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The Signpost: 13 October 2026
[edit]- News and notes: AELECT returns, Jimbo gives a union update, VisualEditor is now default
Plus a survey for North Americans, proposed changes to BoT elections, and developments in the Puerto Rican editing community.
- Serendipity: From a rare portrait of a female millionaire in Nancy to a Japanese painter in Lyon
Images from Leuven Libraries popular on Wiki.
- Obituary: Doug Weller
Twenty-year editor, long-term admin, dearly missed.
- In the media: A(I)pocalypses afoot
Cannibals, freeloaders, rogue agents, scams ... the usual.
- WikiConference Report: WikiConference 2026 & the importance of in-person community
Celebrating 12 years of WikiConference North America.
- By the numbers: Does the country of birth affect the likelihood of having a Wikipedia biography?
A cross-country and cross-wikipedia comparison of the likelihood of having a biography in Wikipedia.
- News from Diff: OpenAI "rogue" agent activities found on Wikimedia projects
CPO/CTO Selena Deckelmann explains the recent detection of AI agent activities on Wikimedia projects.
- On the bright side: Good people
Nice comments and real-life rescuers.
- Op-ed: Who are our readers?
The movement makes progress when we know what our scope is.
- Traffic report: This world is big and wild and half insane
Criminals, 9/11 25 years later, artists expelled for politics... we lived in troubled times.
- Comix: Fudging the numbers
Take 'em away, officers!
Tech News: 2026-43
[edit]Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- To measure the impact of incorporating some community-requested features on logged-out reader retention, a test for Image Carousel will be pushed to logged-out readers. With the Image Carousel feature, readers browse community-uploaded images, selected by editors as relevant to specific articles. The test starts on November 20.
- An experimental notice will be pushed to 0.5% of logged-out mobile readers who come to English Wikipedia from Google, asking them to add Wikipedia as a Google Preferred Source. The test is to see if this notice increases reader retention and encourages people who use Google Search to visit Wikipedia more often. It will run from October 15–29 and will be assessed for its impact on retention and referrals.
View all 26 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where Quarry returned an “Access denied” error when users tried to run SQL queries, preventing queries from running normally, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
Due to a long-standing bug, applications that use the OAuth 2 client credentials flow to act on their owners’ behalf are treated as if they are logged out. This will be fixed for new applications registered on or after Monday, October 19. Some affected applications need to re-register. - Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- A proposal to hold the Wikimedia Hackathon every three years, with regional hackathons in between, has been shared. It explores making the event more accessible to technical communities in different regions. Share your feedback on the proposal’s talk page before November 6.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Wikimedia Apps Newsletter – Third Quarter of 2026
[edit]Hello, and welcome to the third Wikimedia Apps newsletter of 2026!
In this edition, we’ll walk you through the main updates, experiments, results, and improvements in the Wikipedia mobile apps during July, August, and through mid-September.
Following the rollout of the redesigned Home experience on Android, the team continued work to bring the Explore Feed Refresh to iOS.
Development focused on building the foundations of the new experience, including the shared card structure and navigation for the For You feed.
The team also developed a new onboarding experience that allows users to:
- Choose their preferred feed experience.
- Select topics and articles they are interested in.
- Confirm or update the Wikipedia languages they want to read.
- Learn how the new Home and For You experiences work.
The team also built article recommendations based on users’ selected interests and introduced a one-time explanation of the new Home experience for existing users.
Additional work focused on improving the reliability of the experience, including resolving an issue that prevented the For You feed from loading in non-English languages.
Following the launch of “Which Came First?” in June, the team continued improving the game and analyzing how people were using it.
Additional work during this period included:
- Updated App Store screenshots to better reflect the app’s current design and functionality, with localized versions for different regions.
- Replaced the Reading Challenge widget with Random Article following the end of the challenge.
- Improved VoiceOver navigation in Search history by identifying dated groups as headers.
- Added autofill support to the login form to improve compatibility with password managers.
- Improved Find in Page behavior on iOS 26.
- Continued preparation for iOS 26 and iPadOS 26.
Saved and Collections
[edit]A major area of work on Android was redesigning Reading Lists to create a clearer and more consistent Saved experience.
The redesign aligns Android more closely with the current iOS experience and proposed Web experience.
The team:
- Renamed Reading Lists to Collections.
- Added an “All articles” view so users can see their saved articles together regardless of collection.
- Removed the default Saved collection and introduced guidance for existing users.
- Added a “Not in a collection” filter.
- Updated saving and unsaving menus to make collection management clearer.
- Updated search within collections to match the overall Saved experience.
- Migrated the Reading Lists screen to Jetpack Compose as part of the app’s ongoing technical modernization.
Following the launch of the redesigned Home experience, the Android team moved into the next phase of Explore Feed experimentation.
Research showed that new articles personalized around users’ interests were among the content types participants found most interesting and most likely to encourage them to return.
Based on these findings, the team designed and began an A/B test of a new Articles by Topic module in the For You feed.
The team also continued exploring other potential content types, including Creator Videos and Trending by Country, while investigating ways to surface new articles across different Wikipedia languages and account for differences in quality and moderation between Wikimedia projects.
The Apps team has also been working with the Web and Machine Learning teams on Listening to Wikipedia, an initiative exploring how text-to-speech can help readers listen to Wikipedia content.
Research found a strong preference for natural, human-sounding speech over the more robotic on-device voices currently available. Based on these findings, the teams have been exploring an experience using the open-weight Kokoro text-to-speech model.
For the first Apps experiment, the Android team is preparing a limited test that allows selected users to listen to English Wikipedia article introductions directly from the For You feed.
The experiment starts with a limited collection of pre-generated audio rather than generating audio for every article. The audio reads existing Wikipedia article text without rewriting or adding content.
The goal of this initial experiment is to understand whether readers return to listening and learn more about what they would want from a future listening experience.
The team also recognizes the Wikimedia movement’s existing work around spoken content, including Wikispeech and volunteer-recorded Spoken Wikipedia, and is approaching this experiment as complementary to those efforts.
Cross-Platform
[edit]Following the conclusion of the Wikipedia 25th Birthday Reading Challenge, the team completed an analysis of the experiment.
The results showed that the challenge encouraged more frequent app use, increased account creation, and supported the wider app marketing campaign.
Users who completed the challenge continued to show retention rates 20–30% above their pre-challenge baseline after streak tracking ended.
The experiment showed that installing the widget and participating in the challenge helped users build a daily reading habit and that users were willing to create an account to participate.
The team will continue evaluating whether these retention gains persist and explore opportunities for future reading challenges and permanent streak tracking.
The Apps teams continued preparing a new VisualEditor journey designed to make it easier for app users to edit Wikipedia using the visual editing experience available on the web.
User testing was completed for the proposed journey, with a static banner selected as the preferred approach for helping users return to the app after editing.
On Android, the team completed development of an editing entry point that allows users to choose between the native source editor and VisualEditor and remember their preference.
Editing preferences were also added across Android and iOS so users can choose their preferred editing experience when starting an edit.
Following the first phase of the Hybrid Search experiment, work continued on the next generation of Wikipedia search.
During July, the team explored how search results could more clearly communicate that Wikipedia content is human-authored. Designs experimented with trust signals including contributor counts, references, and quoted passages.
Research included surveys and qualitative interviews using realistic multilingual search content. Early findings suggested that the redesigned trust signals improved perceptions of human authorship, while also showing that some participants associated the broader search experience with AI.
In August, the team completed Android and iOS wireframes for the next phase of search. The proposed experience introduces a single search interface that routes queries behind the scenes while making the source of results clearer.
Work on the next Wikipedia Year in Review began across both apps.
The team explored a more immersive design after research participants indicated that they expected a full-screen, slide-based experience similar to experiences they encounter on other platforms.
The team continued defining the overall user journey and preparing the experience for implementation, while working with Communications, Fundraising, and Design on product marketing, feature copy, donor messaging, and connections to Wikipedia’s 25th Birthday.
The team focused on encouraging earlier account creation through a new prompt in the Activity tab and defining the end-to-end Year in Review experience.
Work also included:
- Validating immersive full-screen interactions across Android and iOS.
- Establishing success metrics and experimentation plans.
- Implementing topic identification for articles in iOS and Android reading history.
- Adding Topics metadata to mobile HTML responses to support topic-based Year in Review insights.
- Continuing collaboration on product marketing, donor messaging, and Wikipedia 25th Birthday integration.
Looking Ahead
[edit]July, August, and the first half of September focused on learning from some of the major experiences launched earlier in the year while continuing to build new ways for people to read, discover, listen to, and contribute to Wikipedia.
Results from the Explore Feed Refresh and Reading Challenge are helping the team understand how personalization, content discovery, and lightweight participation can encourage readers to return to Wikipedia.
At the same time, work is continuing to bring the new Home experience to iOS, experiment with new content types on Android, test listening experiences through text-to-speech, develop the 2026 Year in Review, improve search across both apps, and make editing more accessible through the VisualEditor journey.
Thank you for reading!
Tech News: 2026-44
[edit]Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- An experiment launched on September 29 is testing article recommendations for new account holders who also identify as readers. By suggesting articles to read, similar to recommendations in the Wikipedia app for logged-in readers, the experiment aims to encourage new account holders to read and return to the website regularly, with the goal of increasing internal referrals by 1%. See the related Community Wishlist proposal.
- Several Wikimedia services were taken offline last week because of a security vulnerability in PHP. This is because they need to be updated before they are safe to put back online. This is not a problem just for the Wikimedia movement but affects a lot of websites. You can follow updates on Wikitech. Cloud VPS and Toolforge will take longer to bring back online. This is to make sure that applications which run on Cloud VPS or Toolforge are not affected. Tool developers can see updates and more information on the Cloud-announce mailing list.
- Last week we shared that to measure the impact of incorporating some community-requested features on logged-out reader retention, a test for the Image Carousel feature would be pushed to logged-out readers. Due to an issue, we will be restarting the test, but it will be live on October 26, not November 20 as initially announced.
Updates for editors
- A new bot detection system to better identify automated traffic that disguises itself as human visitors, is coming to the Wikimedia wikis. This might cause sudden changes to visitor statistics starting from 26 October, going back to 20 June 2026.
- The Score extension which renders musical notation inside wiki pages, has been temporarily disabled on all wikis due to a security issue. Affected pages will display a notice instead of musical scores, but the underlying code remains intact. No action is needed from editors, and a fix is in progress. A separate announcement will follow when the extension is re-enabled. Read more on Phabricator.
- View all 18 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where CodeMirror syntax highlighter appears to have been enabled in error for existing editors has been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday, October 28 2026 at 15:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests, which happen twice a year. During the switchover, all Wikimedia website traffic is shifted from one primary data center to the backup data center to test availability and prevent service disruption even in emergencies.
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- Scholarship and sponsorship applications for the 2027 Wikimedia Hackathon will close on Friday, October 30th. Submit your application through Pretix before the deadline!
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
The Signpost: 1 November 2026
[edit]- News and notes: AELECT5 concludes, a Wikimedian arrested for treason, and updates to GANs and FARs
Nine new admins, three arrests, and a lot of GAN RFCs.
- Recent research: How Wikipedians use (or don't use) LLMs; experienced editors contribute more to "underproduced" articles than newbies
And other new research findings.
- Disinformation report: Better bots or bothersome baby borgs?
Have the Borg landed on Wikipedia?
- In the media: Stop the internet, I was deleted
Can toeing the line stop the apocalypse?
- News from Diff: Why Wikimedia Is Speaking Up in a Major AI Copyright Case
When AI companies use copyrighted information, does it qualify as fair use?
- By the numbers: Wikipedian Nobel Prize 2026
Which language versions of Wikipedia had biographies of laureates before Nobel announcements?
- On the bright side: Gone fishing
Touring Thailand, exploring iridescence, and translating prairie dog.
- Traffic report: October, and the articles are stripped bare
Lots of deaths, Indian movies, and monsters. Happy Halloween!
- In focus: Two Roles, One Wikimedia Education Ecosystem
What happens when different approaches to Wikimedia education connect?
- Comix: Inactivity
Zounds!
Administrators' newsletter – November 2026
[edit]News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2026).
Administrator changes
Guideline and policy news
- Following an RfC, election to ArbCom now requires at least 60% support. Successful candidates normally serve two-year terms, with one-year terms retained for filling vacancies. Proposals to change the election rules may now be added throughout the year and discussed on the talk page; formal discussion remains in September.
- Following an RfC, first-time reviewers’ reviews require an experienced reviewer’s check, and GA requirements now include alt text and accessible tables. Featured articles may receive GA status during removal discussions if they meet GA criteria. Backlog drives will run every five months, with a points leaderboard and awards for the top five participants.
Miscellaneous
- Self-nominations for the Arbitration Committee are open until 11 November 2026.
- Ongoing backlog drives: Copy editing, Unreference articles
Tech News: 2026-45
[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
- Many Wikimedia tools were taken offline last week because of a security vulnerability in PHP. This affected many websites worldwide. Toolforge and Cloud VPS have been back up since October 22. Many important tools 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. They will require maintainers to upgrade to a more recent version. This might require additional effort. You can follow the work on Wikitech.
Updates for editors
- A new optional search experiment is running in the Wikipedia Android and iOS apps for Arabic, French, and Japanese Wikipedias. Participating readers can search inside articles and open quoted passages directly in their source articles, no answers or summaries are generated. This is the first of four experiments in Phase 2 of Semantic Search. It began on October 22 and runs for 20 days. Feedback is welcome on the project’s discussion page.
- The Future Audiences team is planning to bring Share Cards to Wikipedia on mobile. This feature gives users the option to share a visually appealing card with friends, based on the article they are reading. The card contains the article’s title, image, opening text, and related attribution, and links back to the article for full reading. Editors are invited to try out this feature by adding
?useformat=mobile&sharecard=1to any article URL from October 29 to November 8. Share any thoughts on the project talk page and report any bugs on Phabricator. - The default renderer for math formulas will change on November 2. After the change, the server sends the formula as MathML, and your browser uses MathJax to show it. This is the last step towards the Mathoid/RESTBase deprecation process, for sustainability and security reasons. You can ask questions or report problems.
- Do you have an idea for a new feature, or a bug that needs fixing? Submit your suggestion for the community wish list by November 8!
- View all 41 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
David Castle (psychiatrist)
[edit]Hi 2NumForIce,
I have rewritten the draft for David Castle to clean up the prose remove all metrics/h-index numbers and keep it simple and neutral. Since it was declined for LLM text, could you please take a quick look at the updated version to confirm if it looks good now before I resubmit it?
Thanks Patedits (talk) 14:46, 6 November 2026 (UTC)
Tech News: 2026-46
[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 Wikipedia Apps team is preparing to launch Year in Review in early December. Year in Review gives app users a personalized recap of how they read and engaged with Wikipedia throughout the year. The team is looking for volunteers to help make it available in as many languages as possible. Translators can contribute through translatewiki.net. For Android, search for
yirunder the "Untranslated" tab, and for iOS, search foryear-in-reviewunder the "Untranslated" tab. - The Article guidance feature that helps editors create articles that follow a Wikipedia’s policies, is now available on all Wikipedias. Administrators and interface admins can configure and expose it for editors to use via Special:CommunityConfiguration/ArticleGuidance. A configuration guide is available. Visit the project talk page to ask any questions.
Updates for editors
- Following the release of Reading Lists to all Wikipedias in September, logged-in users will soon be able to organize articles saved in their lists into customizable categories. This will enable readers to create collections and revisit saved articles based on their interests, potentially encouraging frequent visits to Wikipedia. The update will roll out to all Wikipedia users between November 9 and 16.
- The Wikipedia Apps team is preparing to launch the first of two notification experiments for English Wikipedia readers on Android who have opted in to notifications. The three-week experiment will send notifications suggesting personalized Discover reading lists which are collections of Wikipedia articles recommended based on articles the reader has previously viewed. The goal is to understand whether these recommendations help readers discover relevant content and encourage them to return to the app. No action is required, and users can manage their notification preferences in the app settings. Learn more and share feedback.
- A bug in the Global Watchlist was causing the page to fail to load for users who have unseen changes on Wikimedia Commons. The bug has now been fixed. If you temporarily removed
commons.wikimedia.orgfrom your personal Global Watchlist settings due to the bug, you can restore it there. - A new Beta feature called "Home" will be deployed to 10 Wikipedias for a limited test. This new feature aims to replace
Special:Homepagefor newcomers, with additional modules planned for the future to improve upon the current experience. If you want to participate in the test, please sign up. "Home" will be released to all users later this month. - On English and Russian Wikipedias, Source Verification is now available as an experimental Suggestion for experienced editors within Suggestion Mode. It uses an LLM hosted on LiftWing to try to check whether a cited source supports the claim it’s attached to. To try it out, please see these testing instructions. If you are at another language Wikipedia and your community is interested in trying it out, please express your interest.
- View all 35 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where dates passed as blank parameters to functions in wikitext were incorrectly interpreted using the month-day-year format instead of the day-month-year format, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- Starting on 1 December 2026, hCaptcha will be required for edits made via the API by non-autoconfirmed users. If your tool, gadget, or user script makes edits on behalf of newcomer users, see how to update it.
- Nominations are open on Wikitech for new Toolforge standards committee members. The committee oversees the Toolforge Right to fork policy and Abandoned tool policy among other duties. Nominations close on 22 November 2026.
- Toolforge has introduced two new beta features. "Toolforge alerts" send email notifications when a tool becomes unavailable, returns errors, or restarts frequently. "Extended logging" makes it easier to investigate problems by providing logs for events such as job creation, deletion, and deployment failures through the
toolforge logscommand. Both features are opt-in and help tool maintainers become aware of and resolve problems with their tools more quickly. Maintainers can enable alerts and learn how to access extended logs. They are also encouraged to try the features and provide feedback. - Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- A proposal to change how we currently organize the Wikimedia Hackathon has been shared. It explores making the event more accessible to technical communities in different regions. Share your feedback on the proposal’s talk page; the deadline has been extended to November 13th.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.