User talk:ToBeFree
Tech News: 2026-21
[edit]Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- The Abstract Wikipedia team has identified five potential pilot wikis to assess their interest in adopting abstract articles on their wikis. The pilots are Malayalam, Bengali, Dagbani, Arabic, and Indonesian Wikipedia. The feedback period will be open until May 22. If your community is interested in becoming a pilot, let us know on Meta.
Updates for editors
- An experiment to show Reading Lists to logged-out readers on mobile web will launch on May 18 across German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, and Urdu Wikipedias, and will run for one month. The effort supports broader goals of helping readers save and organize articles for later reading, while encouraging habits that could lead to future Wikipedia contributions.
- To support a bookmark button in the Reading List beta feature, the "Tools > Action" menu has been updated to display icons, including the watch star indicator that helps editors identify temporarily watched articles. The icons now also match those used on mobile, improving consistency across platforms. The change is currently limited to the actions menu and mainly affects editors with privileged user rights. [1]
- Suggestion Mode was released as an A/B test for newcomer editors on the mobile website at ~15 Wikipedias. The experiment will measure the impact that Suggestion Mode has on the proportion of newcomer mobile web edit sessions that result in constructive (un-reverted) article edits. The experiment will also evaluate the feature's impact on editor retention, and monitor changes in revert and block rates.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue in the Wikipedia Android app where images could sometimes fail to load after opening a recommended reading list notification, has now been fixed. [2]
Updates for technical contributors
- The Wikidata Platform team has published its backend replacement recommendation and accompanying technical architecture for the migration of the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) away from Blazegraph. Feedback is invited until May 25th 2026, especially on potential gaps and impacts on advanced use cases. Wikidata community members and WDQS users are also encouraged to help identify high-impact tools and workflows that may need attention on this page. Feedback can be shared on the Migration talk page or during the next office hour. See the WDP team newsletter for more details.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- On English, French, Japanese, and a few other Wikipedias, there was a trial of hCaptcha, a third-party bot detection service. The trial showed that hCaptcha effectively detects and deters some bad-faith automated activity, on its own and by giving checkusers and stewards signals to look into. Because the results were positive, hCaptcha will be rolled out across all wikis over the next few weeks. See the hCaptcha project page for technical information about the implementation and privacy protections. Learn more.
- The latest Community Tech update is now available, with progress across several Community Wishlist initiatives, including Reading Lists expansion from the mobile app to the website, new language support for "Who Wrote That" and the Personal Dashboard, improvements to 3D rendering and Charts, and upcoming work on talk page sorting, audio playback, and editing workflows. The update also shares current priorities, wishlist status trends, and opportunities for community feedback on future focus areas and the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2026–2027 Annual Plan. Read the full newsletter for details.
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MediaWiki message delivery 20:20, 18 May 2026 (UTC)
Help request
[edit]Hey there; I wanted to ask an admin for help with an ongoing situation. Something is going on with this user [3] that isn't quite right and I think needs admin attention. I'm coming to an admin directly because I have undone some of this user's edits based on poor sourcing, and contributed to them being blocked for a time - I don't want to attract their attention given what they're currently doing by pinging them or trying to report them to the incident noticeboard. Is it okay to ask if you can take a look at what's going on and try to help them, or at least stop the disruption and harassment? I left an identical help message with another admin, but they may have gone offline. I did the same with a different admin who may not be online yet. It seems like this needs attention sooner than later, so I thought asking a few people wouldn't hurt. Pikkupapupata 💌 🌷 08:45, 19 May 2026 (UTC)
- Hello Pikkupapupata, ANI is the right place for reporting users' behavior including, from what I can see, in cases such as this one. In this community, complaints about users' public behavior on Wikipedia are generally dealt with publicly and including a mandatory talk page notification and evidence in form of diff links. If there is a reason to privately file a complaint, that can be done to the Arbitration Committee, but they'll also just point to ANI if there is no private evidence involved. Best regards, ~ ToBeFree (talk) 09:15, 19 May 2026 (UTC)
