This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Past: WikiNusantara 2019, the first Wikimedia Indonesia conference was successfully held in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, on Apr 27-28, 2019. The conference included two Wikidata talks:
New tool: Wikimedia Related Projects provides statistics about Wikimedia projects and the relations between them, using the number of sitelinks they have in common
Welcome to the seventh newsletter from the Growth team!
The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.
Newcomer homepage release this week
Screenshot of newcomer homepage in Test Wikipedia, in English.The main feature that the team has been working on over the last month is the newcomer homepage. This feature gives newcomers a place on the wiki to get oriented, learn about editing, and see their impact (see the accompanying screenshot from Test Wikipedia). We intend to release this feature to Czech, Korean, and Vietnamese Wikipedias on May 2nd.
Like the other Growth team features, this will be deployed in a controlled experiment, in which half of newcomers will have access to their homepage and half will not. Users with the feature will be able to access it by clicking their username at the top of their browser, and it will only be available on desktop -- not mobile. Experienced users who want to see their homepage will be able to turn it on in their preferences.
Wikis receiving the newcomer homepage can expect these things:
Additional questions will come to the help desk from the "help module" on the homepage.
Mentors who have signed up for the "mentorship module" will start to receive questions on their user talk pages.
More users may create and edit user pages through the "start module".
Mockups for potential designs of mobile homepage
Recent and future homepage development
The most important piece developed for the homepage over the last month is the "start module", which gives newcomers clear actions to take when they are new: add/confirm their email, go through a tutorial, start their user page. We learned about the need for this module from user tests last month. The next priorities for the newcomer homepage are:
Mobile design: to work well in mobile browsers, the homepage needs a separate design and engineering. See the accompanying mockups for potential mobile designs.
Features for discovery: only about 15% - 30% of newcomers will discover their homepage by clicking their username at the top of their browser. We are going to be designing additional ways for newcomers to find out about it.
Additional modules: the initial version contains some of the simpler modules. Potential upcoming modules include task recommendations and a feed of activity on the wiki.
Other updates
Help panel leading indicators: our team published data on the help panel's initial performance. The evaluation exposes some areas for improvement, but we think the help panel's behavior so far is healthy and that it is not having a negative impact on the wikis. We will be publishing additional data, making plans, and asking for community thoughts around the future of the help panel over the course of the next two weeks. If you are interested in trying out the help panel on your wiki, please let us know on our team's talk page.
Long term plans: the team had a week of planning meetings, in which we talked about some longer-term ideas for Growth work. Some of the top ideas are: to extend the newcomer homepage to help user's build their identity through a user profile, and to revisit the "engagement emails" project that the team put on hold. Over the next month, we will be asking for community conversation around how the team can spend our time in the next fiscal year, that starts in July.
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 Wikipedia app for Android now invites users to add Wikidata descriptions to Wikidata objects that have Wikipedia articles but no Wikidata descriptions. It will only invite users who have added a number of Wikidata descriptions in the app without being reverted. This is to avoid spam and bad edits. [1][2]
Problems
Tech News was late last week because of a MassMessage bug. Other newsletters had the same problem. [3]
Changes later this week
You will see when you last refreshed the recent changes page. This is so you can see how recent the changes are. [4]
When you write a comment in Structured Discussions but have not posted it yet your web browser will save it in local storage instead of session storage. This means you do not lose them even if you close your web browser. Structured Discussions used to be called Flow. [5]
You will be able to turn off milestone notifications. Milestone notifications congratulate you when you have made certain numbers of edits. [6]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 May. It will be on all wikis from 2 May (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 1 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
The Wikidata wb_terms table will be dropped. This will affect some Wikidata tools. They need to be updated. The table has become too big which is causing problems. This will happen on 29 May. You can read more. You can ask for help if you need it.
Wikimedia wikis will soon use a token when you log out. This changes how the API works. Some tools might need to be updated. [7]
The second round of the 2019 WikiCup has now finished. Contestants needed to scored 32 points to advance into round 3. Our top four scorers in round 2 all scored over 400 points and were:
Cas Liber (1210), our winner in 2016, with two featured articles and three DYKs. He also made good use of the bonus points available, more than doubling his score by choosing appropriate articles to work on.
Kosack (750), last year's runner up, with an FA, a GA, two FLs, and five DYKs.
Adam Cuerden (480), a WikiCup veteran, with 16 featured pictures, mostly restorations.
Zwerg Nase (461), a seasoned competitor, with a FA, a GA and an ITN item.
So far contestants have achieved nine featured articles between them and a splendid 80 good articles. Commendably, 227 GARs have been completed during the course of the 2019 WikiCup, so the backlog of articles awaiting GA review has been reduced as a result of contestants' activities. The judges are pleased with the thorough GARs that are being performed, and have hardly had to reject any. As we enter the third round, remember that any content promoted after the end of round 2 but before the start of round 3 can be claimed in round 3. Remember too that you must claim your points within 14 days of "earning" them.
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
Special:Watchlist can show the wrong information. It does not always show which edits are read and which are unread. The developers are working on solving the problem. [8]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 May. It will be on all wikis from 9 May (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 8 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
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 14 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 May. It will be on all wikis from 16 May (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 15 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Call for submissions for the Community Growth space at Wikimania 2019
Welcome to a special newsletter from the Growth team! This special newsletter is not about Wikimedia Foundation Growth team projects. Instead, it is a call for submissions for the Community Growth space at Wikimania 2019. We think that many people who receive this newsletter may have something valuable to contribute to this space at Wikimania. We haven't translated the newsletter, because Wikimania's language is English.
Please see below for the message from the organizers of the Community Growth space at Wikimania.
Since you are interested b Growth team projects, and potentially involved in welcoming newcomers initiatives on your wiki, we would like to invite you to submit a proposal to the Community Growth space because of the actions you’ve done around newcomers on wikis. The deadline for submission is June 1. See below for Community Growth submission topics and session formats. Topics and sessions have to be in English.
In the Community Growth space, we will come together for discussions, presentations, and workshops that address these questions:
What is and is not working around attracting and retaining newcomers?
How should Wikimedia activities evolve to help communities grow and flourish?
How should our technology and culture evolve to help new populations to come online, participate and become community members?
Recommended topics: please see this link for the list for the list of recommended topics. If you do not plan to submit a proposal, you can also suggest additional topics here. If your topic does not fit into our space, remember that there are 18 other spaces that could welcome you sharing your knowledge and perspective.
Types of session. We prefer sessions that are participatory, interactive, promote conversations, and give a voice to parts of our movement that are heard less often. Please see this link for the list of recommended session formats.
Poster submissions. Posters are also a good way to introduce a topic, or show some results of an action. Please consider submitting one!
More information about the Community Growth space, topics, and submission formats is available on the proposal page.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
File descriptions for files from Commons were not shown properly on other Wikimedia wikis for a few days. For example the image descriptions and license information were missing. This has now been fixed. [9][10]
Some diffs show an error message when you try to see them. The developers are working on fixing it. It could be because of some edit comments. [11][12]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 May. It will be on all wikis from 23 May (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 22 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
The content translation tool on Wikipedia can use machine translations. There is a system to stop translations where the editors do not fix machine translation mistakes. This warns or stops them if they seem to just copy what the machine translation gives them. If this system is too strict or not strict enough you can tell the language team. [13]
The Wikidata wbeditentityAPI endpoint will remove all aliases if the request includes an empty alias. This is how it supposed to work. It has not been working this way because of a bug. This will start on 12 June. [14]
Wikidata Quality Score Display: Gadget that displays on a Wikipedia article the quality level of the related Wikidata item
Wikidocumentaries service approaches beta quality and displays content from Wikimedia and other openly licensed sources for each Wikidata item. The latest user interface translations are Indonesian and Russian, and the newest content source plugin for the related images section is the brand new Creative Commons Search catalog.
Several developers from the Wikidata team attended to the hackathon, discussed with the community, gathered feedback, hacked on things together with volunteers :)
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
Big changes to the replica database will happen on 3 June. Some tools on Cloud Services will stop working if the maintainers do not update them to use the new schema. This probably affects tools that query for revisions or log entries made by a user. [15][16]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 May. It will be on all wikis from 30 May (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 29 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Past: Wikidata workshop, May 27th at UIN Maliki, Malang, Indonesia (in collaboration with Faculty of Computer Science, UI) - Slideset link - Press release
Blogpost by RightStatements.org - a system of standardised interoperable rights and reuse information for GLAMs - describing the role and importance of the property P6426.
At WikiWoordenboek (Dutch wiktionary) a project titled Widawiwo has begun to explore how the maximal mutual benefit of Wikidata and WikiWoordenboek can be achieved.
Specify license of mediawiki/Wikibase/WikibaseLexeme ontology (phab:T216842)
Enable bugfix on beta for wbeditentity setting aliases to empty array (phab:T223300)
Use correct validator in alias changeop and provide error messages if alias is too short (phab:T223311)
More work on the use of special pages Special:SetAliases and Special:SetLabelDescriptionAliases with aliases containing | character (phab:T223270)
Add Wikidata query service lag to Wikidata maxlag (phab:T221774)
Fix BadMethodCallException wbgetentities when getting Lexeme subentities (forms, senses) (phab:T223995)
Scale the machine learning components of the WDCM system w. {text2vec} WarpLDA implementation (phab:T203366)
Inspect strange behavior of the WD_percentUsageDashboard (phab:T217994)
WDCM dashboards maintenance: eliminating the need to use the wdcm.maintable in Hive, WDCM Geo is now independent of it (with its update engine running Spark instead) and re-designed to match the WDCM standards (phab:T217994, phab:T214586, phab:T217997)
Further preparations for the Wikidata Languages Landscape project (phab:T221965)
More progress in order to get the mobile service deployed
Adding an IP edit warning popup for mobile termbox (phab:T221831)
Allowing users to ignore this popup permanently (phab:T221833)
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
You can now write all special letters in all African Wikipedia languages. This works in the desktop version. [17]
There is now a field called depicts on Commons. This is a way to show what is in a picture with the help of Wikidata. It is still in development. [18]
Some tools on Toolforge may break on or after 3 June because of database changes. Maintainers should update their tools to use the new schema. [19][20]
Problems
You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for 30 minutes on 19 June at 05:00 (UTC). This is to fix a hardware problem. [21]
Changes later this week
Some wikis have one tab for the visual editor and one tab for a wikitext editor. Others wikis just have one tab. If your wiki has two tabs, clicking a link to create a new page has always opened a wikitext editor. It will now open the editor you used the last time you edited. [22]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 May. It will be on all wikis from 6 May (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 5 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
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
When you create a PDF from a page on the wiki this is now done by Proton. Before this we used Electron. It should look the same but work better. Both use Chromium. This is a different system from when you collect several articles into a book and make a PDF from them. [23][24]
The Flagged Revisions extension now uses the standard OOUI icons. There will be additional minor fixes for positioning in the next deployment. [25]
Bots and other scripts that do not set an identifiable User-Agent may find their requests strictly rate-limited until they identify themselves properly. [26]
Problems
Please check if the Flagged Revisions configuration on your wiki is as you expect (or as it was a few weeks ago). If not, please report it. [27]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 12 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Hello and welcome to the June newsletter, a brief update of Guild activities since March 2019. You can unsubscribe from our mailings at any time; see below.
Election time: Nomination of candidates in our mid-year Election of Coordinators opened on 1 June, and voting will take place from 16 June. Coordinators normally serve a six-month term and are elected on an approval basis. Self-nominations are welcome. If you've thought of helping out at the Guild, or know of another editor who would make a good coordinator, please consider standing for election or nominating them here.
June Blitz: Our June blitz will soon be upon us; it will begin at 00:01 on 16 June (UTC) and will close at 23:59 on 22 June (UTC). The themes are "nature and the environment" and all requests.
March Drive: Thanks to everyone for their work in March's Backlog Elimination Drive. We removed copyedit tags from 182 of the articles tagged in our original target months October and November 2018, and the month finished with 64 target articles remaining from November and 811 in the backlog. GOCE copyeditors also completed 22 requests for copyedit in March; the month ended with 34 requests pending. Of the 32 people who signed up for this drive, 24 copyedited at least one article. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here.
April Blitz: Thanks to everyone who participated in the April Blitz; the blitz ran from 14 to 20 April (UTC) inclusive and the themes were Sports and Entertainment. Of the 15 people who signed up, 13 copyedited at least one article. Participants claimed 60 copyedits. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here.
Progress report: As of 04:36, 3 June 2019 (UTC), GOCE copyeditors have completed 267 requests since 1 January. The backlog of tagged articles stands at 605 articles.
May Drive: During the May Backlog Elimination Drive, Guild copy-editors removed copyedit tags from 191 of the 192 articles tagged in our original target months of November and December 2018, and January 2019 was added on 22 May. We finished the month with 81 target articles remaining and a record low of 598 articles in the backlog. GOCE copyeditors also completed 24 requests for copyedit during the May drive, and the month ended with 35 requests pending. Of the 26 people who signed up for this drive, 21 copyedited at least one article. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here.
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators Miniapolis, Baffle gab1978, Jonesey95, Reidgreg and Tdslk.
To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
Welcome to the eighth newsletter from the Growth team!
The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.
May was a busy month, and we apologize for a slightly late newsletter.
General news
The Growth team will begin to work with the Arabic Wikipedia community as a new target wiki. This is in addition to Korean, Czech, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
Several members of the Growth team attended Wikimedia Hackathon. To see what we worked on and learned, read this update (in English).
Wikimania 2019 is coming up in August. The conference will include a "Community Growth" space, for sessions about how our communities expand through software and programs.
Early results from newcomer homepage release
A newcomer homepage on Czech Wikipedia (displayed in English language)
The newcomer homepage was deployed in Czech and Korean Wikipedias on May 6 for desktop users. It is deployed in an A/B test, so that half of newcomers have access to the homepage and half do not. They access it by clicking on their username in their personal tools along the top of the window.
After about a month of usage, we see a few interesting trends. We think that the usage is going well so far, as we continue to work on the feature
About half of users who visit the homepage click on a link or button.
About half of users visit the homepage more than once, with about a fifth of users visiting on multiple days.
Users are interacting with all the different modules on the page -- there is no clear favorite.
Users have been asking questions to their mentors -- but not on the help desk.
Next steps for homepage
Mockup of mobile newcomer homepage
Because we are seeing good reactions to the homepage from the first users, we are prioritizing work that helps more users find their homepage:
Features to aid discovery: only a minority of newcomers who have a homepage will find their homepage on their own. The team is designing features that help newcomers learn where to find their homepage. The most important feature will point to the homepage link using a GuidedTour.
User tests showed that the most important thing to add to the homepage are clear task recommendations to help newcomers get started with editing right away. This is the module that we will be working on next.
Future of team in the next year
The Growth team has been working since September 2018, and we're now planning for the work we'll be doing for the next fiscal year, which begins in July.
Though we have not yet developed a feature that clearly increases growth in our target wikis, we believe that the features we have been developing have high potential to increase growth if we continue to work on them.
Therefore, the team will continue to work on the features we have started, and we will develop related features that improve the overall newcomer experience. These features may include:
Improvements to how newcomers can build their user pages and develop their on-wiki identity. See initial notes here.
Improvements to how newcomers receive notifications on-wiki and through email, so that they quickly find out if other users are contacting them.
Processes that help newcomers get awards or recognition for good work.
Ways for newcomers to see the activity on the wiki and find others who share their interests.
We will start discussions with communities to help us define these ideas before we work on them.
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
You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for 30 minutes on 19 June at 05:00 (UTC). This is to fix a hardware problem. [28]
Changes later this week
MIDI files can soon be played without the Score extension. You can then add them with [[File:Filename.midi]]. Later override_midi and override_audio will stop working. Instead you will need to add the MIDI file below the music score. [29]
A new video player will soon replace the old one. You will be able to enable it as a beta feature in your preferences. It will later be enabled for everyone if there are no big problems. [30]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 June. It will be on all wikis from 20 June (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 19 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
Some gadgets and user scripts still use the old wgEnableAPI and wgEnableWriteAPI values. These values are always true. They will soon be removed. This might break the gadgets and scripts. You should fix your gadgets to not use these values. [31]