Commons:Village pump/Technical

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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/2026/05 /Archive/2026/06.

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“Lua error: too many expensive function calls.” on COM:DR

Starting in May 20, 2026, “Lua error: too many expensive function calls.” have been appearing on COM:DR. 6D (talk) 04:18, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

I've updated Module:Deletion_request_counter (diff) to remove an unnecessary call to title.exists, which seems to have done the trick. ~Kevin Payravi (talk) 06:56, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

(if I'm not mistaken, this took the expensive function call count from 512 to 312, with 500 being the limit). ~Kevin Payravi (talk) 08:51, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

Date errors

I don't know if this is the doing of Upload Wizard or structured data bots or both. I go to edit a file and the date field reads June 31 or July 32 or similar. It's definitely not human editors doing this. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 17:25, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

Hello @RadioKAOS, can you provide some examples of the files with this error? I don't know which files you are referring to, but the date field in a file description is usually provided by the uploader, and the uploader may have unintentionally entered an incorrect date. Thanks. Tvpuppy (talk) 20:33, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

I generally prefer not to do examples, because that gives people an excuse to dwell on the example and not acknowledge the bigger picture when it exists. I also fixed the date fields with my edits, so you won't see it in the current revisions. Therefore, I had to go back and look for them. On all revisions of File:U.S. Air Force members transfer recovered remains from 1952 C-124 crash site on Mount Gannet - Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson Hospital, Anchorage, Alaska - June 2021.jpg prior to my edit, the date shows "1 July 2021" in the file description page, but shows "2021-06-31" while in edit mode. The other one I noticed was File:U.S. Army SSgt Berg climbs out of a crevasse after searching through debris at Colony Glacier, Alaska - July 2024.jpg. All revisions prior to my edit show a date field of "July 2024" in the file description, but shows "2024-07-32" in edit mode. If it helps to determine what the problem might be, both files were uploaded by ERcheck and the information inserted into the date field was different from not only the camera date in the metadata, but the actual date taken as found in the description and the caption. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 15:43, 28 May 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for your reply. I notice both files were uploaded through UploadWizard, and it seems the date was incorrect from the beginning. I don't think the date was automatically extracted by the UploadWizard from the EXIF data, as it would have also included the time from the EXIF data. So, it is possible it was the uploader who simply entered the incorrect date unintentionally.

Note that the UploadWizard only checks if an inputted date is "in the future", it does not check if the date is correct or not.

The {{Information}} template uses {{ISOdate}} to display the date from the date parameter. So, if an incorrect date is provided, then the date displayed will be inaccurate.

• {{ISOdate|2021-06-31}} => 1 July 2021
• {{ISOdate|2024-07-32}} => July 2024

So, in my opinion, these are most likely just human errors. Thanks. Tvpuppy (talk) 16:02, 28 May 2026 (UTC)

It has been almost a year since I uploaded the files, and I do not remember the details of the uploading. It is possible that I had typos in both of those dates. I just did a test edit, with preview, entering the yyyy-mm-dd format. I saw in the preview the same inaccurate rendering of the dates described above. It would be great if automatic error checks warned of these human errors. — ERcheck (talk). 18:55, 28 May 2026 (UTC)

Bug in labels

For the past few days, a bug with labels has been occurring occasionally. Screenshot (labels in any language). Label is being added over the place and there is no way to save it. Eurohunter (talk) 17:48, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

Hello @Eurohunter, this appears to be a Wikidata issue, perhaps you can ask for help at d:Wikidata:Project chat. Thanks. Tvpuppy (talk) 18:45, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

@Tvpuppy: It was supposed to be added there, but I just added it to wrong place. Eurohunter (talk) 18:48, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

Captcha broken when adding structured data on a File: page

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T427608

Hi! I was trying to add a "depicts" thing to a few images, the first one went through but on the second one I got a red textbox that said:

• The save has failed.
• To edit this page, please solve the following task below and enter the answer in the box (more info):

but no captcha actually appeared. Reloading does not fix the issue. I'm guessing this is a bug related to the switch to hCaptcha?

(Also, the text on Special:Captcha/help appears twice, but that's probably unrelated.) ~2026-31778-15 (talk) 13:40, 27 May 2026 (UTC)

I'm not sure. Try bypassing your cache when reloading. HyperAnd [talk] 08:05, 28 May 2026 (UTC)

@KHarlan (WMF) @WBrown (WMF) FYI in case this isn't known / is something related to the hCaptcha rollout. With apologies if you're the wrong folks to ping about this :) ‍—‍a smart kitten_[meow] 08:12, 29 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping. I'll test this now WBrown (WMF) (talk) 10:24, 29 May 2026 (UTC)

I was unable to reproduce this just now. I was able to add a structured data item using a temporary account and didn't see this CAPTCHA. Let me try a few more things, but it would be helpful to know if there was anything other that was different about the structured data edit form when you made the change WBrown (WMF) (talk) 10:30, 29 May 2026 (UTC)

I can't be sure about whether or not this might be relevant context; but it just occurred to me to look at this TA's Special:AbuseLog, and it appears that they may have hit an abuse-filter a few times that resulted in the showcaptcha action? Best, ‍—‍a smart kitten_[meow] 10:36, 29 May 2026 (UTC)

Yeah, you had the same thought as me at the same time :D. Triggering an AbuseFilter during a change then caused it to show this for me. I'll file a Phabricator bug report WBrown (WMF) (talk) 10:42, 29 May 2026 (UTC)

So further investigation shows that:

• The user gets presented with a FancyCaptcha challenge and not hCaptcha
• AbuseFilter forces the CAPTCHA to be shown, which does not work because it seems that the structured data editor does not have support for any type of CAPTCHA

As far as I can see, it seems like this would have been broken before hCaptcha was rolled out. However, we should be able to fix it WBrown (WMF) (talk) 11:18, 29 May 2026 (UTC)

(I'm assuming that this is now phab:T427608 [edit: i didn't originally notice the {{phab}}-box above; d'oh!] — thanks for reporting this @~2026-31778-15, and thanks for filing @WBrown (WMF) :)) ‍—‍a smart kitten_[meow] 12:01, 29 May 2026 (UTC)

The main cause here is the broken abuse filter interpretation of structured data that always adds a link to the new lines parameter. GPSLeo (talk) 18:43, 29 May 2026 (UTC)

Flickr2Commons not working

I can get right up to starting the file upload, but after a few seconds it returns "Origin https://flickr2commons.toolforge.org is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin.". It was working fine just 2 weeks ago.

Not sure if related, but I also tried to upload a video from Flickr using Video2Commons, and that also returned an error. LetmeEditit (talk) 10:46, 28 May 2026 (UTC)

Just tried again, still not working. It also hangs on "running" for 2-3 minutes after I enter the URL, but lets me through eventually. The error shows after I hit "Transfer selected files to Commons". LetmeEditit (talk) 10:10, 31 May 2026 (UTC)

Same issue, I also got “Load Failed” when I hit "Transfer selected files to Commons". 6D (talk) 02:53, 5 June 2026 (UTC)

Still not working... is there anywhere I can report this? I assume it's run by a volunteer who has better things to do than sit around tinkering all day... but worth a shot. LetmeEditit (talk) 13:38, 12 June 2026 (UTC)

Still not working, but I found a copy that works! https://flickr2commons-ng.toolforge.org/ — see Commons talk:Flickr2Commons#Tool down, use this copy. LetmeEditit (talk) 13:26, 16 June 2026 (UTC)

But it don’t support CC 4.0 licenses… 6D (talk) 11:39, 17 June 2026 (UTC)

I was wondering why it wasn't working for one specific user! Well, at least it's something. LetmeEditit (talk) 12:50, 17 June 2026 (UTC)

a month later, still not fixed… 6D (talk) 15:45, 23 June 2026 (UTC)

Search

For several days now, I've noticed that when using the search engine (both on desktop and Android), the image upload results often show missing or corrupted images. For example, when searching for Einstein (this happens with any search term): https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=einstein&title=Special%3AMediaSearch&go=Go&type=image

--Xabier (talk) 13:47, 28 May 2026 (UTC)

@Xabier Thank you for the report :) I could also reproduce this myself, & I notified the relevant folks on Phabricator at phab:T424032#11965264. Best, ‍—‍a smart kitten_[meow] 08:05, 29 May 2026 (UTC)

Survey (proposed direction for Wishlist)

You are invited to voice your opinion on a new community-proposed direction for the Community Wishlist. Thank you! MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:07, 29 May 2026 (UTC)

Tool to download file and its metadata on commons？

is there a tool that downloads the file, as well as the metadata (wikitext of the file page; com:sdc; and possibly entire file page history) in a machine readable format (json/csv/readme.md...?)? requiring as few clicks as possible? one click on one button, or two clicks on two buttons? and a batch download tool for multiple files?

the use is, i save a bunch of files, but i also want to keep track of what each file is and the url they come from. RoyZuo (talk) 21:10, 31 May 2026 (UTC)

before a solution is found i'm just taking screenshots of the wikitext and save them together on my pc. RoyZuo (talk) 21:11, 31 May 2026 (UTC)

gallery-dl should be able to download files within a cat and JSON files with their respective metadata. You may add a sleep timer parameter to avoid too many requests --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 13:07, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

Attribution error resulting from commons design

i've noticed that people quite often copy the url when they "preview an image in a category" for attribution purpose, e.g. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Tsai_Ing-wen_in_2009#/media/File:Tsai_Ing-wen_2009.jpg . if commons is serious about "protecting reusers" by "ensuring hassle-free attribution", this should be prevented. RoyZuo (talk) 07:37, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

What do you mean ? 1. we can't stop what people do. 2. links are how all our images are attributed throughout all the wikis. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:50, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

🤷‍♀️ you could fix this design that leaves room for error? as simple as by for example not making these "preview links" when "Media Viewer" is used? then dummies will not see such links to copy from in the first place? RoyZuo (talk) 10:44, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

Reducing expensive function count on Module:Countries

I proposed some changes to the Module and am looking to hear opinions on that: Module talk:Countries#Reduce expensive function count -- DaxServer (talk) 19:28, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-23

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

• The Reader Experience team is conducting an experiment to show the reading lists feature, which is still in development, to logged-out mobile readers to test whether it encourages account creation at a higher rate compared to the watchstar button. The experiment was launched on May 18th on German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, and Urdu wikis, and it will run for a month.
• The Wikimedia Apps team released Phase 1 of the redesigned Home Feed to the Android Beta app. The new Home Feed includes a refreshed "Community" tab and a personalized "For You" tab featuring daily updated reading recommendations. The redesign is part of a broader effort to improve content discovery and create more engaging learning experiences in the Wikipedia apps.
• View all 18 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where images could fail to load for some suggested edits on Special:Homepage, leaving the thumbnail stuck in a loading state, has now been fixed. [1]

Updates for technical contributors

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 21:05, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

Request of a little correction

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54687

Per a little discussion on Village Pump, I would like to request the change the prefixes of the units mentioned on Special:MediaStatistics. Although units like MB, GB or TB (soon PB) are used, they have the base 1024, and not 1000, like SI prefixes should have. So we should change them to MiB, GiB or TiB, as described in Byte#Multiple-byte_units. --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 08:19, 2 June 2026 (UTC)

See the related Phabricator task and its extensive discussion here: phab:T54687. It appears currently your request is unlikely to be accepted. Thanks. Tvpuppy (talk) 09:38, 2 June 2026 (UTC)

it's just not that important. the page isn't a wikipedia article and most people know what it means. MediaStatistics is also just an approximation to begin with. There's a lot of issues to deal with and correcting this is not very high on most peoples todo list, sorting out peoples opinion about this topic is even lower on that list, and thus things stay the way they are for a little longer. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:23, 3 June 2026 (UTC)

People have been flamewaring about these units since the 90s. You don't need devs permission to change it on commons though, you can just edit mediawiki:size-megabytes and related pages. Bawolff (talk) 22:53, 4 June 2026 (UTC)

HotCat gadget suddenly really slow today

It was incredibly fast, but just today it's slowed to a crawl — about 1 file every 3 seconds. Were there any changes? LetmeEditit (talk) 13:49, 4 June 2026 (UTC)

Seems to be fixed today. Strange... LetmeEditit (talk) 13:24, 5 June 2026 (UTC)

HotCat is client-side application. It might be because of your internet connection. Nemoralis (talk) 21:14, 5 June 2026 (UTC)

Suddenly slow again today. It's so strange, my internet seems to be working fine. All other editing etc is snappy as usual. LetmeEditit (talk) 11:26, 12 June 2026 (UTC)

Sounds like you're talking about Cat-a-lot, not HotCat. Am I right? Ponor (talk) 09:49, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

If it is Cat-a-lot then it will slow down if there is high database load and it will switch to sequental editing instead of parallel which could cause effect described. In any case, please report Cat-a-lot slowdowns here MediaWiki_talk:Gadget-Cat-a-lot.js also. --Zache (talk) 09:58, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

You're right, sorry! I do mean Cat-a-lot. LetmeEditit (talk) 10:05, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

Information about a VisualFileChange bug report

Hello,

I just wrote MediaWiki_talk:Gadget-VisualFileChange.js#Blocking_bug_in_VFC,_existing_since_2025-03-08_at_least. I'm posting this info here for possibly raising broader awareness. Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 00:40, 6 June 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-24

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

• Wikimedia Enterprise has increased the free usage limits for its API offerings. The monthly request limit for the On-demand API has increased from 5,000 to 50,000 requests, while the Snapshot API limit has increased from 15 to 30 requests per month. In addition, Structured Contents snapshots are now available for free accounts. These changes expand access to Wikimedia Enterprise data for developers, researchers, and organizations using Wikimedia content. [2]

Updates for editors

• The refreshed Explore Feed, now called the Home Feed, is rolling out to 50% of users of the Wikipedia Android app. The Home Feed helps readers discover relevant content through two new tabs: Community and For You. The Community tab provides a scrollable feed of curated content and updates from the broader Wikimedia community and movement, while the For You tab offers a full-screen, swipeable experience that shows content tailored to a user's interests. The redesign is part of a broader effort to improve discovery and enhance the learning experience in the Wikipedia app.
• The Which came first? daily trivia game is now available in the beta version of the Wikipedia iOS app in English, German, French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Turkish. The game uses historical events from Wikipedia's "On This Day" content and challenges readers to guess which of two events happened first. The game was previously released on Android. Communities interested in making the game available in their languages can read the instructions and requirements.
• Sub-referencing, a new MediaWiki feature that allows editors to reuse references with different details, will begin rolling out to Wikimedia wikis following a successful pilot phase. Deployment will start on 8 June for most Group 1 wikis and French Wikipedia, with additional Wikipedia language editions receiving the feature over the coming months. Communities are encouraged to prepare by checking for untranslated Cite extension messages in their language and reviewing any use of Reference Tooltips, which may require updates to support the new functionality. Wikis using Reference Previews do not need to take any action. Communities may also wish to create the cite-tracking-category-ref-details tracking category as a hidden category using __HIDDENCAT__ (or a dedicated template), and connect it to the corresponding Wikidata item d:Q129764848. [3]
• The Page Previews experiment on mobile web has concluded. The team decided not to roll out the feature after the results showed no statistically significant impact on reader retention, as the primary success metric was retention improvement. Page Previews, which are already available on desktop and in the apps, display a thumbnail, lead paragraph, and link to the full article when readers tap a blue link. The experiment tested this experience on mobile web across six Wikipedias.
• The user interface icon library will be updated later this week or next week. Most of the ~300 icons have been slightly refined and ~30 new icons have been added. These changes improve the icons to make them more consistent and comprehensible, and provide more visual balance when they are used in groups.
• The Universal Language Selector (ULS) interface in MediaWiki, which helps users select content in other languages, has been updated. The new version improves speed and accessibility, and users of Wikimedia projects can now pin languages for quicker language switching. The deployment to Wikimedia sites will happen gradually in the coming weeks. You can test it now as a beta feature by selecting beta features in your profile preferences and share your feedback on the project page.
• View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the Pageviews Analysis dashboard on pageviews.wmcloud.org stopped updating graph data in May 2026, affecting all users, has been fixed. [4]

Updates for technical contributors

• The function signature for mw.util.addPortletLink() has been simplified. Developers can now pass a configuration object instead of a list of positional parameters when creating portlet links. The previous function signature remains supported for backwards compatibility. For example, instead of: mw.util.addPortletLink('p-cactions', '#', 'Stub', 'ca-stubtag', 'Add a stub tag to this page'); use mw.util.addPortletLink('p-cactions', { href: '#', text: 'Stub', id: 'ca-stubtag', tooltip: 'Add a stub tag to this page' });. Script maintainers are encouraged to review existing uses of addPortletLink() and update them where appropriate. This change will be available on all wikis from 11 June. Thanks to community volunteer Gerges for contributing this improvement. [5]
• Community Wishlist discussion: Product & Technology introduced changes meant to increase the number and complexity of wishes fulfilled, including the disbanding of the Community Tech team. They are engaging in discussions about a proposed direction for the wishlist from community members. Includes ways to structure annual voting, better tracking of wishes, removing focus areas, and staffing updates.
• 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 21:27, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

Large unused SVG files

I'm not sure if these files are eligible for deletion or some other remedy, but it seems like there's some issue with the unused files File:Location of Baixo Alentejo in 1936.svg and File:Location of the Baixo Alentejo Province in 1936.svg, which are very large at 2,211,320 × 6,148,917. They don't seem to render properly on my device. One is marked as having invalid SVG and the other is not. — Wracking ( talk / contribs / uploads ) 23:58, 11 June 2026 (UTC)

For me, in both cases, Commons fails to give me a usable PNG thumbnail (I just get a blank) but if I click through to the "Original file" it renders fine. Obviously if someone can make them render better, that's good, but I don't think deletion is in order, since they aren't useless. - Jmabel ! talk 03:12, 12 June 2026 (UTC)

I fixed File:Location of the Baixo Alentejo Province in 1936.svg by uploading a new version manually edited from File:Portuguese Provinces in 1936.svg (and tagged File:Location of Baixo Alentejo in 1936.svg for deletion as a duplicate). the wub "?!" 07:59, 12 June 2026 (UTC)

Those dimensions would make whopping 13,597,223,140,440 (13.6 terapixels) :O --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 16:06, 12 June 2026 (UTC)

Note that the SVG has no size (and definitely no pixels). It has a coordinate system and it scales infinitely. But the renderer to png DOES need a size and it likely takes this SVG ‘size’ as its initial starting size, before it scales down to whatever you requested. Dividing all coordinates and ‘sizes’ of the SVG by a factor of a 1000 might actually make this SVG work, by reducing the starting drawing surface for the png renderer. But I don’t know if there are any SVG authoring tools that allow you to do that easily. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:39, 13 June 2026 (UTC)

Template:Navbox dark mode

vte buttons in Template:Navbox are invisible in dark mode. i could trace the problem only to Module:Navbar but not any further. RoyZuo (talk) 11:52, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

Not sure what the cause of the problem is, but I think the CSS styles for the navbox are defined in MediaWiki:Common.css. Thanks. Tvpuppy (talk) 14:56, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

Whenever a background color is defined, so should be the text color. But in Special:Permalink/576723076#L-87 that's not the case. I don't really see the need for having the bg color set here to anything TBH. Ponor (talk) 16:28, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

Module:Navbar clearly states that it is imported from English Wikipedia. English Wikipedia moved it´s css to templatestyles. It has been 12 years since it was updated, someone needs to go over the parameter changes, whether the arguments are handled differently and whether they are all still there. If not, some navbox usage might break. Only when that is okay it is safe to update it. Snævar (talk) 10:13, 16 June 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-25

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 Reader Growth team has launched an Image Browsing beta feature on the mobile web version of all Wikipedias. The feature shows an image carousel at the top of articles with 3 or more images. Editors can configure this feature with the following controls: to hide a specific image from a page, either use class=notpageimage excluding it from thumbnail previews, or class=noviewer excluding it from MediaViewer. The carousel can also be disabled from a page entirely, with the magic word __NOMEDIAVIEWERCAROUSEL__. To submit feedback or flag bugs, please visit the project page.
• Wikitables can now be sorted in descending order on the first click by adding data-sort-order="desc" to the header cell. Previously, by default, clicking a column header for the first time sorts it in ascending order. This addition to a Wikitable gives it more control and flexibility, while the default behavior for subsequent clicks remains unchanged. [6]

Updates for editors

• The Article guidance feature is currently being tested with some editors creating new articles on the Simple English, French, and Turkish Wikipedias. The experiment will soon begin on the Arabic and Bangla Wikipedias as well. This feature gives editors community-curated guidance to help them create articles that follow community standards. Experienced editors can continue creating or adapting outlines for specific article types that are commonly created by less experienced contributors. The outlines guide less experienced editors in creating high-quality articles. A quick guide to markups used in outlines can be found on this page. Example outlines that can be adapted and instructions for how to adapt them are on this section of the project page.
• Wikis that wish to replace the "indefinitely" button in Special:Block for temporary accounts (for example, wikis that block temporary users only until account expiration) will be able to do so by creating MediaWiki:ipb-indefinite-expiry-temporary-account with the block duration they want. [7]
• View all 41 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• By the end of June, a valid user-agent string will be required for automated dumps downloads from the dumps.wikimedia.org website. Automated requests that provide a generic or empty user-agent will be blocked. This extends enforcement of the long standing user-agent policy. Access to dumps through Wikimedia Cloud Services will not change.
• The roll out of global API rate limits is now complete, with limits enforced across all APIs and at the documented levels for all groups. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki remain exempt. All bots should continue to follow the documented best practices to avoid being rate limited.
• The API Portal wiki will be read only starting this week (June 15-18). The following week (June 22-25), all API Portal wiki URLs will redirect to Wikimedia APIs on mediawiki.org. Learn more on the project page.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• On June 17th at 6pm UTC the WMF will be holding Discord call focused on a code review. We've heard through the Developer Satisfaction Survey that volunteers are struggling with code review and we'd like to discuss these experiences with the goal of surfacing workable solutions. You can join the call via the Wikimedia Community Discord server.
• The Latin American Wikimedia Conference will host a regional hackathon that will bring together the Wikimedia movement’s technical community including developers, system administrators, data scientists, and users with extended rights. Interested technical contributors can apply for a scholarship to participate until June 21 at midnight (Bolivia time, UTC-4).
• Sign up for Wikimania Team Challenges to join this special event. The Team challenges will take place online and in person from July 21 to 22, before Wikimania conference. Everyone is welcome, regardless of skills or Wikimania registration. Teams will work on 10 important challenges supporting the Wikimedia community. For details, visit the Team Challenges page and register there. Registration closes on June 20th at 11pm UTC.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 16:45, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

Files exist on commons, but cannot be embedded in articles

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T429376

There is currently a strange problem in de.Wikipedia: for some reason File:Mühlgrabenmündung.jpg and File:Mühlgrabenquelle.jpg cannot be included in articles. What makes the situation even more confusing: Parsoid always fails, while the Legacy Parser can sometimes load the files. Here is a comparison using the migration tool. Purging (action=purge) is not fixing the problem. Is this a known problem that can be fixed here on commons? Kallichore (talk) 21:11, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

It seems like some sort of cache on the parsoid side. I haven't heard of anything like this before. I would suggest filing a ticket in phabricator Bawolff (talk) 01:16, 16 June 2026 (UTC)

Ok, I created a task.--Kallichore (talk) 18:18, 16 June 2026 (UTC)

@Kallichore looks more like a commons problem.

when i visited File:Mühlgrabenquelle.jpg, "No file by this name exists, but you can upload it. If a file used to exist, try to purge this page's cache"

even though https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/34/M%C3%BChlgrabenquelle.jpg/250px-M%C3%BChlgrabenquelle.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/M%C3%BChlgrabenquelle.jpg could be accessed.

so i purged the file page, then the file appeared again.

not sure how long it takes until de:Mühlgraben (Aubach) shows it. or maybe it needs to be edited and saved to force it? RoyZuo (talk) 20:23, 16 June 2026 (UTC)

Image does not go away from the category gallery

Any idea why File:09.06.2026 – Vizita de studiu a Comisiei pentru integrare europeană la București - 55324258433.jpg is still displayed in Category:Photos from Parlamentul Republicii Moldova Flickr stream to be reviewed in spite of said category being deleted a while ago? Gikü (talk) 14:15, 17 June 2026 (UTC)

All I had to do is ask :) Can't see it anymore, although like I mentioned it was there for a week. Gikü (talk) 15:15, 17 June 2026 (UTC)

Google lens still not working

Is Google bans requests from Commons directly or there is some technical error here? As Google lens not working, categorizing files and searching copyvios becomes harder. Is there is a chance that the issue will be fixed? Regards, Юрий Д.К. 17:45, 17 June 2026 (UTC)

Last month in technical changes

I decided to give another overview of some of the technical changes that have happened in the media support corner of MediaWiki. This is mostly an overview of activity since may 15th.

• The reduction of allowed thumbnails sizes (to deal with excessive scraping and storage problems) is still ongoing, but most rough edges have now been tackled. The peak disruption of 429 error you might have experienced should be mostly dealt with. Still to do are: T56035 and T401668. Over 22 other tickets have been solved in this area.
• The foundation is implementing a way to keep track of what part of MediaWiki has generated a media url. This is called media provenance. Because of it, you might notice utm parameters in the urls of images
• Work on the migration towards new database tables T28741 for the media files remains ongoing. A few Wikipedias now read from the new tables, and several bugs have been fixed or are being fixed in preparation for the larger switchover.
• Media viewer has seen a lot of action. Myself, simon04 and Krinkle worked on simplifying the existing code and removing lots of legacy code. There were changes for the new thumbnailsizes and the WMF Growth Team has been working on the Image Browsing-feature.
• An issue arose with excessive usage of storage due to uncompressed TIFF uploads that is still under investigation. T427949 There is also an active discussion on the Village Pump about this topic.
• UploadWizard can now make use of captchas (usually this is an invisible captcha) T426126
• A longstanding bug where some of the information in the imageinfo api was missing if a filerevision was missing, has been fixed T239213
• Zoomviewer has been down for several months T428524. If you are interested in picking up maintenance of this tool, you might want to indicate your interest.
• Most devices now support native decoding of our video, and thus the support for software decoding was removed. Software decoding was in place from the very first support of video in 2007 and was actively in use on especially Apple devices all the way up to 2021 T376842.
• And many improvements to keep things working with newer versions of php and MediaWiki itself, code maintenance and technical debt that all have to be done but that are invisible to most users (I estimate some 80+ changes, excl translations).

—TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:02, 17 June 2026 (UTC)

Weird EXIF content in USN image, maybe a Commons bug? - EXIFTool doesn't corroborate

Hello,

the "UserComment" in File:US Navy 101018-N-0711P-005 Berthing spaces aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71).jpg looks weird. It looks like (mostly) nonsensical Chinese (at least, Google Translate doesn't translate it). I'm suspecting some bug in the software here: I downloaded the file and looked into it with the EXIFTool GUI, as I wanted to fix the thing. The corresponding EXIF field should, as far as I can tell, actually show: 101018-N-0711-005 Newport News, Va. (Oct. 18, 2010)- The berthing space is one of 59 that have been upgraded aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) to provide Sailors a higher standard of living. ( U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communications Specialist Seaman Sandra A. Pimentel/Released) What's happening to transform that into Chinese characters? Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 08:10, 18 June 2026 (UTC)

The comment field is internally represented as ASCII text, but is being interpreted as if it were w:UTF-16. See also en:Bush hid the facts (!) for some further discussion of encoding confusion. Omphalographer (talk) 23:11, 18 June 2026 (UTC)

the user comment field in exif is weird because the encoding rules are different. I would guess the file has the encoding incorrectly set to utf-16 or jis, however its always possible mediawiki is in the wrong,the field is rarely used after all. Does the file work in other programs? Bawolff (talk) 14:03, 20 June 2026 (UTC)

It's Thursday...

I assume "it's Thursday" i.e. the day 'Improvements' are rolled out is the explanation for why the little "pointers" next to subcategories are now one-third the size, meaning even my otherwise ordinary-vision eyes have to squint to properly make them out? - The Bushranger (talk) 23:09, 18 June 2026 (UTC)

See point 6 of Commons:Village pump/Technical#Tech News: 2026-24. The icon library has been updated, and part of it includes changing the triangle icon. There are the ongoing discussions at phab:T399175 and phab:T427868, which a user has already pointed out the issue about the visibility of the new "triangle" icon. Thanks. Tvpuppy (talk) 23:52, 18 June 2026 (UTC)

note: Commons is a Wednesday wiki. Thursday is for english Wikipedia. Bawolff (talk) 13:56, 20 June 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-26

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

• Growth features are now available at Wikidata. This update enables access to Mentorship (if configured), Impact module, the Help Panel, and a simplified Newcomer Homepage (without Suggested Edits). Wikidata administrators are still configuring the features through Community Configuration.

Updates for editors

• The special page Special:RangeCalculator has been created. It allows users to find an IP range without needing to rely on external tools. Until now, this tool was only available to CheckUsers. [8]
• Sub-referencing is a new MediaWiki feature that allows editors to reuse references with different details. It will be deployed to most small and medium-sized Wikipedia language versions on June 23. The FAQ lists possible actions to take on your wiki to support the deployment. Check the rollout plan for the next deployment steps. [9]
• Starting next week, users will get a notification when they are blocked or unblocked from editing, or if this block changes. [10]
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Starting next week, abuse filters that are set to "require CAPTCHA verification" will begin to also affect users with the skipcaptcha right, which includes most autoconfirmed users. Bots are exempted. This change only affects edits that trigger an abuse filter. The skipcaptcha right will continue to exempt users from having to solve CAPTCHAs in the ordinary course of using the wikis. [11]
• Reference documentation for the Lift Wing API has moved from the API Portal to the interactive REST Sandbox.
• The API Portal wiki is now closed. For API documentation, see Wikimedia APIs on mediawiki.org. All API Portal wiki URLs (https://api.wikimedia.org/wiki/) will redirect to the mediawiki.org page starting June 22. [12]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• Join an online call on 25 June at 2:30pm UTC to meet the current Wikimedia interns for Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. Interns will provide an overview of their projects and a brief demo of their work so far. Attendees are encouraged to share ideas and connections in their community.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 13:02, 23 June 2026 (UTC)