Forum:Announcements/Wiki Updates, Early 2026
Hello, everyone.
MediaWiki 1.39 has begun sunsetting, and we have been working behind the scenes to upgrade the wiki to version 1.43 for a little while. As a result, there are quite a few changes that we will be taking the time to update and upgrade. There are mostly subtle changes with the wiki version upgrade. The three biggest things you may notice are (1) the amount of article body space becomes more dynamic again and generally larger, (2) wiki skins can be set to "dark"/"night" mode when logged in, and (3) some subtle but notable tweaks in the user interface like the location of action links (e.g. "edit"). There are other minor things that you might notice with line spacing, tables of contents, and category links; but, these are generally minor and may not even be noticed.
To accommodate these changes, especially for users to properly engage with "dark mode" or "night mode," a slew of global pages, templates, categories, forum posts, and other things, will be edited on the wiki. I have prepared updates for over 100 templates, in addition to the numerous flag templates, multiple categories, and other miscellaneous pages. They will be rolled out in stages in the coming days. Among the actions taken will be:
- Retooling flag templates to work by height rather than by width to address changes in font size and line height.
- Migrating a lot of code to a global .css to accommodate preferences for "dark mode" or "night mode" on the wiki.
- Reducing and simplifying the color palette to better integrate "dark mode" and "night mode" while retaining as high contrast visibility and accessibility as possible.
- Cleaning up some templates, categories, and other general maintenance activities.
- Deleting old versions of images that are outdated with no meaningful content change (e.g. resizing or color tweaking) or had errors in them.
- Deleting long-unused images and making changes to the image-upload page.
- Updating the multimap, article template, and general help pages to reflect new or novel uses of templates and data.
- Temporarily taking the wiki offline and launching the 1.43 version. (Further information about this upgrade downtime will be forthcoming in advance.)
Please let me know if you have any questions or thoughts. Happy mapping, happy creating! — Alessa (talk) 03:11, 17 January 2026 (UTC)
- As always, super grateful for your (and admin more broadly) continued hard work on keeping the site and wiki up to date and functional! In terms of old images, I'm not sure if the resource icons that I ported over from the old wiki are currently being used, but I would appreciate if images of that nature could be kept as they have multifarious future possible uses. Thanks again! --User:Lithium-Ion | [1] (talk) 04:41, 17 January 2026 (UTC)
- Thank you. I plan to keep all the icons and have a draft of the multimap page that I'm working on that will include a gallery of icons, so that people know what they can use from we have uploaded already. Hopefully that updated page will have a ton of more utility also. — Alessa (talk) 19:28, 17 January 2026 (UTC)
- Sounds good! --User:Lithium-Ion | [2] (talk) 07:28, 18 January 2026 (UTC)
- Thank you. I plan to keep all the icons and have a draft of the multimap page that I'm working on that will include a gallery of icons, so that people know what they can use from we have uploaded already. Hopefully that updated page will have a ton of more utility also. — Alessa (talk) 19:28, 17 January 2026 (UTC)