Community Tech
This page is kept for historical interest. Any policies mentioned may be obsolete. See Community Wishlist for the current process. |
Community Tech
We leverage the Wishlist to collaborate with editors, volunteer developers, and other Wikimedia teams to turn community-identified needs into real solutions, and work on priority wishes.
The team
🛠️ How We Work
We are a small team with limited resources, and balance our efforts across three categories:
- Building tooling to advance the Community Wishlist
- Maintenance of existing tools and features supported by the Community Tech team
- Delivering on wishes, primarily by adopting Focus Areas supported by volunteers.
When we say "no" to a given request, we are merely stating it goes against our current priorities.
When working and communicating with us:
- Please be calm, civil, and assume we’re working in good faith.
- We aim to respond promptly but can't guarantee immediate replies.
- Sometimes, we may need to close a conversation if it takes too much of our time or attention.
- We can not handle projects on another team's roadmap or ones that conflict with their work, but we will direct you to the right person when possible.
- We can not discuss staffing or confidential issues.
Current selected projects
Community Tech is currently wrapping up carry-over work from the 2023 Wishlist. Beginning in 2024-25, the team will adopt community-supported Focus Areas via the new Community Wishlist.
| Projects | Project status |
|---|---|
| Multiple Watchlists | |
| Support full colour 3D models on Wikimedia projects | |
| Make the Chart extension beginner-friendly |
📢 Latest Updates
June 24, 2026: Latest updates for the Community Wishlist
Hello everyone,
Since our last monthly update on 13th May, substantial changes have been made to how the wishlist will work going forward, and there has been a large amount of community discussion. You can read those updates here and here, and we are asking for community input on how exactly the wishlist should operate in the future. Please join the discussion.
We’re proposing several changes to how we take in and prioritize wishes (such as a return to annual voting), but even as we discuss with communities how the wishlist will work in the future, existing wishes are in progress and continue to be completed by the various teams in the Product and Technology department, by affiliates, and by volunteers. So this is an update on those recently completed wishes, in-progress wishes, and upcoming ones.
The work we did in the last month
The Mobile Apps team has been working on more games (W514): “Which came first?” is now available on Android, and an iOS release will follow in July; “Did you know?” is on hold due to technical and linguistic constraints, though feedback is still welcome.
The Reader Growth team evaluated an experiment to Make 'Table of Contents' available in Wikipedia (Web) Mobile (W423). Results showed it lowered the retention rate for readers (primary success metric) by about 1.5% and shortened the amount of time they spent on wiki. As a result, the team will not implement the Table of Contents for readers on mobile web. Feedback is still welcome on the experiment talk page.
Make subreferencing work with inline refs and reflist (W309) is now done. The feature will be gradually deployed to all wikis starting June 2026 (deployment plan). Feedback can be shared with the WMDE Technical Wishes team on the project page.
Along with Sage (Wiki Ed), SuperGrey and Xinacod, MusikAnimal (WMF) is wrapping up adding new languages to “Who Wrote That” and to the P&E Dashboard (W503) with 56 languages total. Chinese, Japanese and Korean are taking additional time due to large XML dumps to import.
What we currently have in progress
The Wikidata team is working on giving editors an easy and seamless experience when contributing to Wikidata on mobile (W389). Editors can now enable a beta feature for mobile statement editing. The team is taking all the feedback into account as part of the mobile editing work, which will eventually also come to desktop.
The Moderator Tools team has continued the expansion of the Personal Dashboard (W313) to make it easier for editors to identify where their attention is needed. Users with more than 100+ edits (and no more than 500 edits on English Wikipedia) received a UI invite and personal tools menu link to view the page. Learn more about this on their project page.
Aude is working, with support from the Search and Wikidata teams plus Matěj Suchánek, on a patch to ensure to add a date range filter for MediaSearch (W221).
Make the Chart extension beginner-friendly (W414) will be owned by Reader Growth as MusikAnimal wraps up the implementation with their support. This week the realtime preview feature will be added to the JSON editor. The project page will be updated.
Three mobile app wishes related to discovery (W506), customization (W386), and personalization (W384) are informing the Mobile App team’s Explore Feed Refresh project, which is a large redesign to increase engagement through several smaller improvements and experiments. Phase 1 has recently had an Android beta rollout to 50% of users in production. iOS is being targeted for July. You can post feedback on the talk page.
The Language and Product Localization (LPL) team is working on allowing users to pin/unpin specific languages in interwiki links (W264). They aim to release it as part of the language selector UX improvements by the end of June.
The Unsupported Tools Working Group has prioritized Commons work such as uploads, including guidance on categories on upload (W526) and chunked uploading to Special:Upload (W46), which are being worked on by This Dot along with support from the group’s members Sohom Data and Cormac Parle.
What we are scoping next
The Unsupported Tools Working Group has prioritized additional Commons wishes to be implemented by This Dot, who have been doing Wishlist work on a contractual basis since November 2025, along with collaboration with teams such as Reader Growth and Wishlist UX for an updated audio player (W317), while the latter team focuses on the related spoken Wikipedia (W304) wish. Moreover, we continue to scope tools for image editing directly in Wikimedia Commons (W222), while support for brightness, contrast, and saturation filters was made possible thanks to support from Bawolff.
The Editing team has started to scope ways to highlight the edit button (W496) for potential new editors who may not be aware that they can edit. An initial experiment is planned for next quarter (July through September). A project page with more details is forthcoming.
With support of Wikimedia Brasil, Wikimedia Deutschland, and the Editing team, an intern from Outreachy is planning the automatic verification of duplicate references in the Visual Editor (W278). More details are in this Diff post.
Wikimedia Deutschland’s Technical Wishes team has also started a project page to possibly scope improving VE references' automatic names and reuse (W17). Possible solutions are listed on the project page, where you can also join discussions on the respective talk page.
Some statistics
Here is a recent snapshot all current wishes followed by notes on diffs since our last update on 13th May:

The most notable shifts in numbers are “in progress” growing from 18 to 24. These wishes are actively being worked on as seen in patches and user-facing experiments and beta phases.
For wishes marked “Done” in the pie chart, we have heard that some of these should have been declined for existing functionality. A few months ago we added a new sub-status for “Decline” that covers this use case.
You can read more about status details in the FAQ.
We need your feedback
For adding the mobile app reading lists to desktop (W102), the Reader team has updated their project page with a timeline and experiment details – you can join the talk page discussions, and also follow how feedback will be incorporated in Phabricator.
As always, if you have questions or feedback about it, please let us know in the Community Wishlist’s talk page. We are eager to hear from you!
Further information
- Team Processes
- Development
- Maintenance
- Team Documentation (Drafts in progress)
- Community Tech/Phabricator criteria