Community Wishlist

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📢 Latest Updates

May 29, 2026: Wishlist process changes in response to feedback; staffing update

Hello all, I am Selena Deckelmann, CPTO of the Wikimedia Foundation. I have been engaged on the discussion page and continue to follow all conversations here and on en.wiki, as well as other forums, to ensure that I am hearing from as many people as I possibly can about the changes announced on May 20.

I wanted to thank everyone for the feedback and suggestions for improvements to the Wishlist going forward. In thinking about different aspects of the wishlist work, I have noticed a few recommendations we can already move forward with, and let’s keep the conversation going to better define how the wishlist can go well in the future.

Focus areas: themed focus areas were added to the Community Wishlist around 2024 as they were a feature of the WMDE Wishlist that seemed to help that system work. It sounds like these made the process less clear as a whole. We can commit to removing these.
Response time: Multiple editors have mentioned slow or no response to wishes and phabricator tickets. I am also interested in solving the phabricator backlog and responsiveness problems, but will focus on the Wishlist for the purpose of this conversation. We have committed to a 10 business day response time for submitted wishes. We will publish information about response time going forward, as we have been for the last two months in our Monthly Updates, so that community members can track how we perform.
Annual cadence and voting on wishes: Last October, we added voting back. However, what many editors have noted is that we don’t run banners to invite people to participate, leading to only about 30% of the volume of unique participants. I understand that it’s important for the wishlist to have broad exposure, because it’s an accessible way for average editors to express their needs and ideas (whereas Phabricator or direct contact with WMF staff are higher barriers). We can commit to working with community members to invite participation. Suman has opened a thread about what annual participation might look like going forward. I welcome more conversation about how we can move forward with more voting and a better system.
Hackathon wishes: This hasn’t come up, but over the last 2 years, we have introduced wishes to Wikimedia Hackathon. An example from this past hackathon, is that hacker Katie Filbert fulfilled a wish written by Nosferattus to add a date range filter for MediaSearch. We plan to continue making this an explicit part of Hackathon preparation.
Fulfillment of wishes: I appreciate that Barkeep has posted an analysis of wishes, as well as Prototypeperspective ‘s analysis from a few months ago. Mike asked Barkeep to compare notes on his manual analysis of 46 wishes. I’m interested in ways of making this more accurate over time and proposed that we automatically create phabricator tickets for wishes that are adopted. I have a list of wishes that teams at the Foundation committed to as part of the FY26-27 annual plan in March 2026, and are planned to be implemented over the next 12 months or so. As new wishes we can commit to arise, I will add to this list.

Another issue raised by Rhododendrites is around how to engage with the right people at the right time. The Wishlist isn’t the only way that community input goes into WMF work – there’s Phabricator, Discord, discussions at events, talk pages for specific projects and teams, and regular meetings for users with extended rights. I would love proposals from you all on how to best make use of all these channels together, and for volunteers to be able to see the outputs that come from all these inputs.

Finally, an update on staffing. As my team has shared in our past posts, all six Community Tech team members are currently still working at the Foundation and are receiving expedited internal support to interview for open roles at the organization. We have concluded some of those hiring processes, and I’m pleased to share that three of the engineers have received offers for roles in other teams, two of which have been accepted already. They have been encouraged to update their team pages and other external pages as they feel comfortable. These changes will formally take effect next week.

May 20, 2026: Community Tech becomes a program

Hello all, my name is Suman and I'm the Deputy Chief Product & Technology Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation. I'm writing to share with all of you that we've decided to do some internal restructuring about how WMF responds to and supports wishes. After noticing that having a centralized team was leading to frequent bottlenecks and delays as CommTech staff coordinated with other teams, we've decided to shift Community Tech into a program that multiple teams are officially responsible for supporting. This is a model that has proven success already, but it will involve disbanding the Community Tech team and the roles of five engineers and one manager. We still have dedicated staff managing the wishlist intake and triage process and will continue the same financial support for this work, just under a different structure.

Moving forward, the wishlist will continue to work on wishes from across languages and wikis, and complements many of the other channels where we regularly hear ideas and feedback from volunteers (talk pages, Village Pumps, chat platforms, calls, conferences, etc.) Our latest community update offers a detailed update about our progress over the last month, including completing a wish for tagging and tracking which pages users need to edit and adding new languages to “Who Wrote That” and the P&E Dashboard. In the coming weeks and months, we hope you all will continue to see an uptick in the speed and number of wishes we are able to address over time via our monthly statistics.

May 13, 2026: Latest updates from the Community Tech team

Hello everyone! It’s time to share with you an update of the work we’ve done in the last month, and what lies ahead in terms of what we’re going to work on.

The work we did in the last month

As part of the work on Watchlist labels, we closed another wish that was asking for tagging and tracking which pages users need to edit based on priority, interest levels, topics, and page improvement tasks. In addition, some of the required features of the wish were included in the newly deployed Personal Dashboard.

Also, we continued working on adding new languages to “Who Wrote That” and to the P&E Dashboard, with an additional 12 languages now available for those tools. There may be additional languages that will be available in the future.

Moreover, the Editing Team has been working on a wish related to a warning message when large amounts of content are being copy-pasted: a feature for this has now been deployed to all wikis and the team is currently asking for feedback about it.

Lastly, during the Wikimedia Hackathon in Milan, Katie Filbert worked on a patch to ensure to add a date range filter for MediaSearch. The patch is currently awaiting review.

What we currently have in progress

This is what we are currently focusing on this month:

Make the Chart extension beginner-friendly: we have finished some design mock-ups, which we have published on the new project page, and we started the technical implementation of the wish.
Support full colour 3D models on Wikimedia projects: 3D rendering has now been improved (scene lighting and normalising model scale, see this example). In addition, we have been investigating GLB support for 3d2png, exploring a new potential solution to the problem, after we found the initial attempt to not work. You can track progress on Phabricator at phab:T424872.
Add Wikipedia Mobile App’s Reading Lists to the Website: the feature has been deployed to all wikis on Beta only by the Reader team, which will be monitored to determine full production rollout.

What we are scoping next

Looking ahead, we already identified our priorities for the months to come:

Add the "hide templates" option to What links here page, a wish that already made top 6 in the 2022 Community Wishlist survey and that has quite some support in its resolution by users now, that focuses on removing articles from “What links here” page if included in a template, rather than included directly in the text.
Edit introduction instead of the entire article, a wish that asks for the possibility of editing only the incipit of an article, instead of opening the whole article in order to do it.
A way to see why a file is somewhere underneath a specific category (tool to show cat-path), a wish that asks for a functionality that shows the categorization path of the file to the parent category, so that one can spot the faulty categorization and fix it.
A proper audio player, a wish that calls for improving the current way for Wikimedia Commons to show and listen to audio files.
Allow sorting of discussions on talk pages, a wish already proposed in 2023, to help projects and pages that have non-standard sorting of discussions. Instead of forcing all users into one sorting order,, we can allow individual users to sort discussions chronologically in their preferred order, or even by “last modified”.

Some statistics

Here is a snapshot showing the breakdown of wish status over the past month:

These numbers are regularly shifting due to new incoming wishes and more in depth review of wishes under review with stakeholders. The most notable shifts in numbers over the past month have been under review (down from 87 to 79), prioritised (up from 15 to 21) and long-term opportunity (up from 204 to 210).

Lastly, in April we reached a turnaround time of just under 3 business days for all new incoming wishes.

We need your feedback

As always, there are topics and areas for which we are seeking your feedback. In particular:

The Wikimedia Foundation’s 2026-2027 Annual Plan has been published, and six Key Results are relevant for recurring wishes. Join the talk page, which includes various prompts, authored collectively by the Product & Technology department.
- For example, see the discussion on newcomers, which is relevant for the popular Highlight edit button wish.
The draft we shared last month about how we triage and prioritise wishes to work on has now been published, and the page has been reorganised into sections due to the increased length.
As we enter the new financial year in July, we have started to think about refreshing Focus Areas and have posted some initial thoughts where you can participate.

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!

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Recent wishes

These are the recently submitted wishes. You can learn more about each individual wish, and see other wishes in the same focus areas. If you don't find what you are searching for, you are welcomed to submit your wish for consideration.

All wishes