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Tech News: 2026-38
[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 Future Audiences team has started a discussion on English Wikipedia about a proposed new experiment to show a temporary notice about the new Google Preferred Sources feature to Wikipedia readers coming from Google. The experiment is to test whether this notice makes visitors come back to Wikipedia more often. Preferred Sources feature lets users choose websites they trust so Google can highlight content from those sources more prominently in Search and AI experiences. We are interested in testing this on other languages that Google supports and would welcome assistance with starting conversations on other wikis. If interested, please reach out to Future Audiences on the talk page.
Updates for editors
- The chat platform Discord is releasing a new self-service framework that websites can use to specify how their links should look when shared on Discord. The Future Audiences team is planning to start using this new framework to improve how Wikipedia links look when shared on Discord, giving better attribution and credit to contributors. The link appearance and behavior won't change in the first phase of this project as we want to first collect some baseline data to assess the impact of future changes. However, if community members who are active on Discord spot any issues, they can reach out on Phabricator or Metawiki.
- The Reader Growth team will be running an experiment to test whether compacting article lead sections on mobiles with the addition of a "read more" button improves reader retention. The test will begin on September 17 on Arabic, Spanish, French, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Vietnamese, and Chinese Wikipedias and will run for four weeks.
- All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 23. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming week.
View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where Wikistats for Wikipedias was returning an HTTP 500 error and could not be reached, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- Developers who maintain a tool that queries the Wikimedia Commons links tables need to update their code to connect to the new x4 database cluster. The links tables have been moved from the s4 cluster to x4, and will no longer receive updates on s4. The page and redirect tables remain available on both clusters. A wiki replica for the x4 cluster will be set up afterwards. The change is being made because the s4 cluster has grown too large to operate efficiently. You can read more.
- 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.
The Signpost: 16 September 2026
[edit]- News and notes: The Balance of Power
Wikimedia employees unionize, officer departs, The Signpost gains sister on Wiktionary
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The image gallery anyone can edit.
- Disinformation report: Have UN Secretary-General candidates manipulated Wikipedia?
Speaking diplomatically, not all of them.
- Recent research: Google's AI overviews may have reduced search engine referrals to English Wikipedia by 5%
And other research findings.
- WikiConference report: The backwater symbiosis – reflections from Wiki Conference India 2026
The fourth iteration of Wiki Conference India.
- Traffic report: Heaven let your light shine down
The recently deceased dominate while still leaving room for some entertainment.
- Serendipity: Wikipedia Family Mosh Pit
A poem by Mollystarkdean.
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Promoter of cultural knowledge and organizer of global cooperation.
- On the bright side: Fantasy video games, hopeful science fiction, and the change of seasons
The Legend of Zelda, Star Trek, and Vivaldi's The Four Seasons.
- Comix: The Adventure of the Unknown Corpse
An elementary case for fiction's greatest detective.