Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• ORES, the revision evaluation service, is now using a new open-source infrastructure on all wikis except for English Wikipedia and Wikidata. These two will follow this week. If you notice any unusual results from the Recent Changes filters that are related to ORES (for example, "Contribution quality predictions" and "User intent predictions"), please report them. [1]
• When you are logged in on one Wikimedia wiki and visit a different Wikimedia wiki, the system tries to log you in there automatically. This has been unreliable for a long time. You can now visit the login page to make the system try extra hard. If you feel that made logging in better or worse than it used to be, your feedback is appreciated. [2]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 September. It will be on all wikis from 14 September (calendar).
• The Technical Decision-Making Forum Retrospective team invites anyone involved in the technical field of Wikimedia projects to signup to and join one of their listening sessions on 13 September. Another date will be scheduled later. The goal is to improve the technical decision-making processes.
• As part of the changes for the Better diff handling of paragraph splits wishlist proposal, the inline switch widget in diff pages is being rolled out this week to all wikis. The inline switch will allow viewers to toggle between a unified inline or two-column diff wikitext format. [3]

Future changes

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on 20 September. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [4]
• The Enterprise API is launching a new feature called "breaking news". Currently in BETA, this attempts to identify likely "newsworthy" topics as they are currently being written about in any Wikipedia. Your help is requested to improve the accuracy of its detection model, especially on smaller language editions, by recommending templates or identifiable editing patterns. See more information at the documentation page on MediaWiki or the FAQ on Meta.

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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• MediaWiki now has a stable interface policy for frontend code that more clearly defines how we deprecate MediaWiki code and wiki-based code (e.g. gadgets and user scripts). Thank you to everyone who contributed to the content and discussions. [5][6]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 September. It will be on all wikis from 21 September (calendar).
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. [7]
• All wikis will have a link in the sidebar that provides a short URL of that page, using the Wikimedia URL Shortener. [8]

Future changes

• The team investigating the Graph Extension posted a proposal for reenabling it and they need your input.

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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [9][10]
• Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Quechua Wikipedia, Romansh Wikipedia, Romani Wikipedia, Rundi Wikipedia, Aromanian Wikipedia, Tarandíne Wikipedia, Rusyn Wikipedia, Kinyarwanda Wikipedia, Sanskrit Wikipedia, Sakha Wikipedia, Santali Wikipedia, Sardinian Wikipedia, Sicilian Wikipedia, Scots Wikipedia, Sindhi Wikipedia, Northern Sami Wikipedia, Sango Wikipedia, Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, Sinhala Wikipedia, Slovak Wikipedia, Slovenian Wikipedia, Samoan Wikipedia, Somali Wikipedia, Albanian Wikipedia, Serbian Wikipedia, Sranan Tongo Wikipedia, Swati Wikipedia, Southern Sotho Wikipedia, Saterland Frisian Wikipedia, Sundanese Wikipedia, Silesian Wikipedia, Tamil Wikipedia, Tulu Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Tetum Wikipedia, Tajik Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Turkmen Wikipedia, Tagalog Wikipedia, Tswana Wikipedia, Tongan Wikipedia, Tok Pisin Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Tsonga Wikipedia, Tatar Wikipedia, Twi Wikipedia, Tahitian Wikipedia, Tuvinian Wikipedia, Udmurt Wikipedia, Uyghur Wikipedia, Uzbek Wikipedia, Venda Wikipedia, Venetian Wikipedia, Veps Wikipedia, West Flemish Wikipedia, Volapük Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [11][12][13]
• The Vector 2022 skin will have some minor visual changes to drop-down menus, column widths, and more. These changes were added to four Wikipedias last week. If no issues are found, these changes will proceed to all wikis this week. These changes will make it possible to add new menus for readability and dark mode. Learn more. [14]

Future changes

• There is an update on re-enabling the Graph Extension. To speed up the process, Vega 2 will not be supported and only some protocols will be available at launch. You can help by sharing what you think about the plan.

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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 November. It will be on all wikis from 30 November (calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week. [15][16]
• MediaWiki's JavaScript system will now allow async/await syntax in gadgets and user scripts. Gadget authors should remember that users' browsers may not support it, so it should be used appropriately. [17]
• The deployment of "Add a link" announced last week was postponed. It will resume this week.

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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• The spacing between paragraphs on Vector 2022 has been changed from 7px to 14px to match the size of the text. This will make it easier to distinguish paragraphs from sentences. [18]
• The "Sort this page by default as" feature in VisualEditor is working again. You no longer need to switch to source editing to edit ((DEFAULTSORT:...)) keywords. [19]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [20][21]
• On 6 December, people who have the enabled the preference for "Show discussion activity" will notice the talk page usability improvements appear on pages that include the __NEWSECTIONLINK__ magic word. If you notice any issues, please share them with the team on Phabricator.

Future changes

• The Toolforge Grid Engine shutdown process will start on December 14. Maintainers of tools that still use this old system should plan to migrate to Kubernetes, or tell the team your plans on Phabricator in the task about your tool, before that date. [22]
• Communities using Structured Discussions are being contacted regarding the upcoming deprecation of Structured Discussions. You can read more about this project, and share your comments, on the project's page.

Events

• Registration & Scholarship applications are now open for the Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 that will take place from 3–5 May in Tallinn, Estonia. Scholarship applications are open until 5 January 2024.

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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• On Wikimedia Commons, there are some minor user-interface improvements for the "choosing own vs not own work" step in the UploadWizard. This is part of the Structured Content team's project of improving UploadWizard on Commons. [23][24]

Problems

• There was a problem showing the Newcomer homepage feature with the "impact module" and their page-view graphs, for a few days in early December. This has now been fixed. [25][26]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 December. It will be on all wikis from 14 December (calendar). [27][28]

Future changes

• The 2023 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 5 January 2024, and has an associated privacy statement.

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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Tech News

• The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 8 January 2024 because of the holidays.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 December. It will be on all wikis from 21 December (calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week. [29][30]
• Starting December 18, it won't be possible to activate Structured Discussions on a user's own talk page using the Beta feature. The Beta feature option remains available for users who want to deactivate Structured Discussions. This is part of Structured Discussions' deprecation work. [31]
• There will be full support for redirects in the Module namespace. The "Move Page" feature will leave an appropriate redirect behind, and such redirects will be appropriately recognized by the software (e.g. hidden from Special:UnconnectedPages). There will also be support for manual redirects. [32]

Future changes

• The MediaWiki JavaScript documentation is moving to a new format. During the move, you can read the old docs using version 1.41. Feedback about the new site is welcome on the project talk page.
• The Wishathon is a new initiative that encourages collaboration across the Wikimedia community to develop solutions for wishes collected through the Community Wishlist Survey. The first community Wishathon will take place from 15–17 March. If you are interested in a project proposal as a user, developer, designer, or product lead, you can register for the event and read more.

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Hello Clpo13: Enjoy the holiday season and winter solstice if it's occurring in your area of the world, and thanks for your work to maintain, improve and expand Wikipedia. Cheers, Jerium (talk) 16:46, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

New year, new scripts. Welcome to the 23rd issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering around 39% of our favorite new and updated user scripts since 24 December 2021. That’s right, we haven’t published in two years! Can you believe it? Did you miss us?

Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!

Featured script

RefRenamer by Nardog is this issue's featured script. For whatever reason, the foundation will only give us better reference names in VisualEditor if we wish for it in the next survey. Nardog to the rescue! This script has a ton of options to satisfy almost anyone who wishes to use better refnames than ":0" and ":418".

Updated scripts

• Nardog: MoveHistory can now look up the move history of any page from anywhere on the site.
• User:Enterprisey/diff-permalink now has a version that copies the Special:Diff link with square brackets.
• User:GhostInTheMachine/WatchlistTidy now moves the Active Filters panel to the right so that the Show/Hide button doesn't constantly jump.
• User:Alexander Davronov/HistoryHelper has now become stable with some bugfixes and features such as automatically highlighting potentially uncivil edit summaries and automatically pinging all the users selected.
• Wikipedia:AutoEd/unicodehex.js will no longer replace legacy MediaWiki dot-entities (dot followed by two uppercase alphanumeric characters) in article links, which caused several links to become broken.

Improve a script

• Many of our favorite scripts such as User:Fred Gandt/userResourceManager, User:Guarapiranga/search-shortcuts and User:Bradv/Scripts/Superlinks haven't been updated for Vector 2022. You could be the one to change that!
• User:Elominius/gadget/media timer works, but its UI looks alien. Someone could improve it...
• To a lesser extent, the same goes for User:PrimeHunter/Search sort.js. I wish someone would integrate the sorts into the sort menu instead of adding 11 portlet links.
• We want...

• ...a mark-as-read button for Watchlyst Greybar Unsin
• ...a tool to automatically fix CAT:BROKENREFs, preferably a fork/addition to User:TheJJJunk/ARA
• ...a fix/fork of User:DannyS712/SectionRemover.js to make it work

Requested scripts

• A WP:3O requesting and responding tool, similar to Terasil's classic edit request tool
• A "bytes removed"/"added" filter on the user contribs page
• A review tool for WP:proposed deletions
• Mass patrol new pages by a user for use in WP:RFP/A
• ...and many more, all available at Wikipedia:User scripts/Requests

New scripts

• Aaron Liu: Watchlyst Greybar Unsin is a rewrite of Ais's Watchlist Notifier with modern APIs and several new features such as not displaying watchlist items marked as seen (hence the name), not bolding diffs of unseen watchlist elements which doesn’t work properly anyways, displaying the rendered edit summary, proper display of log and creation actions and more links.
• Alexis Jazz: Factotum is a spiritual successor to reply-link with a host of extra features like section adding, link rewriting, regular expressions and more.
• User:Aveaoz/AutoMobileRedirect: This script will automatically redirect MobileFrontend (en.m.wikipedia) to normal Wikipedia. Unlike existing scripts, this one will actually check if your browser is mobile or not through its secret agent string, so you can stay logged in on mobile! Hooray screen estate!
• Chlod:
  • Deputy is a first-of-its-kind copyright cleanup toolkit. It overrides the interface for Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations for easy case processing. It also includes the functionality of the following (also new) scripts:
    • Attribution Notice Template Editor (ANTE) graphically modifies content attribution notices. It is the successor to User:Chlod/Scripts/CopiedTemplateEditor and supports more templates than ((copied)) ones.
    • Infringement Assistant allows a user to hide sections of a page for suspected copyright violations and report the page to the appropriate Wikipedia:Copyright problems noticeboard.
• User:Elominius/gadget/diff arrow keys allows navigation between diffs with the arrow keys. It also has a version that requires holding Ctrl with the arrow key.
• Enterprisey
  • diff-permalink-2 allows quickly copying wikilinks to diff and permalink pages from those pages, a variation of existing script User:Enterprisey/diff-permalink
  • archiver is a fork of Σ's Archiver with several bugfixes.
  • /parent-cats highlights categories that are a subcategory of a category already included in a page's categories.
• User:Guarapiranga/accessKeysCheatSheet adds an access key shortcut to display all shortcuts based on code provided by Nardog and NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh.
• User:HungKhanh0106/ProperDisplay loads a bunch of fonts to add correct rendering supports for "esoteric" languages.
• User:Jeeputer/highlightPiped will make piped links irresistible (or else).
• User:Jerome Frank Disciple/curlyfixer.js adds an WP:AutoEd function that straightens curly quotes per MOS. That's right! Such a module was only made in the 14th year of AutoEd's existence! Configure away!
• Frequently link to Wikipedia on your websites yet find generating CC-BY credits to be such a hassle? Say no more! User:Luke10.27/attribute will automatically do it for ya and copy the credit to yer clipboard.
• User:MPGuy2824/MoveToDraft, a spiritual successor (i.e. fork) to Evad37's script, with a few bugs solved, and a host of extra features like check-boxes for choosing draftification reasons, multi-contributor notification, and appropriate warnings based on last edit time.
• Nardog
  • /CopyCodeBlock: one of the most important operations for any scripter and script-user is to copy and paste. This script adds a copy button in the top right of every code block (not to be confused with <code>) that will, well, copy it to your clipboard!
  • /RCMuter: Hide specific users, perhaps User:MediaWiki message delivery, from the Watchlist and Recent Changes.
  • /VitalTopicon makes you see the vital article topicon on WP:vital articles.
• m:User:NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh/AceForLuaDebugConsole.js adds the Ace editor (a.k.a. the editor you see when editing JS, CSS and Lua on Wikimedia wikis) to the Lua debug console. "In my opinion, whoever designed it to be a plain <textarea> needs to seriously reconsider their decision."
• Novem Linguae
  • DraftCleaner fixes formatting of new articles.
  • GANReviewTool quickly and easily closes good article nominations.
  • ReviewStatus displays whether or not a mainspace page is marked as reviewed.
  • SpeciesHelper tries to add the correct speciesbox, category, taxonbar, and stub template to species articles.
• User:Opencooper/svgReplace and Tol's fork replaces all rasterized SVGs with their original SVG codes for your loading pleasures. Tell us which one is better!
• User:Phlsph7/HighlightUnreferencedPassages adds a button to highlight all unreferenced paragraphs in reds, and can even do it automatically.
• Still hate Vector 2022's floating TOC? User:Phlsph7/UnfoldedNumberedTOC(Vector2022) might make you give it a try.
• Quite a bit of pages at Special:WantedCategories either exist now or got removed. User:Qwerfjkl/scripts/hideUnwantedCategories automatically hides those.
• User:SuperHamster's Wikipedia:Tools/View it! generates a gallery of images for a given subject on any Wikimedia project utilizing Structured Data on Commons. Images can then be added as needed.
• Terasail
  • ArticleInfo displays page information at the top of the page, directly below the title.
  • /HeaderIcons takes away the Vector 2022 user dropdown and replaces it with all of the icons within, top level, right next to the Watchlist. One less click away! There's also an alternate version that uses text links instead of icons.
• ...and any more, all available at WP:US/L.

Due to budget and procrastination limitations, we've only had time to review the first ~39% of the scripts since last issue. Help us out here! Aaron Liu (talk) 13:24, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• mediawiki2latex is a tool that converts wiki content into the formats of LaTeX, PDF, ODT, and EPUB. The code now runs many times faster due to recent improvements. There is also an optional Docker container you can install on your local machine.
• The way that Random pages are selected has been updated. This will slowly reduce the problem of some pages having a lower chance of appearing. [33]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 January. It will be on all wikis from 11 January (calendar). [34][35]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• Pages that use the JSON contentmodel will now use tabs instead of spaces for auto-indentation. This will significantly reduce the page size. [36]
• Gadgets and personal user scripts may now use JavaScript syntax introduced in ES6 (also known as "ES2015") and ES7 ("ES2016"). MediaWiki validates the source code to protect other site functionality from syntax errors, and to ensure scripts are valid in all supported browsers. Previously, Gadgets could use the requiresES6 option. This option is no longer needed and will be removed in the future. [37]
• Bot passwords and owner-only OAuth consumers can now be restricted to allow editing only specific pages. [38]
• You can now thank edits made by bots. [39]
• An update on the status of the Community Wishlist Survey for 2024 has been published. Please read and give your feedback.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 January. It will be on all wikis from 18 January (calendar). [40][41]
• Starting on January 17, it will not be possible to login to Wikimedia wikis from some specific old versions of the Chrome browser (versions 51–66, released between 2016 and 2018). Additionally, users of iOS 12, or Safari on Mac OS 10.14, may need to login to each wiki separately. [42]
• The jquery.cookie module was deprecated and replaced with the mediawiki.cookie module last year. A script has now been run to replace any remaining uses, and this week the temporary alias will be removed. [43]

Future changes

• Wikimedia Deutschland is working to make reusing references easier. They are looking for people who are interested in participating in individual video calls for user research in January and February.

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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

• A bug in UploadWizard prevented linking to the userpage of the uploader when uploading. It has now been fixed. [44]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 January. It will be on all wikis from 25 January (calendar). [45][46]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• Starting Monday January 29, all talk pages messages' timestamps will become a link. This link is a permanent link to the comment. It allows users to find the comment they are looking for, even if this comment was moved elsewhere. This will affect all wikis except for the English Wikipedia. You can read more about this change on Diff or on Mediawiki.org. [47]
• There are some improvements to the CAPTCHA to make it harder for spam bots and scripts to bypass it. If you have feedback on this change, please comment on the task. Staff are monitoring metrics related to the CAPTCHA, as well as secondary metrics such as account creations and edit counts.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 January. It will be on all wikis from 1 February (calendar). [48][49]
• On February 1, a link will be added to the "Tools" menu to download a QR code that links to the page you are viewing. There will also be a new Special:QrCode page to create QR codes for any Wikimedia URL. This addresses the #19 most-voted wish from the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [50]
• Gadgets which only work in some skins have sometimes used the targets option to limit where you can use them. This will stop working this week. You should use the skins option instead. [51]

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