Test Wikipedia (test.wikipedia.org): what it is for

A wiki for testing code

Its main page describes it as a test wiki that normally runs the same version of MediaWiki as mediawiki.org and the other wikis of the first deployment group, sometimes configured with experimental features, so its content may be volatile and buggy. It is the last stop before live production, not a place for unreviewed code. On 31 October 2026 its version page reported MediaWiki 1.48.0-wmf.1, a weekly build of the 1.48 release due in 2027.

You log in with your ordinary Wikimedia account. Teachers may also use it to show a class basic editing without disturbing a real project, though its interface can differ from an ordinary Wikimedia wiki.

Where it sits in the weekly deployment train

Wikimedia deploys new MediaWiki code every week in three steps, so a problem shows up on a few wikis before it reaches the large ones. Test Wikipedia is in the first group.

What Test Wikipedia is not

A page on the wiki, What Test Wiki is not, sets the limits in a list. In short, Test Wikipedia is not:

• a place for content or anything meaningful — nonsense articles will not stay;
• an area to play with administrator tools; for that it points to its list of admin test wikis;
• a place to try AutoWikiBrowser before you have permission to use it;
• a web host, wiki host or file host;
• a trial ground for new projects or language editions, which belong on the Wikimedia Incubator or Wikispore;
• a place where libel is tolerated, or where anything goes.

Becoming an administrator on Test Wikipedia

Admin rights there exist so people can test features that need them, not to teach the tools. A bureaucrat decides each request, and two kinds of people qualify.

Bureaucrats grant and remove admin rights, grant bureaucrat rights and flag bot accounts; removing a bureaucrat is done by stewards on Meta-Wiki. Only admins can become bureaucrats, and the wiki asks people not to request rights on a bureaucrat's talk page unless they already know each other. On 31 October 2026 Test Wikipedia counted 278 administrators among 74,145 registered accounts, of which 359 had been active in the past month.

test2.wikipedia.org and test.wikidata.org

Test2 began as a plainer sandbox wiki at a time when Test Wikipedia ran code straight from a shared file system and served as a slow staging wiki. Once that ended, test2 took on testing of cross-wiki features together with test.wikipedia.org and Test Wikidata. Because test2 is in group 1 and Test Wikidata in group 0, test2 sometimes runs older code than the Test Wikidata it draws data from, as many Wikipedias do against Wikidata.

Test2 also has history with templates: Lua was installed there for testing in 2012, with an open invitation to every editor, before it reached the English Wikipedia in 2013 (see Lua modules). Its main page repeats the same warning: anything may be edited but nothing is kept, and it is not a place to play with admin tools.

The Beta Cluster

Earlier in the pipeline sits the Beta Cluster, a separate wiki farm in Wikimedia's Cloud VPS that copies features from many production wikis. Test Wikipedia's main page sends developers and users there to test new features, gadgets and user scripts before they are deployed. Since 2024 its maintainers have said it is largely unmaintained while they move common uses to on-demand test environments such as PatchDemo and Catalyst.

Which test wiki to use