Commons:Village pump/Technical

Shortcuts: COM:VP/T • COM:VPT

• Community portal
  • introduction
• Help desk
• Village pump
  • copyright
  • proposals
  • technical
• Administrators' noticeboard
  • vandalism
  • user problems
  • blocks and protections

Welcome to the Village pump technical section

Technical discussion

Village pump/Technical

Bug reports

Code review

Tools

Tools/Directory

Idea Lab

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/2026/08 /Archive/2026/09.

COMMONS DISCUSSION PAGES

• Commons Help desk
• Village pump (general discussion)
  • Copyright
  • Proposals
  • Technical
• Graphics and photography discussion
  • Photography critiques
  • Image improvement
    • Illustration workshop
    • Map workshop
    • Photography workshop
    • Video and sound workshop
• Categories for discussion
• Undeletion requests
• Deletion requests
• Volunteer Response Team/Noticeboard
• Translators' noticeboard
• Work requests for bots

---

• Contact administrators
  • Vandalism
  • User problems (Dispute resolution)
  • Blocks and protections
• Bureaucrats' noticeboard
• CheckUser requests
• Oversight requests

---

• Telegram
• IRC ^webchat
• Commons mailing list (archive)
• Commons' bugs on Phabricator

Please note

• Feature or bug reports should be filed on Phabricator (see how to report a bug). Bugs with security implications should be reported differently (see how to report security bugs).
• Have you read the FAQ?
  
  

 

Start a new discussion

	SpBot archives all sections tagged with {{Section resolved|1=~~~~}} after 1 day and sections whose most recent comment is older than 30 days.

Solution idea for category name problem

before we finally get a system that allows multiple / multilingual category names, i just had an idea to patch on top of what we have now.

what if in addition to showing the actual cat names, a tool shows additional names above them (like ruby text)? the additional names could be, that category's wikidata label (in a language chosen by the user), or defined on the cat page itself by using

{{en|...}}
{{fr|...}}
{{ja|...}}
...

it's a solution for people quarreling over whether a category name should be english or other native latin-alphabetic language. example: Category:FC Bayern München. with this tool, if the cat name is english, users can see the german name above so german users still know what it is; if the cat name is german, non german users can see the english (or any other language user chooses) name above.

it appears like this on a parent cat page containing it.

　　FC Bayern Munich
> FC Bayern München (24 C, 88 F)

or

　FC Bayern München
> FC Bayern Munich (24 C, 88 F)

it's not just useful for multilingual name conflicts, but also if something has some very famous alternative names, e.g.

　Sears Tower
> Willis Tower (10 C, 35 F)

other considerations:

1. if querying up to 200 pages every time someone opens a cat page is too much for the servers,
   1. the tool could query the page and show the alternative name only when the cursor hovers over the target.
   2. or there could be a cache set up on toolforge that stores cat pages queried and their alternative names, so if a page is queried recently, there's no need to query wikidata or commons again but the tool can directly fetch the cached data.
2. this solution is ofc not compatible with current designs of hotcat, catalot, uploadwizard... which can only show the actual page name.

RoyZuo (talk) 15:20, 6 July 2026 (UTC)

Closest thing I could think of would be to disable $wgRestrictDisplayTitle, but MediaWiki's manual page discourages that practice. Alternatively, the Translate extension could be used to create internationalization variations for categories, similar to what's already in place for pages in the Commons namespace. ForeverFlying (talk) 18:11, 5 August 2026 (UTC)

So one option here, would be to do something like the following in the {{Wikidata infobox}} template:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span class="translated-title" title="TRANSLATED NAME OF CATEGORY FROM WIKIDATA HERE"><span class="translated-title-inner">{{FULLPAGENAME}}</span></span>}}

Then add the following CSS to either site CSS or your personal Special:MyPage/common.css

#firstHeading .translated-title::before {
  content: attr(title) " ";
}
#firstHeading .translated-title .translated-title-inner {
  font-size: 50%;
  color: grey;
}
#firstHeading .translated-title .translated-title-inner::before {
  content: '(';
}
#firstHeading .translated-title .translated-title-inner::after {
  content: ')';
}

Then we can get translated titles based on wikidata information on the category page.

As far as translating category names on individual pages, that is one of the potential benefits of showing categories in the information template (As i proposed at Commons:Village_pump/Proposals#Include_categories_and_depicts_in_the_{{Information}}_template), since we can potentially translate them in display. For example, see how the category Western Caucasus is shown in my example in english vs french.

That's not exactly what you are suggesting, but perhaps a step in the right direction. Bawolff (talk) 05:44, 21 August 2026 (UTC)

Flickr2Commons

Not all OK with Flickr2Сommons, sadly. I've uploaded File:Sunset in Vernazza 2018.jpg and File:Sunset in Hehuanshan, Taroko National Park.jpg, they have been transferred without date and {{Flickreview}} tag. I've added them manually. It is possible to use an old version? Юрий Д.К. 09:34, 8 July 2026 (UTC)

@1Veertje. RoyZuo (talk) 13:45, 8 July 2026 (UTC)

sorry, should have tested more. Submitted a patch that should fix this Vera ^(talk) 19:25, 8 July 2026 (UTC)

• Currently F2C adding Flickreview tag but date field is still empty. Юрий Д.К. 15:13, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

  @Юрий Д.К. looking at latest uploads, this seems resolved? although it seems if the flickr file has no exif or date taken then f2c leaves it empty. RoyZuo (talk) 10:49, 25 July 2026 (UTC)

  @RoyZuo: Sadly, no. I've uploaded File:Monistrol de Montserrat (55416587297).jpg. EXIF with date, but F2C leaves the file without it. I've added it manually. Юрий Д.К. 12:06, 26 July 2026 (UTC)

  @Юрий Д.К. i see how i got confused. i clicked your 1st version and saw the date in sdc.

  it seems technically ok if f2c doesnt fill in the data for a short while, coz @FlickrResourcesBot adds sdc. RoyZuo (talk) 13:54, 26 July 2026 (UTC)

  @RoyZuo: Hello. I hope that the F2C will add the date during import. It will be convenient for me to add "Taken on" template. Besides, I've noticed another problem. I've uploaded File:Storm cloud at sunset - Paraná, Entre Ríos (34769035286).jpg and the F2C left a digital Flickr ID of an author instead of a nickname. It isn't good indeed. Юрий Д.К. 00:36, 1 August 2026 (UTC)

  @1Veertje.

  @Юрий Д.К., indeed problematic. please report problems to https://codeberg.org/magnusmanske/flickr2commons/issues or m:Talk:Flickr2Commons. RoyZuo (talk) 17:01, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

  Thank you for allerting me. I've submitted a patch Vera ^(talk) 14:38, 3 August 2026 (UTC)

• Also F2C removing coords from Flickr images. Юрий Д.К. 21:39, 10 August 2026 (UTC)
• It appears that it working fine now. Thank for fixing! Юрий Д.К. 19:01, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

Surprising result from Commons search

I searched for "english national football team" in Commons. The URL is https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=english+national+football+team&title=Special%3AMediaSearch&type=image. To my surpise, the result set includes File:Lions Family Portrait Masai Mara.jpg which makes some sense in that the logo for the English national football team is three lions, but the metadata for the lions family portrait file shows nothing about English football that I can see. What might have happened with the search tool that caused this result? I'm wondering if the search tool leverages data from additional sources beyond the search text string and the image metadata. ↠Pine (✉) 19:20, 26 July 2026 (UTC)

I think the search uses Wikidata to try to match up words with concepts. My guess is that since "english national football team" is one of the aliases of Wikidata item England men's national association football team (Q47762), and so is "Three Lions", that those are considered completely equivalent terms by something within the search engine, and that picture has the text "three lions" in its description. That's a guess; I'm not sure where (or if) it's documented exactly how the search finds synonyms or related concepts. — PeterCooperJr (talk) 17:18, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

@PeterCooperJr: thanks for the comment. That may be what happened. See mw:Help:MediaSearch, mw:MediaSearch and Commons talk:Media search. By the way @JTweed-WMF: you appear to be a member of the newly-created mw:Media Platform Team, and perhaps can answer my question authoritatively as well as the unanswered questions and comments on those talk pages. Thanks, ↠Pine (✉) 17:27, 1 August 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping, I love this example and have passed it onto the right team internally. Search is not part of the new Media Platform team scope, but it is a problem space that I'm familiar with from a previous role so it's been interesting to take a look. In this case, the guess above is correct. The "three lions" term is coming from Wikidata and being included as a synonym. The reason that the image of lions is appearing so high in the results is because it's a previous picture of the day, which gives its relevance score a considerable boost. This is a good example of two good things that improve search in the aggregate (synonyms and a quality image signal) causing issues for one particular search. Optimising search is really hard and often things that fix one query will perform worse for others. The Search team is always trying to find the balance that gives the best results overall across all queries, but are now aware of this query and have taken this example on board. JTweed-WMF (talk) 14:26, 12 August 2026 (UTC)

Cleanup of bad pages created by broken template

I just wanted to notify that due to a missing pipe in the template Commons:Deletion requests/Mass deletion request/header/i18n some bad pages got accidentally created such as:

• Commons:Deletion requests/2026/08/05action=edit&preload=Commons:Deletion+requests/newday, deleted by @Jaqen
• Commons:Deletion requests/2026/08/06action=edit&preload=Commons:Deletion+requests/newday, deleted by @The Squirrel Conspiracy
• Commons:Deletion requests/2026/06/30action=edit&preload=Commons:Deletion+requests/newday, which needs its content to be moved to Commons:Deletion requests/2026/06/30 before the page gets deleted.

I already fixed the template but Commons:Deletion requests/Mass deletion request/header/i18n/en and Commons:Deletion requests/Mass deletion request/header/i18n/de need to be updated accordingly.

It's moon (talk) 14:05, 6 August 2026 (UTC)

Moved the last one and deleted it. - Jmabel ! talk 20:30, 6 August 2026 (UTC)

The next needed step is to mark Commons:Deletion requests/Mass deletion request/header/i18n for translation. I don't actually know how to do that. - Jmabel ! talk 20:36, 6 August 2026 (UTC)

Someone has already requested this in Commons:Translators' noticeboard#Mark translation for Deletion requests/Mass deletion request/header/i18n.

According to Commons:Preparing a page for translation, it appears you need translation admin rights, which appear to be separate from regular admin. It's moon (talk) 23:28, 6 August 2026 (UTC)

It looks like the translated subpages have been updated (Special:Diff/1257622398 & Special:Diff/1257622393) :)) It's moon (talk) 21:48, 7 August 2026 (UTC)

Thanks to It's moon for noticing and fixing it, my bad :) —Matrix(!) _{ping one}^{when replying} {user - talk? - _uselesscontributions} 11:46, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-33

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

• A new ChartWizard is now available on Wikimedia Commons for users interested in creating charts from their own data. The wizard makes the Chart extension more beginner-friendly by allowing editors to create charts, such as bar and pie charts, without needing to use JSON. Users can still switch to the JSON editor if they prefer. Feedback on the new tool is welcome on the wish talk page.
• View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the Wikipedia iOS app’s Picture of the Day widget displayed the same image every day instead of updating daily, has now been fixed. [1]

Updates for technical contributors

• Math formula SVG images will soon be generated in the browser instead of on the server. MathML continues to be generated on the server and renders in the browser without JavaScript. Wikibooks will see this change on 12 August, Wikisource on 19 August and Wikipedia from 20-27 August. You can try this by selecting "MathML with SVG image (client side MathJax rendering)" in your preferences. This change is part of deprecating RESTBase and deprecating Mathoid. [2]
• Category pages will soon support sorting entries by the time they are added to a category. This will make it easier to find recently or long-standing categorized pages. It will also improve workflows for maintenance categories such as deletion backlogs and other time-based review tasks. You can use cldsort=timestamp URL argument in category view to sort the entries. [3]
• Gadgets and user scripts on Wikimedia wikis may now use ES2018 features and ES2019 features in JavaScript code. Previously, the platform only allowed up to ES2017. MediaWiki validates the source code to protect functionality from syntax errors and to ensure scripts are valid in all supported browsers. [4]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:42, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Data file too big to edit

I've come across the strange case of Data:McGraw electric railway directory company observations.tab. DavidLevinson was able to upload it and later add categories, but my attempt to move it from Category:Rail transport in the United States to Category:Tram transport in the United States failed with the error The text you have submitted is 3,123.549 kilobytes long, which is more than the maximum of 2,048 kilobytes. David thinks it might be due to how Commons expands JSON. Does anyone have any way to make the category change - and are there any guardrails we can put up to prevent large data files becoming effectively uneditable? Pi.1415926535 (talk) 02:54, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

I filed a request to increase the tabular data limit, but it wasn't successful (Commons:Village_pump/Proposals/Archive/2026/04#Increase_data_maximum_of_(tabular)_data_pages) --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 19:46, 12 August 2026 (UTC)

in theory it should have not been possible to do this in the first place. the file will become editable once enough content is removed from it to bring it below the limit. Bawolff (talk) 17:07, 15 August 2026 (UTC)

Some strange changes in header menu like "nominate this image, copy, etc...

Something seems to have gone wrong here.

.

The old version was located in a separate bar, as can be seen here.

Good day! I have once again noticed that something was unnecessarily changed regarding the display of files here. It used to be displayed on a separate line, but now it only appears under a single dot, and if you're lucky, the full menu actually shows up. Why was this changed, and for what reason? I’m not a programmer, just an admin, and I’m a creature of habit; but if something doesn't work properly, it shouldn't have been implemented in the first place. Best regards, זיו「Ziv」 • For love letters and other notes 14:09, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

Confirmed. Fortunately, it happened just twice and appeared temporarily two days ago, then it was fine again and now it doesn't work properly... --Achim55 (talk) 15:54, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

"File:HTML tooltip.png" fails to render if requested as a thumbnail

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T285875
DECLINED

I noticed that File:HTML tooltip.png is rendered as a blank/broken image if the image is used with the "thumbnail" parameter included, no matter if it's viewed on desktop or mobile device.

For some reason, it leads to the Too many thumbnail requests for failing image error message if visited via the browser's context menu, no matter what the requested thumbnail size is.

Comparison:

[[File:HTML tooltip.png]]:

[[File:HTML tooltip.png|thumb]]:

Is this a software bug that needs to be fixed, or do I have to update (to an image with different content) and upload a new version of the image with larger resolution, or should I do something else, like uploading a new image (like I mentioned before on this paragraph) with different file name and replacing all usage of the older one with the newer one? Exploraz (talk) 00:14, 16 August 2026 (UTC)

According to this snapshot on the Wayback Machine of the downscaled thumbnail image URL, the server returned the following error message: Error while trying to fetch the image: Failed to convert image b"convert: no images defined `png:-' @ error/convert.c/ConvertImageCommand/3229.\n" Exploraz (talk) 06:03, 16 August 2026 (UTC)

Looking at the error message, I think that includes an excerpt of an error message produced by en:ImageMagick.

Indeed, when I processed that image with magick convert HTML_tooltip.png -resize 250 250px_HTML_tooltip.png, an identical but more complete error message shows up:

convert: IDAT: invalid distance too far back `HTML_tooltip.png' @ error/png.c/MagickPNGError/1308.
convert: no images defined `250px_HTML_tooltip.png' @ error/deprecate.c/ConvertImageCommand/3375.

According to this GitHub issue coment, running pngfix --out=HTML_tooltip_fixed.png HTML_tooltip.png does indeed made magick convert HTML_tooltip_fixed.png -resize 250 250px_HTML_tooltip_fixed.png happy.

I'll overwrite it with the fixed image then.

—Exploraz (talk) 06:24, 16 August 2026 (UTC)

It turns out I can't overwrite it by myself with my current user rights (I see others used to be able to do that without autopatrol, but that got changed). If any autopatrols are running a Linux system, feel free to do that. —Exploraz (talk) 06:46, 16 August 2026 (UTC)

@Exploraz: I've marked that file page to allow overwriting. Please let me know when you are done with it so I can revert that. - Jmabel ! talk 20:36, 16 August 2026 (UTC)

 Done -- Thanks for helping, @Jmabel! It took about 3 minutes for the server-side cache to catch up, which has already passed now. Exploraz (talk) 05:02, 17 August 2026 (UTC)

Turns out that this is not the only instance where this would happen in Commons:

• Commons:Village pump/Technical/Archive/2025/03#File:DEU Weißeritzkreis COA.png
• Commons:Village pump/Technical/Archive/2025/06#Server erroros generating thumbnails — two cases
  • Mentioned: Commons:Village pump/Technical/Archive/2025/05#Several images from 2019 are not available in smaller resolutions — this one has a different root cause
• en:Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 219#Attack at Fromelles — Exploraz (talk) 05:20, 17 August 2026 (UTC)

Upload fails

(copied here from Commons:Help desk) I no longer seem to be able to upload anything, either via the Upload Wizard or via the 'Upload a new version' command. I use Private Relay for privacy, so have to manually unhide my IP address to edit here. That worked fine until recently, but no longer seems to – in the upload wizard I get a message that says "The server responded with an invalid JSON document. This could be a problem with the API, or you could be using a proxy server that prevents you from uploading files"; in the 'Upload a new version' dialogue I just get shunted back to a blank upload page. Has something changed, or is there a way round this? Thanks, Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 08:02, 17 August 2026 (UTC)

I've tried switching off Private Relay. That allows me to edit normally, without needing to unhide my IP, but doesn't allow me to upload. Any help welcome. Thanks, Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 08:05, 17 August 2026 (UTC)

I've had nonexistent IP blocks be resolved by clearing cache and cookies. Try logging in in incognito with Private Relay off? JayCubby (talk) 20:18, 17 August 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-34

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 Worklist feature for the Event Registration tool is now live on all Wikimedia wikis. With Worklist, event organizers can add the articles their event will focus on directly to the event page. The Worklist also powers Event Pathways which notifies other editors of the upcoming or ongoing event when they edit an article featured in the event's Worklist. This is the minimum viable version (MVP), and feedback is welcome. Organizers are encouraged to try the feature. A hands-on Worklist Setup Workshop will take place on 18 August at 16:00 UTC and 19 August at 11:00 UTC.

Updates for editors

• Special:ShortPages displays short pages by their size, but in many cases it gets filled with disambiguations and soft redirects, making it harder to find the short articles themselves. Starting this weekend, you will be able to choose not to include an article in the special page by adding the magic word __EXPECTSHORTPAGE__. [5]
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Bole (w:bol:) [6]
• Starting the week of August 17, the page toolbar will wrap onto two lines when there is not enough horizontal space for all the buttons. This is a fully merged patch from the Reader Experience team which aims to reduce crowding in the Vector 2022 toolbar, that may occur on some language Wikipedias at certain screen widths.
• View all 16 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, uploading large files to Wikimedia Commons has become more stable and less prone to failure following some fixes related to the “Could not acquire lock” upload error. [7]

Updates for technical contributors

• Debian Bullseye will reach the end of its Long Term Support on 31 August 2026. Some Cloud VPS projects still have instances running Debian Bullseye. Maintainers of those projects are encouraged to migrate to Debian Bookworm or Debian Trixie. A migration guide is available to help with the process, and users may also want to consider whether their workload is better suited to Toolforge. If you need help or cannot complete the migration by 31 August, please contact the Cloud VPS admins as soon as possible. Read more.
• 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 21:00, 17 August 2026 (UTC)

ค้นหา เมนูผู้ใช้ ไฟล์:'The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon', oil on canvas painting by Edward Poynter, 1890, Art Gallery of New South Wales.jpg

politique de confidentialit'e ~2026-45131-71 (talk) 07:57, 19 August 2026 (UTC)

• Individual keywords aren't helpful here. --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 14:12, 19 August 2026 (UTC)

Uploads do not appear permanently on my Watchlist

My uploads do not appear permanently on my Watchlist (only for "1 year") though my Global Preferences are indicating they should. What do I do wrong or is this a hiccup in the system? JopkeB (talk) 09:13, 23 August 2026 (UTC)

For me it seems to work fine. I've clicked the "edit your watchlist" button and it shows all files as "never", and some o the ones I've found are several years old. Pere prlpz (talk) 14:20, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

@Pere prlpz: Did you do that in your Global Preferences? JopkeB (talk) 02:37, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

Edit requests for abusefilter admin and interface admin

Can someone deal with this editrequest that has been open for a month and also this requested change to the abusefilter 103 ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:55, 24 August 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-35

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 Special:CreateAccount page has been simplified as part of ongoing work to modernize the account creation experience. The panel showing project statistics no longer appears next to the form on desktop and mobile web. Multiple account creation experiments show that a simpler form helps newcomers complete registration. [8]
• In order to improve page performance, images now load when they are viewed. This means images lower down an article will not load if a reader never scrolls to that part of the page, which may affect some image-related metrics. [9]

• View all 42 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where image thumbnails in Abstract Wikipedia could fail to display after the corresponding file was moved on Wikimedia Commons, has now been fixed. Thumbnails will now update correctly when files are moved. [10]

Updates for technical contributors

• User Info card is a feature that helps patrollers see information about user accounts. So far, it has been available only in places such as page history, logs and recent changes. Now, it's possible to place it in the page content as well, using the {{#uic:}} parser function. It can be particularly useful in templates like {{Userlinks}} (or their specialized variants), as it will make it easier to see the context about a user on various noticeboard pages. The card will be displayed only to users who have it enabled in their preferences. [11]
• Due to user security and privacy risks, we have disabled access to Special:MyPage URLs when specifically using action=raw. If you are impacted by this, consider whether you can use an alternative approach. Special:MyPage URLs can still be accessed and used without action=raw. Specified user page URLs (e.g. User:Myusername) can still be used with action=raw. [12]
• Due to an update, the thumbnailing software has been improved. This includes upgrading librsvg to 2.60 and ImageMagick to 7, as well as resolving a number of long-standing thumbnailing bugs like rendering errors. [13]

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:42, 24 August 2026 (UTC)

Problem with FlickreviewR 2

There seems to be a problem with the FlickreviewR 2 bot. It seems recently the rate of Flickr files reviewed by the bot has significantly decreased, causing a large growing backlog in Category:Flickr review needed. The category has 2600+ files when I checked yesterday, currently it has 3300+ files.

Previously these Flickr files were reviewed within several minutes, but now it takes 1 or 2 days for them to be reviewed. I worried that it might taken even longer in the future if the backlog continues to grow.

Anyone knows how to solve this problem? Is it something wrong with the bot or with Flickr? It is possible that this is related to the ongoing rate-limit problem with Flickr at the UploadWizard and Flickr2Commons. Thanks. Tvpuppy (talk) 20:02, 25 August 2026 (UTC)

It appears the problem has somehow been resolved, as the backlog has been decreasing since yesterday. Thanks. Tvpuppy (talk) 13:12, 27 August 2026 (UTC)

Last month in technical changes (August)

Overview of development and technical activity since July 26th. These changes might not have made the bigger news bulletins as they are more specific to Commons and have smaller usecases and/or audiences.

• Already covered in Tech News, but native lazy-loading has landed everywhere on desktop T148047. This means that now all images only load when they are close to being in view of the browser viewport, which should help with bandwidth usage for both clients and the wikimedia servers. This is a browser feature that was launched some 10 6 years ago, that we can now use natively (without Javascript). This took several of the Wikimedia developer teams (mobile, content platform, multimedia etc).
• UploadWizard's Flickr import works again after Content-Security-Policy had broken it T419263 T278472.
• Special:Upload pages can now test larger than 100MB uploads by making use of the chunked parameter phab:T74768. Another very old wishlist item getting closer to resolution. By Amdrel (wishlist contractor) and myself.
• A new version of thumbor (the thumbnailing service) was released. Now running Debian Trixie, with newer versions of Imagemagick, libsvg etc. T419815. Thanks to Wikimedia's MediaWiki-Media-Platform Team.
  • More of the rarer EXIF orientations are handled correctly now T424495. By myself and MediaWiki-Media-Platform team.
  • Transparent WebP images no longer lose their transparency when resized T283646. By myself and MediaWiki-Media-Platform team
  • Multilingual SVG rendering is now better supported, with fixes for language fallback T261192 and T154237.
  • librsvg update fixed T246003, T270836, T370044, T431758.
  • a bug where thumbnails of HDR images would sometimes turn black has been fixed T393331.
• PDF handling should be more resilient now: metadata-extraction failures are classified as transient or permanent instead of getting permanently cached as "no metadata", a likely cause or contributing factor to PDFs showing as having 0×0 dimensions T433059 T420341 T299521. PDFs are also now fetched by storage URL for metadata extraction. Thanks to Chuiimuii_ofc, Sam Wilson, Bawolff and myself.
• TIFF lossy/lossless parameters would sometime break loading TIFF files in MultimediaViewer T434333. By myself
• VTT captions now render natively in the browser instead of with a software renderer, T116154. This briefly broke SRT-only subtitles and audio captions, both now fixed T434172. By myself with support of James Forrester.
• Video transcoding was updated to a newer ffmpeg version. This enabled making use of the ffmpeg's fpsmax flag. This helps with transcoding 60fps original content T318419. Thanks to @Ladsgroup of MediaWiki-Media-Platform team.
• Thumbnail serving is being moved off the upload cluster onto a new thumb.wikimedia.org domain, for better caching and resilience against scraper traffic T427465. This is rolling out wiki by wiki; test wikis, mediawiki.org, cs/fawiki and dewiki so far. By MediaWiki-Media-Platform team
• And the usual set of changes related translations, dependency updates and newer PHP/MediaWiki versions (~90 this period, excl. translations).

Apologies if i forgot to name a few people. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:16, 26 August 2026 (UTC)

Sounds good! --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 13:12, 26 August 2026 (UTC)

Great updates, thank you! I'm especially looking forward to the new thumb.wikimedia.org in hopes that it helps resolve issues for tools whose display of thumbnails have been impacted by rate limiting. ~Kevin Payravi (talk) 16:32, 26 August 2026 (UTC)

Indeed, that is part of the reason we're doing this. The other being it allows us to move thumbnails to the same CDN cache as text, which is much larger and means that thumbnails won't be ejected from the cache due to automated access to the much larger original files. Once this is all in place, we will look to introduce separate rate limits for thumbnails and originals. We're also considering if this can be tiered like the API rate limiting. JTweed-WMF (talk) 12:58, 27 August 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for putting all this together in one place, it's a great summary of what's going on. Happy that the new Media Platform team is starting to make a difference. JTweed-WMF (talk) 12:54, 27 August 2026 (UTC)

Attention! This update of librsvg in August 2026 has almost certainly caused broken rendering of Media Viewer at various types of images and vector files rendering errors in hundreds of known files. I request a fix or tentative rollback of changes before August 2026. (Most recent reports connected: PNG caching bug? and Image not loading the SVG) ThecentreCZ (talk) 08:03, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

I see no evidence in either report. There are a lot of things changing atm for various reasons about images (OS upgrades, improved caching, new urls etc etc). You are going to have to be very specific if you think there is something wrong that you want people to look into. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:11, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

subcategory sortkey display

Mostly, the 'Subcategories' section of a category is divided by letter or number, more rarely other glyphs (there are informal standards); for this post I wish to bring up the 'regional indicator symbols'. For the Unicode characters in the range U+1F1E6 to U+1F1FF, which have the property that when put next to each other (example: 🇧 followed by 🇷) then browsers and font vendors can decide which flag should go with pairs of symbols (🇧🇷). In theory, this makes for a good sortkey. As these characters are encoded in alphabetical order from A to Z, they naturally sort by this two-letter code. However, in the category view only the first character is displayed, which breaks the flag. Could an exception be made for this use case? — Arlo James Barnes 03:13, 27 August 2026 (UTC)

What is the chance of any large number of users being able to work with this successfully through the existing UI? - Jmabel ! talk 20:27, 27 August 2026 (UTC)

I guess that depends on what you mean by large. Plenty of people have access to emoji keyboards that can paste flag icon pairs, but if something breaks (like the two halves get separated) it may not be immediately obvious what went wrong. Arlo James Barnes 20:53, 27 August 2026 (UTC)

Hmm, its an interesting idea. Make the sortkeys of the uppercase collation be first grapheme cluster instead of first character. It might make sense in general, although might be weird if there are keys where the first grapheme cluster is a prefix of some other grapheme cluster and sort both before and after that grapheme cluster.

Of course this might already be fixed if commons switched to the UCA collation, which quite frankly would make sense as a multilingual project. Bawolff (talk) 21:14, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

PNG caching bug?

I've been trying to upload a new version of File:Strait of Malacca highlighted.png, but the image preview is refusing to update (even after reverting back and forth). Is there a currently known bug affecting PNGs or something? — Paul_012 (talk) 00:30, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

Hmm, seems like linking to the file caused it to resolve itself? — Paul_012 (talk) 00:59, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

It's not just PNG, I've noticed various files take awhile to regenerate thumbnails. Maybe a new anti-DOS precaution? #Last month in technical changes (August) mentions some relevant updates. — Arlo James Barnes 16:54, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

@Paul 012 This is most likely a known cache invalidation problem phab:T425216. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:17, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-36

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

• A new format for the Community Wishlist is open for feedback. You can read the proposed ideas on Meta. This new process plans to improve how wishes are triaged, voted on, and prioritized in a way that is transparent and balanced across project families and language editions. This consultation is open for two weeks.

Updates for editors

• The latest release of the Wikipedia Android app includes updates to the Saved feature, bringing the app’s saving experience closer to iOS and Web. The update redesigns the Saved tab with an “All articles” view, removes the default “Saved” reading list, renames reading lists to “Collections,” and modernizes the article-saving experience. [14]
• The Reading Lists feature was enabled for all logged-in users on Bengali, Chinese, Czech and Vietnamese Wikipedias on August 25, after several months as a beta feature. Reading Lists will be available to all logged-in users on Arabic, French and Indonesian Wikipedias on September 1, followed by English Wikipedia on September 14, and all other Wikipedia wikis on September 28.
• At the end of the month, some logged-out readers on Bengali, Czech, Persian, English, and Polish Wikipedias using the Minerva skin on mobile will see an updated navigation bar in an A/B test. The test will compare the current navigation bar with a new version designed to make it easier to find information more quickly. The goal is to determine whether these changes encourage readers to return more often. This experiment will not change the experience for logged-in readers and/or editors.
• Editors who maintain redirects, templates, and categories used on redirect pages now have improved ways for finding and curating redirects. Previously, redirects pages could not be searched. Two new search keywords, onlyredirects: and withredirects:, now allow redirects to be searched directly and can be combined with existing keywords such as incategory:, intitle:, and insource:. [15]
• The ISBN lookup tools for generating citations were recently not working because of external service problems. Developers are working on solutions. [16]
• View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where searching for pages by category using deepcat could return no results or unrelated results has now been fixed. [17]

Updates for technical contributors

• The domain of URLs for thumbnails is changing from upload.wikimedia.org to thumb.wikimedia.org. The old URLs will continue to work for the foreseeable future but MediaWiki will advertise the new domain instead. URLs to other types of media such as original files, videos and transcodes will still be served from upload.wikimedia.org. [18]
• The Wikimedia Math API is now deprecated. These endpoints will be fully sunset by the end of September 2026. Developers who call these endpoints should transition to alternative math rendering solutions, such as the native MathML or MathJax. Third-party MediaWiki installations that utilize the Math extension for formula rendering are required to upgrade to v1.43+ to avoid disruption of service.

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• Read more about TextMatch in a Diff post titled, Custom edit suggestions for every wiki: How communities are shaping Suggestion Mode with TextMatch.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:50, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

"Add a note"

The "Add a note" (ImageNote) feature seems to have gone away for me today on all file pages. Is this a bug, or is there some UI change that requires me to change how I get this? I believe Image-Annotator is turned on by default, and I certainly have not done anything deliberate to disable it.

I'm getting the following in my browser console; maybe something else is firing an error and it never reaches the JavaScript to load this button?

uncaught exception: Object
can't access property "currentWindowGlobal", bc is null ext-tabs-base.js:813:19
uncaught exception: Object 2
IndexedDB UnknownErr in ClampResultCode: ..\..\..\..\checkouts\gecko\dom\indexedDB\IndexedDBCommon.cpp:47
uncaught exception: Object

- Jmabel ! talk 23:21, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

same for me. --Herzi Pinki (talk) 08:55, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Even worse now: "Open in Media Viewer" no longer appears on a line of its own (no line break before it). - Jmabel ! talk 18:24, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

There is an open thread reporting the same bug in MediaWiki_talk:Gadget-ImageAnnotator.js#annotations_with_problems, but I wonder if there is a better place to report it in order to be fixed. Pere prlpz (talk) 13:52, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

Is there a phabricator ticket on this? - Jmabel ! talk 20:40, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

As far as I know there is none, and the help page says bugs and problems should be reported in the talk page. However, we could try opening a ticket. Pere prlpz (talk) 21:03, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

Seems to work again. --Herzi Pinki (talk) 20:55, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

works in rare cases e.g. File:Kreuzspitze-Grossvenediger.jpg --Herzi Pinki (talk) 21:01, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

That one works for me, too; File:Arthur Avenue 07 - Clinton Hall.jpg does not. - Jmabel ! talk 02:32, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

We have on german forum Commons:Forum#Annotation_weg since pretty long a discussion. I tried to contact the developeres more than once, but aint got a reaction. It has to to with the new skins because with the old skins it works fine.--Sanandros (talk) 15:21, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

I am having this problem on Vector (2022). Is that considered a "new" skin (after 4 years)? - Jmabel ! talk 21:40, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

Yes Vector 2022 is the new one, Vector 2010 used to function with me. But some users said also that the browser has a infuence. Some us Firefox and got problems and with Safari it worked fine.--Sanandros (talk) 22:47, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

I tried vector 2010 and Anotation doesn't seem to work there. Example: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Diada_castellera_de_la_Festa_Major_de_la_Salut_2026_-_Muixeranga_de_Barcelona_-_20260906_134240.jpg&useskin=vector Pere prlpz (talk) 16:38, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

If u use your link it works for me, using FF 155.0.1 (64-Bit).--Sanandros (talk) 19:37, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

I found and fixed one issue, which was a regex for the thumbnail URL that didn't include the new thumb.wikimedia.org (phab:T427465). File:Diada castellera de la Festa Major de la Salut 2026 - Muixeranga de Barcelona - 20260906 134240.jpg and File:Arthur Avenue 07 - Clinton Hall.jpg are working for me now, if there are other pages that are still not working, please include a link and what skin you are using. --AntiCompositeNumber (they/them) (talk) 19:54, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

Those two now work for me as well. Thank you, AntiCompositeNumber. - Jmabel ! talk 21:51, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

Yes it worked also for me.--Sanandros (talk) 22:31, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

I need wikidata-to-commonscat help

I need help untangling some Wikidata connections for horse-drawn vehicle categories. Could someone help me establish correct one-to-one Wikidata connections for:

• Category:Coaches (carriage)
• Category:Horse-drawn carriages
• Category:Carriages

I discovered that the Wikidata item d:Q4655519 (coach) was linked to both Category:Horse-drawn carriages and Category:Coaches (carriage). Since d:Q4655519 is specifically about coaches, I removed the carriage-related sitelink. However, Category:Horse-drawn carriages continued to display d:Q4655519 in its Wikidata infobox, and I am not sure why.

While trying to fix this, I started creating a new item (d:Q141245384) before realizing that d:Q235356 (carriage) already exists and is linked to Category:Carriages. But Category:Carriages includes both horse-drawn and non-horse-drawn material, so I am unsure how to correctly align the Wikidata items with the Commons categories.

At this point I am confused and do not want to make things worse. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.   ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 06:32, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Update: This morning, Category:Horse-drawn carriages is no longer displaying d:Q4655519 (coach), which is correct, so maybe that problem was a caching issue.   ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 15:35, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Update #2: I think I've figured it out (courtesy of 2 separate AIs, neither of which gave me the exact right instructions, but which helped me figure it out). At least now there is a 1-to-1 correlation between each of the three Commons categories and a singular wikidata record.   ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 09:36, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

Image not loading the SVG

When I go to Category:Wikipedians interested in East Asia, I seen the SVG is not display on Commons. I seen the image is missing so it not loading SVG?

Ranch9613 💬 17:44, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Hello, I think someone or something broke the SVG Media Viewer and rendering of vector files at Commons in about August 2026. I have seen some files and i have a vector file that was rendered perfectly from 2025 to Summer 2026 and since last month it shows weird wrong line drawing and tweaks. ThecentreCZ (talk) 07:13, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

It seems that a new recursion/depth limit has been put in place in newer versions of librsvg. This will require some investigation. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:13, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

Yeah, it's the limit. test:File:East Asia orthographic projection flattened - 2.svg works fine no issues. Re-upload might still show broken because of memcached protection in place (which is based on the image name, not hash) but that should fix it :/ Amir (talk) 10:34, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

The file there is File:East Asia (orthographic projection).svg. This error sounds similar to T436505: 400 Bad Request on File:Warsaw Pact in 1990 (orthographic projection).svg. Sam Wilson 08:01, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

This is now fixed —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:28, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

Błąd wewnętrzny

[e7abf4b6-7e7a-487d-bc5c-a4eeb7f22944] 2026-09-02 18:25:08: Krytyczny wyjątek typu „InvalidArgumentException”.

-> Błąd Magen (talk) 18:28, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

I have the same, for the last 10 minutes. Ymblanter (talk) 18:30, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

So did I. Obviously the upload is not working at all. -- Clemens 18:48, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

The old form still works. Ymblanter (talk) 18:52, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

Ah, Thank you. Still a severe issue, because the old form cannot be accessed via WP (e. g. Wiki loves monuments pages(!)). -- Clemens 18:55, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

It's now working again. Many thanks to whoever fixed this. -- Clemens 19:10, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

Page formatting problem

File:QR code for mobile English Wikipedia.svg#filehistory. Have a look at the last column ("Comment"). For me, at least, it is cut off. I'm at 1920 x 1080 on a PC, using Firefox, for what it's worth. - Jmabel ! talk 03:32, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

This isn't a formatting issue; the upload comment itself is truncated at 255 characters, probably either by the wiki at the time of upload or by the bot which was responsible for the upload. Omphalographer (talk) 00:43, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

@Omphalographer: yes, I know about the truncation, but for me the right-hand half of the column is cut off, even the header. Does it not look that way for you? I can do a screenshot if it is not something you can see on your system. - Jmabel ! talk 00:59, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

Interesting - I do not see that on my system. What web browser are you using, and what is your skin set to in MediaWiki preferences? Omphalographer (talk) 01:01, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

@Omphalographer: Vector 2022 skin, Firefox 154.0.01 running on a Windows PC. Screenshot now added above, you'll need to click through to the file page to read it intelligibly. - Jmabel ! talk 03:23, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

Ah - yes, I see the same issue if I switch to Vector 2022. Probably worth reporting at mw:Talk:Reading/Web/Desktop Improvements. Omphalographer (talk) 03:44, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

 Done - Jmabel ! talk 07:06, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

Yes, older versions of mediawiki limited edit summaries and image upload comments to 255 bytes (due to being stored in mysql as VARBINARY(255)). The limit is not quite as strict in newer mediawiki, but there is still a similar limit i believe. Bawolff (talk) 01:01, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

Again, I know that, and it has nothing to do with the problem I am reporting. - Jmabel ! talk 03:23, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

Yep, sorry, i replied before i saw Omphalographer"s comment and your response to it Bawolff (talk) 20:59, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

.ogg videos don't have thumbnails on Wikipedia?

On one of my uploads (I usually do webm but I use ogg sometimes) the thumbnail wouldn't show up on the Wikipedia article, I thought it was a fluke, but today I ran across another article using someone else's ogg video and the thumbnail for it wont render on Wikipedia either. Is this a known issue? Is there a fix? Just curious, Nesnad (talk) 12:10, 5 September 2026 (UTC) EDIT: If today's example is useful to see, this is the video that didn't have a thumbnail on Wikipedia: File:Schwebebahn timelapse.ogg Nesnad (talk) 12:12, 5 September 2026 (UTC) FINAL EDIT: Weird. Just noticed on another language Wiki it loads a thumbnail but not on English Wiki? Anyway, just looking for some thoughts. Nesnad (talk) 12:14, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

Broken import function?

I just tried to import the file Gem1.jpg from enwiki (and, in the process, rename it to "The Gem, second series, Number 1, 1908.jpg"). The error message I got was:

"Import failed

Internal error: MediaWiki\Status\StatusFormatter::getMessage: Invalid result object: no error text but not OK"

This broken import/upload process created File:The Gem, second series, Number 1, 1908.jpg, which has metadata and edit history from enwiki, but no associated file. I immediately tried again (with an extra period so as to avoid filename clashes), and got File:The Gem, second series, Number 1, 1908..jpg — which, again, has metadata and enwiki edit history, but no associated file.

I assume this has been a problem for a while; is there a quick way to check all recent imports to see if they're corrupt? DS (talk) 15:07, 7 September 2026 (UTC)

(Also, I think I was using the wrong heuristic to assess whether the image's copyright has expired; better to not put it on Commons just yet. The technical issue still applies, though.) DS (talk) 15:29, 7 September 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-37

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

• Add a Link has been upgraded for English Wikipedia users with improved detection of links that have different capitalization. This will help reduce ambiguous suggestions caused by differences in capitalization in article titles, including articles about cultural goods. A second phase of improvements is planned, which will also prepare the feature for release in other languages. [19] [20]
• The Article guidance feature will be enabled by default for junior editors on Simple English and Turkish Wikipedia starting 10 September 2026 following an experiment. Junior editors with 0 to 99 edits will automatically see the feature when they click a red link or use the "Madde oluşturto" option on Turkish Wikipedia to create a new article. The change is intended to help junior editors create higher-quality articles that meet each Wikipedia’s standards. Additional improvements will continue based on the experiment results and community feedback.
• The Pageviews Analysis tool which allows users to compare pageviews across multiple pages, turns 10 years old this year and several new features have been added. They include WikiNav which provides insights into how readers of Wikipedia explore the content, editing stats in Siteviews, the ability to lookup articles belonging to a WikiProject, and support for dark mode. [21]
• A visually simplified Minerva navigation bar is being tested for logged-out readers using mobile web on the Bengali, Czech, English, Farsi, and Polish Wikipedias. The experiment aims to determine whether simplifying the navigation improves reader retention. The test will run from August 31 to September 28, and no action is required from users.
• WMDE Technical Wishes is working on improving auto-generated reference names in VisualEditor. Editors will only notice a slight change starting this week. When adding automatic reference names the numbering will start at :1 instead of :0. Read more on the project page. [22]
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 23. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [23]
• View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where Parsoid could mishandle nested nowiki tags, causing content to be lost and displaying unwanted text has now been fixed. [24]

Updates for technical contributors

• Interface administrators can configure gadgets from MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition. The definition format has been updated and no longer requires the ResourceLoader option, as gadgets are always loaded through ResourceLoader. This simplifies gadget configuration by removing an option that is no longer necessary, making gadget definitions easier for administrators. [25]
• 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 18:41, 7 September 2026 (UTC)

"the numbering will start at :1 instead of :0" Arlo James Barnes 19:01, 7 September 2026 (UTC)

"We will only be adding arsenic to the well, not cyanide." DS (talk) 02:33, 8 September 2026 (UTC)

42 would be so much better! ℺ Gone Postal (〠 ✉ • ✍ ⏿) 04:45, 8 September 2026 (UTC)

I fixed links in this message that didn't show up because of missing colons. But because this is a mass message delivery, other wikis might have the same typos too that have yet to be fixed :v. HyperAnd [talk] 04:25, 8 September 2026 (UTC)