For Tech News, what wording would you suggest as the entry's content? You can either draft an entry here, or if you're confident on what it should say add it directly to the next draft.
Timing-wise, based on the merged-patch above I assume this should go in the upcoming edition (frozen for translations in ~18 hours, and delivered on Monday), but if that's incorrect please share a rough time-estimate for which week it should be announced. Thanks!

For Tech News (once this is ready to announce): Drafts/suggested wording would be welcome! (I always appreciate help understanding what exactly needs to be communicated).
Any estimates of the timing of the entry are also always welcome (for when I/other editors are skimming the workboard for recently-active tasks, each week). Cheers.

For Tech News, please could someone suggest the wording for an entry? [The task/comments/patches here are a maze of jargon, with unclear ramifications!] Either write a proposed entry here, or in the draft directly (within the next ~18 hours). Thanks.

In T219543#10827855, @A_smart_kitten wrote:

This might just be the way that I'm reading it, but "Later this week, [[Special:SpecialPages]] will be updated with a new design" feels like it reads slightly easier for me here.

Agreed, thank you, now updated on Meta.

Also, should we invite people to leave feedback on the new design (if any) in this task?

Seems reasonable, though I'm mindful that the changes were implemented as a volunteer side project, so any extensive change-requests might be more complicated. However, now added to the entry on Meta.

For Tech News, as this change won't arrive until mid-week for most users (IIUC), I propose linking the Beta Cluster page directly. I will use this draft, unless folks suggest further improvements within the next ~24 hours:

• Later this week, an updated [[Special:SpecialPages]] design will be used. This page has been redesigned to improve the user experience in a few ways, including: The ability to search for names and aliases of the special pages, sorting, more visible marking of restricted special pages, and a more mobile-friendly look. The new version can be previewed at Beta Cluster now. [1]

I've added it to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/2025/19 with this wording; please advise (or edit directly) if changes are needed:

Developers who use the moment library in gadgets and user scripts should revise their code to use alternatives like the Intl library or the new mediawiki.DateFormatter library. The moment library has been deprecated and will begin to log messages in the developer console. You can see a global search for current uses, and ask related questions in phabricator.

I also recommend adding any useful links into the Task Description here, e.g. linking to any documentation about the mediawiki.DateFormatter library.

For Tech News: Please could someone suggest how to phrase an entry? My best-guess would be to re-use parts of the summary from the page Taavi made. -- But I'm not sure if that is enough info, or if affected developers will want to know other details upfront (to determine if/when they need to pay attention)? Or maybe we can drop the 3rd sentence (redundant? or clarifying?). Edits welcome.

Agreed. I cannot reproduce anymore.
(But they were all definitely broken (showing the 'broken image' icon) for a few hours).
I'll leave this task unresolved in case it needs follow-up from devs.

I'm moving this into the Tech News 'completed' column, as we included SUL3 entries in a few editions (the latest being https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/2025/14 and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/2025/10).

For Tech News (thanks for the suggested entry!) please could someone suggest (or improve my) draft wording, and confirm the best timing? I imagine it would be something like:

• A new lint-error category has been created: [[Special:LintErrors/empty-heading | {{int:linter-category-empty-heading}} ]]. The Linter extension's purpose is to identify wikitext patterns that must or can be fixed in pages and provide some guidance about what the problems are with those patterns and how to fix them.

Question 1: What is the second new linter? [Thanks, Nemoralis!]
Question 2: I believe these will all be getting deployed with the 'train' this week, and thus will be linkable (blue-links) at all Wikimedia-wikis the following week, and have content very-soon after, and hence this proposed entry would be suitable for next week's edition (delivered April 21). --- If that is wrong, and you'd prefer it a week later (e.g. to give time for categories to automatically populate if that isn't instant? or UI-translations?), please correct me with the preferred announcement date.

Thanks for the drafts, both! I will add this to Tech News tomorrow, pending your confirmation on the wording-tweaks I've made, and answers to the four questions at the bottom:

• The default thumbnail size has been increased from 220px to 250px. This changes how pages are shown visually in all wikis and has been requested by some communities for many years, but wasn't previously possible due to technical limitations. (1)
• File thumbnails are now stored in discrete sizes. If a page specifies a thumbnail size that's not among the standard sizes (20, 40, 60, 120, 250, 330, 500, 960), then MediaWiki will pick the closest larger thumbnail size but will tell the browser to downscale it to the requested size. In these cases, nothing will change visually but users might load slightly larger images. If it doesn't matter which thumbnail size is used in a page, please pick one of the standard sizes to avoid the extra in-browser down-scaling step.

Q1: Is there a page we can link to, regarding where these 'standard sizes' are now permanently documented?
Q2: In the first entry, should I add "Wiki communities that wish to request a larger default size, out of the new standard size options, can request a configuration change." or similar?
Q3: Is this rolling out on Monday by itself, or rolling with the deployment train? I.e. If it's the latter, then we need to start the first entry as "Later this week, [...]".
Q4: In the second entry, I'm nervous by the phrase "In these cases, nothing will change visually but users might load slightly larger images" - Are we certain there won't be any visual-artifacts from the down-sizing in some edge-cases? [I'm not an image-rendering expert, I'm just an 'over-generalization' checker!] - If there might be edge-cases, can we document that elsewhere and refer to it in this announcement? If not, all good!
Thanks!

Re: User-notice / Tech News, I'm going to hesitantly decline this proposed entry (and then un-subscribe myself), as it doesn't seem like a significantly different change (i.e. It's not likely to confuse, nor delight, anyone) but is more of a nice small improvement that will make intuitive sense to anyone. If you disagree, feel free to re-add the tag, and we can discuss how to phrase an entry to highlight the important aspects to the movement. Thanks!

Tech News - Just noting that I will wait for your confirmation about which week to include this. You can either ping me here/elsewhere, or move the task in the User-notice workboard, or edit the relevant week's Tech News directly.
And here's an updated final-draft (and question):

• Starting later this week, on all wikis except the largest 20, editors using the mobile visual editor will have additional tools in the menu bar, accessed using the + button's drop-down menu. The new menu will include buttons to add: references, templates, tables, reference lists, formulae, comments, hieroglyphs, and maps.

If we have any expected details about when it will be deployed at the remaining 20 wikis, that might be good to add. Thanks.

@LSobanski I thought this bug was just a brief problem on Monday(?), but the missing emails still haven't appeared, if we were expecting/hoping for that to happen? -- So I'm not sure what you mean by 'improvement'.
I.e. I only noticed a problem with emails that were sent on Monday: specifically those 2 from wikitech-l@ in my screenshot; and yesterday I noticed the wikidata Weekly Summary (from Monday) also isn't in my inbox (but I assumed it was just "all emails sent around a certain time", so I didn't add another comment here about it). Hope that helps.

Here's a representative example of 2 emails that I noticed are missing from my inbox, but included in the online archives:

Re: User-notice please could someone provide a draft entry, and comment about the desired-timing, for Tech News? From a skim...

Devs are looking into it. https://www.wikimediastatus.net/incidents/1w3rq4d2zljj

Makes sense. +1. Thanks again, Tacsipacsi (and Krinkle!). Sorry for the confusion & noise.

Haha! Edits crossing in the night, I removed the entry as you were typing the above. I had meant to ask you if it should be clarified, but i didn't notice it till late yesterday (yesterday was very busy....) so I just left it in.
We can go either way - Up to you.
I'd hesitantly suggest leaving it out if there's nothing actionable.
If you want it back in, and if I/we replace it within the next hour, then that should be fine, but if you don't notice this response for longer, then let's keep it out.

If I understand correctly, I believe the communication about this feature change, has been covered/resolved by the wikitech-l@ email, and we don't need/want to also include this in Tech News. Therefore I will remove the [somewhat confusingly named!] User-notice tag (which is primarily intended for Tech News entries). If I'm mistaken, please re-tag it, and we can work out the wording for a blurb. Thanks.

Note: I believe that string is added via this code:
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Gadget-site-deploycal.js#L-154
It still works as expected on Vector, but not Vector-2022:
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?useskin=vector
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?useskin=vector-2022

I think my idea here probably requires the user-setting for "Expand watchlist to show all changes" -- But just in case it inspires anything, or is useful to someone:
One tangential idea that I've used for years, is to change the opacity for certain things that I don't want to be distracted by, but also don't want to overlook entirely.