Per https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/XOP5OXEYO2XLQJNGFJHCYOPJT5LPTF7P/, all editions of Wikinews have been marked for read-only status per the WMF Board of Trustees. Per https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinews, that means 31 wikis:
- ru
- sr
- pt
- pl
- fr
- en
- zh
- de
- it
- es
- cs
- nl
- ca
- ar
- ja
- el
- ta
- li
- sv
- uk
- fa
- fi
- ro
- eo
- guw
- sq
- ko
- no
- shn
- bs
- he
As an aside, I would like to request the courtesy that anyone locking en.wn allow for the completion and publication of the article https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_closes_Wikinews_after_21_years as the last edits.
Technical notes:
The plan is to close them by adding them to closed.dblist and follow the steps on https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Close_a_wiki
Tentative date of deployment: Week of May 4, 2026 (preferably Tuesday or Wednesday since the previous weekend is the hackathon).
Basic steps
- foreach wikinews (one at a time)
- add .* <noedit> to MediaWiki:Titleblacklist block all edits (stops vandalism until there is time to close it properly)
- write and backport a mediawiki-config patch...
- removing it from the open dblist and adding it to the closed dblist
- removing it from group1/group2 dblist and adding it to group0 dblist
- removing it from miscellaneous dblists such as commonsuploads and securepollglobal
- removing most entries in config files:
- InitializeSettings.php -> remove $wgImportSources, $wmgUseDynamicPageList, most other entries
- core-Permissions.php -> remove all
- flaggedrevs.php -> remove all. closed wikis don't need FlaggedRevs.
- add a MediaWiki:Sitenotice that states <div style="border:3px solid currentColor; padding:1em;">'''This wiki has been closed ([[m:Special:PermaLink/30328679#Board_of_Trustees_Approves_Closure_of_Wikinews|see announcement]]).</div>
Extra clean up
- T421798: Undeploy GoogleNewsSitemap after 2026-05-04
- T421797: Remove Wikinews from various multilingual portals
- depopulate all user groups
- T423577: Undeploy FlaggedRevs from Wikinews and drop FlaggedRevs tables
- T423578: Remove custom user groups from Wikinews (in core-Permissions.php)
- with a bot using the flood flag...
- all wikinews wikis: replace the output of DynamicPageLinks with hard-coded wikicode, so that the extension can be uninstalled from these wikis. (done by Dexbot)
- enwikinews only: delete user talk pages whose only content is a welcome template. this is 90% of this wiki's pages. this will reduce the size of database dumps. (done by Zabe)
- T425264: Remove Wikinews from SiteMatrix