As a feedback: I actually like the overall changes. They are now much less "bulky". My only note would be that now most of them are less bulky except the bell which is producing a contrast:

Comparing with the old that is a mix of bulky and non-bulky:

I'm kinda the person that would totally design something like this so feel free to ignore this feedback!

I was curious what the old set's speech bubble series would look like with the new set's 2px outlines. Here's my take on it!

I slightly adjusted the proportions of the "add" and "ongoing" ones to not clash with the outline. I do prefer these to the fully redesigned ones, and having the outlined versions and the filled versions as complementary parts of a coherent set is an interesting idea!

Who will change the icon on the different Wikipedias? The volunteers want other things like writing articles.

I appreciate SpecialPages not looking like AI pages now (knowing it was designed before the AI trend, of course)

In T399175#12033103, @Bahnmoeller wrote:

Who will change the icon on the different Wikipedias? The volunteers want other things like writing articles.

It will be handled automatically using train deployment in a few hours from now.

Before further deployment, it is probably wise to recognize the community's displeasure with these new icons.

In T399175#12033418, @Hakimi97 wrote:

In T399175#12033103, @Bahnmoeller wrote:

Who will change the icon on the different Wikipedias? The volunteers want other things like writing articles.

It will be handled automatically using train deployment in a few hours from now.

please someone stop and reverse the train. the community's feedback is clear.

I want to first thank you all for your patience in a response, as well as your attention and feedback on this work. There's a lot here, and I will do my best to respond as thoughtfully and inclusively as possible.

First of all, I want to apologize for those who wanted to be involved earlier in the process of this work but weren't. Moving forward, we will work on better ways of communicating this type of work out to seek more involvement from the community during the process. Regardless, I'm thankful you all are here now.

Secondly, I want to emphasize that the design process is iterative. The dialog that has been opened here offers us an opportunity to collaborate on the next round of amendments to the icons. This work being released does not mean it's complete. We will continue to learn as we go and iterate accordingly, as collaboratively as we can.

On that note, I encourage those who would like to be involved in the continuing design process to head over to T427868: Icon refinement follow ups where we will conduct the next round of amendments. In that task, I would also like to encourage sharing of constructive feedback that is actionable. While we will start sharing some of the in process updates and demos in the follow up task, I want to address here what I am hearing from you all so far, as well as provide some context.

This task, which has been opened for nearly a year and worked on during that time, most notably the past 8 months, documents design ideas that were explored along the way. Many of the decisions of where we landed can be found on the project page for this work, including details regarding the styles as well accessibility. This project page can and will be updated with more details as we learn and continue to evolve. Additionally, the most up to date collection of the icons lives on Codex which can be seen not as a screenshot but as their native SVG format. This is a better rendering than what is included in this task, and contains icons which have already been amended but not updated in this task.

Some constructive and actionable things I am hearing from you all so far:

From @Chaotic_Enby

I can see the advantages for readability at small scales, but not every icon needs to be a pure outline, and not everything needs to keep this same thickness, which leads to many of the awkwardness pointed above.

The outlined style should be flexible, and allow for more filled elements, helping to increase legibility and meaning of the icons, as well as bring back some "soul" that @stjn and @Icepinner mentioned. We should be okay redefining [edit] the rules we are defining, such as equidistant spacing and sizing of lines, so to not "break" lines where unnecessary and again, better communicate the meaning of the icon.

@stjn @Qcne mention the new icon set feels "generic". It's worth noting that the previous library included many icons that were used directly or modified from various open source icon sets such as Material (by Google). The new set in its entirety is completely hand drawn and custom, using unique styles like the miter join which helps improve accessibility (also mentioned on the project page) by helping more of the shapes to fall on whole pixels, which is especially relevant to low-DPI screens. The overall, more squared style, comes from the rather brutalist but simple and not overly designed nature of Wikipedia, a concept being harnessed by the recent visual design language efforts.

@stjn @Qcne @Finnfrog99 @Snaevar @Icepinner have expressed how special the userTalk icon is. We should really make sure this one, and those related to it, feel right.

I want to offer a special thanks to those who have started providing ideas for how to improve certain icons. The next round of amendments is already in progress thanks to all of your feedback and will be tracked in the follow up task.

Please do not release it!!! A majority of feedback here has been negative, 21 negative tokens, 2 positive

Also for a new set of icons that bases itself off fixing the current icons' "inconsistency", you just said you're willing to make them partially inconsistent!
"We should be okay breaking the rules we are defining a little, such as equidistant spacing and sizing of lines, "

We have expressed we do not want these released yet, and they have issues that need fixing, so please do not release these yet!

The current icons are fine, do not replace them with icons many have pointed out issues with

I am the second person to say do not release them yet after lettherebedarklight

sorry, 20 negative, 3 positive

Seconded (or thirded?), at least give people an option to revert back to the old icons in the preferences. Could even track this as a measure of approval (though, I think the above messages are enough of an indicator).

maybe put the option to use these in preferences, with current being the default

The current ones need to be the default, maybe add a banner to the main page saying something along the lines of "new icons have been made! if you want to try them out, change them in preferences and leave your thoughts on [link to this page]!"

So they arent forced on people, as most dont like these icons

They just released them WHYYYYYYY

How do I change back to the old ones

We get your point. Please stop spamming.

Sorry, that was not my intention

I don’t think it’s at all related to the rollout of new icons, so you’ll have to file a different task under MediaWiki-Recent-changes / MediaWiki-Watchlist tags (since it’s probably the same in both).

This appears to have caused T429642: Enhanced watchlist arrows shrank almost beyond clickability/visibility in June 18 2026 deploy.

ArticleSearch (and ArticlesSearch) is very bad. Why is the magnifying glass so small?

In T399175#12035222, @Nemoralis wrote:

ArticleSearch (and ArticlesSearch) is very bad. Why is the magnifying glass so small?

So you get a second magnifying glass to see the first magnifying glass, of course. How else are they going to stay in business?

In T399175#12035133, @YuniToumei wrote:

On de-wiki, mobile browser, the new icons seem to cause some text overflow on the watchlist controls, leading to some awkward layouting. Any chance this could be fixed?

Reported in T429646: Watchlist options are displayed incorrectly on Minerva

If you're here because you don't like the new icons and want a way to revert them, I've made a css module for that at User:Pattersonuwu/OldIcons.css.

I don't have an issue with most of the icons, except for the Down and Up Triangles. For one thing, it's not a triangle anymore, and for a more important thing, depending on screen resolution, it's almost impossible to see properly.

I don't really enjoy the new icons in comparison with the former. They appear more complex / less legible at a glance, which I think is a detriment to the user experience. Some of the thin lines may also prove to decrease accessibility of the websites.

I can't say I liked the three most noticable new icons on desktop (eyeglasses, black bell, notices), but I'm very pleased with the icons in my menus on mobiles. I find things much easier to find. Not all of them are perfect, but overall it's a nice improvement.
New designs take time to get used to, but after a few months we'll be hating the old one.

I mean, look how neat these menus are:

(can we get a lighter replacement for the black squares?)

Good thing you changed triangles to pentagons. I think circles would be much better by the way.

No offence to the artist who made the new icons, but they are not a good fit for MediaWiki, the old icons were perfectly fine at getting the job done, they looked great and they scaled with device widths and heights, and they were still legible and discernible at lower resolutions, this is just a step in the wrong direction imo.

The change to the 'DownTriangle' icon is a real usability issue. The previous icon was small but still legible. The new one is so tiny that I can barely tell whether it's a dot or just a speck on my screen. For me, it's almost invisible.

Are we still calling them "Codex icons" by the way? How about a new name or Codex 2026? That's a really big redesign and we might have to refer to them with different names.

Not a fan. They are bland and lack contrast. The "old" icons are better.

In T399175#12036703, @Wostr wrote:

The change to the 'DownTriangle' icon is a real usability issue. The previous icon was small but still legible. The new one is so tiny that I can barely tell whether it's a dot or just a speck on my screen. For me, it's almost invisible.

see T429642: Enhanced watchlist arrows shrank almost beyond clickability/visibility in June 18 2026 deploy

This project's meant to be consensus-driven, why were these released given the feedback here (FWIW I'm personally indifferent about all of them other than the usertalk one)? If the answer's that the team working on it were effectively forced to by strong incentives to meet deadlines etc., that's an abject management/systemic failure.

Cross link for those looking for it: I think work on refining these icons moved to the ticket T427868: Icon refinement follow ups.

Change #1307062 had a related patch set uploaded (by Thiemo Kreuz (WMDE); author: Thiemo Kreuz (WMDE)):

[mediawiki/extensions/TwoColConflict@master] Replace rotated markup icon with sortVertical icon

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1307062

Change #1307062 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/TwoColConflict@master] Replace rotated markup icon with sortVertical icon

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1307062

Change #1301335 had a related patch set uploaded (by Thiemo Kreuz (WMDE); author: Thiemo Kreuz (WMDE)):

[oojs/ui@master] Minor code optimizations to the new SVG icon set

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1301335

Test wiki on Patch demo by ESanders (WMF) using patch(es) linked to this task was deleted:

https://717968d63e.catalyst.wmcloud.org/w/