Hi! We will perform an upgrade of the wiki’s software starting at around 2025-08-28T20:00:00Z. We hope nothing major breaks and everyone can continue using the wiki without many issues. Discussions will be down for rebuilding for about 5 minutes during the upgrade. If something breaks and you're simply trying to view wiki pages, try opening them in incognito mode.
Here’s what’s changing:
Discussions
We’re getting a few new features in Discussions, which you can see in the screenshot below:
Reactions to posts
You will be able to react with any emoji to posts, instead of just using likes. Reactions appear in the lower left corner of posts, like this:
They can be chosen in the same area as regular likes, just by hovering over the like button:
The rightmost option in the picker allows you to use any reaction:
Post voting
You will be able to start posts where users can vote on every reply, similarly to some popular Q&A sites. We could use this for community votes in the future, where options to vote for are not immediately clear.
If you choose this post format, users will be able to vote on every reply to that post and comment under different replies in case they aren't providing a reply to the original question but rather asking for clarification or similar.
You will be able to choose this post format by selecting this option when creating a new post:
Search bar in header
The search bar will be available from the header in Discussions:
Search was already available in the header, but this should make it more prominent.
Rich text editor
Instead of having to write Markdown, you should be able to toggle a setting in the post composer to switch to the new rich text editor, where what you see written is pretty much what you'll get when you publish your post (although with a few limitations). Here's the button for it:
You should be able to use this right now! It has rolled out a few weeks ago, actually, I just never posted about it.
Wiki
The wiki is upgrading to MediaWiki 1.44, and while the linked page mostly explains a lot of technical details that are uninteresting, here are some highlights:
- We can now perform renames more easily, so if you need a rename that's going to be a much faster process. Earlier, this process was only easy if you contributed to only one wiki.
- When viewing file pages, a section below the file usage section will show if the file is used on any other language wikis. When renaming files, please make sure you update the pages from other language wikis as well!
- When you get notifications from another wiki, the dropdown will more clearly state which wikis are they from.
- The editor will warn you if you attempt to create a double redirect.
After the upgrade, I can look into fixing the bug with infoboxes displaying weirdly in the visual editor, as recent development around that extension added VisualEditor-related support.
was an emote.
Woah I didn't know we had our own emojis that's cool
