Tech News 2026, week 07

Latest *tech news
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News>* from the
Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes.
Not all changes will affect you. Translations
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2026/07> are
available.

*Updates for editors*

   - Logged-in contributors who manage large or complex watchlists can now
   organise and filter watched pages in ways that improve their workflows with
   the new Watchlist labels
   <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Help:Watchlist_labels>
   feature. By adding custom labels (for example: pages you created, pages
   being monitored for vandalism, or discussion pages) users can more quickly
   identify what needs attention, reduce cognitive load, and respond more
   efficiently. This improves watchlist usability, especially for highly
   active editors.
   - A new feature available on Special:Contributions
   <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions> shows temporary
   accounts
   <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Trust_and_Safety_Product/Temporary_Accounts>
   that are likely operated by the same person, and so makes patrolling less
   time-consuming. Upon checking contributions of a temporary account, users
   with access to temporary account IP addresses can now see a view of
   contributions from the related temporary accounts. The feature looks up all
   the IPs associated with a given temporary account within the data retention
   period and shows all the contributions of all temporary accounts that have
   used these IPs. Learn more
   <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Trust_and_Safety_Product/Temporary_Accounts#February_2026:_Improvements_to_the_patroller_tooling>.
   [1] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T415674>
   - When editors preview a wikitext edit, the reminder box that they are
   only seeing a preview (which is shown at the top), now has a grey/neutral
   background instead of a yellow/warning background. This makes it easier to
   distinguish preview notes from actual warnings (for example, edit conflicts
   or problematic redirect targets), which will now be shown in separate
   warning or error boxes. [2] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T414742>
   - The Global Watchlist
   <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:GlobalWatchlist> lets you view
   your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension
   <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Extension:GlobalWatchlist>
   continues to improve — it now properly supports more than one Wikibase
   site, for example both Wikidata <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/> and
   testwikidata <https://test.wikidata.org/wiki/>. In addition, issues
   regarding text direction have been fixed for users who prefer Wikidata or
   other Wikibase sites in right-to-left (RTL) languages. [3]
   <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T415440>[4]
   <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T415458>
   - The automatic "magic links" for ISBN, RFC, and PMID numbers have
been deprecated
   in wikitext since 2021
   <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Help:Magic_links> due
   to inflexibility and difficulties with localization. Several wikis have
   successfully replaced RFC and PMID magic links with equivalent external
   links, but a template was often required to replace the functionality of
   the ISBN magic link. There is now a new built-in parser function
   <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Help:Magic_words#isbn>
   {{#isbn}} available to replace the basic functionality of the ISBN magic
   link. This makes it easier for wikis who wish to migrate off of the
   deprecated magic link functionality to do so. [5]
   <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T145604>
   - Two new wikis have been created:
      - a Wikipedia in Jju <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q35401> (w:kaj:
      <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/kaj:>) [6]
      <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T413283>
      - a Wikipedia in Nawat <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1186896> (
      w:ppl: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ppl:>) [7]
      <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T413273>
   - View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week
   <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/Recently_resolved_community_tasks>
   .

*Updates for technical contributors*

   - A new global user group has been created: Local bots
   <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Local_bots>. It will
   be used internally by the software to allow community bots to bypass rate
   limits that are applied to abusive web scrapers
   <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Web_scraping>. Accounts that are
   approved as bots on at least one Wikimedia wiki will be automatically added
   to this group. It will not change what user permissions the bot has. [8]
   <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T415588>
   - Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
   <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.46/wmf.15>

*Meetings and events*

   - The MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference, Spring 2026
   <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/MediaWiki_Users_and_Developers_Conference_Spring_2026>
   will be held March 25–27 in Salt Lake City, USA. This event is organized by
   and for the third-party MediaWiki community. You can propose sessions and
   register to attend. [9]
   <https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/[email protected]/thread/AZBWVI46SDEB65PGR5J6E4TYOQQEZXM7/>

*Tech news <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News>
prepared by Tech News writers
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/Writers> and
posted by bot
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/User:MediaWiki_message_delivery>
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