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Tech News: 2025-12

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

Twice a year, around the equinoxes, the Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team performs a datacenter server switchover, redirecting all traffic from one primary server to its backup. This provides reliability in case of a crisis, as we can always fall back on the other datacenter. Thanks to the Listen to Wikipedia tool, you can hear the switchover take place: Before it begins, you'll hear the steady stream of edits; Then, as the system enters a brief read-only phase, the sound stops for a couple of minutes, before resuming after the switchover. You can read more about the background and details of this process on the Diff blog. If you want to keep an ear out for the next server switchover, listen to the wikis on March 19 at 14:00 UTC.

Updates for editors

The improved Content Translation tool dashboard is now available in 10 Wikipedias and will be available for all Wikipedias soon. With the unified dashboard, desktop users can now: Translate new sections of an article; Discover and access topic-based article suggestion filters (initially available only for mobile device users); Discover and access the Community-defined lists filter, also known as "Collections", from wiki-projects and campaigns.
On Wikimedia Commons, a new system to select the appropriate file categories has been introduced: if a category has one or more subcategories, users will be able to click on an arrow that will open the subcategories directly within the form, and choose the correct one. The parent category name will always be shown on top, and it will always be possible to come back to it. This should decrease the amount of work for volunteers in fixing/creating new categories. The change is also available on mobile. These changes are part of planned improvements to the UploadWizard.
The Community Tech team is seeking wikis to join a pilot for the Multiblocks feature and a refreshed Special:Block page in late March. Multiblocks enables administrators to impose multiple different types of blocks on the same user at the same time. If you are an admin or steward and would like us to discuss joining the pilot with your community, please leave a message on the project talk page.
Starting March 25, the Editing team will test a new feature for Edit Check at 12 Wikipedias: Multi-Check. Half of the newcomers on these wikis will see all Reference Checks during their edit session, while the other half will continue seeing only one. The goal of this test is to see if users are confused or discouraged when shown multiple Reference Checks (when relevant) within a single editing session. At these wikis, the tags used on edits that show References Check will be simplified, as multiple tags could be shown within a single edit. Changes to the tags are documented on Phabricator. [1]
The Global reminder bot, which is a service for notifying users that their temporary user-rights are about to expire, now supports using the localized name of the user-rights group in the message heading. Translators can see the listing of existing translations and documentation to check if their language needs updating or creation.
The GlobalPreferences gender setting, which is used for how the software should refer to you in interface messages, now works as expected by overriding the local defaults. [2]
View all 26 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the Wikipedia App for Android had a bug fixed for when a user is browsing and searching in multiple languages. [3]

Updates for technical contributors

Later this week, the way that Codex styles are loaded will be changing. There is a small risk that this may result in unstyled interface message boxes on certain pages. User generated content (e.g. templates) is not impacted. Gadgets may be impacted. If you see any issues please report them. See the linked task for details, screenshots, and documentation on how to fix any affected gadgets.
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.

MediaWiki message delivery 23:46, 17 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question

Hi ToBeFree, I hope you're doing well. I wanted to clarify something regarding my 1RR restriction. While reverting a large and unexplained content removal by an IP on Drakhtik, I used Twinkle to roll back the edit. The IP's edit appeared to violate WP:GS/AA, as it involved an Armenia–Azerbaijan-related article and the IP didn't meet the extended confirmed restriction (500 edits / 6 months). However, Twinkle initially reverted only a subsequent registered user's edits rather than the IP’s removal. To correct this, I performed another revert to restore the pre-IP edit version. As a result, this appeared as two separate reverts, though my intention was a single rollback of disruptive editing. This was an accidental outcome due to Twinkle's behaviour rather than an intentional breach of 1RR. Given my restriction, would you advise that I self-revert to be safe, or is this acceptable under the circumstances? Thanks for your guidance. Best, – Olympian ^loquere 11:45, 19 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Olympian, thanks for asking!

You didn't revert twice, though. This is easy.

A series of consecutively saved reverting edits by one user, with no intervening edits by another user, counts as one revert.
— WP:3RR

Best regards,
~ ToBeFree (talk) 21:14, 19 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

(PS: Additionally, to me, the WP:3RRNO#3 exception applies to reverts of restriction violations such as an extended-confirmed restriction, as they are practically reverts of ban violations.) ~ ToBeFree (talk) 21:16, 19 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for clarifying that, ToBeFree. It's much appreciated. Best, – Olympian ^loquere 22:00, 19 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

No problem! ~ ToBeFree (talk) 22:44, 19 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]