This is a draft of a potential Signpost article, and should not be interpreted as a finished piece. Its content is subject to review by the editorial team and ultimately by JPxG, the editor in chief. Please do not link to this draft as it is unfinished and the URL will change upon publication. If you would like to contribute and are familiar with the requirements of a Signpost article, feel free to be bold in making improvements!
| |||||
For years, the Community Tech team was dedicated to managing and implementing the Community Wishlist, before the WMF decided to disband the team and turn it into a program. The Wikimedia Foundation made the desicion as the engagement with the Wishlist had sharply dropped in recent years, after the program had been restructured in 2024. As a result of the Tech team's disbandment, discoure erupted over the decision. The community raised concern over the loss of a major communication venue with Foundation staff, and its associated layoff of Tech team staff, some of whom were heavily involved in developing the Wiki Workers United union. More information on the disbandment can be found in our June technology report.
The new wishlist process is to be divided in to four stages, those being Triage, Voting, Post-vote, and Implementation. A more detailed summary of the process it available over on the page about the updated process, with more information to come on the Community Wishlist updates page.
The first voting period is currently expected to be in January (verify before publishing).
After the voting period closes, wishes will be sorted by their vote count. From here, the Foundation will decide on the wishes they plan to work on.
As of August, the Journal Cited by Wikipedia compilation reports whether journals are open accessible, and whether publishers publish open access journals. The feature is fresh, so tweaks are likely to happen, but what is currently there is very functional. Essentially, JL-Bot looks at various categories present on an article an determines as best it can if a journal/publisher can be classified according to the table below:
| Open | : | Open access publisher/publication. This includes CC-licensed journals, Diamond open access, Gold open access, etc. |
| S2Open | : | Subscribe to Open publisher/publication |
| Delayed | : | Delayed open access publisher/publication |
| Hybrid | : | Hybrid open-access journal publisher/publication |
| Closed | : | Closed access publisher/publication |
| Unflagged | : | Bot finds no information. For publishers, this likely means the publisher does not have a consistent open access publishing policy, and thus cannot be categorised. Or it could be that no one bothered to check. |
An example of where this can be seen in action is Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Journals cited by Wikipedia/Target1. The table is sortable, so you can easily browse targets by open-access categories.
In light of this more-easily findable information about which journals/publishers are openly accessible, a parallel effort to tag citations with |doi-access= was happening. In August 2026, there were about 27.99% of DOIs that were tagged as free to read. This percentage has remained relatively constant, in the 27% range, never reaching 28%, since the compilation started tracking |doi-access=free usage (see chart on the right). In September, usage increased by a massive 1.25% to reach 29.24%. – H
A new extension has been enabled on Commons allowing users to easily create and modify charts from a dataset. On pages in the Data namespace whose name ends with .chart, a new Edit with form mode can be selected from the top right of the page. This will bring up a menu, allowing editors to select a data source, the chart type, display title and other associated characteristics. Users will also be able to see a live preview of their chart as well as the generated code. – M
Add using {{userscript |code= [.js] |name= [script name] |doc= [doc page] }}
(SUBST: THE TRANSCLUSIONS, AND TRIM/REFORMAT, PRIOR TO PUBLICATION)
{{Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/Approved}}
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2026 #35, #35, & #35 (FIX WEEK NUMBERS). Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.
Discuss this story