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Administrators' newsletter – May 2026
News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2026).
Administrator changes
Interface administrator changes
CheckUser changes
Oversight changes
Guideline and policy news
Technical news
- Changes to user permissions made from Meta are now included in the local user permissions log (T6055).
- The autoconfirmed user group will soon be modified such that the four-day account age requirement begins when an account makes its first edit (T418484).
Arbitration
- The arbitration case SchroCat has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case closed on 15 April.
- Per a recent motion, appeals of blocks from the conflict-of-interest VRT queue are, by default, appealed on-wiki through the normal unblock process. However, they may be heard by the Committee if COIVRTers disagree on the interpretation of the evidence or believe ArbCom would be better suited to hear the appeal. Administrators are also advised that loosening or lifting such blocks without the consent of someone with access to the queue or ArbCom can be grounds for desysopping.
- Per a recent motion, restrictions issued directly by the Committee may now be enforced with blocks which work exactly like contentious topic blocks.
- The arbitration case Maghreb has been closed.
Miscellaneous
- The May 2026 administrator elections are scheduled to run from April 29 to May 19. The call for candidates ends May 5.
- The 2026 Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) election is scheduled to run from April 25 to June 1. Candidacy submissions close on May 10.
- A new noticeboard for non-urgent, batch page protection requests has been created, primarily for the enforcement of contentious topic restrictions.
Wikidata weekly summary #730
week leading up to 2026-05-04. Missed the previous one? See issue #729.
Discussions
- New requests for permissions/Bot: Chamiln17@FineWiki - Task: This bot performs a read-only cache build for an academic temporal language model dataset.
- Other: better tools to support constraints implied by properties like disjoint union of
Events
- Upcoming events:
- WikiProjects Days 2026 (online, June 19 to 21). A community gathering focused on making WikiProjects more useful, visible, and alive. Propose a session (deadline for proposals: May 26, 2026) or register now.
- Language Diversity Conference - Call for Submissions ends 15 May 2026.
- Wikidata Community Summit 2026 @ COSCUP - Call for Proposals ends May 9, 2026.
- LIC Photo Walking Tour + Wikipedia & Wikidata Workshop - May 16, 12:30 - 16:00 EDT (UTC-4). A historical walking tour of Long Island City, New York, concluding with a Wiki-skills workshop at LaGuardia. Registration on the event link.
- Ongoing: COORDINATE ME 2026 - a Wikidata competition for geolocatable content has just started and ends 31 May 2026. Visit the link for details on how to participate.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs:
- Visualised Blog metadata through SPARQL queries - ChristianMahnke blog.
- Mozilla Common Voice Meets Wikidata (How the Dagbanli Dictionary Got Audio Usage Examples)
- Wiki Loves Mother Tongue 2026 in the Igbo Community
- EduWiki Workshop Highlights Practical Uses of Wikimedia Commons in Education
- Recap: Wiki for Human Rights, LGBTIQ+ Nigeria, February and March Training
- The new Art+Feminism’s Wikidata Modules are here!
- Videos:
- Panel on Wikidata and public domain in Colombia (Spanish): on April 24th, the National Library of Colombia, The Cultural Network of the Bank of the Republic of Colombia, Wikimedia Colombia and Fundación Conector discussed about digital heritage and Wikidata, its challenges and opportunities for collaboration.
- Wikibase - an introduction by Jason Evans (Open Data Manager, National Library of Wales). Produced by the Wikimedian in Residence channel, University of Edinburgh.
- A uMap based on Wikidata - a use-case of Holy Wells located in Ireland, associated with female Saints, powered by Wikidata and OpenStreetMap.
- Wikifunctions in practice: Reusable Logic for Wikimedia - Presentation given by Toby Hudson (User:99of9) at the Wikiconference Australia 2026.
- Mentor Me! Session 3A - This in-person and hands-on session is provided by the Wikimedia Tyap User Group, and continues in the following sessions: Mentor Me! Session 3B and Mentor Me! Session 3C. Led by Gwakhap D. Anthony, it will cover how to document languages with Wikidata lexemes.
- Africa Wiki Women:
- Linking images from Commons to Wikidata and Wikipedia - how images are used across the Projects with examples documenting African Women.
- Newbies Monthly Meetup for Africa Wiki Women - further training and introductory skills for Wikidata and how it interacts with the other Wikimedia Projects.
- EditHer Africa Contest (April) - a beginner-friendly hands-on Wikidata item creation guide and launch of the monthly contest, with a focus on African Women in Works and Leadership.
Tool of the week
- OpenHistory – interactive historical atlas of 21k+ Wikidata-sourced historical events, polities, and territories on a timeline+map. SPARQL-driven pipeline, MIT/CC BY-SA. (GitHub)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- WikiTrivia - the webgame about putting historical events in the correct order recently got a huge update, thanks to creator Tom Watson.
- Wikimedia API's / Rate limits - new rate limits are being added for all Wikimedia projects, to ensure sustainable use to the REST an ACTION API's. If you operate a bot and it has recently started producing an error message for producing too many API requests, please consult the linked MediaWiki page and amend your bot as needed.
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes: meta-category for (topic or class of items covered by the lowest categories in this meta-category's hierarchy)
- Newest External identifiers: KISTI article ID, FISH Monument Types Thesaurus ID, FISH Evidence Thesaurus ID, Organization in cooperation with ISO ID, ScriptSource script code, ScriptSource language code, Tube8 performer ID, Bundestag Group Minutes ID, Westra code, Myrotvorets ID, Irish State Administration Database Unit ID, Hessische Parlamentarismusgeschichte Abgeordneten-ID, YouPorn performer ID, GFMIS Agency Code, Royal Australian Air Force service number, Plataforma Acácia ID, Observatório Terras Quilombolas ID, BIOSOP ID, BIOKAND ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- (found) liable of (tort or civil wrong a person or organization was found liable of)
- DMCA takedown policy URL (DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown policy or submitting page of this hosting site or UGC (User Generated Content) distributor)
- 18 U.S.C. § 2257 policy URL (age requirement documentation URL statement of this website or company)
- monolingual text name properties ((with an associated language code) name by which a subject is recorded in a database, mentioned as a contributor of a work, or is referred to in a particular context)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: Gidrologicheskaya Izuchennost Code, QBWiki article ID, Dijital İstanbul ID, NaPTAN stop area code, Identifiant Cairn d'un éditeur, Darwin Correspondence person ID, ACM Digital Library institution ID, SensCritique person ID, National Archives of Japan Digital Archive ID, VGs drapsoversikt ID, Semanticscience Integrated Ontology ID, Senkyo.com, Objectif plumes author pages, Maoyan personage ID, critify.de publication ID, BookNotification author ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples: Script style of manuscript Qur'ans
- Newest WikiProjects:
- WikiProject Highlights: WikiProject Ontology has gathered a list of potential projects for the second offering of the Wikidata Ontology course, and has published a subpage to discuss the future of Ontology Classes and Properties.
- Newest database reports: Unmarked Supercentenarians - this list displays humans who do not have a claim supercentenarian (Q1200828) (or alleged supercentenarian (Q106991708)), but the difference between their Date of Birth and Date of Death is greater than 110 years.
- Showcase Items: Raiders of the Lost Ark - a 1981 film directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, and John Rhys-Davies.
- Showcase Lexemes: gje (L2205) - Norwegian verb (jeː) meaning "to give", "to perform/hold", or "to diminish in strength"
Development
- Mobile statement editing: We continued fixing issues uncovered in testing
- WikiProjects: We are working on adding links to the sidebar of Items to lead people to the respective WikiProjects for that Item. This way we hope to help people more easily find data modelling documentation as well as other editors interested in the same topic.
You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.
Weekly Tasks
- Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
- Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country:
- Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
- Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
- Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
- Help write the next summary!
Tech News: 2026-19
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 Article guidance team invites experienced editors of pilot Wikipedias—Arabic, Bangla, Japanese, Portuguese, Persian, Turkish, Simple English, Spanish, and French—to help translate and adapt sample outlines. These outlines will guide editors in creating clear, well-structured, and policy-compliant articles when using the feature once it is launched in May 2026. Simple instructions on how to translate and adapt the outlines are available.
Updates for editors
- The Product and Technology Advisory Council has published draft recommendations on a model that affiliates can follow when contributing to the technical space. Community members are invited to provide feedback on the recommendation until May 8th on the talk page.
- The number of available thumbnail size preferences in MediaWiki is being reduced to three standardized options—Small (180px), Regular (250px), and Large (400px), as part of ongoing efforts to improve performance and reduce strain on thumbnail services. As a result, existing preferences will be mapped to the nearest new size (for example, smaller selections like 120px or 150px will render at 180px, while larger ones like 300px or 360px will render at 400px). The preferences interface will soon be updated to reflect these changes, and users who wish to opt out or provide feedback can do so.
- From now on, even when a permission expires automatically, users will receive an Echo notification similar to the standard notification for permission changes. There is a difference between this and Global reminder bot in that the latter reminds users a week before the rights are due to expire, so that they can renew the rights.
View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the problem where the ULS language selector in Special:Translate would scroll vertically when it shouldn't, has been resolved. Previously, when users opened the "Translate to English" dropdown and typed certain inputs, the dialog would scroll vertically by a few pixels even when there was enough space to display all results. The dropdown no longer shifts unnecessarily when filtering languages. - The Global Watchlist, which lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on a single page, continues to improve. For example, watchlists for Wikibase sites such as Wikidata now support EntitySchema elements for better tracking. The Live Updates mode now refreshes the special page every 60 seconds to comply with the updated global API rate limits for improved real-time responsiveness. Additionally, a directionality bug that displayed links as "changes 3" instead of "3 changes" in mixed-direction lists has been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- The second phase of global API rate limits has been rolled out to reduce the impact of AI crawlers and ensure fair, sustainable access to Wikimedia resources, prioritising human and mission-aligned traffic. Limits have been shifted from per-hour to per-minute, producing smoother traffic patterns and more predictable API load. Community users are not expected to be affected, and no action is required. Early indications show some User-Agent-based requestors are adjusting behaviour, and around 64% of automated API traffic has been identified. Monitoring continues, and Wikimedia Enterprise remains available for commercial support.
- 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 20:41, 4 May 2026 (UTC)
May 2026 Administrator Elections – Discussion Phase
The discussion phase of the May 2026 administrator elections is officially open. As a reminder, the schedule of the election is:
- May 8–12: Discussion phase (we are here)
- May 13–19: SecurePoll voting phase
- Scrutineering phase
We are currently in the discussion phase. The candidate subpages are open to questions and comments from everyone, in the same style as a request for adminship. You may discuss the candidates at Wikipedia:Administrator elections/May 2026/Discussion phase.
On 13 May, we will start the voting phase. The candidate subpages will close to public questions and discussion, and everyone will have a week to use the SecurePoll software to vote, which uses a secret ballot. You can see who voted, but not who they voted for.
Any questions or issues can be asked on the election talk page. Thank you for your participation. Happy electing.
You're receiving this message because you signed up for the mailing list. To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself from the list.
-- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:22, 8 May 2026 (UTC)
Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #247 is out: References from Wikidata now available
There is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!
In this issue, we announce that is now possible to pass references in Wikidata statements, we introduce the Abstract Data dashboard, we report you on the presentation about Abstract Wikipedia at WikiCon Australia, and we take a look at the latest software developments.
Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!
Also, we remind you that if you have questions or ideas to discuss, the next Volunteers' Corner will be held on May 11, at 17:30 UTC (link to the meeting).
Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 11:16, 8 May 2026 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #731
week leading up to 2026-05-11. Missed the previous one? See issue #730.
Discussions
- New requests for permissions/Bot: AAU Research NLP Bot 1 - Task(s): Querying Wikidata for entities and relations and paths between them. From 1-hop until 3-hops.
- Closed request for permissions/Bot: MarisDreshmanisBot (formerly ReNeuralAgent Bot) has been approved after a community intervention, see the discussion here.
Events
- Upcoming events:
- WikiProjects Days 2026 will take place between 19 - 21 June.
WikiProjects are crucial to improving data quality and onboarding newcomers to specific areas of Wikidata. This event is the place for all editors to discover WikiProjects, find ones to join, learn about their modelling practices and how to improve the content and tools of your favourite WikiProjects. Register here to get any news or updates about this new Wikidata X Days event. The Call for Proposals is open! If you have an idea for a session, please submit it here by 26 May. - Wikidata Live Editing, 11 May
- AI Bridges Symposium is taking place at Senate House, University of London across 28 and 29 May. (Free) Registration for this on-site event closes 21 May. The event will begin with introductions to Wikidata, Wikibase, connecting AI with Wikidata and follow on day 2 bringing the full ecosystem together for dialogue, debate, and collaborative action.
- WikiProjects Days 2026 will take place between 19 - 21 June.
- Ongoing: Coordinate Me 2026 - edit items with a P625 (coordinate location) from the focus countries and be in the running for a prize. Ends 31 May 2026.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs:
- Building Wikimedia tools in Northern Nigeria: launch of Arewa TechCom through the Arewa Wikimedia Hackathon 2026
- Editing wikibase.world (a MediaWiki site), with Jules (an AI agent) by Addshore.
- Libraries as AI Infrastructure: The African Edition - reflections on overlooked African contributions to linked data and AI infrastructure, highlighting Wikibase-powered projects African Literary Metadata (ALMEDA) and Nigeria’s Semantic Name Authority Recognition (SNAR). By Stuart Michael Edelenbos
- Tabakalera promotes open access to cultural knowledge by linking their medialab catalogue to Wikidata
- The Stoa: a Review for Digital Classics - report on Linked Pasts 11 - Epigraphic Data in Wikidata, from Ontology to Practice
- Technical tinkering for CommonsDB at the WM Hackathon by Ainali.
- Ezra Brand - Introducing a New Index of Biblical, Talmudic, and Medieval Jewish Figures - Wikidata helps index and categorise Jewish figures into distinct periods.
- (Deutsch) ArtHist: New Art-Historical Resource on the Web and TIB Blog: Embossed story – the Meistersiegel-Wiki is online are both articles about the new Meistersiegel Wikibase instance.
- Papers: Volume 12,2 of Digital Classics Online contains many papers regarding the use Wikidata and Wikibase in the field of Classics:
- Hypotheseis, a Database of Named Entities Surrounding Greek Rhetorical Exercises by Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo
- Altinum: a Wikidata Project for Digital Epigraphy and Prosopography by Anna Clara Maniero Azzolini
- The NIKAW Project: An Infrastructure of Texts, Entities and Language Models to Study the Circulation of Knowledge in the Ancient World by Margherita Fantoli
- Videos:
- OpenDataDEx - Exploring Supreme Court Rulings in Wikidata, for The Knowledge Commons project. Try it out for yourself: Open Data Explorer
- Wikidata: Introduction and Basics - an introductory session provided by WMUG Uganda.
- (Arabic) Introduction to Wikidata hosted by Michel Bakhni for the channel: Wikimedia group for those interested in Islamic civilization
- Presentations:
- (Deutsch) Wikidata in Museums, Archives and Libraries
- White Paper (PDF) - Wikidata Days and Wikicite (2025) - Open bibliographic metadata in practice, what was learned in Bern and what libraries and the community can do next.
Tool of the week
- Open Data DEx Explorer - "an interactive graph visualizer of semantic Open Data. Relationships are discovered heuristically and a graph structure created in real time, allowing navigation and insight into raw data without building formal ontologies."Read more on The Knowledge Commons blog, by Michelle Tomlyn.
- GapMap.Wiki - explore knowledge gaps between different language Wikipedia's. GapMap identifies Wikipedia articles that exist in many languages but missing from the target, helping editors prioritize which articles to translate or create. No AI is used, just comparing publicly available databases.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Mobile editors can now edit all datatypes directly in the mobile view. To help improve this new interface, Wikimedia Deutschland is looking for volunteers (especially editors from Right-to-left languages) for UX testing sessions. Participants will be compensated for their time. Sign up here (greatquestion) and learn more on the project page: Mobile editing of statements
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes:
- energy density (amount of energy extractable from a substance (e.g. in a combustion engine) per unit of volume or of mass)
- Parental Advisory System rating (content rating for coin-operated video games)
- Newest External identifierss: Cyprus company ID, DBNL title ID, ShotOnWhat film ID, Shinmei database ID, ColBase ID, Lubimyczytać version/edition ID, Files of the Reich Chancellery ID, Darwin Correspondence person ID, Gidrologicheskaya Izuchennost Code, Brew TV movie ID, National Archives of Japan Digital Archive ID, PlayStation Trophies trophy ID, Tax Identification Number (Spain), 19star actor ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review: concentration camp prisoner number (registration or prisoner number assigned to a person in camps operated under Nazi persecution between 1933 and 1945)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: ID für Kulturdenkmale in Lübeck, Datenbank-ID für Kulturdenkmale in Lübeck, Prime Video URL ID, Prime Video GTI, Portable Antiquities Scheme record ID, Identifiant d'un(e) éditeurice dans le DEF19 2.0, Apple TV parson ID, CINEMATODAY film ID, Verfassungsblog author ID, Blätter author ID, EGAFD film ID, Museum of Canadian Music artist ID, Museum of Canadian Music work ID, BGAFD film ID, Movielens ID, Instrumentalistinnen-Lexikon ID, parliament.scot member ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- Newest WikiProjects:
- Project Horse Racing : On topics relating to horse racing.
- Project William & May Law School EMCO - to create and enhance entities for persons and corporate bodies related to the law school, for use in the library's metadata and archival work.
- WikiProject Highlights:
- Project GovDirectory: How to use QuickStatements 3.0 to add data to GovDir
- Ontology Course: Projects Offering 2 - Modelling Dictionary Usage Labels in Wikidata, Roots and Rhythms: Modelling music as cultural heritage.
- Showcase Items: Catch Me If You Can - a 2002 film by Steven Spielberg starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks. A dramatic re-telling of the life and exploits of serial confidence man Frank Abegnale Jr., ironically the events of the film were later found to be mostly fabricated.
Development
- Mobile statement editing: We are continuing to improve the UX and fix issues uncovered in testing
- Making WikiProjects more visible: We are working on adding links to the sidebar menu of Items to make it easier for people to find the WikiProject(s) associated with an Item, find like-minded people and learn about data modelling conventions etc in that particular area
- Query Service: The service is being hit quite heavily and the Wikidata Platform team is working on blocking scrapers and misbehaving tools
- Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are continuing our experiment to further reduce the amount of Wikidata changes that show up on Recent changes and Watchlist but don't actually change the article. Specifically we are looking at checking if there is any difference in the rendered article before and after the change coming from Wikidata
You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.
Weekly Tasks
- Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
- Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
- Govdirectory weekly focus: public universities
- Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
- Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
- Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
- Help write the next summary!
Tech News: 2026-20
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
- Community Tech has published new guidance explaining how wishes on Community Wishlist are triaged and prioritized. The documentation is intended to help contributors write stronger proposals by clarifying the factors that influence prioritization decisions. Beyond vote counts, the guidance highlights considerations such as potential impact on the community when determining which wishes move forward.
Updates for editors
- The Reader Growth team is launching an experiment to test a new Share Card feature that allows readers to create visually engaging cards from Wikipedia articles or selected article sections and share them online, with each card linking back to the original article to help expand readership and article discovery. The mobile-only A/B test will be available to a portion of readers on Arabic, Chinese, French, Vietnamese, and English Wikipedia to better understand reading and sharing habits, and is scheduled to begin the week of May 18 and run for four weeks.
- The Android and iOS Wikipedia apps recently released the 25-day reading challenge into Beta, as part of efforts to drive reader engagement by encouraging users to complete reading milestones. To track their reading streak during the challenge, App users can add a widget featuring Baby Globe to their home screen. The challenge officially begins May 11.
- View all 17 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the global preference for enabling syntax highlighting in wikitext could unexpectedly disable itself after being turned on, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
The ResourceLoader module mediawiki.ui.input, deprecated since September 2023, will be removed this week. There is a guide for migrating from MediaWiki UI to Codex for any tools that use it.- 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 19:19, 11 May 2026 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 9
Highlights
- Community Protection: Wikimedia Foundation secured Indonesian government’s commitment to user safety, privacy, and content integrity ahead of administrative registration in Indonesia.
- Stronger protections against bots: Wikimedia Foundation is replacing our CAPTCHA with a new approach to detect bad-faith activities without making things harder for users.
- Transparency Report: The Wikimedia Foundation has published its latest Transparency Report. This provides an overview of the work to protect Wikimedia projects and support the volunteer communities who handle the majority of content requests. Our users trust us to protect their identities against unlawful disclosure, and we take this responsibility seriously, granting only 1 of 30 requests for disclosure we received from July to December 2025.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Reading Challenge: As part of the 25th birthday celebrations, Wikipedia Mobile Apps launched a limited-time feature, the 25-day reading challenge with Baby Globe. This challenge encourages a daily habit of reading one Wikipedia article. The goal is to motivate users to come back to the app regularly.
- Latest experiments: One upcoming experiment is introducing the Incident Reporting System (IRS) to help contributors easily find the right place to seek help when facing harassment or other issues. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
- Change in how new users are autoconfirmed: The account age for autoconfirmed users will now start from their first edit, not the registration date. This is to avoid exploitation by vandals. This change will only apply to wikis that require at least one edit for autoconfirmation.
- Organized Reading lists: All Wikipedia users with new accounts and those who activated the “automatically enable most beta features” option can now use the reading lists beta feature. This lets you save articles for later reading and keep it organized in one place for easy access.
- Thumbnail size preferences: Default thumbnail size preference for article content is now limited to three sizes: Small (180px), Regular (250px), and Large (400px). This change aims to improve performance and reduce strain on thumbnail services. Current preferences will shift to the nearest new size.
- Wikifunctions: To make the development of Abstract Wikipedia visible, the Foundation is requesting your input: which metrics about Abstract Wikipedia pages do you deem important?
- Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News weeks 18 and 19 include improvements on Global Watchlist. See also the 62 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · The Wikipedia Library · list of movement events
- Annual Planning: We welcome your feedback on the main talk page for the 2026–2027 draft Annual Plan and many other places for the coming fiscal year.
- Wikimania: Wikimania is a joyful event. It is a chance to celebrate our community and projects, share ideas and information, build connections among Wikimedians, and inspire and develop future projects. If you and your community are interested in hosting Wikimania in 2028 and 2029 submit an expressions of interest.
- Community Conferences: The Foundation is supporting 15 strategic, diverse, and critical convenings taking place in 2026 and 2027, bringing together approximately 1800 Wikimedians across various regions, themes, and language communities.
- Don't blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
- Wiki Loves Monuments: The winners of the 2025 Wiki Loves Monuments photo contest are announced.
Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness
See also: Progress on the annual plan
- Enterprise: How CivicLens Uses Wikidata APIs to Make Civic Data More Accessible.
Board and Board committee updates
See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- Wikinews closure: All Wikinews have been closed and switched to read-only mode. Content will remain accessible, but no new edits or articles will be able to be added. This closure was approved by the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation following extended discussions.
- Affcom News: Read the latest issue of AffCom News (January-March 2026) to learn more about the latest news about the work of Wikimedia's Affiliations Committee.
- Model for affiliates to support contributors through tools: The Product and Technology Advisory Council has published draft recommendations on a model that affiliates can follow when contributing to the technical space.
- Grantmaking: The Global Resource Distribution Committee closed their request for feedback on three initial questions about grantmaking, and published their monthly update for April.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletin
wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 19:58, 12 May 2026 (UTC)
May 2026 Administrator Elections – Voting Phase
The voting phase of the May 2026 administrator elections has started and will continue until 19 May 2026 at 23:59 UTC. You can participate in the voting phase at Wikipedia:Administrator elections/May 2026/Voting phase.
As a reminder, the schedule of the election is:
- May 13–19: SecurePoll voting phase (we are here)
- Scrutineering phase
In the voting phase, the candidate subpages close to public questions and discussion, and everyone who qualifies to vote has a week to use the SecurePoll software to vote, which uses a secret ballot. You can see who voted, but not who they voted for. Please note that the vote totals cannot be made public until after voting has ended and as such, it will not be possible for you to see an individual candidate's vote total during the election. The suffrage requirements are similar to those at RFA.
Once voting concludes, we will begin the scrutineering phase, which will last for a few days, perhaps longer. Once everything is certified, the results will be posted on the results page (this is a good page to watchlist), and transcluded to the main election page. In order to be granted adminship, a non-recall candidate must have received at least 70.0% support, calculated as Support / (Support + Oppose), and a minimum of 20 support votes. Recall candidates must achieve 55.0% support. Because this is a vote and not a consensus, there are no bureaucrat discussions ("crat chats").
Any questions or issues can be asked on the election talk page. Thank you for your participation. Happy electing.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:10, 13 May 2026 (UTC)
Online meeting May 12
 |
| Wikimedia US Mountain West |
We will host an online meeting for Wikipedia users in the Mountain States from 8:00 to 9:00 PM MDT, Tuesday evening, May 12, 2026, at meet.google.com/kfu-topq-zkd. Anyone interested in the future direction of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement is encouraged to attend. We will discuss the new CARUSCA organization and how users in each of our states can help one another. Help is available for new users, and all guests are welcome. Please see our meeting page for details.
If you don't wish to receive these invitations anymore, please remove your username from our invitation list. Thanks.
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:53, 13 May 2026 (UTC)
New Page Patrol Newsletter - May 2026
Hello Matthewrb,
Backlog update
At the time of this message, there are 15,282 articles and 32,951 redirects awaiting review.
After the January–February drive the article backlog was reduced to 15,179 articles and the redirect backlog to 19,053 respectively. Great job! However, both queues are growing rapidly and any additional reviews are highly appreciated.
2024 and 2025 NPP Awards
Hey man im josh and MPGuy2824 won the Redirect Ninja Master Award for 2024 and 2025 respectively, for reviewing the most redirects.
Overall in 2024, one Platinum, two Gold, eight Silver, 12 Bronze and 45 Iron Barnstars were awarded. Additionally, 66 reviewers got the NPP barnstar for doing more than 100 reviews through the year. In 2025, one Platinum, ten Silver, 13 Bronze and 38 Iron Barnstars were awarded. Additionally, 38 reviewers got the NPP barnstar for doing more than 100 reviews through the year.
BoyTheKingCanDance, Rosiestep, SunDawn, and Vanderwaalforces were inducted into the NPP Hall of Fame for having two separate years of 2,000+ article reviews.
January–February backlog drive
The experimental two-month long backlog drive concluded with 183 reviewers patrolling over 27,761 articles and 35,309 redirects, earning over 36,836 points. Congratulations to JTtheOG, who achieved first place with 6,484.6 points in this drive.
May backlog drive
An article-only backlog drive is currently underway. We are hoping to make a big dent in the backlog. You can read more about it or join at Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Backlog drives/May 2026.
PageTriage
An attempt was made to get the New Pages Feed to sort by date marked as reviewed instead of date created. However we had to revert it due to bugs. We may try again in the future. You can subscribe to the Phabricator ticket if you're interested in following along.
Reminders:
- You can access live chat with patrollers on the New Page Patrol Discord.
- Consider adding the project discussion page to your watchlist.
- To opt out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:37, 14 May 2026 (UTC)
Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #248 is out: A higher meaning
There is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!
In this issue, we discuss functions creating language fragments, we present our latest news in Types, and we take a look at the latest software developments.
Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!
Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 14:36, 15 May 2026 (UTC)