Commons:Village pump/Technical

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This page is used for technical questions relating to the tools, gadgets, or other technical issues about Commons; it is distinguished from the main Village pump, which handles community-wide discussion of all kinds. The page may also be used to advertise significant discussions taking place elsewhere, such as on the talk page of a Commons policy. Recent sections with no replies for 30 days and sections tagged with {{Section resolved|1=--~~~~}} may be archived; for old discussions, see the archives; recent archives: /Archive/2026/02 /Archive/2026/03.

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Thumbnail problem

Anyone know why no thumbnail shows for File:View west on Boyer Avenue, Seattle, December 15, 1911 (MOHAI 13058).jpg, and/or can fix it? - Jmabel ! talk 04:01, 7 February 2026 (UTC)

@Jmabel: I can see the various thumbnail sizes (330px, 960px, etc.) fine on my end. Are you still experiencing the issue? ~Kevin Payravi (talk) 08:03, 7 February 2026 (UTC)

@Kevin Payravi: I can see several sizes of thumbnail, but on the file page itself the preview is blank. If that's just me and not a more general problem, then it's odd but not important. - Jmabel ! talk 19:55, 7 February 2026 (UTC)

I see both thumbnails in Firefox. There have been multiple threads about the thumbnails missing problem here, two or one in I think the latest archive. Prototyperspective (talk) 22:04, 7 February 2026 (UTC)

Problem of accessing Commons

Since 2025, when accessing Commons without using a VPN, it has sometimes been inaccessible for a day, sometimes for several days, and occasionally, clicking "Publish changes" after editing fails to go through. May I ask what is causing this? Huangdan2060 (talk) 14:16, 7 February 2026 (UTC)

If even regular reading access is limited your IP might be on an AI scraper list. Maybe you can get help at ca@wikimedia.org. GPSLeo (talk) 14:50, 7 February 2026 (UTC)

Thank you, but the page you provided cannot be accessed in China. Huangdan2060 (talk) 01:09, 8 February 2026 (UTC)

That's not a page, it's an email address. Jmabel ! talk 05:12, 8 February 2026 (UTC)

Irritating preview for grayscale GeoTIFFs

Hi!

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T416775

I filed a task. When special GeoTIFFs like "digitale Geländemodelle" (digital terrain models) are uploaded, we see a plain white preview. This is irritating and may lead to premature deletion requests. When I put this file in QGIS, I see graphical information. This task may be useful, as Commons acquires more and more GeoData. --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 20:56, 7 February 2026 (UTC)

Help downloading full-resolution images

Could anyone please help obtain the full-resolution images found here? I'm able to upload the as-displayed images, but—if you click on the images—you're able to zoom in further. I also tried dezoomify (website & extension), but it did not work. There are for use on the article Serpent labret with articulated tongue and, as works by the U.S. federal government, should be in the public domain. Thanks, --Usernameunique (talk) 17:16, 8 February 2026 (UTC)

I read a bit in the source code, hinting at that the source is using Open Seadragon. Using that info to google, I landed upon https://hackernoon.com/how-to-download-hi-res-images-from-museum-websites-b4446387e75d That may help other people investigate further, I stopped at that point... Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 20:04, 8 February 2026 (UTC)

Perhaps I'm missing something, but are you referring to this image version (2000x1321)? I just copied the image URL from the page you linked and remove the size parameter (&max=980) to get the image in its actual size. Thanks. Tvpuppy (talk) 23:02, 8 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks, both. Tvpuppy, I tried that too, but it's still smaller than the zoomed-in version—so unless you can zoom in beyond full resolution (i.e., you zoom in more, but it just gets fuzzier), it seems there's a higher-resolution version. --Usernameunique (talk) 01:02, 9 February 2026 (UTC)

I've uploaded these at the available resolution for now (here, here, and here), but if anyone is able to download the full resolution, please let me know. Thanks, --Usernameunique (talk) 20:04, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-07

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

• 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 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 shows 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. [1]
• 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]
• The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension continues to improve — it now properly supports more than one Wikibase site, for example both Wikidata and testwikidata. 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][4]
• The automatic "magic links" for ISBN, RFC, and PMID numbers have been deprecated in wikitext since 2021 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 {{#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]
• Two new wikis have been created:
  • a Wikipedia in Jju (w:kaj:) [6]
  • a Wikipedia in Nawat (w:ppl:) [7]
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• A new global user group has been created: 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. 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]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• The 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]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 23:27, 9 February 2026 (UTC)

Process Duplicates

Can somebody explain what will happen if I will press "Process Duplicates". I found it on File:2022 California Proposition 27 by County.svg and a duplicate. I do not understand how to handled the two content pages. I did search for a Help: page, but did not find any. Thanks, Ellywa (talk) 22:39, 10 February 2026 (UTC)

Looks like you get a tool intended to let you merge any content from the two different file pages and then to turn one file into a redirect to the other file. However, it doesn't look to me like it's a very clear UI (e.g. both file descriptions are editable; which one will be used once the merge takes place?)

Anyone know who is in charge of this thing? - Jmabel ! talk 00:43, 11 February 2026 (UTC)

FastCCI dysfunctional again?

I was completing the overly incomplete Category:Videos of Trochilidae after creating a redirect to it from the easier-to-find (in HotCat & UploadWizard autocomplete, Commons search, and Web search engines) Category:Videos of hummingbirds. To do so, I used deepcategory:"Trochilidae" -incategory:"Videos of Trochilidae". There, I noticed lots of videos of helicopters.

(All of this is a normal method to complete a category which could be applied in many cases, maybe at some point more systematically or semi-automatically or routinely.)

There is just one way to see why a given file is underneath a category branch. That is going to the respective category -> Page information -> copy page ID -> append ?fastcci_from=id with the id (29437) to the URL of the file one would like to check that one has to open in a new tab. For example:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Escuadrilla_Hist%C3%B3rica_Mentor_y_Patrulla_Aspa_-_BugWarp_408.webm?fastcci_from=29437

However, it doesn't work. There just recently was this thread about the topic of category<->file path but FastCCI is already dysfunctional again.

@Dschwen: Could you restart it please and if possible look into why that tool is going down all the time and fix that (or create an issue about how it could be fixed)? Another approach to this would be for somebody to implement m:Community Wishlist/Wishes/A way to see why a file is somewhere underneath a specific category (tool to show cat-path) (voting open) where this functionality would be in a separate tool that doesn't go down all the time and where one can display the cat-path within the deepcategory view (linked above) without having to open a new tab an all the time-intensive manual things. Thanks, Prototyperspective (talk) 13:04, 11 February 2026 (UTC)

 Comment, about the helicopters videos, the reason they are under Category:Trochilidae is because "Trochilidae --> Things named after hummingbirds --> Airbus Helicopters H120 Colibri". Thanks. Tvpuppy (talk) 17:37, 11 February 2026 (UTC)

Ah thanks so it's another case of Things named after… categories introducing unexpected/offtopic files; see Commons:Village pump#Moving Things named after xyz categories out of xyz cats. Nevertheless, it would be nice if the tool could be restarted. Prototyperspective (talk) 17:46, 11 February 2026 (UTC)

Download ZIP contents through OpenRefine

I would like to upload a batch of orthophotos of Thuringia. Each tile comes as ZIP file with TIF, meta and tfw file. Is there a way to let the Wikimedia servers extract only the TIF to be uploaded? Having them down- and reuploaded on my PC probably takes some time. Thanks! --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 16:15, 12 February 2026 (UTC)

Probably a good candidate for Commons:Bots/Work requests. - Jmabel ! talk 18:27, 12 February 2026 (UTC)

CommonsDelinker is dead

CommonsDelinker (talk · contributions (views) · deleted user contributions · deleted uploads · recent activity (talk · project · deletion requests) · logs · block log · global contribs · CentralAuth) Still processes deletions and cat moves, but no file moves since 2026-01-22. There are ca 1750 accumulated unprocessed requests. The page toolsadmin lists 7 administrators: @User:AntiCompositeNumber @User:Grin, @User:Magnus Manske, @User:Mdaniels5757, @User:Peter Gervai, @User:Steinsplitter, @User:Zhuyifei1999. -- Taylor 49 (talk) 02:02, 14 February 2026 (UTC)

Looks like it's working again. AntiCompositeNumber (they/them) (talk) 22:26, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

@AntiCompositeNumber: Hi, I don't see it replacing files. It only removes files, and renames catgories. Yann (talk) 09:48, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

Bot was crashing because it was failing to log in to one wiki. Should be working now. AntiCompositeNumber (they/them) (talk) 02:56, 18 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks a lot! Yann (talk) 16:14, 18 February 2026 (UTC)

There was an ongoing problem (for many years now) that due some mediawiki... whatever, let's call it bug, some projects fail login and respond unholy errors instead which make the bot getting stuck after a while.

I have implemented a workaround, so theoretically this login reason will not get the bot stuck anymore, hope dies last. Thanks for the ping. -- grin ✎ 02:51, 22 February 2026 (UTC)

Sidenote: do not ping other people (old developers) in, unless you deliberately plan to annoy them. It is not an accident they have not wanted to maintain it anymore. (Only exception is Steinsplitter, who operates the Category Mover "bot subtask".) -- grin ✎ 02:54, 22 February 2026 (UTC)

How to create barnstar?

Anyone know how to create such barnstar and icon in Gimp? I have seen this video but it's less advanced. Eurohunter (talk) 16:33, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

@Eurohunter, you might try Commons:Graphic Lab. Nemoralis (talk) 21:21, 18 February 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-08

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 SRE Team will be performing a cleanup of Wikimedia's Etherpad instance, the web-based editor for real-time collaborative document editing. All pads will be permanently deleted after 30 April, 2026 – if there are still migration projects in progress at that point the team can revisit the date on a case by case basis. Please create local backups of any content you wish to keep, as deleted data cannot be recovered. This cleanup helps reduce database size and minimize infrastructure footprint. Etherpad will continue to support real-time collaboration, but long-term storage should not be expected. Additional cleanups may occur in the future without prior notice. [10]

Updates for editors

• The Information Retrieval team will be launching an Android mobile app experiment that tests hybrid search capabilities which can handle both semantic and keyword queries. The improvement of on-platform search will enable readers to find what they’re looking for directly on Wikipedia more easily. The experiment will first be launched on Greek Wikipedia in late February, followed by English, French, and Portuguese in March. Read more on Diff blog. [11]
• The Reader Growth team will run an experiment for mobile web users, that adds a table of contents and automatically expands all article sections, to learn more about navigation issues they face. The test will be available on Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
• Previously, site notices (MediaWiki:Sitenotice and MediaWiki:Anonnotice) would only render on the desktop site. Now, they will render on all platforms. Users on mobile web will now see these notices and be informed. Site administrators should be prepared to test and fix notices on mobile devices to avoid interference with articles. To opt out, interface admins can add #siteNotice { display: none; } to MediaWiki:Minerva.css. [12][13]
• View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue on Special:RecentChanges has been fixed. Previously, clicking hide in the active filters caused the "view new changes since…" button to disappear, though it should have remained visible. The button now behaves as expected. [14]

Updates for technical contributors

• New documentation is now available to help editors debug on-site search features. It supports troubleshooting when pages do not appear in results, when ranking seems unexpected, and when you need to inspect what content is being indexed, helping make search behavior easier to understand and analyze. Learn more. [15]
• 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 19:14, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

Issue uploading Inkscape SVG

I attempted to upload an updated version of File:Preferred_PM_polling_Canada_46th_federal_election.svg today. The graph is created in LibreOffice, exported as an SVG, and then inserted into Inkscape where the legend is edited, before being saved as an SVG. I have never had a problem uploading such SVGs before. However, today, I was prevented from uploading the update by the following error, which I have collapsed for convenience as it is daunitingly long. How can I fix this? Cremastra (talk) 22:19, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

Isn't this all code like if you open image in Notepad? I would like to know what is this code. Eurohunter (talk) 22:40, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

You have included a non-SVG image inside the SVG. That’s not allowed. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:56, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

Okay, I suspected that. But how did I do that in the first place? Cremastra (talk) 23:28, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

I was actually just using inkscape myself, so i think i know what happened. When you press "import" in inkscape there is a dialog that comes up. Its important to select "Include svg as an editable object in current file" to prevent this from happening. Bawolff (talk) 19:58, 26 February 2026 (UTC)

Its actually kind of the opposite. They embedded an svg inside an svg, which isn't allowed. If it was a non-svg image it would be allowed. Basically, the svg has to be directly included instead of being indirectly embedded. Probably the issue is that you "inserted" the file into inkscape instead of opening the file with inkscape. Bawolff (talk) 19:43, 22 February 2026 (UTC)

Note: I removed the file content you pasted here and copied it into Phabricator Pastebin. It is available here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/P88886. Nemoralis (talk) 21:18, 18 February 2026 (UTC)

Wrong coordinates can't be removed

At File:Edinburgh Airport.jpg I can't remove the coordinates of the point of view. Is this a known problem? (I'm not asking about workarounds.) Prototyperspective (talk) 11:42, 19 February 2026 (UTC)

@Prototyperspective: you removed the template but not structured data; they both need to be removed. I have done that. However since the coordinates are present in the file EXIF, it is possible that a bot might add them again. MKFI (talk) 15:38, 19 February 2026 (UTC)

you removed the template but not structured data this is what this thread is about. it is possible that a bot might add them again does somebody know whether it will? Prototyperspective (talk) 16:03, 19 February 2026 (UTC)

I have done that How? It did not work when I tried so at least it's unintuitive or there's a bug. Prototyperspective (talk) 16:27, 19 February 2026 (UTC)

You can always override it by entering the correct coords or tag the problem using {{Fact disputed}}. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 15:48, 19 February 2026 (UTC)

Those are two workarounds. Also both have issues. I'm asking how to remove the geoinfo from the SD, it doesn't seem to be possible when I tried. {{Fact disputed}} is for file contents, not the metadata. Prototyperspective (talk) 16:04, 19 February 2026 (UTC)

@Prototyperspective: I don't know why it didn't work for you, I simply went to the structured data, clicked edit on coordinates and then the trashcan icon. For suppressing the wrong coordinates there is also {{Location withheld}}. MKFI (talk) 16:46, 19 February 2026 (UTC)

I tried it on a different file and there it removed the coordinates. It only doesn't remove them when clicking "Remove all" (there is no blue publish icon when pressing that and confirming the popup that shows then). Prototyperspective (talk) 16:54, 19 February 2026 (UTC)

It depends, I also can not remove the coordinates from the interface. When I need to remove them I just revert the bot edit. Ymblanter (talk) 17:37, 19 February 2026 (UTC)

Might be related: phab:T313638. Nemoralis (talk) 20:58, 19 February 2026 (UTC)

Commons contributors by number of uploaded files (in use)

Commons:Commons contributions achievements/Commons contributors by number of uploads is a relatively new meta page showing a table of Commons users with a column for the number of files upload.

• I just wanted to check which quarry I used to create it but the server times out with error [65d16284-b14b-40ad-aff6-d0fa12d44efb] 2026-02-19 18:17:35: Fatal exception of type "Wikimedia\RequestTimeout\RequestTimeoutException" – the table can still be accessed in the archives here. Maybe somebody knows how this can be fixed (the points below require either that or creating a new page).
• Does somebody know how to add a column for a) rank b) whether or not the user is a bot c) number of files in use in any Wikimedia project d) maybe number of files in use in Wikipedia mainspace separately.
• Maybe people have further ideas for columns – e.g. maybe it's possible to have sortable column to also show number of files by filetype, and/or fraction of files in mainspace use, and/or files that are own work...

I think these would be interesting stats. Prototyperspective (talk) 18:26, 19 February 2026 (UTC)

For the timeout, splitting this across multiple pages might help. Bawolff (talk) 21:04, 22 February 2026 (UTC)

What is interesting is the percentage of files in use. Yann (talk) 21:35, 22 February 2026 (UTC)

Does somebody know how to add a column for … c) number of files in use in any Wikimedia project d) maybe number of files in use in Wikipedia mainspace the percentage could be calculated from that but I'm not sure it's more meaningful than number of files in use; percentage would imply one barely ever uploads other kinds of files. Prototyperspective (talk) 21:42, 22 February 2026 (UTC)

Well, having 1,000 files in use is not the same after uploading 1,000,000 files or after uploading 2,000 files. Yann (talk) 21:49, 22 February 2026 (UTC)

This could however be read by also looking at the other column that has that number. Anyway, I wouldn't have an issue with the percentage which btw is also shown in the Commons app. Prototyperspective (talk) 22:14, 22 February 2026 (UTC)

https://quarry.wmcloud.org/query/102335 (adding in use slowed down the query significantly. Percentage, and in use on main ns on a wikipedia are probably also possible but would slow it down more) Bawolff (talk) 06:22, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

Amazing, thank you! Since this would be run only rarely I don't see much of a problem with it taking long to load (in this case ~13 minutes). Regarding percentage, I think this can be seen in the columns and if one added it, one can't use it for sorting because at the top would be lots of users who uploaded just 1 or so file(s) which is in use. I would have no issue with it being added but don't think it's needed or very useful.

Do you know how one could show the number of files in use on Wikipedias mainspace? This is useful because for example some files are used only in sandboxes, talk pages or are pronunciation audios used in lots of wiktionary and Wikidata pages. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:11, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

Query updated to show that. Note this only includes actual main space, will not include non-main content namespaces like portal. It determines if the site is a wikipedia by if the wiki name ends in "wiki" and os less than 9 letters. I think that should include all wikipedias and exclude other sites, but there could be edge cases possibly. Bawolff (talk) 18:12, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

Aside: while percentage of files that are in use can be interesting, it should not be seen as a metric of who is a great contributor of content to Commons. A very high percentage usually means someone whose uploads have been driven precisely by what is need it in some particular sister project or projects, and who rarely or never uploads more than one image related to a particular subject. Example to the contrary: I just uploaded several dozen photos I took of contributing properties of NRHP-recognized historic districts in Binghamton, New York. Most of these buildings previously had no image on Commons. Few, if any, are likely to end up "used" in the near future because the en-wiki articles on these topics are stubs or near-stubs, the Wikivoyage article has exactly one image of the city's historic center, and I can't think where else they would show up on a sister project. Nonetheless, they are clearly well within Commons scope, and I can't imagine an argument against us actively wanting such images. - Jmabel ! talk 20:50, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

Yeah, sometimes a closer look is needed. I cover the upload of orthophotos. With this, you can link the images to almost any geographical point in Germany or the US in Wikidata. This would mean the usage of maybe more than 100k files, but needless to say I cannot do this by hand :D --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 11:11, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

Super interesting, thanks! I find the use in WP-mainspace column the most interesting – since there is no way afaik to enumerate the table based on whatever column is sorted by, could you add a column for the # of number in use on WPmNS? Moreover, maybe a separate list without the bots would be interesting too but it seems like the human/bot boolean is totally false. Many bots, incl the user with most uploads do not have the bot flag but https://commons.wikiscan.org/ does show the correct bot flag – do you know why that is or how to show the correct value in that column? Maybe the accounts' bot flag was removed from somewhere where it shouldn't have been removed or it's not set but sth else is set that could be shown. Minor correction: it should be 'Files uploaded', not 'Images uploaded'. Prototyperspective (talk) 00:54, 24 February 2026 (UTC)

Sorted on the other column https://quarry.wmcloud.org/query/102363 Bawolff (talk) 02:19, 24 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks! I've now put it on a page where links are clickable and which can be found from within Commons: Commons:Commons contributors by number of uploads and Wikipedia uses thereof (1-5000)

I've put further ideas and remaining issues regarding the list(s) into section "Development". For example, it would be nice if the usernames could be linked to their Uploads page (and I think linking there instead of their userpage also avoids them getting pinged). Prototyperspective (talk) 18:02, 24 February 2026 (UTC)

Those are files uploaded and files in use right, not just images? Because the tables are named as if these were just images so I'm confused whether to rename the column. Prototyperspective (talk) 22:39, 24 February 2026 (UTC)

Yes these are files of all types. The term image is used in the database for historical reasons. Bawolff (talk) 06:21, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

8.8 Mio. files uploaded by one entity is just incredible 😶 --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 17:43, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

Idea: see top domains of source links & top uploaders to category

This could be useful to identify more Commons:Free media resources for example, interesting statistics (imagine seeing pie charts for categories with a click), better partnership & requests & recognition potentials, and broadly to better see where files are coming from.
For example, in categories relating to data graphics probably, ourworldindata.org would be a top domain and in some other cat it could be some academic journal.
There may be many applications for this and probably many are found only once this is possible over time. Maybe this is already possible via some Quarry queries. A difficulty is that one would have to search the {{Information}} template's source field and that currently only seems possible via the insource search oeprator workaround (see thread).

Given new AI coding tools, maybe implementing this via some new gadget and/or query wouldn't be super difficult so I thought I'd just put it here even though the potential applications aren't yet very clear and probably not nearly as large as those of many other things talked about in the archives of this discussion page. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:27, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

You can do external links with quarry and just assume that every external link is a source, but you would have some false positives. Alternatively you can use SDC, but i dont know how complete SDC is when it comes to sources, and linking SDC to categories is hard. For small categories you can use the api (extimageinfo) but that doesn't scale. Doing top uploader of a category is easy. Bawolff (talk) 06:31, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

For example, https://commonswalkabout.org/?lang=en&f.P180=Q22667&cf=P7482 gives a list of sources of railway images. The results aren't super interesting which suggests to me that the dataset is fairly incomplete. Bawolff (talk) 06:41, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

Oh, i guess sdc is also hard to query due to the complex (and quite frankly inconsistent) schema with wide usage of qualifiers. Anyways here is a slightly better SDC query for sources of train images https://w.wiki/HxSN Bawolff (talk) 07:01, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

That query is interesting, thanks, but it only displays sources of a small fraction of files which were imported by bots (and shows these bots' source sites). I just checked a bunch of files and they nearly all did not have the SD set. Moreover, this really is about scanning files in a category and while this is possible with the Commons query service (I've used this to set the language of files on Wikidata using the Commons categories about language), afaik one can't scan also subcategories of the selected category (see also).

So I think the approach with Quarry has more potential / is better suited for this. Scanning external links is not necessarily worse than checking just the source field. However, a big problem there is that it would be biased by files that link to many URLs. Maybe this could be mitigated by counting only one link per file. However, isn't it possible to search for URLS between |source= and the next | (probably via regex)? Prototyperspective (talk) 14:28, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

Quarry does not have access to article texts so can't do anything with them. Commons blazegraph can do subcategories (via federated query to the wikidata category server), but i think it can only get access to which category an image is in via federated query to mediawiki api, which makes things more difficult, especially for large categories. Bawolff (talk) 16:03, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

Attempt using sparql federation [16]. Seems to work - can find sources and do subcategories, but i suspect it will have issues on latge categories. Bawolff (talk) 18:07, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

example with WDQS aggergating into bar chart. Only works on small-ish categories. Bawolff (talk) 19:31, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

Woa, very interesting – so it seems there is a way. I thought one would need a second tool, maybe used by some gadget, that takes the data and extracts the URLs per item which can then be analyzed and be returned as chart...but it seems the second query already does that too.

That this only works in very small categories of course more or less negates its usefulness however, but there must be some way around that...maybe running it somehow iteratively/batch-wise (possibly like these 1000 batches) or by making some exception/permission where this query can run for longer or something. Studies could be based on this query and we could have lots of interesting stats and insights or use-cases for this but it would first need to work on larger categories that have more files and/or subcategories. Prototyperspective (talk) 00:40, 24 February 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-09

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

• Reference Check has been deployed to English Wikipedia, completing its rollout across all Wikipedias. The feature prompts newcomers to add a citation before publishing new content, helping reduce common citation-related reverts and improve verifiability. In A/B testing, the impact was substantial: newcomers shown Reference Check were approximately 2.2 times more likely to include a reference on desktop and about 17.5 times more likely on mobile web. [17]

Updates for editors

• The InterwikiSorting extension, which allowed for the sorting of interwiki links, has been undeployed from Wikipedia. As a result, editors who had enabled interwiki link sorting in non-compact mode (full list format) will now see links reordered. The links moving forward will be listed in the alphabetical order of language code. [18]
• Later this week, people who are editing a page-section using the mobile visual editor, will notice a new "Edit full page" button. When tapped, you will be able to edit the entire article. This helps when the change you want to make is outside the section you initially opened. [19][20]
• The Reader Experience team is inviting editors to assess whether dark mode should still be considered "beta" on their wiki, based on their experience of how well it functions on desktop and mobile. If the feature is deemed mature, editors can update the interface messages in MediaWiki:skin-theme-description and MediaWiki:Vector-night-mode-beta-tag to indicate that dark mode is ready and no longer considered beta.
• The improved Activity tab which displays user-insights is now available to all users of the Wikipedia iOS app (version 7.9.0 and later). Following earlier A/B testing that showed higher account creation among users with access to the feature, it has been rolled out to 100% of users along with some updates. The Activity tab now shows your edited articles in the timeline, offers editing impact insights like contribution counts and article view trends, and customization options to improve in-app experience for users.
• View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug that prevented DiscussionTools from working on mobile has now been fixed, restoring full functionality. [21]

Updates for technical contributors

• The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension that makes this possible continues to improve. The latest upgrade is the inclusion of a new hook, ext.globalwatchlist.rebuild, which fires after each watchlist rebuild. This allows you to run gadgets and user scripts for the Special page. [22]
• 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 19:00, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

How to develop a tool like Flickr2Commons?

I'm thinking of maybe giving development of a Study2Commons tool a try (upload images from an individual study) based on the code of Commons:Flickr2Commons.

So I downloaded the code from bitbucket but what now? How can I launch and test things – is there a simple beginner guide for this kind of development somewhere? I don't have my own server and it would eventually be deployed on toolforge I guess. Prototyperspective (talk) 18:50, 24 February 2026 (UTC)

That might not be the easiest project to start on for a beginner due to lack of docs, but here would be my advice:

• setup php & apache on your local computer. This is easiest if you use linux (apt or dnf) or mac ( brew) but can also be done on windows (wamp)
• make some very simple php page if you havent done it before, just to get a feel for how it works [im not sure what level you are at with php, so ignore this if it doesn't make sense]. Something simple like a web page that takes 2 numbers and adds them together.
• install mediawiki from git. (This would be good practise for how all the various tools work together. I would reccomend a manual install over using docker as a teaching exercise in how it works, which will be important to learn). Also install mw:Extension:OAuth
• Take the flicker2commons tool and try to modify it to work with your local server instead of commons.
• ask questions when you get stuck (for example on discord or irc)

From there you should have a bit more of a feel of how things fit together, which should make it easier to get started modifying it to do something different. Bawolff (talk) 21:32, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks, that's very helpful! Gonna try. Can't one use flickr2commons locally and let it upload to Commons for testing? And if I actually get sth to work, how could I make this available on toolforge so that instead of running sth locally (Linux) I could just access the toolforge webapp? Prototyperspective (talk) 19:38, 28 February 2026 (UTC)

Yes you could. Normally people like setting something up locally at first as it makes it easier to experiment and try things which can help with learning how it works. Bawolff (talk) 03:18, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

EXIF date import conditional?

Hey, not sure if this is a bug or intentional so thought I'd ask first (and couldn't find this asked previously). Is it intentional that the "Date work was created or first published" field is auto-filled by the Upload Wizard if at the start the file was marked as mine for copyright purposes, vs. it is not auto-filled if it's marked as "I have permission from my employer to upload"? I would think it would scrape the metadata either way. Thanks. ErinAtTCDDigitalCollections (talk) 09:54, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

Strange (to me, at least) message in response to an attempted upload

I just attempted to upload files from Flickr. Right away, I was met with a dialog box stating "This file can't be used - Unfortunately, no images from this Flickr account can be uploaded on this site." The file in question is https://www.flickr.com/photos/fncll/35971117. This is entirely new to me. The file and others hosted on the account are appropriately licensed and there's other photos on this site from that user. Anyone want to help me out here? RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 20:38, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

@RadioKAOS: See Commons:Questionable Flickr images. This flickr account is on the disallowlist, apparently for having copyright violations. Looks like Yann added it in 2023. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 21:22, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

Help to rotate video

Hi everyone, I have this video that needs to be rotated. I rotated it on my machine and converted it to webm, but the file upload size limit is 100mb and the file I have is over 1 GB, can anyone help? Thanks! Victorgrigas (talk) 00:54, 26 February 2026 (UTC)

Try using UploadWizard instead, it has an upload limit of 5 gigabytes. Bawolff (talk) 03:07, 26 February 2026 (UTC)

Editing many categories at once

Is there really no way to edit many categories in the same way as file pages can be edited with VisualFileChange? I need to just add a parameter to a template in lots of categories so it's basically just a search and replace across multiple pages. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:12, 26 February 2026 (UTC)

I believe this is possible with AWB or JWB. Nemoralis (talk) 08:09, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks! I'll have to go with JWB. Any guidance/tutorial would help – I'm looking for a simple search and replace across a set of category pages (I could paste these or enter a search query that returns just these pages). I've requested to be added at Commons:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPageJSON. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:31, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

@Prototyperspective Seeing your wish at meta made me ask for the right to use awb today, and now I'm seeing this. 1) You should better ask at Commons:Requests_for_rights#AutoWikiBrowser_access 2) See if you like wAwB better, it's a new kid in town. I can help you setting it up. 3) CoolCat could use some testing too (adding a sort key to multiple cats might be an interesting feature at Commons). Ponor (talk) 03:18, 28 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks! 1) I'm not requesting AWB access but JWB and there's no section for it on the page you linked and other people have requested access on the talk page of the page I've linked too 2) looks like an interesting tool and apparently hard to find but I don't know the difference to JWB – do I need AWB access to be able to use this browser tool, is that what you meant? I don't need or want to do any complex operations or any regex; it's enough to be able to to search and replace a text string or just add some text to a set of pages 3) I think I've seen that gadget but it's not relevant to the task here and also I don't see how it has an advantage compared to HotCat+CataLot. Prototyperspective (talk) 11:45, 28 February 2026 (UTC)

Exploratory: Handling the uploading of images better

This is nowhere near any form of proposal. If it were I would have formulated it as such. This is separate from the question "Should this be done?" which is when a proposal might be made in order to determine that greater decision.

Background / problem

A strong example of the issues Commons faces, especially with bulk uploads, is discussed with respect to a particular uploader at Commons:Administrators' noticeboard/User problems § Uploads by Fabe56. I do not anticipate that we shoudl discuss uploader specific issues here. I use ut purely as an example. Distilling the key points from the tl;dr discussion for those without the inclination to take a deep dive, it is all too easy, and with good faith, to Upload great swathes of files which are correctly licenced for onward use, without:

• using sensible file names. "DSC, IMG etc are useless for descriptive and retrieval purposes
• entering the uploaded files into a meaningful category scheme which is part of a full Commons hierarchy
• using critical judgement and uploading many files of high'y similar nature

This results in the use of Commons as what may appear to be a personal file store by some uploaders, perhaps even a kind of vanity of the "I have uploaded more than you" sort

Solving the existing issues

Nothing obvious springs to mind to solve the existing problem. We are not speaking of a small number of files. The example has over two hundred thousand files of varying quality and variable retrievability. It might be that Commons has to bite the bullet on legacy uploads and work towards a future which seeks to promote good housekeeping at upload time.

Working for the future

I assume there is some form of Edit Filter which is, or can be implemented on Commons which would seek to control this at upload time. This is the reason I have posted this at the technical Village Pump, not the one for proposals. I hope that those who understand filtering tools and enjoy technical puzzles can look at the issues form above, and consider how uploads might be better handled to seek to ensure the ability to catalogue them for retrieval and, where desirable, use.

I'm posting this exploratory post because I do not have the skill to formulate even in plain language, how a technical solution might be created. But we have experts in all fields here who have that skill. 🇵🇸‍🇺🇦 Timtrent 🇺🇦 talk to me 🇺🇦‍🇵🇸 12:59, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

Please see Commons:File naming and Commons talk:WMF support for Commons/Upload Wizard Improvements#Guidance/facilitation of categorization. Further comments there as well as specific ideas what else could be done (how) would be welcome. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:01, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

@Timtrent: Sorry, I seemingly fail to understand what you wanted to express in your section heading. The sequence of an adjective and two -ING words is puzzling for me, who's not a native English speaker, so I can't correct that in my head. Did you use some kind of autocompletion tool while writing who bungled the wording? Going by the main body of text, did you perhaps mean something along the lines of "Exploration of possible new ways to better handle file uploads"? Please confirm or fix the wording according to your actual idea. Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 16:06, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

I amended the title. 🇵🇸‍🇺🇦 Timtrent 🇺🇦 talk to me 🇺🇦‍🇵🇸 18:26, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

Since Commons:File naming already says that images should not have generic names such as DSC123456.jpg it does seem appropriate that an Abuse filter would at least log such uploads if not outright block them. For Fabe56 to have uploads 18000+ DSC... images without challenge is odd, I'm sure there are other automatic meaningless names they used.

Since the filter is just on an per edit basis, a bot would presumably be required to spot a pattern of possible bad upload behaviour. It would also be useful if a bot made regular lists of batch uploads with a common factor, such as all from a Flickr account; all named in a format {prefix} {number}.{extension}; etc. This would make it easier to review mass uploads to flag as problematic, raise a deletion discussion or if useful to better name/categorise/etc as a group. It would also be easier to go back and review past batches for an uploader if a problem is identified. KylieTastic (talk) 19:27, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

Looking into that, Flickr transfers of DSC filenames aren't caught by the MediaWiki:Titleblacklist. A Fabe56 upload like File:DSC 8266 (13991064494).jpg wouldn't have triggered the File:DSC.[\d\s]+\.JPG blacklist entry because of the Flickr ID in parentheses. It's only looking for a plain File:DSC 8266.jpg. We might want to add a few more possibilities for Flickr in the "Other common patterns" section of the blacklist. Belbury (talk) 19:46, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-10

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

• Wikipedia 25 Birthday mode is now live on Betawi, Breton, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, Gorontalo, Indonesian, Italian, Luxembourgish, Madurese, Sicilian, Spanish, Thai, and Vietnamese Wikipedias! This limited-time campaign feature celebrates 25 years of Wikipedia with a birthday mascot, Baby Globe. When turned on, Baby Globe is shown on ~2,500 articles, waiting to be discovered by readers. Communities can choose to turn Birthday mode on by getting consensus from their community and asking an admin to enable the feature and customize it via community configuration on the local wiki.

Updates for editors

• Sub-referencing, a new feature to re-use references with different details has been released to Swedish Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia and a couple of other wikis. You can try the feature on these projects or on testwiki and betawiki. Learnings from the first pilot wiki German Wikipedia have been published in a report. Reach out to the Wikimedia Deutschland team if you are interested in becoming a pilot wiki.
• Paste Check will become available at all Wikipedias this week. The feature prompts newcomers who are pasting text they are not likely to have written into VisualEditor to consider whether doing so risks a copyright violation. Paste Check tags all edits where it is shown for potential review. Local administrators can configure various aspects of the feature via Special:EditChecks. Research across 22 wikis found that Paste Check resulted in an 18% decrease in relative reverted-edits compared to the control group. Translators can help to localize this and related features.
• The Reader Experience team will be standardizing the user menu in the top right for all mobile users so that it is closer to the desktop experience. Currently this user menu is only visible to users with Advanced Mobile Controls (AMC) turned on. The only change is that a couple buttons previously in the left-side menu will move to the top right for users who do not have AMC turned on. This change is expected to go out March 9 and seeks to improve the user interface. [23]
• Starting in the week of March 2, the emails sent out when an email address was added, removed, or changed for an account will switch to a substantially nicer and clearer HTML email from the prior plaintext one. [24]
• Notifications are currently limited to 2,000 historic entries per user, and extend back to 2013 when the feature was released. This is going to be changed to only store Notifications from the last 5 years, but up to 10,000 of them. This will help with long-term infrastructure health and help to prevent more recent notifications from disappearing too soon. [25]
• The Global Watchlist which lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on a single page continues to see improvements. The latest update improves label usage experience. The extension now allows activating the language fallback system for Wikidata items without labels in the viewed language, and showing those labels in the user’s preferred Wikidata language if no uselang= URL parameter is provided. [26][27]
• The Wikipedia Android team has started a beta test of hybrid search on Greek Wikipedia. Hybrid search capabilities can handle both semantic and keyword queries enabling readers to find what they’re looking for directly on Wikipedia more easily.
• For security reasons, members of certain user groups are required to have two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled. Currently, 2FA is required to use the group, but not to be a member of it. Given that this model still has some vulnerabilities, the situation will gradually change in March. Members of these groups will be unable to disable last 2FA method on their account, and it will be impossible to add users without 2FA to these groups. Users will still be able to add new authentication methods or remove them, as long as at least one method is continuously enabled. In the second half of March, users without 2FA will be removed from these groups. This applies to: CentralNotice administrators, checkusers, interface administrators, suppressors, Wikidata staff, Wikifunctions staff, WMF Office IT and WMF Trust & Safety. Nothing will change for other users. See the linked task for deployment schedule. [28]
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue preventing users from creating an instance in Wikibase.cloud has now been fixed. [29]

Updates for technical contributors

• To help ensure fair use of infrastructure, over the next month the Wikimedia Foundation will implement global API rate limits across our APIs. In early March, stricter limits will be applied to unidentified requests from outside Toolforge/WMCS and API requests that are made from web browsers. In April, higher limits will be applied to identified traffic. These limits are intentionally set as high as possible to minimise impact on the community. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits.
• The Wikidata Query Service Linked Data Fragment (LDF) endpoint will be decommissioned in February. This endpoint served limited traffic, which was successfully migrated to other data access methods that were better suited to support existing use cases. The hardware used to support the LDF endpoint will be reallocated to support the ongoing backend migration efforts. [30]
• The new Parsoid parser continues to be deployed to additional wikis, improving platform sustainability and making it easier to introduce new reading and editing features. Parsoid is now the default parser on 488 WMF wikis (268 Wikipedias), now covering more than 10% of all Wikipedia page views.
• The process and criteria for requesting exceptional access to the high volume feed of the Wikimedia Enterprise APIs (at no cost for mission-aligned usecases), have now been published. This is to provide more thorough and clearer documentation for users.
• Tech Blog, the blog dedicated to the Wikimedia technical community will be migrating to Diff, the community news and event blog. The migration should be complete in April 2026, after which new posts will be accepted for publishing. Readers will be able to access posts – old and new – on the landing page at https://diff.wikimedia.org/techblog.
• 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 17:48, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

Just a finding.

Whenever I nominate a file for deletion, I start to receive notifications about unrelated deletion requests, and I have to turn off notifications manually. Can someone fix this? Candidyeoman55 (talk) 10:01, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

See the prior discussions about this at Receiving reply notification when subsequent DRs are added to daily page. Looks like by now phab:T412462 is solved but in practice one still needs to manually unsubscribe from the DR page to stop getting these notifications. Prototyperspective (talk) 15:13, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

Critical error with ‘use this file on web’ functions

The integration of images from Commons no longer works to a large extent. I described the problem here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Help_desk#Warum_funktioniert_das_Einbinden_eines_Bildes_in_eine_externe_Website_nicht_ (see example). The cause (according to my tests) is that ‘use this file on web’ (or ‘embed’) works with image sizes such as ‘256’ or ‘512’, while technically it has obviously been changed to “250” and ‘500’! If I manually change the 256 or 512 to 250 or 500 in the ‘Embeds’ in the ‘Thumbnail Link’, it works again. With my extremely large number of affected pages from the last 10 years (which I cannot automatically adjust myself), this is extremely annoying. But even the current ‘use this file on web’ template (on German Wikimedia Commons) still offers the old values (which no longer work) – so it is currently inoperable (no longer works). However, it would make sense for the ‘previous solutions’ in the existing world, such as my many pages, to continue to work, e.g. by redirecting the “256” link versions to the new ‘250’ versions. (This applies to the other sizes as well, of course: 512=>500, etc.) Or is there already an elegant solution for automatically changing the format in ‘externally hosted’ websites (in my case, Strato)? It would also be very unfavourable for the ‘use this file on web’ function as a whole if there were no guarantee that the integrations would continue to work in the long term and could not suddenly fail at any time (as is currently the case). Is anyone already working on a solution? Unfortunately, I am unable to do so. What does the solution will look like? Dirk Liesch (talk) 10:54, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

Seems like the stockphoto gadget needs an update to suggest the recommended file sizes. Johannnes89 (talk) 12:44, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

I have a proposed fix on the stockphoto gadget talk page. Bawolff (talk) 10:20, 9 March 2026 (UTC)

@Bawolff: Where? I see nothing at File talk:Wikimedia Commons - Stockphoto gadget.png. - Jmabel ! talk 19:16, 9 March 2026 (UTC)

@Jmabel at mediawiki talk:Gadget-Stockphoto.js Bawolff (talk) 20:13, 9 March 2026 (UTC)

The Challenge Speedy Delete button worked but there was an unfortunate anomaly

Please examine Commons:Deletion requests/File:Baswanthrao Patil TRS.jpg

Salient points:

• I challenged an SD on the file using the big grey button
• There had been a prior DR
• The SD challenge grabbed the prior DR rationale instead of the SD nominator's rationale
• This caused confusion between me and Shaan Sengupta who was the SD nominator.

While the circumstances are unusual they are unlikely to be unique. Please will someone who understands this record it as an issue to be investigated? 🇵🇸‍🇺🇦 Timtrent 🇺🇦 talk to me 🇺🇦‍🇵🇸 15:23, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

I went to the old revision, and clicked the "Challenge speedy deletion" button to check, and I got the same incorrect DR message as you did. I have no idea what is the reason for this, since for me the gadget is working fine for the other files in similar situations. Thanks. Tvpuppy (talk) 03:27, 6 March 2026 (UTC)

• I just tested with other files, I found out that if you clicked the "Challenge speedy deletion" button, it will always get the delete reason of the earliest instance of that specific SD template, not the current instance.
• So, for the case of File:Baswanthrao Patil TRS.jpg, if other users nominated the file for speedy using {{Copyvio}} again, and then you challenge it, it will always incorrectly get the earliest delete reason made by User:আফতাবুজ্জামান in 2024, not the latest one made by other users (the correct one).
• The problem is most likely in MediaWiki:Gadget-AjaxQuickDelete.js, probably somewhere between line 735 and 811. However, I have still no idea what the cause of the problem. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable can help fix this.

Thanks. Tvpuppy (talk) 04:01, 6 March 2026 (UTC)

Upload from Flickr not working

I am unable to upload my Flickr photos using the Upload Wizard. No errors, just does nothing upon entering link and clicking the button. I am guessing this has to do with the incident from earlier today? Hope it works again soon, Flickr2Commons also doesn't work, as usual. PascalHD (talk) 05:12, 6 March 2026 (UTC)

 Comment, see related discussion at Commons:Help desk#Commons Upload Wizard is broken. Thanks. Tvpuppy (talk) 15:38, 6 March 2026 (UTC)

(I noted this there as well; but for the record, but I've filed phab:T419263 about this.) ‍—‍a smart kitten_[meow] 16:40, 6 March 2026 (UTC)

This should work now. Nemoralis (talk) 10:49, 7 March 2026 (UTC)

Mostly I believe it now does, yeah — as far as I'm aware, there's now just an issue with some image thumbnails not being displayed when UploadWizard is given the link to a Flickr album (as opposed to a single file). Best, ‍—‍a smart kitten_[meow] 19:45, 7 March 2026 (UTC)

Thumbnails not generating for external wikis

In the past several days, thumbnails are not being properly generated acrsso multiple wiki farms that use the wikimedia commons. Clicking through on the thumbnail returns a " Error Use thumbnail steps listed on https://w.wiki/GHai. Please contact noc@wikimedia.org for further information (a765913)"

Has something changed which has broken the standard functionality used by literally thousands of mediawiki wikis that rely on the wikimedia commons shard libraries? - 17:08, 7 March 2026 (UTC) Lestatdelc (talk) 17:08, 7 March 2026 (UTC)

@Lestatdelc, as stated in mw:Common thumbnail sizes#FAQ, the error is probably due to the wikis not using one of the "standard" thumbnail sizes. Previously, the thumbnail will generate for any specified size via URL, but now MediaWiki requires one of the "standard" size to be specified when requesting via URL.

However, this change was made in January 2026, so the problem might be something else if it only occurred in the past several days. Thanks. Tvpuppy (talk) 19:40, 7 March 2026 (UTC)

If you are using mw:Extension:QuickInstantCommons, please update to the latest version. I just recently (like last week) fixed a bug in it to make it compatible with these changes. Bawolff (talk) 10:19, 9 March 2026 (UTC)

Help fixing template i18n

Since no one else would do it, I finally created an {{AI modified}} template, so that we can track media altered by AI software (as required by the new Commons:AI images of identifiable people guidelines). However, I'm sure I fucked up the i18n set-up (which is quite confusing). If anyone could fix it and get it to use the translate extension for i18n, that would be awesome! Nosferattus (talk) 23:53, 8 March 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-11

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

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday, 25 March 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.
• Last week, all wikis had 2 hours of read-only time, and extended unavailability for user-scripts and gadgets. This was due to a security incident which has since been resolved. Work is ongoing to prevent re-occurrences. For current information please see the post on the Stewards' noticeboard (translations).

Updates for editors

• Users facing multiple blocks on mobile will now see the reasons for each block separately, instead of a generic message. This helps them understand why they are blocked and what steps they can take to resolve the issue. For example, users affected for using common VPNs (such as iCloud Private Relay) will receive clearer guidance on what they need to do to start editing again. [31]
• Later this week, Suggestion Mode will become available as a beta feature within the visual editor at all Wikipedias. This feature proactively suggests various types of actions that people can consider taking to improve Wikipedia articles, and learn about related guidelines. The feature is locally configurable, and can also be locally expanded with custom Suggestions. Current settings can be seen at Special:EditChecks and there are instructions for how administrators can customize the links to point to local guidelines. The feature is connected to Edit check which suggests improvements while someone is writing new content. In the future, the Editing team plans to evaluate the feature's impact with newcomers through a controlled experiment. [32]
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where the cursor became misaligned during the use of CodeMirror’s syntax highlighting, which makes wikitext and code easier to read, has now been fixed. This problem specifically affected users who defined a font rule in a custom stylesheet while creating a new topic with DiscussionTools. [33]

Updates for technical contributors

• API rate limiting update: To help ensure fair use of infrastructure, global API rate limits will be applied this week to requests without a compliant User-Agent that originate from outside Toolforge/WMCS and to unauthenticated requests made from web browsers. Higher limits will be applied to identified traffic in April. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits.
• The new GraphQL API has been released. The API was developed as a flexible alternative to select features of the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS), to improve developer experience and foster adaptability, and efficient data access. Try it out and give feedback. You can also sign up for usability tests.
• The PTAC Unsupported Tools Working Group continued improvements to Video2Commons in February, with fixes addressing authentication errors, large-file handling, task queue visibility, and clearer upload behavior. Work is still ongoing in some areas, including changes related to deprecated server-side uploads. Read this update to learn more.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The Article Guidance team invites experienced Wikipedia editors from selected pilot wikis and interested contributors from other Wikipedias to fill out this questionnaire which is available in English, Arabic, Bengali, Japanese, Portuguese, Persian, and Turkish. Your answers will help the team customize guidance for less experienced editors and help them learn community policies and practices while creating an article. Learn more on the project page.

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MediaWiki message delivery 18:50, 9 March 2026 (UTC)