every venue was used if they didn't receive a ping for this. ~2026-55973-77 (talk) 10:28, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

​They did not receive a talk page message because they were likely not subscribed to the Feedback request service for Wikipedia proposals. 99% of registered accounts couldn't care less about these changes, that's why interested editors need to opt in.

And you don't even need to subscribe to anything in order to view CENT. FaviFake (talk) 11:45, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

I was not aware the FFS even existed and I've been editing Wikipedia most of my life. Again, this just shows a major problem with the way editors are informed of significant changes. wound theology◈ 19:05, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Thanks! Where could we have advertised it in a way that you would've noticed? FaviFake (talk) 19:13, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

When I check my watchlist, I see the following:

I don't vote in administrator elections nor do I read The Signpost, so I haven't opted-in to either of these. If there were a similar notification, something like "There is a RfC discussing a major change to the Main Page" would have caught my eye and I would have certainly participated. wound theology◈ 19:32, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

I never check my watchlist, so I never knew that there were watchlist notifications myself... 7amiþ = reform(solidarity).__init__(t, c) 19:45, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Fascinating. I’ve never seen those - from looking, it seems like that’s because I have my language set to EN-GB instead of just EN. I should probably change that . Chorchapu (talk | edits) 19:58, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Yes, this has been an issue for several years. FaviFake (talk) 19:58, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Here's the problem, as I see it. A major change should be advertised in a place that gets at least about as many views as the place to be changed, so that (ideally) everyone seeing the place to be changed sees the proposed change. So... what page on Wikipedia has as many views as the Main Page (and is in scope)? 7amiþ = reform(solidarity).__init__(t, c) 19:18, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

At this point, honestly, just put WP:CENT on the Main Page. Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 20:08, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

I like being able to edit CENT too much, but, honestly, some form of curated CENT/newsletter might be nice in the "other areas of Wikipedia" section.

Certainly more useful than portals, and now there's a very prominent link to the Teahouse in the AFI section, we could remove it from that section there as well to make more space. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸 20:14, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Yep, I was being a bit hyperbolic but a version of it adapted for newcomers would be best. In general, we don't want to limit the ability of editors to update CENT, but having a protected "Main Page-friendly" version of it (that admins update once the main CENT is updated, while taking care to make the descriptions more accessible to newcomers) would be a good stopgap to keep the current fluidity while preventing vandalism on the Main Page. Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 20:46, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

XD Hason-LEK-SIN ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 23:11, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Really, wound theology? You started editing Wikipedia when you were nine (or younger)? — JohnFromPinckney (talk / edits) 22:45, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Yes. I am 27 years old and made my first edits on the account Runestatue (talk · contribs) in 2008, 18 years ago, when I had just turned 9. My edits were deleted as a WP:HOAX (talking about my micronation at the time), but in reality they were actually in good faith and I just lacked WP:COMPETENCY. I have edited on various accounts since then, I stuck with this one since it was the one I was using when I turned 18 and started taking Wikipedia more seriously. wound theology◈ 23:20, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

What was your micronation called? FaviFake (talk) 23:22, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

You can find it if you dig, but I'd prefer you didn't. It's a little bit like naked baby pictures for me. I was a very weird child (and a weird teenager, and a weird adult) and most of it is supremely embarrassing to me. wound theology◈ 23:29, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Wound theology: when visiting somebody else's user talk page, have you noticed messages like this? That's the feedback request service in action. There are two links to it in the edit summary, and two more in the text of the message, four in all - some might say that's three too many. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:50, 20 October 2026 (UTC)

Nope, I have not noticed it. wound theology◈ 09:35, 20 October 2026 (UTC)

Should we take another page from our beloved explainxkcd.com and put a notice on top of the Main Page when major discussions are underway? Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 12:11, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

That would certainly have helped. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 14:38, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Perhaps, but that banner idea itself would be a major change to the Main Page and where would you advertise its RfC? Truly a chicken and egg type of situation. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 16:32, 19 October 2026 (UTC)

Agreed. This re-design significantly reduces my (and many others?) use of the main page. At work I could very quickly load the main page (despite work VPN servers being on the other side of the world) and right at the top see links to ongoing wars or significant events I need to have overview on. Now I have to scroll down and find links in a sea of links. But I guess for the diehard wiki editors this AFI section is important song congrats on your victory and making it worse for everyone else.Oathed (talk) 08:34, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

It's surprising that Oathed and others get so much out of ITN when it posts so little, ITN seems to average about one new blurb every other day and often goes for days without posting anything new. And many of these items are routine WP:ITN/R events while much of the novel news doesn't get covered. That's fine by several of the ITN regulars who keep asserting that ITN is not a news ticker and that reporting the news is not its function.

To keep up with the news, you'd get a lot more out of Portal:Current events. That posts about 20 news items per day which is about 40 times more than ITN. And it lists all the ongoing conflicts, elections, sporting events, etc. in a more comprehensive and systematic way than ITN.

Andrew🐉(talk) 19:49, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

ITN (was) the first thing that readers saw on Wikipedia, on the top right corner of the page. Many readers, like it or not from us at the project, use ITN to get their news and read more about these topics. P:CE is not as prominently displayed, being located on a different page, and is less well-known to readers. I myself didn't know about it until after I started contributing to ITN. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 19:51, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

The daily readership of Portal:Current events is about 50K. It's not clear what the readership of ITN as it's part of the main page rather than being separate. The number that glance at it after loading the main page is uncertain. But the number that engage with it by clicking through to its articles seems to be of the order of 10K, which is comparable. For example, the readership of 2026 Bangkok floods jumped from about 5K to 20K when it was posted to ITN. The readership then fell away to about 1500 before it scrolled off. ITN doesn't lead millions of readers to articles -- just a few thousand. Andrew🐉(talk) 22:22, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Yes, even if there are some people who click through to the articles, as a comprehensive source of news it's utterly subpar,and I can't imagine very many people rely on it as their main window on the world. Not to mention that it's in contradiction to WP:NOTNEWS, which is supposed to he one our guiding principles in how to build the encyclopedia. I will probably vote to abolish ITN in the upcoming RFC, it generates far more heat than light, is a waste of editor time and resources, and won't be missed if it goes. Cheers  — Amakuru (talk) 22:34, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

I completely agree. There appears to be a dividing line in Wikipedia, where people who know a lot of the inside baseball say that ITN sucks and AFI is better, while the less-engaged reader likes seeing the news and is completely blind to things like P:CE. Joseph Zadeh (talk) 05:19, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

Never saw this RfC advertised. My 2 cents is to move the ITN back to its original position. A reverse featured article taking up that much space on the Main Page is far less valuable than providing brief, informative news blurbs for readers.  Spy-cicle💥  ^Talk? 00:33, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

An RfC is likely coming at some point in the future. I suppose the biggest lesson is to advertise it more widely. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 00:42, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

When there's a TfD, we put a little notice in small print at the top of the template advertising the TfD. What if we did this with the Main Page templates when they have RfCs? It could just be a little grey note at the top or bottom linkng to the RfC, without being too obtrusive. It would allow readers to be aware of ongoing discussions affecting the Main Page, and it would also serve to advertise it to editors who don't check the likes of CENT and the FRS. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 00:49, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

I can see some advantages to doing that. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸 00:52, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

There's also an ITN RfC coming up, so if this sort of notice were to happen it could be used there as well. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 01:01, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

@GreenLipstickLesbian and Axolitl: I've made a mockup at Template:Article for improvement/sandbox. Of course, it will need some copyediting and such, but what do you think about it in general? Chorchapu (talk | edits) 02:04, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Oh, and mark my words, the RfC for ITN has just started. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 02:17, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Also agree with a TfD-like notice on ITN for the ongoing RfC. Really like your mockup of the notice! Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 04:36, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Ah, now I can see it! Looks good for me, too. Good solution to the "I wasn't informed" problem. BTW, anyone else getting 503s left and right? I tried to thank CE but couldn't.nvm there's a topic right at the bottom of the page.  Self-trout 7amiþ = reform(solidarity).__init__(t, c) # Leave a talkback, TWAfI's wild rn 04:44, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

I messed with it a bit to make it a bit more similar to TfD notices. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 04:54, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Yes, that looks great! Do we want to deploy it, for both the ITN mega-RfC right now and the AFI RfC in a few weeks? Chorchapu (talk | edits) 11:51, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

I think we should deploy it for the AFI RfC. NewAccount7295 (talk) 14:20, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Why AFI but not ITN? The ITN reform RfC will (hopefully) have effects visible to the Main Page and could benefit from the input of readers. If not for this reform RfC, I think we should definitely use it for the abolition RfC in a few months if that ends up happening. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 14:24, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

If you want it can be used for the ITN RfC as well. I was just saying we should at least deploy it on the AFI one. NewAccount7295 (talk) 14:26, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Oh yes, sorry. I misunderstood. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 14:28, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Probably both! The change is relatively minor, and serves to get more input for broader changes, so I don't think we should be bogged down into a whole discussion to deploy it. Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 14:58, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

See {{In the news/sandbox}} and Wikipedia:Main Page/sandbox. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 15:15, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

@Chaotic Enby Do you want to add it? There seems to be a consensus here to do so. NewAccount7295 (talk) 18:12, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Since it appears uncontroversial, I'm willing to do it after a bit more feedback. I'm going to put a note at the RfC itself (which is also valid here) that I am operating on unopposed consensus – namely, if anyone voices opposition, they are free to ping me and I will self-revert, after which we can lead to the downfall of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth hold a regular consensus discussion over it. Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 18:17, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

If there is, could you do me a favour and Ping me please. Don't want to risk missing it again.  Spy-cicle💥  ^Talk? 17:41, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

When comparing page views for the Main Page with even the TFA average, the clear conclusion is that if readers have been telling us anything for many years now, it's that they'd be perfectly happy if we replaced the entirety of the Main Page with a simple search box.

But a lot of contributors are here primarily for Main Page activities, and again the overwhelming number of readers don't care at all about what's on the main page, so the value question is going to be more what more encourages people to contribute. Difficult to come up with a suitable assessment criteria for that, and very little data anyway.

Aesthetically it strikes me as a little off, but that may just be because I'm not used to it yet. From a web design perspective the entire model is so dated that any assessment based on contemporary criteria will grade both options rather low. ~2026-46960-97 (talk) 16:21, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

This should not have been placed above the ITN section in my opinion. - Indefensible (talk) 18:10, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Something I wish we could A/B test: randomly give users either ITN or AFI first, allow them to easily switch positions, and compare how many switch positions one way vs the other. Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 18:12, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

I mean no offense to anyone who got this new section onto the WP home page. But I would say pretty objectively this is both bad UX design and bad WP process that produced this result. It absolutely should be A/B tested. - Indefensible (talk) 18:15, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

I agree in part with the process part, but what about the UX is bad (other than the placement)? Axolitl (talk | contribs) 01:39, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Mainly the placement, but also having an extra box throws off the balance in the 2 columns format. It looks more cluttered and disorganized now because it is more cluttered having an extra box smushed in with the rest. I don't really think it gives a good first impression to any visitors, and it's immediately jarring seeing the format change to something different that is less usable for veteran visitors. - Indefensible (talk) 15:29, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Preparing for a short-notice security update to our services

Hey everyone – due to a critical security advisory about the PHP language (which we depend on), many Wikimedia services are going to be affected. We are hoping to avoid downtime to the wikis, but some supporting tools and services are unfortunately going to be impacted. This is a complex operation on short notice and we are still figuring out the details. More information will come later this week. Johan (WMF) (talk) 21:55, 20 October 2026 (UTC)

Some tools (not using PHP) are now back up and working. You can see more at wikitech:Talk:Incidents/2026-10-21 PHP security update/Community.

There's also an FAQ aimed at technical contributors at wikitech:Incidents/2026-10-21 PHP security update/Community#FAQs. Johan (WMF) (talk) 08:59, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for your patience as we've been dealing with this security issue. It's been a lot of hard work, for the Wikimedia technical community and the web in general.

Toolforge and Cloud VPS have been back up since last Thursday, 22 October. Many key tools the editing communities depend on have been gradually restored.

Some tools need the respective volunteer maintainers to restart them. Others still need to upgrade to a patched PHP version – some tools were using older versions of PHP which are not supported by the recent security patches, and these will require maintainers to carefully upgrade to a more recent version, which might require additional effort to make them compatible. You can follow the work on Wikitech. Johan (WMF) (talk) 15:57, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Toolforge and Cloud VPS temporarily offline

Sharing from listarchive:list/cloud-announce@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/CXGLGXBFICWKOHPPXWMFFG4GZCH5HQR7

In response to the recent PHP security advisory[0], we are temporarily disabling all network access for Toolforge and Cloud VPS pending security patches.

As security patches get deployed we plan to incrementally re-enable services. Initial efforts will be focused on securing Toolforge, but if you are 100% sure that your project uses no PHP please contact us directly and we’ll put you on the short list.

This is likely to be a prolonged outage which will depend on a lot of coordination with project and tool admins. This is not ideal, but is the best option among those currently available.

-Andrew + the Toolforge admin team

[0] https://www.php.net/archive/2026.php#2026-10-20-1

— JJMC89 (T·C) 00:02, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

• Well, this answers some of the questions that drew me to this page. Please keep the communication open and alert us to any progress made or obstacles that come up. Thank you. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 00:12, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

  wikitech:Incidents/2026-10-21 PHP security update/Community is where they will post updates. Nemoralis (talk) 00:51, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

Miraheze has taken their entire wiki farm offline. Obsidian the Fox 03:33, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

Well, shucks. That's why PetScan wasn't wanting to load. I hope they take the time that's necessary to do a patch; I'm glad they're being cautious. EatingCarBatteries _{(contribs | talk)} 04:15, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

An update outlining the work to bring back affected tools, from the teams working on this (I'm merely passing it on):

https://diff.wikimedia.org/2026/10/21/impact-of-php-vulnerabilities-on-wikimedia-cloud-services/ Johan (WMF) (talk) 20:46, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

Update from listarchive:list/cloud-announce@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/CMA4M3LKRKZWH7HG4BS7KSF7WRRUO3CV:

For people following along: We have a two-pronged approach to getting services back up.

Toolforge:

We're working on making the Toolforge build service smart enough to block launching of PHP tools so that we can start launching non-php things safely. Next, we'll figure out what to do about tools that rely on unfixed/unfixable PHP versions. We hope to have partial (php-free) Toolforge functionality restored sometime in the next 24 hours.

Cloud-VPS:

We're currently focusing on projects maintained by WMF staff and/or NDA users, since we have more flexibility to adjust those projects to our current safety standards. Our team is auditing projects one by one with the goal of starting up those projects that don't use PHP at all ASAP. After that we'll look at patching projects that use PHP in some form - we'll do so to the best of our ability and understanding of each project, with a focus on security rather than fully enabled functionality at first - and after that we will face up to the projects that rely on unfixed PHP versions. This whole process will likely take a few days for most projects which have a simpler path to safety, and a few weeks for the most complex ones. We might start contacting some maintainers for support as we start working on their projects.

Both:

It's worth noting that while we're still focused on the wider platform functionality, we're hoping to use your input on specific tools at some point, so thank you to everyone who has been contributing to the talk page[0].

All of these timelines should be interpreted very loosely -- any new surprises will delay things. We appreciate your continued understanding and support as the WMCS admins continue to work diligently to bring as much as possible back up as quickly and safely as possible.

- Andrew + sleepy colleagues

[0] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Incidents/2026-10-21_PHP_security_update/Community

— JJMC89 (T·C) 16:04, 22 October 2026 (UTC)

Update from listarchive:list/cloud-announce@lists.wikimedia.org/message/GO6ICTSJYMAL2VINTY3MZKGRMRCD7BCZ:

We are happy to announce that Toolforge is available again for users.

We don't have yet images with patched php or have updated the buildpacks to be able to build images with php, but non-php jobs and webservices are free to run once again.

We will update as soon as possible once we have patched images for webservice and can allow build service images that use php back, but until then, please refrain from trying to work around the guardrails we have put in place.

There might be other things still not working completely, as not all CloudVPS is online yet, but please reach out with any issues you find and we'll try to help get you unblocked, though please be patient as we are still working on bringing some of the system online.

Our availability across timezones is also limited, and we're trying to make sure the team can get some rest in between all the effort we're applying, so any and all questions can take a while to get back to.

Thanks you very much for your patience and your effort, it's really appreciated.

David

— JJMC89 (T·C) 18:24, 22 October 2026 (UTC)

Updates page on Wikitech

wikitech:Incidents/2026-10-21 PHP security update/Community — JJMC89 (T·C) 00:37, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

That page is also down as of the time of writing. – MrPersonHumanGuy (talk) 15:45, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

The wikis were temporarily affected by related maintenance work, but the link above should remain the best place for updates about which tools remain offline and which have been fixed. Johan (WMF) (talk) 18:14, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

I'm assuming that it's still down, perhaps? Tried to visit these links:

• https://xtools.wmcloud.org/articleinfo/en.wikipedia.org/YVR%E2%80%93Airport_station
• https://xtools.wmcloud.org/authorship/en.wikipedia.org/YVR%E2%80%93Airport_station

but it reports an error about the services being unable to be reached, and telling me to contact a maintainer, without stating who a maintainer is in this instance (but including instructions for maintainers):

Error

This web service cannot be reached. Please contact a maintainer of this project.

Maintainers can find troubleshooting instructions from our documentation on Wikitech.

--ABx11 (she/they) 00:24, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

XTools is back up now. –Novem Linguae (talk) 03:14, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Phabricator also offline

For the same reason. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 01:02, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

Same for WP:TWL. Now all we get is a connection timed out error. ミラP@Miraclepine 03:50, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

WP:TWL is part of Cloud VPS. Since it's not written in PHP it should be back online sooner than most tools ... * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 04:13, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

TWL now works! |)are2|_eap (Talk) 13:59, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

Phabricator is back up now. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 15:18, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

Wikimedia Docs also down?

Wikimedia documentation also seems to be down. Should this be listed as part of the affected systems? Axolitl (talk | contribs) 05:14, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

Yes. I confirmed that it is down intentionally, then added it to the Wikitech page. –Novem Linguae (talk) 13:15, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

It has now been restored, as have Phabricator, Translatewiki and GitLab. Johan (WMF) (talk) 18:10, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

Context

for those who are seeing this and don't immediately know what it's about: two vulnerabilities have been found in PHP versions up to the latest, and they're really really bad Gnomingstuff (talk) 06:30, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

and for the very beginners, PHP is the absolute essential foundation software Wikipedia needs to run. The whole of Wikipedia cannot operate without PHP. MilkyDefer 07:26, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

It is also the "php" in en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?. LightNightLights (talk • contribs) 08:08, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

Yes – SD0001 (talk) 13:01, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

We have an article on it: PHP2Shell. --4thTrumpSichuanMandarinCall (talk | contributions) 13:54, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

de.wiki down?

• I assume that this is connected to German Wikipedia being down right now? RIght now it gives "Error: Please try again later (a607b0e)" when I try to access any pages. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 15:19, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

  Many others, too, eg. nl.wiki and et.wiki.

  Also just noticed that many images aren't displaying on en.wiki, although when you click through to Commons, they seem fine there. Presumably that's somehow part of this. -- DoubleGrazing (talk) 15:23, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

  ZHwiki also went down, I saw, but it looks like they've all just gone back up. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 15:25, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

Down for me. But this is expected, they will selectively allow certain blocks of IPs to work (sites, services), check logs if any exploits come in, move on to the next. -- GreenC 15:59, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

• I see also that image issue now. It looks like it's just previews - when reading the articles the thumbnails seem to load just fine, but when I click into the preview it goes black. Then, on Commons the preview also doesn't load but the image does. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 15:38, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

  Some maintenance work briefly affected the wikis, yes. We have updated our related Diff post to acknowledge this. Johan (WMF) (talk) 18:09, 21 October 2026 (UTC)

reFill down?

Resolved

 – Restored. https://refill.toolforge.org/ –Novem Linguae (talk) 20:35, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

I just keep getting a no healthy upstream error? GiantSnowman 20:53, 22 October 2026 (UTC)

Likely #Toolforge and Cloud VPS temporarily offline. Shubinator (talk) 21:00, 22 October 2026 (UTC)

All my non-PHP tools on toolforge required a webservice restart to get rid of that error. Refill looks like it's node.js based, so Novem Linguae probably just has to give it a good kick to get it running again. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 21:51, 22 October 2026 (UTC)

It uses a php image, with vue.js as the front end framework. Ill try a restart when im back at a computer –Novem Linguae (talk) 02:29, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

Restart didn't work. I think Toolforge is up but PHP is still down. Details of what I tried at phab:T441973#12464513. Will try again another time. –Novem Linguae (talk) 05:47, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

Even though Toolforge is back up, for the most part, AIUI the owners of each tool/bot still need to update their individual tool to get it working again. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 22:23, 22 October 2026 (UTC)

For non-PHP tools nothing needs to be done other than a restart. For PHP tools, if they're using a patchable version it should be similar once WMCS updates the images over the next few days, but otherwise tool owners will need to update their scripts to support a more modern version of PHP. That being said, for non-PHP tools, this is a good opportunity for tool owners to update them to the latest versions of their languages. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 23:41, 22 October 2026 (UTC)

OK thanks - didn't even think the PHP issue would affect this! GiantSnowman 08:11, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

It's up now. I put in a temporary non-PHP server for the static files. – SD0001 (talk) 10:47, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

excel2wiki

Resolved

 – Restored. https://excel2wiki.toolforge.org/ –Novem Linguae (talk) 20:38, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

The Excel-to-Wikitable tool on Toolforge is still down. When I copy a spreadsheet into the tool, it says no healthy upstream. Do I need to ask the owner of the tool when it will be available, or can that question be answered? Robert McClenon (talk) 05:18, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

I think Toolforge PHP is still disabled. We should circle back to this when the cloud-announce mailing list says that safe PHP versions on Toolforge have been restored. –Novem Linguae (talk) 05:50, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

I am the owner of a tool. That tool also says no healthy upstream. If you asked me when it will be available I wouldn't know the answer. I think owners are meant to add the tool to this list. I think that has already happened for Excel2Wiki Sean.hoyland (talk) 05:53, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

...apparently owners can now manually restart non-PHP tools themselves. Sean.hoyland (talk) 05:57, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

@Robert McClenon: excel2wiki is written in PHP, so I'm waiting on the new PHP images to be made available on Toolforge before I can re-enable it. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 14:12, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

It's back up, and I took the opportunity to rewrite it entirely in Javascript so there's no server-side processing or dependency on PHP. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 21:24, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

Comment on excel2wiki

As User:Ahecht notes, the tool has been rewritten. There is no longer a button to push to request the conversion. The conversion happens immediately on pasting the spreadsheet into the space. This is good, but is a surprise. Existing links to the tool work, but existing pages of the tool do not work, and must be relaunched from links. Thank you. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:29, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

Wikipedia library

Resolved

 – Restored. https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/ –Novem Linguae (talk) 20:40, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

I'm a big user of the Wikipedia Library wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org which is not available currently. Same problem? Any timeline to fix it? Thanks.Bob (talk) 20:13, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

TWL is apparently now accessible, according to Dare2Leap's comment above. LightNightLights (talk • contribs) 20:22, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

Can confirm, the Wikipedia Library is fully active. Biologo-in-erba (talk) 20:24, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

GAN stats still down

The GAN stats tool is still down.. Vestrian24Bio 11:17, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

I've restarted it. Should be up now. cc @Mike Christie. – SD0001 (talk) 11:26, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Thanks; I've been away from the PC I use to access toolforge this week so could not do it myself. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:40, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

gitlab.wikimedia.org/toolforge-repos

Resolved

 – GitLab SSH is moving to gitlab-ssh.wikimedia.org

I am unable to git push to gitlab.wikimedia.org/toolforge-repos. I am getting a "ssh: connect to host gitlab.wikimedia.org port 22: Operation timed out" Hawkeye7 (discuss) 23:32, 27 October 2026 (UTC)

List of tools still down

Tools running deprecated PHP is extensive and concerning, many may never return. -- GreenC 23:29, 30 October 2026 (UTC)

Navigation templates break the "What links here" tool

When someone clicks Special:WhatLinksHere from the sidebar of a Wikipedia article, they expect to find the pages which link to the page, or one of its redirects. But, for many pages, what they get instead is mostly noise consisting of all pages transcluding some navigation template, among which the actual inbound wikilinks are hiding and difficult to find. In my opinion this is a serious bug which makes the "What links here" tool cumbersome and frustrating to use for many pages, sometimes to the point that it is basically unusable.

Instead, the "What links here" page should only show linking pages for which the link is directly contained in the source, excluding the content of template transclusions where the template directly contained the wikilink. The template itself should show up in the "What links here" list, but we don't need dozens to hundreds of list items for a single inbound link defined in a template.

This should not affect links generated by other types of template. (E.g. if someone uses the {{slink}} template to link to a section, that should not be excluded).

(The example that came up recently was a new user complaining that they couldn't easily find the articles linking to Intersecting chords theorem because it is included in the navigation footer template Template:Ancient Greek mathematics, which is transcluded by hundreds of pages.) –jacobolus (t) 17:32, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

While we're here, it would also be extremely helpful if the "What links here" tool would separate inbound links pointed at specific sections of the linked-to page, and explicitly show which anchor each inbound link was pointed at. –jacobolus (t) 17:36, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Update: After running a search, I see that people have been complaining about this over and over again since 2004. Here's a partial list of past complaints/requests about this issue:

1. November 2004 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive A#What links here
2. January 2006 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive M#Bad What links here
3. March 2006 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive O#What links here and templates
4. December 2006 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive AF#What links here oddness
5. April 2006 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive S#Whatlinkshere idea
6. January 2007 Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive AC#Disable What links here from transcluded templates
7. August 2007 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive AT#Templates and "What links here"
8. December 2007 Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 11#What links here: pages linked to within templates
9. December 2007 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 8#'What links here' and templates
10. February 2008 Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2008 February 25#Incoming/Outgoing page links (Backlinks and What links here) issue
11. December 2008 Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 40#"What links here" used to be useful
12. December 2008 Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 41#Would it be possible to filter "what links here" by removing links added by templates?
13. June 2009 Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2009 June 20#What links here
14. August 2009 Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2009 August 17#.22What links here.22 oddness
15. August 2009, May 2011, June 2021 Help talk:What links here#Question. How do we hide excessive linkage?
16. September 2009 Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2009 September 2#What Links here - filter problem?
17. September 2009 Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2009 September 16#Dab help
18. October 2009 Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2009 October 10#Chasing WP links
19. January 2010 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 69#What links here and navboxes
20. March 2010 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 73#Page listed on "what links here" ... doesn't
21. October 2010 Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2010 October 16#"What links here" bug
22. January 2011 Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2011 January 18#how do I filter out template links from "what links here"
23. April 2011 Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2011 April 25#What links here (but not there)
24. May 2012 Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2012 May 9#"What links here"--is there a way to eliminate the nav box links?
25. December 2012 Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2012 December 13#How to really filter transclusions out of .22what links here.22
26. April 2013 Help talk:What links here#Hiding transclusions (or something)
27. July 2013 Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 104#What links here - templates
28. January 2014 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 122#WhatLinksHere overwhelmed by links in navigation templates
29. March 2014 Help talk:What links here#Article with thousands of spurious links
30. May 2014 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 126#"What links here" to group links from templates as it does with redirects
31. July 2014 Help talk:What links here#Default to not showing transclusions
32. October 2014 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 131#Fix a problem with What Links Here?
33. November 2014 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 132#Amount of work for "What links here" to distinguish between links from within templates and those that aren't.
34. December 2014 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 132#What Links Here generating too many listings due to navboxes
35. December 2014 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 133#What links here and navbox
36. March 2015 Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2015 March 25#Filtering "what links here"
37. May 2015 Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2015 May 28#Problem with "What links here"
38. March 2015 Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2015 March 25#Filtering "what links here"
39. April 2015 Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions/Archive 328#'what links here' question
40. June 2015 Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2015 June 6#What Links Here and API
41. August 2015 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 139#Can links via navboxes be excluded from "what links here"?
42. June 2016 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 147#What links here / templates
43. September 2016 Help talk:What links here#We need a way to hide.2Fshow links from templates
44. September 2016 Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2016 September 7#What links here - hide transclusions
45. November 2016 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 151#What links here not hiding transclusions
46. May 2017 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 155#What Links Here vs.Templates
47. January 2018 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 162#What links here? - Exclude links from templates
48. May 2018 Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 148#“What links here”
49. August 2018 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 139#Can links via navboxes be excluded from "what links here"?
50. August 2019 Help talk:What links here#Many false positives from What links here
51. January 2020 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 178#What links here, excluding templates?
52. July 2021 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 191#glitchy What links here?
53. December 2021 Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2021 December 13#"What links here" and transcluded boxes of links
54. May 2022 Help talk:What links here#How to only get links from page that link the article ?
55. November 2022 Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2022 November 8#Using PrimeHunter or similar tool to find REAL What Links Here
56. January 2023 Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2023 January 1#.22What links here.22 with templates excluded.3F
57. August 2023 Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2023 August 27#What links here: hide links from templates
58. September 2023 Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2023 September 9#What Links Here contains pages without links?
59. November 2023 Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2023 November 9#Why are the "what links here" pages wildly inaccurate?
60. April 2026 Wikipedia:Help desk/Archive 81#What links here, minus navboxes

How can we get the WMF / Mediawiki developers to fix this bug? –jacobolus (t) 17:52, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Sounds like this community wish (?) Ponor (talk) 18:01, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Or m:Community Wishlist/W338 Ponor (talk) 18:03, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

This has been a known problem for longer than I've been editing navboxes (1 August 2009). --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:15, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Yeah, hee's a complaint from 2004. Among dozens if not hundreds of others since then. It's absurd that this has never been fixed, since it is obvious to everyone that it fundamentally breaks the "What links here" tool. –jacobolus (t) 18:24, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

The links table does not distinguish between links that come directly from the wikitext for the page and those that come via templates. This is because the links table is updated after all templates have been expanded, and so are essentially part of the final wikitext. But consider also that links may also be made by templates that are not navboxes - for example I might put {{tlx|not done}} which makes a link - is that link due to the template, or due to the wikitext of this page? In short, how would the links table generator know the difference? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:55, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Templates such as navboxes which always include a specific wikilink as part of their output are clearly different from templates which generate a wikilink based on their inputs, and should not be treated the same way.

One possibility would be to have some kind of dedicated marker for templates such as navboxes (a start could even be as simple as flagging any template built on top of {{Navbox}}) which causes them to be excluded by whatever process is building and analyzing pages to compute the link tree. –jacobolus (t) 19:50, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

How about a hybrid approach, similar to what we currently do for redirects? This might be more complicated to implement, though, since the target page can be variable.

• Template:Section link
  • [usages that result in a link to the page in question]
• Template:Navbox foo
  • ...
• ...

Solomon Ucko (talk) 16:21, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

This should not affect links generated by other types of template. (E.g. if someone uses the {{slink}} template to link to a section, that should not be excluded). Already you're realizing why "fixing" this would be more difficult than it seems. Anomie⚔ 18:58, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

It may be difficult to fix, but the current state, since the beginning of Wikipedia, has been profoundly broken. It's ridiculous for Mediawiki developers to just mark this as WONTFIX and the let thousands of people repeatedly hit the same catastrophic bug over and over again until the end of time. –jacobolus (t) 19:44, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Meh, I mean, it's not necessarily trivial, but I assume there's an HTML class used by most navboxes; exclude links coming from that (or make a new class), or preferably a box to tick as an option of whether to include them or not.

Yes, the tree view mentioned in Meta:Community_Wishlist/W185 would be more complicated to implement, but I suspect that simpler fix would cover most people's concerns. LittlePuppers (talk) 19:52, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

User:PrimeHunter/Source links.js finds links which are made with wikilink syntax [[...]] in the source text. On Intersecting chords theorem it produces Source links. It doesn't find links made with templates which specify the page name like {{slink}} and {{tl}}. It uses JavaScript to produce the link but wikitext can also do it so we could add such a link to MediaWiki:Linkshere which is displayed on Special:WhatLinksHere/Intersecting chords theorem. {{Source links}} makes a similar but currently not identical search to the script. {{Source links|Intersecting chords theorem}} produces Source links. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:05, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Allow me to propose:

This might not resolve the original issue where transclusions are shown, but doing this by default would greatly improve the reader's experience if we think about the overall goal of initially showing only links to the page, instead of redirects and transclusions as well (though they can continue to be shown after user input).
By the way, the mockup should have the "Show links" as the first checkbox, not in the current default ordering (I just used DevTools to change "Hide" to "Show"). Hason-LEK-SIN ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 09:08, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

Your image looks essentially identical to the current version. What are you proposing to change, exactly? I also don't understand how this is relevant to the issue under discussion. –jacobolus (t) 09:45, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

I understand that the proposed solution doesn't exactly resolve the original issue (which I acknowledged: This might not resolve the original issue), however, by only showing page links by default in the special page, and automatically hide transclusions and redirects, as shown in the mockup, this would let readers more clearly see which pages are linked to the page being queried (which I also mentioned: doing this by default would greatly improve the reader's experience). Hason-LEK-SIN ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 12:11, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

Can you move this to a new discussion? It't completely off topic here. –jacobolus (t) 15:51, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

Although not a navigation template (but another form of template), this is the exact reason why using the IMDb template on actresses links to IMDb (identifier) which in turn redirects to IMDb. Same with good articles when clicking on the green circle on the top right; it leads to Wikipedia:Good articles* (with an asterisk at the end) rather than just Wikipedia:Good articles. And then you have links to periodicals like The Guardian often using a citation template, but it would break the 'what links here' feature if one isn't used. But anyway, I do agree that the feature shouldn't include links from navigation templates, but its just quite difficult to implement. Because of that, I'm surprised it isnt currently listed at Wikipedia:Perennial proposals JuniperChill (talk) 10:22, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

I'm apparently unable to edit from my user account

I am User:IGAEB. Something appears to be wrong with my account, and I don't know what the situation is. I log in, then whenever I make an edit, it says I'm logged out. It then posts my edit as an edit from a temporary account, as it has done here. Whenever I try to edit protected pages, it says I can't do it because I'm not logged in (even though I am an extended confirmed editor). One WP how to page said that it might work if I cleared my cookies, but I did that and the problem persists. And, this is not just my computer -- the same thing has happened when I attempt to make edits from many computers. Often, when I edit, it says, "You are centrally logged in as IGAEB. Reload the page to apply your user settings." But, when I refresh the page, it does the same thing. How do I edit from my account? What it the problem, and how do I fix it? ~2026-56871-02 (talk) 20:04, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Are you logged out when you click edit or when you save the edit? Does it happen if you select "Always enable safe mode" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering? Does it happen at other wikis like commons:Commons:Sandbox? PrimeHunter (talk) 20:12, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

When I click "Edit source" it says I am still logged in. But then, when I click "publish changes" it says I'm logged out. I did log in and then went to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering and I selected "Always enable safe mode." But then, after I clicked "save" on that page it again said I was logged out again. So, apparently, this is a Catch-22. I can't select "Always enable safe mode." Nothing like this has ever happened to me on Wikipedia before. It started happening two nights ago (Thursday). Then, on Friday, I was again able to edit under my user account. But then on Friday afternoon, I was again unable to edit from my user account. This morning (Saturday morning) I could at first edit from my user account. But, later today, I couldn't edit from my user account.

This all started just after I made an edit to Wiktionary. I don't know if that did something to cause this, but I'd like to be able to again edit from User:IGAEB. An admin said I wasn't blocked, so I don't know what the problem is.

But now a new problem has arisen. I tried to post this comment using a temporary account. But it said it couldn’t create a temporary account due to throttling. So, I created this new account just so I could post this comment. I believe that this is a legitimate use of an alternative account, but I would really like my old account back so I could just stick with one account. IGAEB2 (talk) 22:04, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Safemode is automatically enabled while you are at Special:Preferences so if it happens there then I guess it wouldn't help to always enable safemode. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:42, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Then what do I do? IGAEB2 (talk) 23:57, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Could it be due to Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts/WikiBreak Enforcer? Hason-LEK-SIN ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 02:05, 25 October 2026 (UTC)

They don't have any user scripts. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 12:36, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

I just successfully made an edit; I made this edit. So apparently my editing ability has been restored. I'm not sure this will continue, however; in the past few days, I have made some edits, and then later on I was unable to do so. IGAEB (talk) 02:30, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

However, a few minutes after I made the above mentioned edit, it wouldn't let me make any more edits. Every time I would try to edit, a message would pop up saying something like "Server error HTTP 503 forbidden." It wouldn't let me log out either, when I would try to log out, it would also say Server error HTTP 503 forbidden. But, when I closed the page, it did log me out. But I still couldn't make edits while logged out; even while logged out, when I tried to edit with a temporary account, it also said Server error HTTP 503 forbidden. Then, I tried to log in under my makeshift alternative account, User:IGAEB2. When I tried to edit from that account, it still said Server error HTTP 503 forbidden. But, if this post gets posted, it will show that I can edit now.

I've not had this happen before. Does anyone know what might be causing this, and how I can stop it from happening in the future? IGAEB (talk) 13:28, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Since you may not be able to make edits even after switching accounts, it sounds like a device issue.
Have you tried doing your edits on another device and/or internet connection?

• If you can edit from your phone but not your computer it's likely your device.
• If you can't edit from both your computer and phone, and both are connected to the same Wi-Fi network, then it's likely your network's firewall is blocking Wikipedia.
  • Try whitelisting *.wikipedia.org.

Hason-LEK-SIN ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 14:14, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

I was able to edit from my cell phone this morning (although I have had trouble editing from my cell phone in the recent past. I'm on my desktop now, and if this post gets published, it will show that I can edit from my desktop. But, to keep this from happening in the future, how do I whitelist a website? IGAEB (talk) 00:24, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Could you making a few more edits (preferably 5 each) on both devices to see if the 503 forbidden issue stops? (You can use your sandbox for doing dummy edits) Adding a whitelist to your network can be complicated especially if it requires changing settings on your router/modem and the steps differ wildly between manufacturers. Whitelisting on your devices (which is easier) may help, but I don't believe it's an issue with your phone/computer. Hason-LEK-SIN ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 00:44, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

I just made five dummy edits from my desktop, and five dummy edits from my mobile device. No trouble.

I don't know whether the problem has to do with a network. But here's what I do know: My desktop is not connected to Wi-Fi, it's connected to a land line. And this morning, I made my mobile edits from the local courthouse. Just now I made my five mobile edits from the same place where my desktop is. IGAEB (talk) 00:55, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Interesting. I'm unable to assist further though since you're using a landline, sorry! Regardless, it looks like you've (temporarily) fixed the issue. If you continue to face any other issues I would let other volunteers assist you. Happy editing! Hason-LEK-SIN ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 01:11, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

If you continue to have these issues, please note the exact languge of the error, even a screenshot will do, and create a task in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/ giving as much detail as you can, including the error message. (Your IP address should not be in there, but if it is, obscure that.) If by any chance there is an email address given in the error message to report problems, do that instead. I would send you to bot-traffic per https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bot_traffic but it doesn't sound like you are doing anything that approaches bot behaviour. ArielGlenn (talk) 05:23, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Outdated thumbnail in file history

Hello, the thumbnail for the latest version of this file shows the previous image, even though opening the revision shows the correct one.

File (Elektronika 60) screenshot.png

Could someone help fix this? Thanks! Carloseow (talk) 13:35, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

This might be related to § "File missing" in recent uploads above. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 14:19, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Now the thumbnail is correct, so the issue is fixed. Carloseow (talk) 00:04, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Template generating categories mess

Can someone familiar with overly convoluted templates have a look at Template:Category U.S. State elections by decade/core and fix a problem? The US elections categories are being renamed en masse, basically from STATENAME elections to elections in STATENAME (see Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Working/Large) but they're populated by messy templates and attempts to adjust them are creating oddities - see Category:1912 elections in Alabama for one of numerous such cases where the template generates category names like "1910s elections i elections", "Elections in elections i by year" and "1912 in elections i". Thanks in advance. Timrollpickering (talk) 14:51, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Also Template:Category U.S. State elections by year/core is a potential pain. Timrollpickering (talk) 15:00, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

I think the problem is the lines | place = {{{place|{{#invoke:string|sub|{{BASEPAGENAME}}|5|-10}}}}} and | year = {{{year|{{#invoke:string|sub|{{PAGENAME}}|1|4}}}}} in Template:Category U.S. State elections by year (and the similar ones in "by decade"). I'll see if I can make it a bit more robust. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 15:12, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

I have done quick (non-robust) fixes to both pages that seem to be working. There will be some red categories until the category moves are complete, but the category names should all make sense. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:13, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

The one problem I can spot involves the ones with "(state)" in the name - see Category:1953 New York (state) elections and Category:1953 Georgia (U.S. state) elections for examples. I don't know if this will fix when those ones are renamed. Timrollpickering (talk) 15:18, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Seems to be fixed when I moved Category:1996 elections in New York (state) manually. Timrollpickering (talk) 15:23, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

We can't have the old set of categories and the new set working at the same time. Old category names will be broken until all of the pages have been moved by the bot. I have also adjusted {{Category U.S. State elections by decade}}, which will break existing pages until all of the category pages have been moved. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:29, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

The bot is working at a rate of very roughly one state per hour, and there are 50+ states and territories, so these updates might take a day or three. Pinging Bearcat, who will probably notice. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:38, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

@Jonesey95, Timrollpickering: I implemented a much more robust fix that can handle either format ("#### elections in Foo" and "#### Foo elections") and correctly handles "(state)" and "(U.S. state)".--Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 16:29, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

There are indeed a pile of related categories on the current run of Special:WantedCategories, but entirely so far of the "[State] special elections" → "Special elections in [State]" variety that seems to be handled by a different template than the one under discussion, specifically {{United States House of Representatives special elections in state category header}}. Could somebody more versed in template coding than I am look into that template, since it doesn't appear to have been updated in conjunction with this? (It hasn't been edited at all since May.)

I'd also like to note that at least officially, we have a rule that template-generated categories aren't supposed to be speedy-moved by bots, precisely to avoid pages being left sitting in the redlinked old categories due to the template not being updated — but when this has been raised in the past, the maintainer of the bot that does speedy moves complained about the added burden that would be placed on his shoulders if he had to verify the template-generatedness of every category before throwing it to the bot. (Yet the added burden that's placed on my shoulders as Cleaner-Upper-of-Redlinked-Categories if this isn't done seems not to be a concern at all, as if his time is more valuable than mine?) So could we at least compromise on a new rule that the bot has to speedy-move categories with a categoryredirect from the old name instead of deleting the old names outright, and then the old category can be deleted after we've been able to confirm that it's been fully emptied instead of before? Bearcat (talk) 16:49, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

ISTR we had that set-up in the later years of Cydebot but it provoked complaints that numerous redirects were being created by bot. It may be time to reconsider that one. Though it would place a large burden on the redirect system and those who clear that up.

I think the biggest annoyance is the drive by, slap one, rush off approach by both nominators and some admins. The original nomination made a vague reference to "any related templates should be updated" instead of identifying which templates should be amended. Then the processing admin just slapped them on the large working page and left it to the bot to plough through them. It's only once the bot is underway that it becomes clear there's a problem and that encourages speedy attempts to fix it. Is there any way to automate showing that a category is populated to a template rather than relying on nominators and admins to check? Timrollpickering (talk) 18:37, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

CSS width values are offset

Don't know if this has anything to do with PHP or not, but something weird is happening with the width of my signature. Currently, the code for signature is <div style="border: 2.25px solid #333; width: 210px; border-radius: 12px; padding: 7px; background-color: #FFD230; display: in;">[[User:F0malhaut42|ғѳmɑɭʱɑυե]] [[Wikipedia:Editors' pronouns|(Any pronouns)]][[User Talk:F0malhaut42|ᵀᵃˡᵏ]]</div> , but the width part appears to be glitched. 185px width should leave enough space for my signature to fit on one line, but when I replace the 210px with 185px, the following happens:

ғѳmɑɭʱɑυե (Any pronouns)ᵀᵃˡᵏ

Same thing happens with any number up to 200 and possibly higher (I haven't tested any values in between 200 and 210), so it looks like the width values are offset by roughly 20. I only changed my signature to this today, so I'm not sure if this is a known problem or not, but it's probably for the best if I put this here just as a heads-up.

ғѳmɑɭʱɑυե (Any pronouns)ᵀᵃˡᵏ

23:29, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Probably depends on the font and skin. But more importantly, you really need to go read Wikipedia:Signatures#Appearance and color, your signature goes against the policy there in multiple ways. Anomie⚔ 23:51, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

With that said, the first one shows no line wrapping for me. LittlePuppers (talk) 00:05, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Something like <span style="border: 2.25px solid #333; border-radius: 8px; padding: 3px; background-color: #FFD230; display: inline;">[[User:F0malhaut42|ғѳmɑɭʱɑυե]] [[Wikipedia:Editors' pronouns|(Any pronouns)]][[User Talk:F0malhaut42|ᵀᵃˡᵏ]]</span> would fix... several issues. LittlePuppers (talk) 00:10, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

They look fine to me unless I hit Command-+ to increase my browser's zoom level, at which point the signature wraps. That tells me that a fixed pixel width is the wrong way to construct this signature, or any box with text that is not supposed to wrap. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:30, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Indeed, the width really shouldn't be needed, your browser will figure out what's needed on its own. (I meant to fix that in my example above but forgot... regardless, inline elements ignore width so it wouldn't have mattered.) LittlePuppers (talk) 04:26, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Stay away from block elements - not just <div>...</div> - for content that is supposed to be inline. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 06:46, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Difference between revisions - new display?

I have noticed that the differences between revisions have been displaying differently since yesterday (or was it the day before)? I assume that this is meant to be an improvement, but (a) I find it harder to read - although this may just be a matter for getting used to it, and (b) it seems to be taking an inordinately long time to open for me after clicking on the link in an email. Can someone advise me as to why this was done or what is the benefit of the change? Laterthanyouthink (talk) 06:19, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Different in what way? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 06:47, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

It used to show the removed text highlighted in yellow, and the added text in blue, side by side. No other colours.

Now, it highlights the previous "revision as of" line at the top in red, with a strikethrough, and the new "as of" version in turquoise, across the top.

Then, if it's just an addition, you have to scroll down to see the bits that have been added (in turquoise). If just a removal, there's just text at the side, e.g. "Link removed: [name of link]". If the changes are more complicated, various means show new bits in turquoise, notes on the right about removals, etc.

A bit difficult to describe without being able to do screenshots, but if you look at differences in any page history, you should be able to see them. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 07:59, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

VisualDiff

Wikitext diff

Toggle button

@Laterthanyouthink I don't think it's a software change, perhaps you accidentally clicked on "Visual" which enabled the view you're currently seeing – clicking on "Wikitext" switches you back to the diff view you're used to. More info: mw:VisualEditor/Diffs. Johannnes89 (talk) 09:43, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Ah, doh! So that's what the problem was! Thanks very much for that - all hunky dory now. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 12:12, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

IOS watchlist

My IOS app watchlist has been essentially broken today. It does not show any edits on English Wikipedia, even though I have them marked, and finagling with the settings, which I have not changed prior to this problem, only allows me to see items on my watchlist that I have already seen. I have my watchlist set so that I see every edit made to a page on it, always. 1brianm7 (talk) 15:32, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

oh boy is it thursday again ~2026-57845-13 (talk) 16:48, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T442922

Thanks for reporting this, @1brianm7! I've logged it as a bug on Phabricator at T442922 and we'll look into it. Cheers, Sdkb‑WMF ^talk 18:31, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Reply text box not accepting input?

I'm replying to a comment (clicked the "[reply]" link). The text box came up where I can type in my reply but it won't let me type anything. If I click in the box, it gets focus, but doesn't accept anything I type. Clicking "Cancel" and then "[reply]" again does not fix the problem; I have to reload the page.

I saw this once a couple of days ago and passed it off as a fluke, but now it's happening again. Has anybody else seen this? RoySmith (talk) 17:54, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

I haven't encountered it personally. If it's happening consistently on a particular page or in a particular situation, let me know. We need to be able to replicate the issue in order to investigate it and issue a potential fix. Cheers, Sdkb‑WMF ^talk 19:06, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

So far, I've only seen it twice. I don't remember what other page it was on. I did look in the browser console and didn't see any messages that looked like they might be related. If it happens again, I'll poke around some more. RoySmith (talk) 19:40, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Text box size when using the source editor and one of the toolbars

Text box size without 2010 toolbar

Text box size with 2010 toolbar

Is it possible to control the size of the text box size of the source editor? I think it was a recent change, I'm not sure, but the size of the text box is very squashed when using one of the toolbars (2010 or 2017, the 2010 one is shown as an example). When opening the editing screen it will appear larger, but then squash up as the toolbar loads. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 19:51, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

See line 89 of User:Jonesey95/vector-2022.css: #wpTextbox1 {height: 38em;}. YMMV. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:58, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Thanks Jonesey95 works wonders. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 20:20, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Reading lists expansion: custom collections

Hi everyone,

I’m writing here on behalf of the Reader Experience team. We announced back in September that reading lists would be launched as a full feature on all Wikipedias on mobile and desktop. This launch is now completed and logged-in users see a bookmark icon next to the watchstar, which allows them to save articles to read later.

These screenshots show an example of the custom lists flow – users can save an article to a particular themed list of their own creation, ie "Biographies," rather than all articles saved in one large list.

Why are we doing this?

With declining pageviews to Wikipedia and fewer readers returning to the site, we want ways to encourage readers to come back to Wikipedia more often. We hope that by giving readers with accounts the ability to bookmark and curate their reading they will return to learn more often, with some of them eventually becoming editors. Since its September launch, reading lists have already become quite popular. 93% of users surveyed so far have shared that the reading list feature was useful to them. We’ve gotten lots of great feedback, like:

• I find this new feature very interesting, especially for saving articles I'd like to expand, modify, or extend, and then keeping the ones I've already created. :D
• OMG when did this become a thing in the browser. I love this feature, thank you so much.
• Love being able to save pages on mobile. Now being able to access them in the browser is really nice

This positive reception encourages us to keep building improvements to the feature to make it continually useful. We see this feature as foundational to allowing us to offer more ways to curate one’s Wikipedia experience in the future; we’ve received many requests for feature expansions from both readers and editors.

The most commonly requested one, the ability to organize saved pages (what we call custom collections), will soon be rolled out to use in the feature.  Apps users can already use custom lists, where it has contributed to improved reader retention.

Here are just a few of the requests we received for the ability to organize saved pages into custom lists:

• I would like them to be organized into collections like in the mobile version, so that navigation is easier.
• [I would like to] be able to save pages to separate folders
• I would love to be able to make sections to organise my saves!

What do custom lists add to the current reading lists experience?

Custom lists add onto the “save later” bookmark by letting users create and organize articles into multiple lists. Examples could be “Caribbean history,” “Favorite authors,” “Space missions to read,” or “Space missions already read.”

We also think this could be useful for editors who want to create buckets of articles for their editing work, like “Articles to refresh,” “Science articles to translate,” “Biographies to review,” and so on.

How will custom lists be implemented?

The custom lists expansion to reading lists will roll out to Wikipedia users between November 9 and 16.  

Users who are logged in across multiple devices will see their saved custom lists synced across devices, including items saved from the Wikipedia App.

We encourage you to try out custom lists when available and give us feedback on the project page.

Do you have any other ideas for reading lists based on this information? Please let us know! Thank you. EBlackorby-WMF (talk) 20:45, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/MathFormattingBugs § Math formulas as client-side SVG rendering becomes the default on Nov 2, 2026: decision, what's left, and how to weigh in

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/MathFormattingBugs § Math formulas as client-side SVG rendering becomes the default on Nov 2, 2026: decision, what's left, and how to weigh in. MSantos (WMF) (talk) 21:18, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Number of page watchers label in page info

MediaWiki:Pageinfo-watchers says "Number of page watchers". For old pages, this sometimes leads to misunderstandings. For example, the old Wikipedia:WikiProject Contents has almost 2,000 "watchers", but it has almost no actual watchers in practice. The people making this mistake do not notice the following row in the table, which is watchers that actually looked at the page during the last 30 days.

To reduce this confusion, could we change that text to say something like "Number of page watchers (including inactive users)"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:31, 30 October 2026 (UTC)

Add AutoCiteWikidata as gadget?

Automatic citations are now easier via Wikidata: See the AutoCiteWikidata gadget. Discussed here on Diff: "making automatic citations connected with Wikidata"

This should be a default gadget option without users having to discover this user page. See the discussion at T289287. – SJ + 19:02, 30 October 2026 (UTC)

The likelihood that we will be expanding the reach of {{cite Q}} I estimate is about 0. So, it has no chance of being a default gadget any time soon. Izno (talk) 21:03, 30 October 2026 (UTC)

Cite Q is and always has been an ill-behaved and underdeveloped template that has caused CITEVAR issues. Just to check if anything had changed, I clicked on four articles at random from its "What links here" list, and found Cite Q CITEVAR problems and related inconsistency at Frances Abington, Edible mushroom, Atrial natriuretic peptide, and William Dampier. Four out of four. This template being used in over 17,000 articles is a problem for people who care about consistent presentation of citation information. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:57, 30 October 2026 (UTC)

Two of your four articles do not even use Cite Q for citations. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits; 23:03, 30 October 2026 (UTC)

Frances Abington uses it in the Wikipedia:External links section, and Atrial natriuretic peptide uses it inside a template in the ==Notes== section. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:33, 30 October 2026 (UTC)

Some issues. Cite Q only exists in 78 languages while cite journal is in 237. This is going to be an issue for those of us involved in translation.
When one looks at the Wikitext like <ref>{{cite Q|Q38897648}}</ref><ref>{{cite Q|Q104102440}}</ref> one has no ability to see the metadata. Ie what journal is this, what was the year of publication, all critical to determine reliability. One has to go back to the article text to see the reference which makes editing difficult.
Would need global templates and would need the lake of metadata in wikitext mode solved before this template should be used IMO. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 22:32, 30 October 2026 (UTC)

Cite Q is available to any project which wishes to use it and works in any language which Wikidata supports - which is far more than 237.

Your second paragraph is addressed in the template documentation.

While global templates would indeed be good, we do not need them for Cite Q to work. This too is addressed in the template documentation. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits; 22:45, 30 October 2026 (UTC)

I see the drawbacks of cite Q as greater than the benefits. I have raised these issues for years. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 22:56, 30 October 2026 (UTC)

Odd, the template's talk page archive search only finds your name once. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits; 23:01, 30 October 2026 (UTC)

Yah 9 years ago I raised the issue of no metadata in the wikitext and it appears not solved. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 23:05, 30 October 2026 (UTC)

"This too is addressed in the template documentation." Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits; 23:09, 30 October 2026 (UTC)

"Addressed", in the meaning of discussed? But not "addressed" in the meaning of solved? Or am I missing something.

Sure we could at the Q to cite templates. But that is not this.

The Cite Q template has many of the same issues as the Cite doi template that was deprecated. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 23:14, 30 October 2026 (UTC)

• I think this would be good - Cite Q's quite a mature template now, and it's widely used across many different language Wikipedias. There's been ongoing conversation in particular re Doc James's points in T289287. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 20:25, 2 November 2026 (UTC)

Would it be possible to add a size parameter to user contribution searches?

When I search contributions by an editor or to an article for potential shenanigans (e.g., unattributed copy-paste edits, LLM usage, etc.), it would be very useful to be able to limit the search to, for example edits adding more than 5,000 bytes, or some comparable arbitrarily large amount. Since that data is already reflected in these lists of contributions, would it be possible to add it as a searchable parameter? BD2412 T 22:46, 30 October 2026 (UTC)

Have you asked the maintainer of the relevant tool? Izno (talk) 02:14, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

I guess the post is about the standard MediaWiki filters at the top of user contributions like Special:Contributions/BD2412 and page histories like . phab:T235730 is a 2019 request about user contributions. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:21, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

Yes, I mean the native display, not an issue with added=on tool. BD2412 T 16:43, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

Likely the blocker to such a thing being built into MediaWiki would be the lack of an efficient database query to fetch the matching edits. Without that, you'd do just as well with a user script that would simply hide the rows based on the size displayed. Anomie⚔ 12:23, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

The numerical data is already returned as part of the display. I would tend to assume that what data it can return, it can parse. BD2412 T 16:47, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

Parsing isn't the problem, efficient fetching is. The database can easily handle a query like "fetch the first 5001 rows by $USER ordered by timestamp", then a second query "fetch the lengths for these 5000 revision IDs" so the display code can subtract the lengths to get the size difference. A query like "fetch 5001 rows by $USER ordered by timestamp, along with their corresponding parent rows, subtract the lengths, and keep only the rows where the length difference is > $N" would be less efficient but (probably) still ok, but would give a fairly poor UX if $USER's last 6000 edits were all or mostly < $N. Where it really fails is when you change that for better UX to "fetch rows by $USER ordered by timestamp, along with their corresponding parent rows, subtract the lengths, keep only the rows where the difference is > $N, and stop once you have kept 5001". Set $USER to say User:WP 1.0 bot and $N to something large, and the database would have to scan 12 million rows (plus their parent rows) to tell you there are fewer than 5000 big enough for your filter. Anomie⚔ 18:02, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

It could make a limited return, for example just analyzing the last 5,000 edits. BD2412 T 18:10, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

Sure. Or, as I suggested earlier, you could accomplish exactly that using a user script to hide the rows rather than waiting for MediaWiki developers to spend time writing and reviewing code for what many would find to be a poor UX. Anomie⚔ 19:03, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

Interface elements in user ribbon

<rant mode> I find it ridiculous that you can change one aspect of your preferences in your user ribbon (the thing in the upper right, including watchlist and contribs) but all other user preferences are under preferences. It should be available in preferences only, and the people who implemented it as part of the ribbon should be run out of town riding a change log! :) </rant mode> --Hammersoft (talk) 12:38, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

What ribbon is this? Which is the one preference? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:49, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

They may be referring to the eyeglasses/brassiere icon in Vector 2022, which expands into a menu or can be pinned as a right-hand sidebar element. It contains three appearance preferences: text size, dark/light mode, and content width. Those preferences do not appear in Preferences → Appearance. Possibly related: T432280. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:29, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

Real users shun Vector 2022. I also shun Vector legacy; I started on MonoBook and not only does it still work, it doesn't get messed about nearly so often. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 15:20, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

If Wikipedia were old enough that it had once had a punched card interface, there would be users saying they still used it and couldn't understand what people saw in these new-fangled screen things. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:38, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

https://xkcd.com/1782/? Anomie⚔ 16:07, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

These preferences were made available for unregistered users as well, whom do not have a preferences page. Izno (talk) 16:28, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

I use monobook. I'm referring, in desktop mode, to the ribbon in the upper right that says "Hammersoft <icon> <icon> sandbox preferences beta dark mode watchlist contributions logout" (emphasis mine). --Hammersoft (talk) 18:52, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

That's a gadget, Wikipedia:Dark mode (gadget), not part of MediaWiki. Anomie⚔ 19:06, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

And gadgets don't run on Preferences for security so they can't add options there. Nardog (talk) 01:33, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

Oh and actually, all that gadget does is provide a convenient way to toggle the dark mode, which is its own gadget. So disable "Dark mode toggle" and use "Core styling for dark mode gadget" to toggle the dark mode itself. Nardog (talk) 01:36, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

Link search oddity

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T443138

Using Special:LinkSearch, why do:

• thegazette.co.uk
• www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/

each get 1000s of hits (the former including URLs both with and without www.), but:

• thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/

only gets 2? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits; 16:07, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

Looks like the behavior prior to 2023 did the expected thing for searches like (1) example.com, (2) *.example.com, and (3) example.com/some/path, but for (4) *.example.com/some/path it would ignore the path part, giving the same results as (2). In 889575, the "new" code path (accidentally?) did the right thing for (4), but broke both (1) and (3) by treating them like (2) and (4), i.e. treating every domain as if it had the *. prefix. Later 936769 reversed that breakage, treating (2) and (4) as if they were (1) and (3), i.e. breaking the *. prefix search entirely. Finally 937067 settled on the current brokenness, treating (1) like (2) but (4) like (3), i.e. forcing *. if there's no path given and ignoring it if there is. Anomie⚔ 17:40, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

You mean this behaviour is intended? It seems very counter-intuitive. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits; 19:33, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

Seems like a bug to me, and then a series of bad "fixes". Anomie⚔ 20:18, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

OK, I've raised a ticket. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits; 21:04, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

 This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits; 20:58, 2 November 2026 (UTC)

Is there a way to create a list of redirects or links to disambiguation pages on a page?

I use AWB, and it can create lists using Links on page (only bluelinks) and Links on page (only redlinks). Is there a way to create a list of links on a page which go to redirects or disambiguation pages? In my common.css page, or somewhere, I've set redirects to be colored green and links to disambiguation pages to be colored orange, so I think it should be possible for the destination of those links to be communicated back to the page. Thanks, SchreiberBike | ⌨  22:25, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

What is the use case for only getting redirects? Redirects generally don't need to be bypassed (WP:NOTBROKEN). Axolitl (talk | contribs) 22:29, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

I'm updating the long List of birds by common name. By agreement Wikipedia follows AviList for what common names we use to refer to bird species. Because Wikipedia is complicated and we don't all use the same variety of English, and we make different choices from AviList regarding diacritics in place names, we don't use exactly the same names. Also, the science changes for what species are accepted and what are not, so we need to be able to update List of birds by common name regularly and as quickly as practical. Identifying redirects and links to disambiguation pages in a sandbox used to prepare that list would save effort. Thank you. SchreiberBike | ⌨  23:18, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

There are 50 redirects and no disambigs linked from that page. Or did you mean from your sandbox? —Cryptic 23:59, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

Wow. That's the ticket. Thank you @Cryptic! I may as well ask for the moon, because you've already done so much. I'd really like to be able to run it on User:SchreiberBike/sandbox and to be able to run it repeatedly as I work through one issue after another, and to get redlinks at the same time, to find out what redirects need to be created. I've not used SQL in about 20 years, and I don't remember it looking like that. I see I can create an account on Quarry, and I've tried to fool with a copy of the program you wrote, but I've not yet figured out how to do anything there. Thanks again for your help, and if you could do what I describe above, please let me know. Thanks, SchreiberBike | ⌨  01:15, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

Here you go. —Cryptic 01:48, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

OpenStreetMap

Does anyone here have any experience with OSM? I've created a new article and am trying to add a customized map to it and I'm lost... Like REALLY lost. Anyone with any experience here would be super appreciated! Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 02:25, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

How do temporary accounts work "cross-project"?

If I start a temporary account like this one on (say) Wikipedia and make some edits, and then go to Wiktionary — or vice versa — then sometimes I can use the same temp account there. But on other occasions (by far the majority) I cannot: the other project shows me as completely logged out. What dictates this behaviour, and in general how can I use my temp account from one project on another one, rather than having to create two temp accounts on the same day? (I am not interested in creating a named account.) ~2026-58009-05 (talk) 12:24, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

Seems to be discussed in phab:T355280 and related tickets. In short: in principle it should work (and it was intended to work that way), in practice it often doesn't, there doesn't seem to be an easy solution. Andrew Gray (talk) 13:01, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

2026 United States elections seems to hit some technical limit

See Talk:2026_United_States_elections#External_links_is_broken Laura240406 (talk) 15:47, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

WP:PEIS. Anomie⚔ 16:21, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

weirdly, the page isn't in Category:Articles where post-expand include size is exceeded Laura240406 (talk) 17:34, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

It was in the category at revision 1383211260. Seems like it has been fixed. Sean.hoyland (talk) 17:42, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

PEIS has since been reduced by switching citations to use the module instead of the template. LittlePuppers (talk) 17:44, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

Gadget to strike through blocked editors no longer working as advertised

In the past couple of weeks, the gadget that is supposed to strike the username of editors who are blocked has stopped doing that. Instead, it now shows those usernames in italics and light blue. I am using the Vector legacy (2010) skin and I don't think that I have any other code or settings that should be affecting this nor have I made any relevant changes to my preferences. It worked as advertised and then suddenly stopped working as advertised.

If this is an intentional change, can someone please (a) point out where this was discussed and advertised and (b) update the language in the preferences screen so it provides an accurate description of what the gadget does? If this is not an intentional change, can someone please fix it? Thanks! ElKevbo (talk) 18:15, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

Example: User:Sandbox. The reason this happens is because something changed in the "Preferences → Appearance → Underline links: = Never" setting, as it now overrides all text decoration on links, which prevents the strikethrough. This probably needs to be brought up on Phabricator. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 18:24, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

Which is the point of that option. It is an accessibility option and should trump any other customizations. Izno (talk) 18:43, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

Fair. Perhaps this is more an issue with the gadget than the skin. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 18:55, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

Another customization for blocked editors can be added to one's personal CSS, as the script does add a class to the relevant element, if you should so choose. If in fact the issue is the incompatibility with the accessibility option identified by Axolitl. Izno (talk) 18:44, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

Can't speak for everyone, but at least for me the point of that accessibility option is that links aren't indicated solely by color. Dotted underline does that just as well; line-through is less good but sufficient, especially with the lower opacity and, for indef blocks, italics. (And if a user's gone out of their way to turn on a gadget whose only purpose is to restyle a handful of links, shouldn't that take precedence over an option that restyles almost all of them?) Anyway, it's fixable with a.user-blocked-partial.user-blocked-partial { text-decoration: underline dotted; } a.user-blocked-temp.user-blocked-temp, a.user-blocked-indef.user-blocked-indef { text-decoration: line-through; } in your CSS. —Cryptic 19:10, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

Looks like it's an accidental side effect of 1345183, which changed the selector for the preference from .mw-underline-never a to html.skin-underline-clientpref-never a. This raises the specificity above that of the gadget's a.user-blocked-indef selector. It should be straightforward enough for an iadmin to update the gadget's selectors, e.g. changing it to html a.user-blocked-indef (and similarly for the others there). Anomie⚔ 21:06, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for tracking this down. Will an iadmin see this thread or do we need to do something specific to alert them? ElKevbo (talk) 22:43, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

There are fifteen intadmins. One of them (Izno) has already commented here; several more (Chaotic Enby, MusikAnimal, Novem Linguae, Pppery, SD0001, Sohom Datta) have commented in other threads on this page recently. So the chances of one of them seeing this thread are high; the question is, would they wish to change it without further discussion? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:12, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

I came by to report the same issue. S0091 (talk) 16:34, 2 November 2026 (UTC)

Done. – SD0001 (talk) 20:13, 2 November 2026 (UTC)

Talk page with "/" in the title of the article displays a secondary link with text before the slash

On Talk:Baby/girls, an article I submitted through AfC, a link displays for Talk:Baby. This makes sense considering how links typically work across the internet - is there even a fix for something like this? 30Four (talk) 20:57, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

This is a side effect of subpages. There isn't really a good solution here. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 21:04, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

That's just how it works, generally. Mostly just means page movers need to be careful with moving with subpages. ScalarFactor (talk) 22:17, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

Something like __NOSUBPAGE__ would be a nice feature though. Community wishlist possibly? Axolitl (talk | contribs) 23:19, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

There is a 2012 request in phab:T41395. We cannot hide it with TempateStyles because it automatically adds .mw-parser-output to CSS rules and that class isn't present at the interface link. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:42, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

New share button coming to mobile Wikipedia

Hello, I'm Maryana, a WMF Product Manager. We’re planning to add a new way to share Wikipedia articles on mobile web: a dedicated Share button and Share Card.

Screenshot of what the new share button on mobile Wikipedia looks like. The new button is to the right of the (locked) edit button in this screenshot.

Screenshot of the share card that appears after tapping the share on mobile Wikipedia. Tapping to Share pulls up your phone’s native Share sheet to ensure we don’t promote any specific third-party app or website.

Why are we doing this?

People share Wikipedia articles with each other through text and social media, but our mobile experience doesn’t encourage this behavior. With Wikipedia traffic declining, we want to help bring readers to our platform by providing additional information and attribution. Share buttons on articles are a WP:PERENNIAL request, and we’ve built this feature to allow users to choose whichever social or messaging apps on their phones that they would like to use to address the concern of promoting any specific third-party app or website.

This work is based on a May 2026 Reader Growth team experiment on mobile Wikipedia (arwiki, zhwiki, frwiki, viwiki, enwiki) to show this new Share button/card to a sample of readers. Findings from this experiment indicate that additional traffic was brought in by people clicking on Share Cards shared on external platforms, bringing an estimated potential 25 million additional pageviews to Wikipedia per year.

What risks have we considered?

We have held two calls with Wikipedians on Discord this year to discuss this feature and hear any concerns or risks, which we have worked to address:

• Bad-faith actors using Share Cards to share inappropriate images. To mitigate this and concerns about the quality of images in Share Cards, we disabled sharing for images that appear on the Bad Images Lists and have ensured that we are respecting notpageimage, noviewer and/or NOMEDIAVIEWERCAROUSEL. Editors who don't want a particular image to show up cards can add notpageimage to the image.
• Promoting specific social platforms to share to. As noted above, the Share Card does not specify any social platforms to share to and allows the user to share to any messaging or social app that is installed on their phone.
• The feature won’t be used because there are other ways to share (via link, browser share button, screenshot, etc.). There were thousands of article shares and pageviews to Wikipedia coming from the share button and cards during the small-scale (1% of readers) experiment earlier this year, so we are expecting a good amount of usage when scaled up to all mobile readers.

How we are planning to proceed

1. Today through November 8th: we are inviting all Wikipedians to test this feature for themselves on their wiki. To test: on a mobile device, add ?useformat=mobile&sharecard=1 to the end of any Wikipedia article URL. Please feel free to report any issues here or on this task in Phabricator: phabricator:T442968.
2. On November 9th: if all looks good and there are no outstanding major issues, we will deploy this feature on mobile web to all Wikipedias. (This feature will not be available on desktop.)
3. After November 9th: we’ll continue to monitor for any bugs, issues, and any enhancements suggested by communities. We will also consider future iterations of the share card to test.

Please let us know if you have questions or feedback, and we encourage you to give the feature a try. Thank you! Maryana Pinchuk (WMF) (talk) 14:01, 2 November 2026 (UTC)

Mechanics of redirects used with fragments

 You are invited to join the discussion at Template talk:Shortcut § Shortcut links with hash broken. I'm having difficulty explaining "that's how it works, it won't be altered". Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:02, 2 November 2026 (UTC)

PHP

Meant to ask long ago, have the Foundation updated the XAMPP package to resolve the PHP issues? All the best: Rich Farmbrough 23:21, 2 November 2026 (UTC).