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January 2016

The Signpost: 06 January 2016

Wikidata weekly summary #191

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 21:50, 10 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-02

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

Problems

  • Some pages do not turn in up in categories where they should be. This is because link tables are sometimes not populated. [3]

Changes this week

  • The Nuke extension will work with Flow. This will make it easier to handle spam in Flow. [4]
  • New file uploads will now be patrollable. [5]
  • Internet Explorer 8 will no longer have JavaScript support. You will still be able to browse and edit Wikipedia if you use Internet Explorer 8, but will not be able to use some features. This can be solved by upgrading to a newer version or switching to a different browser. [6][7]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 12 January at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • URLs in the recent changes IRC feed will no longer be rewritten to unencrypted HTTP. This could be a breaking change for bots dependent on the IRC feed. [8]
  • The edit tabs for the wikitext editor and the visual editor will be combined to one single edit tab. You will be able to choose which one you prefer. If you are not logged in, your choice will be saved as a cookie in your browser. You can test the single edit tab. [9][10]
  • There is a beta feature that adds links to the subject on other Wikimedia projects. This works much like the links to for example Wikipedia articles in other languages. It will go out of beta testing and be enabled for everyone in January. Wikis that don't want this can decide to have it disabled. [11][12]
  • The difference between "alerts" and "messages" notifications is unclear to some. The developers want feedback at the Phabricator task or on MediaWiki.org so they can make this better. You can give feedback in your language if you can't write in English.

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

16:59, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 13 January 2016

Wikidata weekly summary #192

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 11:21, 18 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-03

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 will be able to find or mark bugs and suggestions in Phabricator that are specific for your language or wiki. [13]
  • Notifications have been upgraded with more detailed and easier-to-access information. See the documentation. Cross-wiki notifications will be available soon on the two test wikis. [14]

Changes this week

  • The visual editor uses the TemplateData extension to make editing templates easier. You will now get a warning when you edit a TemplateData form and leave it without saving. [15]
  • MediaWiki will get a new authentication and authorization system called AuthManager. This is planned to happen in a month or two. Some bots will need to change how they log in. Two new and more stable authentication methods will be available now: Owner-only OAuth credentials and bot passwords. You can read more about the change. [16]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 January. It will be on all Wikipedias from 21 January (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 19 January at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is governance model. The meeting will be on 20 January at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

17:56, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 6

Newsletter • January 2016

Hello there! Happy to be writing this newsletter once more. This month:

What comes next

Some good news: the Wikimedia Foundation has renewed WikiProject X. This means we can continue focusing on making WikiProjects better.

During our first round of work, we created a prototype WikiProject based on two ideas: (1) WikiProjects should clearly present things for people to do, and (2) The content of WikiProjects should be automated as much as possible. We launched pilots, and for the most part it works. But this approach will not work for the long term. While it makes certain aspects of running a WikiProject easier, it makes the maintenance aspects harder.

We are working on a major overhaul that will address these issues. New features will include:

  • Creating WikiProjects by simply filling out a form, choosing which reports you want to generate for your project. This will work with existing bots in addition to the Reports Bot reports. (Of course, you can also have sections curated by humans.)
  • One-click button to join a WikiProject, with optional notifications.
  • Be able to define your WikiProject's scope within the WikiProject itself by listing relevant pages and categories, eliminating the need to tag every talk page with a banner. (You will still be allowed to do that, of course. It just won't be required.)

The end goal is a collaboration tool that can be used by WikiProjects but also by any edit-a-thon or group of people that want to coordinate on improving articles. Though implemented as an extension, the underlying content will be wikitext, meaning that you can continue to use categories, templates, and other features as you normally would.

This will take a lot of work, and we are just getting started. What would you like to see? I invite you to discuss on our talk page.


Until next time,

Harej (talk) 02:53, 20 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 20 January 2016

Tech News: 2016-04

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 follow when pages are added or removed from a category on German Wikipedia. The plan is to add it to Wikimedia Commons and other Wikipedias this week. [17][18]
  • Administrators can hide individual entries of a page with RevisionDelete. There is now a button to choose "all", "none" or "inverse" in Special:Log. The article history will get the same buttons soon. Wikis that have done this locally with JavaScript will be able to remove that code. [19]

Changes this week

  • You will be able to see the references when you preview a section you are editing. This will happen even if there is no <references /> tag in that section. [20]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 January. It will be on all wikis from 28 January (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 26 January at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • There is now an extension called ArticlePlaceholder. It can automatically generate content on Wikipedia with data from Wikidata if there is no Wikipedia article. It will have a tag to remind the reader it is not an article and ask the reader to create one. The developer is now looking for smaller Wikipedias that want to try the extension. [21]
  • The OTRS system will be upgraded. The plan is to do this on 3 February at 08:00 (UTC). It will probably take 6 to 8 hours. OTRS will be down during the upgrade. [22]
  • Users will soon be automatically congratulated when they reach some edit count milestones. [23]

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

16:39, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #193

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 17:10, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 27 January 2016

February 2016

Wikidata weekly summary #194

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 17:45, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-05

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

  • Sites with a wikimedia.org address were by mistake redirected to the Wikimedia Foundation wiki on 26 January. This included Meta and Wikimedia Commons. The mistake was fixed after an hour. [26]
  • Some users had problems logging in and out around 22 January. Bots also had problems and edit previews did not work properly. This was because of problems related to the new component SessionManager. It was undone on 23 January. [27][28]
  • Because of new problems with SessionManager the latest version of MediaWiki was removed from the Wikimedia wikis again on 31 January. The new version this week will be without SessionManager. [29]

Changes this week

  • The page history will get a help link. This will go to Help:Page history on Meta. Wikis can exchange it for a link to their local pages. [30]
  • Notifications will only show part of a page name if it is very long. You will also have another way to mark notifications as read. [31][32]
  • The Universal Language Selector input methods are now available with the visual editor. This means many who write in non-Latin scripts can now use the visual editor. [33]
  • The visual editor will now give you more tools to edit tables. You can move rows and columns in a table and copy parts of tables to make new ones. You can also copy and paste more than one cell at the same time. [34][35][36]
  • The visual editor has a new warning message when you leave a page you are editing without saving. Non-English wikis might need to translate it. [37][38]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 February. It will be on all wikis from 4 February (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • The rest.wikimedia.org domain will be shut down. This is planned to happen in March. You should use /api/rest_v1/ at each individual project domain instead. [39]


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

21:02, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Google Doodle task force collaboration for 4 February 2016

Hello, Kharkiv07.

The current collaboration of the Google Doodle task force is:

Fat Thursday

Please be bold and make this a valuable reference for interested readers! Opt-out instructions

Posted by: MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:59, 4 February 2016 (UTC) on behalf of the task force. This task force is part of Today's articles for improvement. Opt-out instructions[reply]

(Note that this doodle is only targeted to German users of Google.)

Tech News: 2016-06

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

  • Syntax highlighting support is now available for 53 more computer languages. [40]
  • When you get a notification that an edit has been reverted, the notification now quotes part of the edit summary. [41]
  • RESTBase is now using scrub_wikitext instead of scrubWikitext. [42]

Changes this week

  • Wikidata will have a new data type called "math". It will be used for formulas. [43][44]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 February. It will be on all wikis from 11 February (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • Other sites will be able to tell when visitors come from links on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites. They used to be able to do this until we started using forced HTTPS in June 2015. This is planned to happen on 15 February. [45][46]
  • Wikidata will have a new data type called "external-id". It will be used for references to external resources. It will be enabled on February 16. Some properties will be changed to the new data type. [47][48][49]

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

18:58, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #195

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 21:42, 8 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 03 February 2016

The Signpost: 10 February 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:28, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-07

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 edit pages on the mobile site version without JavaScript. [50]
  • You can now use the Math extension to write chemistry formulas. [51]

Problems

  • A few editors might have been logged in as someone else because of a bug. For security reasons everyone was logged out on 9 February. If you have seen this bug, you can report it. [52][53]

Changes this week

  • There is a beta feature that adds links to the subject on other Wikimedia projects. The plan was to have it leave beta testing and be enabled for everyone in January. It will happen on 16 February instead. Wikis that don't want this can decide to have it disabled. [54][55]
  • Cross-wiki notifications will be available as a beta feature on Wikidata, MediaWiki, Commons, and all Hebrew and French wikis on 19 February. [56]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 February. It will be on all wikis from 18 February (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 16 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • The search function on Wikimedia wikis will get a completion suggester that tries to find the right pages as the user is typing. It will also recognize some typos. This will probably happen in March. It is currently in beta. [57]

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

16:16, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #196

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 09:57, 16 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #196

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 09:58, 16 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 17 February 2016

Tech News: 2016-08

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

Problems

  • There was no new MediaWiki version last week. Changes that were planned to happen last week will happen this week instead. This is because of a bug that made saving pages take longer time. [60][61]

Changes this week

  • After February 23, you can use Wikidata for inter-language links on Wikiversity. [62]

Meetings

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

18:22, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #197

Wikidata weekly summary #186

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 22:23, 22 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 7

Newsletter • February 2016

This month:

One database for Wikipedia requests

Development of the extension for setting up WikiProjects, as described in the last issue of this newsletter, is currently underway. No terribly exciting news on this front.

In the meantime, we are working on a prototype for a new service we hope to announce soon. The problem: there are requests scattered all across Wikipedia, including requests for new articles and requests for improvements to existing articles. We Wikipedians are very good at coming up with lists of things to do. But once we write these lists, where do they end up? How can we make them useful for all editors—even those who do not browse the missing articles lists, or the particular WikiProjects that have lists?

Introducing Wikipedia Requests, a new tool to centralize the various lists of requests around Wikipedia. Requests will be tagged by category and WikiProject, making it easier to find requests based on what your interests are. Accompanying this service will be a bot that will let you generate reports from this database on any wiki page, including WikiProjects. This means that once a request is filed centrally, it can syndicated all throughout Wikipedia, and once it is fulfilled, it will be marked as "complete" throughout Wikipedia. The idea for this service came about when I saw that it was easy to put together to-do lists based on database queries, but it was harder to do this for human-generated requests when those requests are scattered throughout the wiki, siloed throughout several pages. This should especially be useful for WikiProjects that have overlapping interests.

The newsletter this month is fairly brief; not a lot of news, just checking in to say that we are hard at work and hope to have more for you soon.

Until next time,

Harej (talk) 01:44, 24 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 24 February 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:04, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

VisualEditor News #1—2016

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

Did you know?
Among experienced editors, the visual editor's table editing is one of the most popular features.
Screenshot showing a pop-up menu for column operations in a table
If you select the top of a column or the end of a row, you can quickly insert and remove columns and rows.

Now, you can also rearrange columns and rows. Click "Move before" or "Move after" to swap the column or row with its neighbor.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has fixed many bugs. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Indic, and Han scripts, and improving the single edit tab interface.

Recent changes

You can switch from the wikitext editor to the visual editor after you start editing. This function is available to nearly all editors at most wikis except the Wiktionaries and Wikisources.

Many local feedback pages for the visual editor have been redirected to mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.

You can now re-arrange columns and rows in tables, as well as copying a row, column or any other selection of cells and pasting it in a new location.

The formula editor has two options: you can choose "Quick edit" to see and change only the LaTeX code, or "Edit" to use the full tool. The full tool offers immediate preview and an extensive list of symbols.

Future changes

The single edit tab project will combine the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab. This is similar to the system already used on the mobile website. (T102398) Initially, the "Edit" tab will open whichever editing environment you used last time. Your last editing choice will be stored as an account preference for logged-in editors, and as a cookie for logged-out users. Logged-in editors will have these options in the Editing tab of Special:Preferences:

  • Remember my last editor,
  • Always give me the visual editor if possible,
  • Always give me the source editor, and
  • Show me both editor tabs.  (This is the state for people using the visual editor now.)

The visual editor uses the same search engine as Special:Search to find links and files. This search will get better at detecting typos and spelling mistakes soon. These improvements to search will appear in the visual editor as well.

The visual editor will be offered to all editors at most "Phase 6" Wikipedias during the next few months. The developers would like to know how well the visual editor works in your language. They particularly want to know whether typing in your language feels natural in the visual editor. Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. This will affect the following languages: Japanese, Korean, Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, Thai, Aramaic and others.

Let's work together

If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thanks!

– Whatamidoing (WMF) 17:47, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Google Doodle task force collaboration for 29 February 2016

Hello, Kharkiv07.

The current collaboration of the Google Doodle task force is:

February 29

Please be bold and make this a valuable reference for interested readers! Opt-out instructions

Posted by: MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:21, 29 February 2016 (UTC) on behalf of the task force. This task force is part of Today's articles for improvement. Opt-out instructions[reply]


Tech News: 2016-09

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

  • Thanks to the Graph extension and Pageview API, we now have ((Graph:PageViews)) templates that can show pageviews for any wiki page for any of the wikis. See the examples.
  • The Capiunto extension is installed on test wiki. Capiunto provides flexible infobox functionality for Scribunto and generates HTML for infobox features such as headers and rows. It is designed for clean and modern infoboxes that are driven by data from Wikidata, easily usable across different language versions, and easily extensible.
  • The visual editor now follows the TemplateData format setting announced in November. When you edit or add a use of a template, the wikitext will be laid out in one of the two ways. [63][64]
  • The order of parameters and format defined in a template's TemplateData will be now respected. [65][66]

Changes this week

  • On wikis where the visual editor is available in single edit tab mode, red links may open the visual editor instead of the wikitext editor, depending on user preferences. [67]
  • Anonymous editor warning is now displayed as a warningbox for consistency in both the visual editor and the wikitext editor. [68]
  • Parsoid has been updated to fit some HTML 5 specifications. [69]

Meetings

  • Resigning executive director Lila Tretikov is taking questions at Knowledge Engine FAQ regarding the much talked about project. [70]
  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 1 March at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

20:12, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #198

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 22:00, 29 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
March 2016

Tech News: 2016-10

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

  • Files on Wikimedia Commons can now be 2 GB big. The old limit was 1 GB. [71]
  • Welcome notifications now have a different symbol. English Wikipedia already had this one. [72]
  • The Wikimedia memory cache servers in the Eqiad cluster have now been upgraded to Debian 8 (Jessie). Some users might have had to log in again because of this. [73]
  • It is now easier to categorize images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in the Commons Android app. [74]
  • Bare attributes in tags now parse according to the HTML5 specifications. <pages from= to= section=1> will parse as <pages from="to=" section="1"> instead of <pages from="" to="" section="1"> as it used to. Please use <pages from="" to="" section=1> or <pages section=1> instead. This is mostly likely to affect pages on Wikisource projects. [75]

Problems

  • Phabricator has been a bit unstable lately. This should be fixed now. [76]
  • The PageView API shows wrong data between 23 February and 29 February for pages with special characters in their title. [77]
  • The parsing change mentioned above caused a large number of pages to break, especially on Wikisource. [78]
  • You may see falsely formatted edit links on both mobile and desktop devices. Mobile devices can also show incorrect formatted table of contents. This should be fixed soon. [79]
  • Templates using TemplateData that were edited with the visual editor might have some problems in wikitext mode. This can be fixed by editing and saving the page by using the visual editor without making any changes. [80]

Changes this week

  • Cross-wiki notifications will be enabled as a beta feature on all wikis on 10 March. You will be able to get notifications when something happens on another Wikimedia wiki. [81]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 March. It will be on all wikis from 10 March (calendar).
  • Wikivoyages will get the Kartographer extension. Kartographer will allow <mapframe> and <maplink> tags in an article to insert an interactive map and overlay it with different markers. You can add ideas and suggestions to the Maps talk page. If you find any bugs, you can report them in Phabricator. [82]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 8 March at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • The buttons in interfaces will be simplified. Instead of white, red, green and blue buttons, in future there will only be white, red and blue ones. [83]
  • The Wikimedia technical operations team plans to do some server work on 22 March. This could cause some problems, for example make it possible to read but not edit the Wikimedia wikis for a short period of time. The date for this might change. [84]

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

20:24, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #199

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

The Signpost: 02 March 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:00, 8 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Google Doodle task force collaboration for 8 March 2016

Hello, Kharkiv07.

The current collaboration of the Google Doodle task force is:

International Women's Day

Please be bold and make this a valuable reference for interested readers! Opt-out instructions

Posted by: MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:46, 8 March 2016 (UTC) on behalf of the task force. This task force is part of Today's articles for improvement. Opt-out instructions[reply]


The Signpost: 09 March 2016

Tech News: 2016-11

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 mobile web interface no longer suggests HiDPI thumbnails. This is to take up less bandwidth on slow or expensive connections. [85]
  • The search engine on wikipedia.org has been updated. [86]

Changes this week

  • Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 22 March and 24 March. This could be postponed to April 18. You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. Because of a test, there will also be a couple of minutes where you can't edit the wikis on 15 March starting 07:00 UTC. You can read more about the server work. There will be more notifications and updates about this.
  • Administrators and other users with advanced permissions will need to have an 8-byte long passwords. This change takes place on 15 March. Users with too short passwords will be asked to change password the next time they log in. This was decided in a discussion on Meta and is because they can use tools that can hurt the wikis. [87]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 March. It will be on all wikis from 17 March (calendar).
  • The buttons in interfaces will be simplified. Instead of white, red, green and blue buttons, in future there will only be white, red and blue ones. [88]

Meetings

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

18:37, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #200

Wikidata weekly summary #186

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

The Signpost: 16 March 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:13, 19 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #201

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

Tech News: 2016-12

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

  • Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. The Wikimedia Technology department planned to test it this week. This will take place the week of April 18 instead. You can read more about the server work. There will be more notifications and updates about this.
  • In Firefox, the visual editor would sometimes just jump down to the bottom of the page when you double-clicked on a table cell. This has now been fixed. [89]

Changes this week

  • It will now be easier to list IP addresses that don't have to solve CAPTCHAs. [90]
  • You will now be able to mark Echo notifications as unread. [91]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 March. It will be on all wikis from 23 March (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 22 March at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • URLs in the recent changes IRC feed will no longer be rewritten to unencrypted HTTP. This could be a breaking change for bots dependent on the IRC feed. This will happen on May 2. [92]

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

16:04, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 23 March 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:24, 27 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #202

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

Tech News: 2016-13

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

Problems

  • Adding references with Citoid was broken for approximately 6 hours on 24 March. This was fixed. [95]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 March. It will be on all wikis from 31 March (calendar).
  • You will be able to remove the header and footer style from User language (babel) boxes. This will make it easier to use them with other userboxes. [96]

Meetings

Future changes

  • Commons will soon have improved access to Wikidata's data. It will then be possible to access data about any concept on any page on Commons. Assistance with testing this on the beta cluster is appreciated. [97]
  • Wikibits.js will not be loaded by default anymore starting April 2016. Gadget and script authors should have already updated their code since the previous announcements, but there is another migration path available if needed. See wikitech-l for details.

Corrections

  • Last week Tech News said the new MediaWiki version would come to wikis from 21 March to 23 March. The right dates were 22 March to 24 March.

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

19:43, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 1 April 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:12, 1 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-14

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 filter Special:Log in more detail. [98]
  • Wikimedia wikis have a new way of counting visitors. [99]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from April 5. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from April 6. It will be on all wikis from April 7 (calendar).

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

22:13, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #203

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 08:57, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Google Doodle task force collaboration for 6 April 2016

Hello, Kharkiv07.

The current collaboration of the Google Doodle task force is:

1896 Summer Olympics

Please be bold and make this a valuable reference for interested readers! Opt-out instructions

Posted by: MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:34, 6 April 2016 (UTC) on behalf of the task force. This task force is part of Today's articles for improvement. Opt-out instructions[reply]


Do you want one Edit tab, or two? It's your choice

How to switch between editing environments
Part of the toolbar in the visual editor
Click the [[ ]] to switch to the wikitext editor.
Part of the toolbar in the wikitext editor
Click the pencil icon to switch to the visual editor.

The editing interface will be changed soon. When that happens, editors who currently see two editing tabs – "Edit" and "Edit source" – will start seeing one edit tab instead. The single edit tab has been popular at other Wikipedias. When this is deployed here, you may be offered the opportunity to choose your preferred appearance and behavior the next time you click the Edit button. You will also be able to change your settings in the Editing section of Special:Preferences.

You can choose one or two edit tabs. If you chose one edit tab, then you can switch between the two editing environments by clicking the buttons in the toolbar (shown in the screenshots). See Help:VisualEditor/User guide#Switching between the visual and wikitext editors for more information and screenshots.

There is more information about this interface change at mw:VisualEditor/Single edit tab. If you have questions, suggestions, or problems to report, then please leave a note at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback.

Whatamidoing (WMF) 19:22, 11 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-15

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 visual editor can generate wikicode with image options in your language. Examples of image options are "thumb" or "left". You can ask to change to options in your language in Phabricator. [100][101]
  • Wiktionaries and Wikisources can now use the visual editor. It is an opt-in beta feature. It still needs development to work better with these projects. [102][103]
  • ORES is using new models. Tools that use ORES' predictions can behave strangely. ORES also has a new API. [104]
  • The visual editor now supports classical Greek characters. [105]

Problems

  • There was a bug when you used keyboard arrows in templates in the visual editor. This has now been fixed. [106]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 April. It will be on all wikis from 14 April (calendar).
  • The wikipedia.org portal will get many small bug fixes and improvements. Most will be for the search box and suggested results that were added in March. [107]

Meetings

Future changes

  • Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 19 April and 21 April. This will start at 14:00 UTC and last for 15 to 30 minutes. [108]

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

20:45, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #204

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 10:58, 12 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 14 April 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:46, 14 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #205

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 15:19, 18 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-16

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 filter Special:Log in more detail. You can filter different imports and new users. [109][110]
  • You can use Telnet to read Wikimedia wikis. [111]
  • MediaWiki wikis can handle bigger file uploads. The new limit is 4 GB. [112]

Changes this week

  • Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 19 April and 21 April. This will start at 14:00 UTC and last for 15 to 30 minutes. [113]
  • There is no new Mediawiki version this week. This is because of the data center test.

Meetings

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

20:40, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 8

Newsletter • March / April 2016

This month:

Transclude article requests anywhere on Wikipedia

In the last issue of the WikiProject X Newsletter, I discussed the upcoming Wikipedia Requests system: a central database for outstanding work on Wikipedia. I am pleased to announce Wikipedia Requests is live! Its purpose is to supplement automatically generated lists, such as those from SuggestBot, Reports bot, or Wikidata. It is currently being demonstrated on WikiProject Occupational Safety and Health (which I work on as part of my NIOSH duties) and WikiProject Women scientists.

Adding a request is as simple as filling out a form. Just go to the Add form to add your request. Adding sources will help ensure that your request is fulfilled more quickly. And when a request is fulfilled, simply click "mark as complete" and it will be removed from all the lists it's on. All at the click of a button! (If anyone is concerned, all actions are logged.)

With this new service is a template to transclude these requests: ((Wikipedia Requests)). It's simple to use: add the template to a page, specifying article=, category=, or wikiproject=, and the list will be transcluded. For example, for requests having to do with all living people, just do ((Wikipedia Requests|category=Living people)). Use these lists on WikiProjects but also for edit-a-thons where you want a convenient list of things to do on hand. Give it a shot!

Help us build our list!

The value of Wikipedia Requests comes from being a centralized database. The long work to migrating individual lists into this combined list is slowly underway. As of writing, we have 883 open tasks logged in Wikipedia Requests. We need your help building this list.

If you know of a list of missing articles, or of outstanding tasks for existing articles, that you would like to migrate to this new system, head on over to Wikipedia:Wikipedia Requests#Transition project and help out. Doing this will help put your list in front of more eyes—more than just your own WikiProject.

An open database means new tools

WikiProject X maintains a database that associates article talk pages (and draft talk pages) with WikiProjects. This database powers many of the reports that Reports bot generates. However, until very recently, this database was not made available to others who might find its data useful. It's only common sense to open up the database and let others build tools with it.

And indeed: Citation Hunt, the game to add citations to Wikipedia, now lets you filter by WikiProject, using the data from our database.

Are you a tool developer interested in using this? Here are some details: the database resides on Tool Labs with the name s52475__wpx_p. The table that associates WikiProjects with articles and drafts is called projectindex. Pages are stored by talk page title but in the future this should change. Have fun!

On the horizon


Until next time,

Harej (talk) 01:29, 20 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Google Doodle task force collaboration for 22 April 2016

Hello, Kharkiv07.

The current collaboration of the Google Doodle task force is:

Earth Day

Please be bold and make this a valuable reference for interested readers! Opt-out instructions

Posted by: MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:46, 22 April 2016 (UTC) on behalf of the task force. This task force is part of Today's articles for improvement. Opt-out instructions[reply]


The Signpost: 24 April 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:42, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #206

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 20:42, 25 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-17

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

  • Wikimedia tested a new data center last week. This meant that the wikis could be read but not edited for 45 minutes on April 19 and for 20 minutes on April 21. [114]
  • When the data center was tested, new edits were not shown in the recent changes log for 20 minutes. They are in the logs now. You can read more about how to find the edits.
  • Unread notifications were sometimes counted incorrectly. This has now been fixed. [115]

Changes this week

  • Wikimedia Commons will have better access to Wikidata. They can use data from any page on Wikidata on any page on Commons. This will happen on April 26. [116]
  • It will be easier to choose if you want to watch files you have uploaded with the upload wizard. [117]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from April 26. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from April 27. It will be on all wikis from April 28 (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on April 26 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • The "Save page" button when you edit will be called "Publish" instead. This is to help new editors understand what it does. It already works like this on some wikis. [118]

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

21:02, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 2 May 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:09, 2 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #207

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Wikidata's coverage as of April 2016
Difference of Wikidata's coverage between April 2016 and 6 month before
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 15:03, 2 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-18

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 visual editor now works when you use Internet Explorer 9. [119]

Problems

Changes this week

Meetings

Future changes

  • Pages could be added to new users' watchlists by default when they edit them. New users could also by default get email notifications when pages they watch are edited. This is discussed on Meta. [122]

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

20:09, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #208

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 15:21, 9 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-19

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

  • Wikiversities now have better access to Wikidata. They can use data from any page on Wikidata on any page on Wikiversity. This happened on May 3. [123]
  • You can use Wikipedia GapFinder to find missing articles between languages. [124]
  • Users are invited to try Cross-wiki Notifications on all wikis. This is the last test session before the release by default, scheduled for May 12th at 23:00 UTC. [125][126]
  • You can use keyboard shortcuts to open the visual editor (meta+V) or the wikitext editor (meta+E) (on certain wikis, even if you have chosen a favorite editor). [127]
  • Uploading files bigger than 100 megabytes on Wikimedia Commons required to opt-in in your preferences. This is not necessary anymore. [128]
  • The UploadsLink extension is now available on Wikimedia Commons. [129]
  • Deleting a translation unit page didn't remove the corresponding content from the translation page. This is now solved. [130]
  • Translation suggestions based on Apertium are now available on Mediawiki.org. [131]

Problems

  • MediaWiki 1.27.0-wmf.23 has been rolled back from Wikimedia wikis, due to a performance issue. [132]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 10. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 11. It will be on all wikis from May 12 (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • Today, in categories, a page titled "11" comes before "2". We plan to reorder that: "2" will come before "11". Please tell the developers if the change will cause problems. [133]

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

23:22, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-20

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

  • Some image thumbnails now load faster on mobile. They also take up less bandwidth. [134]

Problems

  • Last week's MediaWiki version was late on some wikis. [135]

Changes this week

  • Special:Notifications will have "mark as read" buttons for each day. The non-JavaScript version will get it this week. A JavaScript version will come later. [136]
  • Wikis can now locally decide what wikitext they want the signature button to produce. [137]
  • A one-time welcome message for users will now be shown in the wikitext editor. This will include existing users. [138]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 17. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 18. It will be on all wikis from May 19 (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • Using self-closing tags like <div/> and <span/> to mean <div></div> and <span></span> will not work in the future. Templates and pages that use these tags should be fixed. When Phabricator ticket T134423 is fixed these tags will parse as <div> and <span> instead. This is normal in HTML5. [139]

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

16:01, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #209

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 16:22, 16 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 17 May 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:34, 17 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #210

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 14:50, 23 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-21

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

Problems

  • Commons had problems with server lag. This meant that it took longer time for files to turn up in categories. [141]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 May. It will be on all wikis from 26 May (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on May 24 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • All HTTP access to Wikimedia sites and APIs will stop working. Some bots still use HTTP. They will need to use HTTPS instead. This will happen on June 12. [142]

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

18:40, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 May 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:12, 28 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-22

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

  • There is now a standard way to get the target of a redirect page from a Lua module. [143]

Problems

  • A new way to handle rollback was introduced. It broke some tools and scripts and was reverted. This will be re-planned after review. [144][145]
  • CentralNotice didn't work in some older browsers. This has now been fixed. [146]

Changes this week

  • When you edit a file or category page with the visual editor the rest of the page will be shown in its normal place. [147]
  • The Translate extension will get an edit summary field. [148]
  • A change to the <charinsert> feature could break some user scripts. Contact Bawolff if the "click to insert special characters" links in the edit window break on your wiki. [149][150]
  • Elasticsearch will be upgraded on Wikimedia wikis this week. This should not affect you, but if you have problems with the search function this is probably the reason. [151]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 June. It will be on all wikis from 2 June (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 31 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:19, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #211

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 18:24, 30 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 05 June 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:12, 5 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #212

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 14:28, 6 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-23

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

Changes this week

  • The history page can tell you if a page on your watchlist was updated since you last visited it. This now works the same way in Vector as in other skins. The change broke local designs on some wikis. This will be fixed this week. [154]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 June. It will be on all wikis from 9 June (calendar).

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

20:51, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #213

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 14:25, 13 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-24

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

Changes this week

  • You can filter user contributions to hide minor edits. [160]
  • It will be easier to edit galleries with the visual editor. [161]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 June. It will be on all wikis from 16 June (calendar).

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

18:41, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 15 June 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:57, 15 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #214

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 13:29, 20 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-25

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

  • Notifications were not always marked as read when you followed a link from an email notification. This will now happen. [162]

Changes this week

  • The list of other languages an article is available in will be shorter on small Wikipedias and non-Wikipedia projects. This is to make it easier to find the most relevant languages for each user. You will still be able to see the other languages. [163][164]
  • Alerts (the red badge) will not be automatically marked as read when you open the Notifications popup. [165]
  • When you get several thanks you can see them as one notification. This is instead of one notification for each thanks. [166]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 June. It will be on all wikis from 23 June (calendar).

Meetings

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

19:14, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 9

Newsletter • May / June 2016

Check out this month's issue of the WikiProject X newsletter, featuring the first screenshot of our new CollaborationKit software!

Harej (talk) 00:23, 25 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-26

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 ORES service has now moved to a new location. This should make it easier to use ORES. The ORES review service is now available as a beta feature on Wikidata and Persian Wikipedia. ORES is an artificial intelligence system for Wikimedia wikis to help editors. [167]
  • The order of wikis in collapsed cross-wiki notifications was different than when the list was expanded. This is now fixed. [168]
  • A new category for tracking pages with math errors was added: Category:Pages with math errors. [169]

Problems

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 June. It will be on all wikis from 30 June (calendar).
  • The way to mark notifications as read or unread will be changed to be more clear. [172]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 28 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • The Collaboration team at the Wikimedia Foundation will look at developing better tools for edit review. This is because research suggests we scare away newcomers who want to help. [173]
  • An e-mail from the Editing Department explains the technical work that is planned and being researched for the future. Items include better wikitext and visual editing, prompts for edits, language improvements, annotations, and meta-data separation. [174]
  • The sorting of Notifications into the two fly-out menus is going to change on July 5 to 7. Bundled notifications should be easier to explore and mark as read individually. [175][176][177]
  • From 29 June git.wikimedia.org (running Gitblit) will redirect all requests to Phabricator. The vast majority of requests should be correctly redirected. [178]
  • Catalan and Polish Wikipedias will have Wikidata descriptions added to articles in the mobile view by default. This is currently a beta option for the mobile versions. This might come to other wikis later. [179]

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

15:42, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #215

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 16:48, 27 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Editing News #2—2016

Editing News #2—2016 Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

Did you know?

It's quick and easy to insert a references list.

Screenshot showing a dropdown menu with many items

Place the cursor where you want to display the references list (usually at the bottom of the page). Open the "Insert" menu and click the "References list" icon (three books).

If you are using several groups of references, which is relatively rare, you will have the opportunity to specify the group. If you do that, then only the references that belong to the specified group will be displayed in this list of references.

Finally, click "Insert" in the dialog to insert the References list. This list will change as you add more footnotes to the page.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has fixed many bugs. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for Arabic and Indic scripts, and adapting the visual editor to the needs of the Wikivoyages and Wikisources.

Recent changes

The visual editor is now available to all users at most Wikivoyages. It was also enabled for all contributors at the French Wikinews.

The single edit tab feature combines the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab. It has been deployed to several Wikipedias, including Hungarian, Polish, English and Japanese Wikipedias, as well as to all Wikivoyages. At these wikis, you can change your settings for this feature in the "Editing" tab of Special:Preferences. The team is now reviewing the feedback and considering ways to improve the design before rolling it out to more people.

Future changes

The "Save page" button will say "Publish page". This will affect both the visual and wikitext editing systems. More information is available on Meta.

The visual editor will be offered to all editors at the remaining "Phase 6" Wikipedias during the next few months. The developers want to know whether typing in your language feels natural in the visual editor. Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. This will affect several languages, including: Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam, Urdu, Persian, Bengali, Assamese, Aramaic and others.

The team is working with the volunteer developers who power Wikisource to provide the visual editor there, for opt-in testing right now and eventually for all users. (T138966)

The team is working on a modern wikitext editor. It will look like the visual editor, and be able to use the citoid service and other modern tools. This new editing system may become available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices around September 2016. You can read about this project in a general status update on the Wikimedia mailing list.

Let's work together

If you aren't reading this in your preferred language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk), 21:09, 30 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #216

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 16:51, 4 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 04 July 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:47, 4 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-27

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

  • A daily email summary of notifications could be sent even when there were no notifications from the wiki. Now no email will be sent if there is no activity. [180]

Changes this week

  • The "⧼citoid-citefromidtool-title⧽" button in the visual editor's toolbar will move into the "Insert" menu except for Wikipedias, Wikibookses and Wikiversities. This is to make it less prominent on wikis that don't use it as much. [181]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 July. It will be on all wikis from 7 July (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can take part in the next office hour for Wikidata on IRC on July 8 at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

19:45, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-28

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

  • A new image scaler fixed a number of bugs for showing SVG files. Some new problems turned up. [182][183][184]
  • Notifications are grouped by types. They are now counted by number of notifications and not by unread groups. That change may increase the number of notifications displayed. The earlier way of counting was often incorrect. Unread notifications will also be displayed first. [185][186][187]
  • Special:Notifications now has a maximum width for the notifications list on desktop computers. This allows long titles and descriptions to be cut properly. Notifications are now also better parsed. [188][189][190]

Problems

  • On 5 July Wikimedia Commons had problems and could not be edited for 20 minutes. For a short while after that the recent changes log and some gadgets were not working properly. It affected administrative actions on other projects too. [191]
  • Users who have multiple unread notifications can mark them as read by visiting Special:Notifications page on their wiki.

Changes this week

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

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 12 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:15, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #217

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 15:33, 11 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

[m:Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2016/29|Tech News: 2016-29]]

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

Problems

  • On July 12 all wikis were rolled back to MediaWiki 1.28.0-wmf.8 due to a problem in the log-in system. [195][196]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 July. It will be on all wikis from 21 July (calendar).
  • Special:Log now has a help link. [197]
  • The RevisionSlider can be tested on the beta cluster. From 22 July, it will be available as a beta feature at: German Wikipedia, Arabic Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 19 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is "Devise plan for a cross-wiki watchlist back-end". The meeting will be on 20 July at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join. [198]

Future changes

  • User scripts and bots can no longer use http:// to edit wiki pages. [199][200]
  • Gerrit is going to be updated. Developers are invited to test it. [201]

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

12:01, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #218

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 17:06, 18 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 21 July 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:19, 21 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-30

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

Problems

  • Sometimes, the visual editor required saving twice. That problem is now fixed. [203]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 July. It will be on all wikis from 28 July (calendar).
  • It is now possible to mark all Notifications as read on Special:Notifications, by clicking on the cog icon. [204]
  • Wikipedia search will now detect the language of your search if 2 or fewer results are found. It will then show results from the matching language Wikipedia, if any relevant article exists. It will start to roll out in 5 languages. [205]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 26 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is "an extension that implements an authenticated key-value store". The meeting will be on 27 July at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join. [206]

Future changes

  • The current icon for Notifications "Notices" (in English "Notices") will be changed from a bubble-speech icon to a tray icon for consistency. [207]
  • Special:Notifications page code will be changed to be more Mobile friendly. [208]

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

19:54, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #219

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 08:33, 26 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #220

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 21:33, 1 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-31

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

  • A prototype for structured data on Commons is available now. [209]
  • The RevisionSlider beta feature can now be tested on mediawiki.org, German Wikipedia, Arabic Wikipedia and Hebrew Wikipedia.

Problems

  • Renamed users on some wikis were not connected to their account on other wikis between 20 July and 21 July. This has been fixed. [210]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 August. It will be on all wikis from 4 August (calendar).

Meetings

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

21:48, 1 August 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 04 August 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:32, 4 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-32

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

  • In notifications, the icon for Notices has been changed from a speech-bubble icon () to a tray icon () for consistency. The Alerts icon has been redesigned too. The colors have been changed for accessibility. [211]

Problems

  • If you use the wikEd gadget, changes you made were not kept when you switched from the wikitext editor to the visual editor while you were editing. This has now been fixed. [212]

Changes this week

  • Wikimedia search will now ignore question marks at the end of the sentences or words you use when you search. Until now the question mark was just a wildcard. [213]
  • On Commons, UploadWizard will now be available on mobile, rather than just the old upload form. This should reduce the workload for the community in reviewing images. [214]
  • When you edit with the visual editor a puzzle symbol tells you there is an invisible template in the article. It will now mention the name of the template. [215]
  • The button to read something in another language will move for mobile users. This will happen on 9 August. [216]
  • When someone mentions you and links to your user page you get a notification. You will now get a notification when you mention yourself this way. [217]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 August. It will be on all wikis from 11 August (calendar).
  • A message on Notifications panel will invite users to try Special:Notifications page. [218]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on August 9 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:41, 8 August 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #221

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 09:40, 9 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-33

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

  • Last week Tech News announced you will get a notification when you mention yourself the same way as if someone else had mentioned you. This caused some problems and will happen later instead. [219]
  • Creating and editing links to sections on other pages on the wiki now works again in the visual editor. [220]
  • For some users, cross-wiki notifications haven't been working properly. The count has been wrong when only cross-wiki notifications were present. The cross-wiki bundle has been showing only the names of wikis and not the actual notifications. This will be fixed soon. [221][222]

Changes this week

  • The login session when you choose "Keep me logged in" will now last a year. Previously it was 30 days. This will happen on August 16. [223]
  • Some abuse filters will have to be updated during the week. This is because a bug will be fixed. [224]
  • In compact language links, two new kinds of languages will be shown in the shorter language list: Languages that are used in the article's text, and languages where the article has a badge like "featured article" or "good article". [225][226]
  • The visual editor will be available by default for logged-out editors on Wikipedias that use the Arabic script. It is already default for logged-in editors. [227]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 16. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 17. It will be on all wikis from August 18 (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on August 16 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Starting the week of August 22 there will be three software deployment windows. They will be at 13:00, 18:00, and 23:00 UTC. This is to have more times when software of the wikis can be updated and make it easier for developers in different parts of the world. [228]

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

19:37, 15 August 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #222

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 08:27, 16 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 18 August 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:40, 18 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-34

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 ORES review tool is now available on Special:Contributions as a beta feature. It can make it easier to find contributions that are probably damaging the wikis. The ORES review tool is available on Wikidata and Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Dutch, Turkish and Russian Wikipedia. [229]
  • The norm and ccnorm functions have been updated to make it easier to write abuse filters. This also affects the TitleBlacklist extension. You don't have to transform "I" and "L" to "1", "O" to "0" and "S" to "5" anymore. [230]
  • The old pageview data in the "pagecounts-raw" and "pagecounts-all-sites" files is no longer being updated. You can find the new pageview data here. This happened on August 5. [231]

Problems

  • Some big image files could not be thumbnailed. This has now been fixed. [232]
  • When you moved a page over a redirect it would delete the redirect without saving it in the logs. This has now been fixed. [233]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 23 August at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Sometimes when you mention another user they don't get a notification. You will be able to get a notification when you successfully sent out a mention to someone or be told if they did not get a notification. This will be opt-in. You can test this on the test wiki. [234][235]
  • How you add text after an edit conflict might work in a different way in the future. You can test the prototype. [236]

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

21:18, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #223

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 16:29, 23 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #224

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Planet to Earth: this tool uses data from Wikidata to visualise the links between places on an astronomical body named after a place on planet Earth.
    • WikiDataScape is a Cytoscape app for interactive browsing of Wikidata.
    • The property "KML file" was created last week (see list below) and has already a full list of values, sample LUA module and property documentation page available (Property talk:P3096)
    • enabling data access in user language will be deployed on Wikidata on August 29
  • Development
    • Fixed a but where the text field doesn't always load when trying to add a statement (phabricator:T115267)
    • We're now also creating mediainfo entities when a statement is added to a non-existent media info entity (phabricator:T140760)
    • Fixed a but where the suggester would show information twice (phabricator:T143645)
    • The ArticlePlaceholder now also shows the links to other projects in the In Other Projects sidebar (phabricator:T141771)
    • Worked more in figuring out how to show usage tracking data (phabricator:T103091)
    • Made progress on Citoid support for Wikidata to make it easier to add useful and complete references (phabricator:T141856)
    • Worked on restore "purge without confirm" user right (phabricator:T143435)


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 13:41, 29 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-35

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

  • Wikimedia mobile sites now don't load images if the user doesn't see them. This is to save mobile data and make the pages load faster. [237]
  • When you edit a table with the visual editor, pressing Tab in the last cell of a row will take you to the first cell in the next row. Pressing Shift and Tab in the first cell of a row will take you to the last cell in the previous row. [238]

Changes this week

  • The name of the "Save page" button will change. The button will say "Publish page" when you create a new page. It will say "Publish changes" when you change an existing page. [239][240]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 August. It will be on all wikis from 1 September (calendar).

Meetings

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

16:02, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #225

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • The events page is now up to date. You want to join or organise a meetup with other Wikidata editors? Keep an eye on this page!
    • 30K entries from Kindred Britain added in Mix’n’Match
    • Welsh Wikipedia includes Wikidata-based article placeholders, like this one
    • Wiki Loves Monuments started! You can help by improving the items about heritage buildings or use Wikishootme to find unpictured monuments
    • English Wikipedia now has a WikiProject Wikidata to coordinate integration with Wikidata. Why not start one for your local Wikipedia? Add it to Q20855878 if you do.
  • Development
    • RDF exports now contain page properties, this allows to query by number of statements or sitelinks (T129046)
    • Working on unit conversion for RDF exports (T117031)
    • Enabling Wikidata data access in user language deployed (T122670)
    • Information about usage of entities in other projects will be visible and reusable (T103091)
    • Pasting full entity URLs into suggesters will be possible (T117763)
    • Added meta descriptions to allow for better snippets in external search engines (T88475)
    • We replaced the old parser limit report (an HTML comment) with the new format (T143423)
    • Ongoing refactoring of the frontend JavaScript, this may break user scripts accessing private properties (T142694)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:19, 5 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-36

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

  • Word-level diffs now work in longer paragraphs. [241]
  • Interactive maps now have a frame by default. This is to make them look like other multimedia objects. This affects all Wikivoyages, the Catalan, Hebrew, Macedonian Wikipedias and Meta. [242]
  • When you preview the MediaWiki:Captcha-ip-whitelist page it will show a validation output of the listed IP addresses instead of the list of addresses only. This can help you to identify if your whitelist rules will work or not. [243]

Changes this week

  • You will be able to use <maplink> on all Wikipedias. It creates a link to a full screen map. [244][245]
  • Sometimes when you mention another user they don't get a notification. You will be able to get a notification when you successfully send out a mention to someone or be told if they did not get a notification. This will be opt-in. [246][247]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 September. It will be on all wikis from 8 September (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

17:12, 5 September 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 06 September 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:44, 6 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-37

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

Changes this week

  • The RevisionSlider will be available as a beta feature on all wikis from 13 September. This will make it easier to navigate between diffs in the page history. [252]
  • A new user right will allow most users to change the content model of pages. [253][254]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 September. It will be on all wikis from 15 September (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

18:04, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #226

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Lowered relevance threshold for ArticlePlaceholder search results from 3 to 2 sitelinks (T144188)
    • Added 'otk' as an available language for monolingual text values (T137809)
    • Working on making it possible to paste partial URLs into the site selector (T144310)
    • A Grafana board now tracks general usage and error metrics of the Query Service UI
    • Made progress on showing editors on all Wikimedia projects which articles on their project use data from a given Wikidata item. We will also show in the page information (action=info) which items a given article uses. Also worked on showing which projects use a given item in the page information. (T103091)
    • Added meta information to the html header of item pages (T88475)
    • Made progress on making ArticlePlaceholders indexable for search engines (T144590)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 10:17, 13 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #227

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
Quality process on Wikidata

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 16:05, 19 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-38

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

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will hopefully be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 September. It will be on all wikis from 22 September (calendar). This is the version that was meant to go out last week.

Meetings

Future changes

  • Wikidata will start working on adding support for Wiktionary. The Wikidata development team is now taking one last look at the development plan. [257]

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

22:09, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-39

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

  • If your wiki wants numerical sorting in categories you can request it after a community decision. See how to request it. [258]
  • When you edit text and mention a new username they are notified if you add your signature. Before this only happened under certain conditions. [259]
  • Users are notified if they are mentioned in a section where you add your own signature even if you edit more than one section. Before, users were not notified if you edited more than one section in one edit. [260]

Problems

Changes this week

  • There will be no new MediaWiki version this week. [263]

Meetings

Future changes

  • Abandoned tools on Tool Labs could be taken over by other developers. There is a new discussion on Meta about this. It will be discussed until 12 October and then voted on. [264]

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

18:07, 26 September 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #228

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 21:32, 26 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 29 September 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:21, 29 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #229

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Worked more on making it possible to use Wikidata items and properties to make statements about multimedia files on Commons in the future
    • Adding a list of items used in an article to the edit page on Wikipedia and co (phabricator:T144921)
    • More work on automated language links for Wiktionary (phabricator:T145412)
    • Improve the way to count and display the number of items on the main page (phabricator:T144687)
    • Solved a bug on the gadget DuplicateReferences (phabricator:T146318)
    • Clicking on the desired property while adding a new Statement didn't focus the value input. That has been fixed (phabricator:T144037).
    • Made it possible to use the bzr and cvs protocols in URL data types (phabricator:T146692)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:34, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-40

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 this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 October. It will be on all wikis from 6 October (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 4 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Tidy will be replaced. Instead the HTML 5 parsing algorithm will be used to clean up bad HTML in wikitext. This would cause problems on a number of wikis. They need to be fixed first. [265]
  • <slippymap> will not work on Wikivoyage after 24 October. You should use <mapframe> instead. If you need help to fix this before 24 October you should ask for it as soon as possible. [266]

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

21:30, 3 October 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #230

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • The property talk namespace now has subpages enabled (phabricator:T146271)
    • More work on automated sitelinks for Wiktionary (phabricator:T987)
    • More work on federation for Commons in order to be able to use Wikidata's items and properties there (phabricator:T76007)
    • Adding entity usage information in action=edit on Wikipedia and co (phabricator:T144921)
    • Working on making it possible to get formatted values back on the client. With this we will for example link the value to a Wikipedia article where possible. (phabricator:T142940)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 16:13, 10 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-41

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 show Special:RecentChanges on a page by using ((Special:RecentChanges)). You can now use tag filters by using ((Special:RecentChanges/tagfilter=tagname)). [267]
  • The notification badge is coloured if you have notifications. When you check the notification the badge will now turn grey on all wikis instead of just the local one. [268]
  • Colours used in the Wikimedia wikis' main interface changed slightly. This is to make them easier to see for readers and editors with reduced eyesight. [269]

Changes this week

  • Hidden HTML comments will be more visible when you edit with the visual editor. <!-- You write hidden HTML comments like this. --> [270]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 October. It will be on all wikis from 13 October (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • Language converter syntax will soon no longer work inside external links. Wikitext like http://-{zh-cn:foo.com; zh-hk:bar.com; zh-tw:baz.com}- must be replaced. You will have to write -{zh-cn: http://foo.com ; zh-hk: http://bar.com ; zh-tw:http://baz.com }- instead. This only affects languages with Language Converter enabled. Examples of such languages are Chinese and Serbian. [271]

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

20:30, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

Editing News #3—2016

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter • Subscribe or unsubscribe on the English Wikipedia

Did you know?

Did you know that you can easily re-arrange columns and rows in the visual editor?

Screenshot showing a dropdown menu with options for editing the table structure

Select a cell in the column or row that you want to move. Click the arrow at the start of that row or column to open the dropdown menu (shown). Choose either "Move before" or "Move after" to move the column, or "Move above" or "Move below" to move the row.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has mainly worked on a new wikitext editor. They have also released some small features and the new map editing tool. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. You can find links to the list of work finished each week at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. Their current priorities are fixing bugs, releasing the 2017 wikitext editor as a beta feature, and improving language support.

Recent changes

Future changes

The visual editor will be offered to all editors at the remaining 10 "Phase 6" Wikipedias during the next month. The developers want to know whether typing in your language feels natural in the visual editor. Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. This will affect several languages, including Thai, Burmese and Aramaic.

The team is working on a modern wikitext editor. The 2017 wikitext editor will look like the visual editor and be able to use the citoid service and other modern tools. This new editing system may become available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices in October 2016. You can read about this project in a general status update on the Wikimedia mailing list.

Let's work together

Do you teach new editors how to use the visual editor? Did you help set up the Citoid automatic reference feature for your wiki? Have you written or imported TemplateData for your most important citation templates? Would you be willing to help new editors and small communities with the visual editor? Please sign up for the new VisualEditor Community Taskforce.

If you aren't reading this in your preferred language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:19, 14 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 14 October 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:28, 14 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-42

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

Problems

  • Some users got a warning about Wikipedia's security certificate last week. This was because of a problem GlobalSign had. This has now been fixed. Only a small number of users got the warning. [279]
  • Editors couldn't edit semi-protected pages in the Wikipedia app for Android. This has now been fixed in the beta version. [280]

Changes this week

  • There will be no new MediaWiki version this week. [281]

Future changes

  • The Editing Department are working on a new wikitext editor. It will have tools that are in the visual editor but not in the wikitext editor today. You can read more about this. This is an early plan and things can change. The old wikitext editor will still exist.

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

16:43, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #231

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 21:56, 17 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #232

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.


Wikidata celebrates its 4th anniversary on October 29th. Around this date, a lot of events will happen online and offline.

Birthday events

Editors all around the world organize meetups to celebrate the birthday. You can join one of them or create an event in your own town!

Online

A lot of surprises, stories and presents will be shared between October 29th and November 4th. Check the project chat or the mailing-list every day to see what happens!

You can also participate by posting a story (more info here), a tweet with #WikidataBirthday, let a message or a present on the birthday page.

If you're participating to Wikidata's birthday, you can add this template to your user page.



  • Development
    • Fixed a rounding error in the geo coordinate formatter (see GitHub). Thanks, 0x686578!
    • Improvements to technical error messages, e.g. "illegal value" when editing a Commons media statement (phabricator:T141880).
    • Continued working on a new parser function to get rich, formatted statements.
    • Continued working on making entity usage information visible to users.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 10:37, 24 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-43

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

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from October 26. It will be on all wikis from October 27 (calendar).
  • The "Search" text in the search box will show the name of the project. For example, on Wikipedia it will say "Search Wikipedia". [283]
  • About a dozen wikis now have numerical sorting in categories. If your wiki wants numerical sorting in categories you can ask for it. [284]
  • Some wikis that want numerical sorting in categories can also ask to use UCA to sort categories. The biggest difference is that characters with diacritics will be sorted together. For example, for most languages Ä will be sorted with A instead of at the end of the alphabet. This is not true for languages that have Ä as a character in their alphabet. Wikis that already use UCA are listed on Meta. Languages that can use UCA are listed on MediaWiki.org. You can test it.

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

17:39, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #233

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

The birthday week started and already a lot of events happened, presents have been shared, stories have been told! Here's what you may have missed:

The birthday party is not finished yet, every day until November 4th you will discover new presents and stories. Follow the project chat or the mailing-list or #Wikidatabirthday to get the news!

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:06, 31 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-44

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

  • Now you can include Commons video films with subtitles in your wiki language. Before you could see translated videos on file page at Commons only. [285]
  • Search now has an updated preference tab to configure the search completion suggester. [286]
  • The visual editor is now available on all wikis using only one language script. [287]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 1st. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 2nd. It will be on all wikis from November 3rd (calendar).
  • Now you can use autocomplete for page names in "Preview page with this template (what's this?)" field when editing templates. [288]
  • Special:NewPages can now be filtered by page size. [289]

Future changes

  • New MediaWiki deployments will be now based on MediaWiki 1.29. [290]

Miscellaneous

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

16:18, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 4 November 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:51, 4 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #234

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Map of the birthday parties

Thanks to everyone who celebrated the birthday by organizing or attending to an event, letting a message on Wikidata or on the social networks, writing a story or creating a present!

Here's the list of the birthday presents from the community and development team:

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:08, 7 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-45

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

  • Victoria Coleman is the new Chief technology officer for the Wikimedia Foundation. [291]
  • First release candidate for MediaWiki 1.28 is now available. [292]
  • .gitreview for MediaWiki branches and extensions switched from targeting a specific branch to using track=1. [293]
  • Section numbers in Table of Contents boxes will use grey to improve readability. [294]

Changes this week

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 8 November 2016 at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week are Image Thumbnail API and allow SVG files uploaded on MediaWiki to have XHTML namespaces. The meeting will be on 9 November at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

23:01, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #235

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2016-11-12.

  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • A new Wikidata PageRank dataset has been published. The dataset was computed in August 2016 and provides PageRank scores for 10,364,840 Wikidata entities.
    • Due to a possible hack, please consider resetting your passwords.
  • Development
    • More work on federation (phabricator:T76007)
    • Worked on first basic version of Lexeme entity type for Wiktionary support (phabricator:T148139)
    • Test system for automated language links for Wiktionary (phabricator:T987)
    • Analysed feedback prototype for editing on Wikipedia in order to refine it
    • Worked on mapping Commons workflows and needs
    • Analysed queries used with Listeria
    • More work on making ArticlePlaceholder pages indexeable by search engines (phabricator:T117693)
    • More work on enabling translations from existing articles in other languages on ArticlePlaceholder pages (phabricator:T124036)
    • Link to local articles in ArticlePlaceholders (phabricator:T113955)
    • Fix for bug that prevented editing (phabricator:T150401)
    • Experimented with improvements for property suggestions (phabricator:T132839)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 17:20, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-46

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 edit with the visual editor you can use meta + shift + k to add a reference. The meta key is often the control key or command key. [299]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 15. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 16. It will be on all wikis from November 17 (calendar).
  • In Special:Preferences you can choose which language menus and buttons will be in. If there is no translation for that language, MediaWiki has a list of fallback languages. A fallback language is a language many will understand better than English. MediaWiki will now use English when there is no Ukrainian translation. [300]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 15 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

19:18, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #236

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Unit conversion has been rolled out for the first dimension for a short while now.
    • Undo diffs now utilize language fallbacks for property and item labels (gerrit:315291). Thanks to Matěj Suchánek!
    • Reworked database schema for Cognate (the extension that will do automatic interwiki links for Wiktionary). It is still waiting for security review before it can be deployed.
    • Worked more on basic version of Lexeme entity type
    • Fixed a bug where the links on action=info where wrong (phabricator:T149598)
    • Getting close to finishing the groundwork for Federation so that in the future you'll be able to use Wikidata's items and properties to describe files on Commons.
    • Added Innu-aimun as a language for monolingual text values (phabricator:T151129)
    • Worked on linking to Wikipedia articles in the statements on an ArticlePlaceholder (phabricator:T113955)
    • ArticlePlaceholder got a button to translate articles via the ContentTranslation extension (phabricator:T124036)
    • Prepared a bot to fix quantity values after the recent changes to precisions (phabricator:T142087)
    • Did user interviews for use cases and workflows on Commons
    • Analyzed more Listeria queries in order to figure out steps forward for easier query writing

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:07, 21 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-47

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

  • Administrators, bureaucrats, oversighters and checkusers can now use two-factor authentication. This makes their Wikimedia accounts more secure. This can be turned on in Special:Preferences. There are discussions on how to best turn it on for everyone. [302]
  • You can now search for file properties. For example you can search for media type, how big a file is or what resolution it has. [303]
  • The latest Collaboration team products newsletter has been published. It has more details about their work than Tech News has.

Problems

  • A hacker group is hacking Wikimedia accounts. They can probably do this because users have the same passwords on Wikimedia wikis as on other sites. Please have a password you use only on the Wikimedia wikis and nowhere else. This is especially important for administrators, bureaucrats, oversighters and checkusers. These users can also turn on two-factor authentication. [304]

Changes this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
  • RevisionSlider will be a default feature on German, Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedia. This will happen on 22 November. It will come to other wikis later. [305][306][307]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 22 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • It will be possible to do cross-wiki search. The developers who work on this are looking for communities that want to test this. [308]
  • Hovercards will leave the beta stage. The Wikimedia Foundation Reading Web team wants communities to set Hovercards as a default option for readers who are not logged in. Communities that are interested can say so on the Hovercards talk page. [309]

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

15:33, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 4 November 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:06, 26 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #237

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Adding new wikis to interwiki sort order and move sort orders to WMF config. phab:T111023

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:54, 28 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-48

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 this week

  • When someone tries to log in to a blocked account they will be blocked by a cookie. This means their browser will be blocked even if they change their IP address. This makes it more difficult for returning vandals. [310]
  • When you use Content Translation to adapt a template to a new translation it will work differently. You can adapt big templates such as infoboxes. Translators will have control over the template parameters. A first version of this is released this week. It is possible it will not work correctly with all templates. There will be more updates for this soon. [311]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 November. It will be on all wikis from 1 December (calendar).
  • Gadgets will have a new option called "hidden". This means you can register gadgets that can't be turned on or off from the preferences page. Hiding gadgets was already possible by using [rights=hidden]. You should now use [hidden] instead. [rights=hidden] in old gadgets should be changed to [hidden]. [312][313]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 29 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

21:17, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #238

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Special:EntityUsage and Special:PagesWithBadges now are using OOjs UI (phab:T152046)
    • RFC discussion on ways to allow visitors to choose a language without logging in (phab:T149419 and phab:T114662)
    • Investigating performance issues with change dispatching (phab:T151681)
    • Continued work on Lexeme prototype (phab:T146662), refining the Lexeme data model (phab:T151582)
    • Continued work on federation basics (phab:T149580)
    • Some discussion on tracking usage of statements or statement groups on clients (phab:T151717, see mailing list)
    • Investigating support for Linked Data Fragments (phab:T136358)
    • We're participating in this year's Google Code-In with a couple of Wikidata related tasks
    • Research for Wikidata for Commons and Wiktionary continues
    • Added olo (Livvinkarjala), mai and tcy to interwiki sorting order. (phab:T151449)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:58, 5 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-49

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 choose to see users from specific user groups in Special:ActiveUsers. [314]
  • Everyone can now see Special:UserRights. Previously only those who could change user rights could. Other users got an error message. [315]
  • ORES can now show how likely an edit is to be damaging to the wiki with different colours. This only works for languages that have trained ORES to recognize damaging edits. [316]

Changes this week

  • You will now see categories with 0 pages in Special:Categories. Previously you did not see empty categories there. [317]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 December. It will be on all wikis from 8 December (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 December at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

18:07, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #239

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

It is with great sadness that we share the news of the passing of User:Coyau. He was a very active editor on Wikidata and the other Wikimedia projects. He will be deeply missed by his friends and family but his great work on open culture will stay. Feel free to browse and share his work. Thanks Guillaume for this message.


  • Events/Press/Blogs
    • Past: Open Gov Partnership conference in Paris, where Ash_Crow and other editors presented Wikidata
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Development
    • Continued work on Lexeme prototype (phab:T146662), we're discussing some details in the data model (phab:T152019)
    • Continued work on federation basics (phab:T149580)
    • Rework translation/article creation UI (phab:T151858)
    • Creating OOUI mockups as preparation for the dev summit
    • Finishing touches on the extension for automatic generation of inter-wiktionary links (preparatory work for lexicographic data in Wikidata)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:47, 12 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-50

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

  • Users who have Yahoo email addresses could not use Special:EmailUser to send emails. This has now been fixed. Emails will now come from a @wikimedia.org address. Users who get an email from you will still reply to your email address and be able to see it. [318]
  • You can now see how many categories and pages there are in the categories in Special:TrackingCategories. This is to help you find pages that could need attention. [319]
  • Markup colours for reviewed and pending revisions in the page history and recent changes and logs now match Wikimedia standard colours. The "You have a new message on your talk page" notification will have a slightly different colour. [320]

Problems

  • Because of work on cross-wiki watchlists global renaming is not working. The plan is to turn it on again on 16 December. Global renaming was turned off for a while in late November and early December as well. [321]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 December. It will be on all wikis from 15 December (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on December 13 at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

19:30, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #240

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:19, 19 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-51

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

  • Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 9 January 2017.
  • The writers of the technical newsletter are asking for your opinion. Did you get the information you wanted this year? Did we miss important technical news in 2016? What kind of information was too late? Please tell us! You can write in your language. Thank you!

Recent changes

  • Administrators and translation administrators can now use Special:PageLanguage on wikis with the Translate extension. This means you can say what language a page is in. The Translate extension will use that language as the source language when you translate. Previously this was always the wiki's default language. This was usually English. [322]
  • Wikis connected to Wikidata can now use the parser function ((#statements: )) to get formatted data. You can also use ((#property: )) to get raw data. You can see the difference between the two statements. There are also similar new functions in Lua. [323]

Problems

  • Some abuse filters for uploaded files have not worked as they should. We don't know exactly which filters didn't work yet. This means some files that filters should have prevented from being uploaded were uploaded to the wikis. MediaWiki.org and Testwiki have been affected since 13 October. Commons and Meta have been affected since 17 October. Other wikis have been affected since 17 November. [324]

Changes this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week. There will be no new MediaWiki version next week either.

Meetings

  • The next meeting with the VisualEditor team will be on 3 January at 20:00 (UTC). During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. See how to join.

Future changes

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

20:33, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 22 December 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:04, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #241

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 13:30, 26 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #242

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • When a ((#statements:…)) property couldn't be resolved, a tracking category will be added (phab:T50799)
    • Rewrote Special:NewItem and all other Special:New… pages to use OOUI error handling (phab:T150205)
    • Getting ready the basic Lexeme prototype (phab:T146662)
    • Continued work on federation basics (phab:T149580)
    • Release version 1.0.0 of the DataTypes component
    • Enjoying the holidays and getting ready for this year's challenges. Hope you do to :)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:55, 2 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #242

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • This week, most of the developers are at the Dev Summit hacking stuff and doing great things!
    • Continued working on "federation" – support for multiple Wikibase repositories (phab:T76007)
    • New dimensions for unit conversion in the query service (phab:T150881)
    • Fixed a timing issue that can happen when using the property suggester (phab:T115267)
    • Still investigating an issue in which the "save" button stays disabled, as reported in December
    • We may remove the sliding animation when using the date, geo, monolingual, and quantity experts (gerrit:330145). The preview popup may now cover parts of the page. Please try it at wikidata.beta.wmflabs.org and tell us what you think on our contact page.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:00, 9 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-02

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

Problems

  • Editors who use Firefox 50 might get logged out or fail to save their edits. This is because of a browser bug. Until this is fixed you can enter about:config in the address bar and set network.cookie.maxPerHost to 5000. Firefox 50 is the current version of the Firefox. [329]

Changes this week

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

19:12, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-03

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

Problems

  • video2commons was down for two weeks. This was because of a problem with Commons video transcoders. It is now back up. [331]

Changes this week

  • There is a new magic word called ((PAGELANGUAGE)). It returns the language of the page you are at. This can be used on wikis with more than one language to make it easier for translators. [332]
  • When an admin blocks a user or deletes or protects a page they give a reason why. They can now get suggestions when they write. The suggestions will be based on the messages in the dropdown menu. [333]
  • You will be able to use <chem> to write chemical formulas. Before you could use <ce>. <ce> should be replaced by <chem>. [334]
  • You now can add exceptions for categories which shouldn't be shown on Special:UncategorizedCategories. The list is at MediaWiki:Uncategorized-categories-exceptionlist. [335]
  • The "Columns" and "Rows" settings will be removed from the Editing tab in Preferences. If you wish to keep what the "Rows" setting did you can add this code to your personal CSS: #wpTextbox1 { height: 50em; } You can change the number 50 to make it look like you want to. [336]
  • Sometimes edits in MediaWiki by mistake are shown coming from private IP addresses such as 127.0.0.1. Edits and other contributions logged to these IP addresses will be blocked and shown the reason from MediaWiki:Softblockrangesreason. This should not affect most users. Bots and other tools running on Wikimedia Labs, including Tool Labs will receive a "blocked" error if they try to edit without being logged in. [337]
  • When you edit with the visual editor categories will be on the top of the page options menu. [338]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 January. It will be on all wikis from 19 January (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on January 17 at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

23:24, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

The Signpost: 17 January 2017

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:39, 17 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #243

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Attended the Wikimedia Developer Summit to talk about a lot of things (including editing Wikidata from Wikipedia directly, back-end work for structured data support for Commons - specifically Multi Content Revisions, ideas for improvements to the query service)
    • Final touches to get ArticlePlaceholder pages ready for search engine indexing
    • Continued working on "federation" – support for multiple Wikibase repositories (phab:T76007)
    • Clickable prototype for client editing is finally in the works!

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:46, 17 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #244

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • New administrator: Pyb is now admin on Wikidata!
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Development
    • Created a new Special:EntityPage, needed for federation (phabricator:T153499)
    • Sitelink "name" and "badges" in diffs are now translated (phabricator:T111016)
    • Worked on finalizing mockups for editing Wikidata from Wikipedia and co. Now working on the click-dummy for it so we can try it with you.
    • Last touches for automated sitelinks for Wiktionary.
    • A ton of refactoring needed for Wiktionary support.
    • More research on improving our input widgets (for example URL and date).

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:55, 23 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-04

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 see a list of the templates on a page you edit with the visual editor. [339]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 January. It will be on all wikis from 26 January (calendar).

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

20:15, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #245

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • RDF exports will contain sitelink page names as strings in addition to the URLs (phab:T148923)
    • Switching the remaining special pages for labels, descriptions and aliases to the OOUI design (phab:T48248)
    • Finalizing the security review of the Cognate extension for Wiktionary (phab:T149082)
    • We plan to provide og:image Open Graph tags for sharing Item pages in social networks (phab:T51859)
    • Introducing a new test framework for special pages (phab:T69122)
    • Refactoring the wbeditentity API to work with the new Lexeme entity type (phab:T154288)
    • Added docs/change-op-serializations.wiki documenting how to use the wbeditentity API
    • Added a CREDITS file to the Wikibase code base, listing all authors

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 13:42, 30 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-05

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 OAuth management interfaces now look slightly different. [340]

Changes this week

  • ElectronPdfService will be enabled by default on Meta and German Wikipedia. This is a new way to get articles as PDF files you can download. It will come to more wikis later. [341]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from January 31. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from February 1. It will be on all wikis from February 2 (calendar).

Future changes

  • The Community Tech team will develop more tools to handle harassment of Wikimedia editors. The goal is to give the communities better tools to find, report and evaluate harassment. They will also work on more effective blocking tools. [342][343]
  • The Wikimedia technical community is doing a Developer Wishlist survey. Developers can propose ideas before 31 January 23:59 UTC. This is soon.

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

18:45, 30 January 2017 (UTC)

The Signpost: 6 February 2017

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:46, 6 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-06

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

  • The block log sometimes showed blocks as being much longer than they were. This has now been fixed. [344]

Changes this week

  • Wikimedia pages will now be better at showing pictures when you share them on social media. The descriptions will be different too. You can see an example of before and after. [345]
  • There are some changes to the OOjs UI. Some old functions will not work anymore or not work as they used to. This could be a breaking change. [346]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 February. It will be on all wikis from 9 February (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 7 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Tidy will be replaced later this year. Instead, the HTML 5 parsing algorithm will be used to clean up bad HTML in wikitext. This will cause problems on a number of wikis. They need to be fixed first. You can see if your wiki still has something to fix here for one of the HTML problems. This list does not cover all problems. You can read about more problems. [347][348]

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

19:46, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #246

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • You can now download query results as SVG images
    • When posting a link to an item to social networks and on messenger apps that show previews the previews will now be nicer and show an image. (phabricator:T51859)
    • We published the results of our research around Commons usage: How do heavy Commons users work? ...and what does that mean for structured data on Commons?
    • Setting up test system for federation (being able to use Wikidata's items and properties on Commons)
    • Setting up test system for lexemes
    • Setting up test system for improved change dispatching (sending notifications about edits on Wikidata to Wikipedia and co)
    • Doing more groundwork for lexemes
    • Working on better integration with Elastic
    • More work on Federation
    • Getting ready to deploy automated sitelinks for Wiktionary
    • Fixing a number of keyboard navigation issues based on your feedback
    • Working on the new datatype for geoshapes (phabricator:T57549)
    • Looking into linking more complicated external identifiers properly (phabricator:T151329)
    • Improved the link to the help portal on the query service (phabricator:T154993)

See all open tickets related to Wikidata.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 13:26, 7 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-07

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

  • EventStreams is a new way to show activity on Wikimedia wikis. For now it works with the recent changes feed. It will do more things later. It will replace RCStream. Tools that use RCStream should move to EventStreams before 7 July. [349]

Problems

  • The Firefox add-on Firefogg can cause problems with the Upload Wizard. This will not be fixed, because Firefox will not support Firefogg in the future. The Upload Wizard will no longer work with Firefogg. [350]
  • Tool Labs and Wikimedia Labs databases will be under maintenance on 15 February. This will start at 17:00 (UTC) and last for about six hours. Some tools could have problems during or after this. [351]

Changes this week

  • The TwoColConflict extension is a new way to solve edit conflicts. It makes it easier to copy and paste the relevant text to the text field. It will come to Meta and German Wikipedia this week. It is already available on MediaWiki.org. It will come to more wikis later. [352]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 February. It will be on all wikis from 16 February (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 14 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Page Previews will be turned on for logged-out users on the Catalan, Greek, Russian, and Italian Wikipedias in the middle of February. Page Previews shows readers a short part of a linked article when they rest their mouse pointer on the link. This is to help them understand what it is about without leaving the article they are reading. Page Previews used to be called Hovercards. It will come to more wikis later this spring. [353]
  • The Developer Wishlist is a list where developers prioritize tools they need. The voting closes at 14 February 23:59 (UTC). This process is only for developers.

Review

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

18:06, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #247

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Doing a trial run of allowing search engines to index a number of ArticlePlaceholder pages on Welsh Wikipedia. If there are no major issues we will enable this for all placeholders.
    • Improving Federation-related after initial tests,
    • Getting ready to deploy automated sitelinks for Wiktionary
    • Further work on the new datatype for geoshapes (phabricator:T57549)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 08:41, 14 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #248

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Making final fixes to initial version of Federation (needed to be able to use Wikidata items and properties to describe media on Commons in the future)
    • More work on baseline for Lexeme entity type for Wiktionary support
    • Fixed an error on d:Special:ConstraintReport (phabricator:T158183)
    • Wikidata Query Service got additional servers, the data has been reloaded to fix a number of issues caused by missed updates and an increase of the time-out of 30s is being looked into.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:56, 20 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-08

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

Changes this week

  • Page Previews will be updated on 23 February. This fixes many bugs. Page Previews can be turned on as the Beta Feature called Hovercards. [355]
  • There has been a problem where the CSS of gadgets has been loading twice. The Gadgets extension has two new options: type and peers. The type option solves this problem. You can use peers to create gadgets with more than one style module. Read more about type and peers. [356]
  • OAuth will handle blocked users in a more consistent way. [357]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 February. It will be on all wikis from 23 February (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 21 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

19:25, 20 February 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #249

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Continued to finalize the initial version of Federation (needed to be able to use Wikidata items and properties to describe media on Commons in the future)
    • More work on baseline for Lexeme entity type for Wiktionary support

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. These other tasks need a volunteer.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:54, 27 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-09

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

  • On 22 February the wikipedia.org portal did not work for an hour. This was because of a problem with a JavaScript file. [358]

Changes this week

  • You will be able to use <chem> to write chemical formulas in the visual editor. Previously this only worked in the wikitext editor. [359]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 March. It will be on all wikis from 2 March (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 28 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • You can soon upload 3D files to Commons. The file formats are AMF and STL. The plan is for this to work later this week but it could be later. [360]
  • The name "Wikipedia" will be more obvious at the top of the page when you read Wikipedia in the mobile view. This is because many readers don't realize they are on Wikipedia. [361][362]

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

19:56, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 February 2017

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:20, 28 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 10

Issue 10 of the WikiProject X newsletter is here!

This month, we discuss the new CollaborationKit extension. Here's an image as a teaser:

23:59, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #250

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:34, 6 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-10

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 search on English, French, Hebrew and Greek wikis and find words even if you forget the diacritics. It also works if you use diacritics in your search but the wiki doesn't. [363]
  • When you use the mobile view and click on a link to an article in another language you will see that article in the mobile view. Previously it changed to the desktop view. [364]

Problems

  • Some watchlist gadgets didn't work for a period of time last week. This has now been fixed. [365]
  • Admins who click on "mass delete" on a user's Special:Contributions will be taken directly to a list pages created by that user. It has worked like this before, but not lately. [366]

Changes this week

  • The way you switch between wikitext and the visual editors in the desktop view has changed. It is now a drop-down menu. This is the same as in the mobile view. [367]
  • The "flag the edit in the abuse log" checkbox will be removed from the abuse filter interface. This is because the edits are always flagged in the abuse log. [368]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 March. It will be on all wikis from 9 March (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 7 March at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Clarification

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

23:23, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-11

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 this week

  • You will be able to show references from <references /> tags in more than one column on your wiki. This is the list of footnotes for the sources in the article. How many columns you see will depend on how big your screen is. On some wikis, some templates already do this. Templates that use <references /> tags will need to be updated, and then later the change can happen for all reference lists. [369][370]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 March. It will be on all wikis from 16 March (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 14 March at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Some old web browsers will not be able to use JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis in the future. If you have an old web browser on your computer you can upgrade to a newer version. [371]
  • CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future. [372][373]

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

15:26, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #251

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Converted undo/restore interface to use OOUI. You can test it here (phab:T134643).
    • Fixed an other rounding issue on geo coordinates (phab:T158772).
    • Added thumbnail images to the Wikimedia Commons suggester (phab:T160319).
    • Continued working on introducing Lexeme entity type.
    • Finishing federation prototype.
    • We are going to change all snak, reference, and qualifier hashes with the planned DataModel 7.0 release. If you are a tool developer, make sure you do not persist hashes, and never use them to request edits to entities. Statement IDs are safe (phab:T157965).
    • Removed unnecessary CSS on ooui special pages (phabricator:T159702)
    • Allowed example queries to be searched for SPARQL commands (phabricator:T154768)
    • Converted Wikibase interface for undoing/restoring a revision to OOUI (phabricator:T134643)
    • Converted image header user script to gadget (phabricator:T159929)
    • Started writing spec for technical data model for Wiktionary support (phabricator:T150785)
    • Worked on providing API for constraint check (phabricator:T102757)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:27, 13 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Weekly Summary #252

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 16:28, 20 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-12

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 Save page button now says Publish page or Publish changes on the Wikimedia wikis except for Wikipedias and Wikinewses. This change will come to Wikipedias later. The point is to make it more clear that the edit will change the page immediately. Publish page is when you save a new page and Publish changes when you edit an existing page. [374]
  • DMOZ no longer works. Templates that use DMOZ can be redirected to archive.org or another mirror. DMOZ has been removed from the RelatedSites extension on Wikivoyage. [375]
  • You can see monthly page views when you click on Page information in the sidebar. Developers can also get monthly page views through the API. [376]
  • The Linter extension is now on smaller Wikimedia wikis. It helps editors find some wikitext errors so they can be fixed. It will come to other Wikimedia wikis later. The extension will be able to find more errors later. [377]
  • The MediaWiki-Vagrant portable development environment has been updated to use Debian Jessie. This means local development and testing will be more like on the majority of Wikimedia production servers. [378]

Problems

  • On 15 March some interwiki links to other languages were not correctly sorted. This has been fixed. If you still see pages where the interwiki links are not sorted as they should be, they should be fixed automatically with time or you can edit the page and save it without changing anything. If this doesn't work, please report it. [379]

Changes this week

  • When you edit with the visual editor, you will be able to switch the direction you write in from right-to-left to left-to-right as you are editing. This is especially important for editors who edit in languages that write from right to left. You can do this with a tool in the editing menu. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+X on PCs or Cmd+Shift+X on Macs. [380]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 March. It will be on all wikis from 23 March (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 21 March at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

22:03, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #253

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2017-03-27.

  • Development
    • Fixing a bug that prevented users to edit descriptions in some non-latin alphabets (phab:T161263)
    • Worked on Special:NewLexeme which will be used to create new Lexemes for supporting lexicographical data (phabricator:T157973)
    • Aligned some more colors with Wikimedia color palete (phabricator:T151194)
    • Added more autocompletion for the Wikidata Query Service (phabricator:T150950)
    • Started working on support for Forms of words in the UI for supporting lexicographical data (phabricator:T160520)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:39, 27 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-13

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 edit with the visual editor, you can see a visual diff as well as a wikitext diff when you review your changes. [381]

Problems

  • Special:AllPages was disabled for two days due to some performance issues. It is back, but the filter for redirects is gone as the cause of the performance problem. It still needs to be fixed. [382][383]

Changes this week

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

14:47, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #254

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • A warm welcome to our new intern, Lucas Werkmeister! You may now him for his work on queries as WikidataFacts. He will work in the team for the next months.
    • Attending to Wikimedia Conference, talking with Wikidata and Wiktionary users
    • Improving performance on Special:Entities pages (phab:T161631)
    • Tracking the number of identifier properties on an item in page_props (phab:T114617)
    • More work on Senses (phab:T161523) and Forms (phab:T160524)
    • Improving the autocompletions of Query Service (phab:T150950)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 13:35, 3 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-14

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 Save page button now says Publish page or Publish changes on most Wikipedias. The point is to make it more clear that the edit will change the page immediately. Publish page is when you save a new page and Publish changes when you edit an existing page. [384]
  • The tracking category Category:Pages with template loops is now added when a template loop is found. A template loop is for example when a template tries to use a second template that uses the first template. [385]
  • English Wikipedia now has cookie blocks. It will come to more wikis in the future. This is an extension to the autoblock system so when a user is blocked, the next time they visit the wiki a cookie will be set. This means that even if the user switches accounts and to a new IP address the cookie will block them again. [386]

Problems

  • Wikidata descriptions, aliases and labels that used some characters could not be saved. This has now been fixed. [387]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 April. It will be on all wikis from 6 April (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 4 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the next office hour with the Wikidata team. The meeting will be on 5 April at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

17:53, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #255

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Preparing for making more ArticlePlaceholder indexable by search engines on Welsh Wikipedia (phab:T162244)
    • Preparing the deployments of Cognate and geoshape data type
    • Lexemes: starting adding sections for forms and senses

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 12:26, 10 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-15

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

Changes this week

  • Some older web browsers will not be able to use JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis from this week. If you have an old web browser on your computer you can upgrade to a newer version. [390]
  • New filters for Recent changes will come to Wikidata and Persian, Russian, Turkish and French Wikipedia on 11 April. The schedule has been changed to fix the user intent prediction filters for some wikis. User intent prediction means the filter tries to make it easier for editors to determine if the edit was made in good faith or not. Other wikis will get it later. [391]
  • The list of special characters in the wikitext editor and the visual editor will now have a group of Canadian Aboriginal characters. [392]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 April. It will be on all wikis from 13 April (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 11 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April and 3 May. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. You can read more about this.
  • RevisionSlider will change how you move between revisions. This will be available on the test wiki from 11 April. It will come to other wikis later if users like the change. You can test it and give feedback.

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

18:35, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-16

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 add ?safemode=1 to the end of the URL on Wikimedia wikis to disable your personal CSS and JavaScript. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature?safemode=1. This means you can test if a problem is because of your user scripts or gadgets without uninstalling them. [393]
  • You can now see a list of all autoblocks on Special:AutoblockList. [394]
  • The Wikiversity and Wikinews logos are now shown directly from the configuration and not from [[File:Wiki.png]]. If you want to change logo or have an anniversary logo, see how to request a configuration change. This is how it already works for other projects. They can request logo changes the same way. [395]

Problems

  • Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. You can read more about this. This will also happen on 3 May.

Changes this week

  • There is no new Mediawiki version this week. This is because of the data centre test.

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 18 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

19:32, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #256

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

Events/Press/Blogs

Other Noteworthy Stuff

Did you know?

Development

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Monthly Tasks

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 10:26, 18 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #257

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Changing Special:NewProperty to not have a datatype selected by default (phab:T138295)
    • Restoration of deleted items broken on Wikidata (phab:T163144)
    • Making notifications when page is being connected to Wikidata ready to deploy (phab:T110604)
    • Writing basic documentation for WikibaseMediaInfo extension (phab:T159710)
    • Hiding header image gadget when sitelinks are floated below the statement section (phab:T160530)
    • Making the "add" button display the "add Form" form (phab:T162342)
    • Getting the datatype to link to tabular data sets on Commons ready to deploy (phab:T160048)
    • Showing supported data formats in Special:EntityData (phab:T162870)
    • Setting meta name="description" on article placeholders (phab:T157466)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 13:14, 24 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-17

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

Problems

Changes this week

  • The GuidedTour extension will be enabled on all wikis. This is a tool to explain to new users how to edit. [402]
  • Wiktionary will handle interlanguage links in a new way. The Cognate extension will automatically link pages with the same title between Wiktionaries. For this to work all old interlanguage links have to be removed. You can read more about this. [403]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 April. It will be on all wikis from 27 April (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 25 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:40, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-18

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

Problems

  • Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for 20 to 30 minutes on 3 May. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. You can read more about this.

Changes this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week. This is because of the data centre test.

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 2 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • All Wikimedia wikis will have cookie blocks from May 8. This is an extension to the autoblock system so when a user is blocked, the next time they visit the wiki a cookie will be set. This means that even if the user switches accounts and to a new IP address the cookie will block them again. [407]
  • The Publish changes, Show preview and Show changes buttons will look slightly different. This is to fit with the OOUI look. Users can test scripts, gadgets and so on to see if they work with the new interface by adding &ooui=1 to the URL. [408]

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

19:50, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #258

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Working on Lexeme support - specifically grammatical features of Forms of a Lexeme and statements on Forms
    • Finishing touches on a new notification type for Echo. This will notify the creator of an article when it has been connected to an item on Wikidata.
    • The new d:Special:AvailableBadges list all badges that can be used for sitelinks.
    • Discussed implementation plan for Multi Content Revisions which are a building block for structured data on Commons (phabricator:T107595)
    • Worked on feedback for the constraints API and user script
    • Worked on database and access improvements to take load off a much-used database table

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:09, 2 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #259

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Worked more on support for lexicographical data (specifically support for lexicographic category and statements on forms)
    • Dealt with issues after the deployment of automatic interwiki links for Wiktionary
    • Worked on constraint violation user script based on your feedback (improving messages to make it more understandable, layout, etc)
    • Add support for the following new language codes for monolingual text properties: brx, chn, cop, gez, quc, kjh, nr (will become available in a few days)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:57, 8 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-19

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

  • Some users have a problem with the watchlist. Some changes in categories make the watchlist a blank page. The developers are working on this. Until this is fixed you can try some things that have helped other editors if you have this problem. You can turn on Hide categorization of pages in your watchlist preferences. You can turn off Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent in your watchlist preferences. You can remove problematic categories from Special:EditWatchlist/raw. [409]
  • There was a problem with the visual editor for several days. You could not save edits that triggered a CAPTCHA. This would for example be when a new user added external links in references. This was fixed on 2 May. [410]

Changes this week

  • When you edit you can switch between the visual editor and the wikitext editor. This works if the wiki you edit has the visual editor. The menu will now say Visual editing and Source editing instead of Switch to visual editing and Switch to code editing. This is because it was confusing when the menu said you could switch to the editor you were already using. [411]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 May. It will be on all wikis from 11 May (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 9 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • You will be able to get a notification when a page you created is connected to a Wikidata item. This will come to Wikivoyage on 9 May. If there are no problems it will come to most Wikipedias on 30 May. It will come to other projects and English, French and German Wikipedia later in the summer. It will be opt-in for existing users and opt-out for new users. [412][413]
  • Markup that looks like code for language variants might need to be fixed. If -{ is used in transclusions or web addresses it has to be escaped appropriately. You can use -<nowiki/>{ for transclusions and %2D{ in web addresses. A transclusion could for example be when you use -{ in a template: ((1x| sad :-{ face )). This is because of some code fixes to the preprocessor and affects all wikis. [414][415]

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

02:25, 9 May 2017 (UTC)

Editing News #1—2017

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

VisualEditor
Did you know?

Did you know that you can review your changes visually?

Screenshot showing some changes to an article. Most changes are highlighted with text formatting.
When you are finished editing the page, type your edit summary and then choose "Review your changes".

In visual mode, you will see additions, removals, new links, and formatting highlighted. Other changes, such as changing the size of an image, are described in notes on the side.

Toggle button showing visual and wikitext options; visual option is selected.

Click the toggle button to switch between visual and wikitext diffs.

Screenshot showing the same changes, in the two-column wikitext diff display.

The wikitext diff is the same diff tool that is used in the wikitext editors and in the page history.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has spent most of their time supporting the 2017 wikitext editor mode which is available inside the visual editor as a Beta Feature, and adding the new visual diff tool. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. You can find links to the work finished each week at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. Their current priorities are fixing bugs, supporting the 2017 wikitext editor as a beta feature, and improving the visual diff tool.

Recent changes

A new wikitext editing mode is available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices. The 2017 wikitext editor has the same toolbar as the visual editor and can use the citoid service and other modern tools. Go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures to enable the ⧼Visualeditor-preference-newwikitexteditor-label⧽.

A new visual diff tool is available in VisualEditor's visual mode. You can toggle between wikitext and visual diffs. More features will be added to this later. In the future, this tool may be integrated into other MediaWiki components. [416]

The team have added multi-column support for lists of footnotes. The <references /> block can automatically display long lists of references in columns on wide screens. This makes footnotes easier to read. You can request multi-column support for your wiki. [417]

Other changes:

Future changes

If you aren't reading this in your preferred language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you! User:Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:19, 9 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #260

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 19:48, 15 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-20

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

Problems

  • The mediawiki.util library does not load automatically any more. Your Special:MyPage/common.js may use it. If you have technical problems that started a couple of weeks ago you can try adding mw.loader.using( 'mediawiki.util' ).done(function(){ as the first line in the file and }); as a last one. Tech News wrote about this in the 2017/18 issue. [432]

Changes this week

  • The RevisionSlider extension will be a default feature on all wikis. RevisionSlider is an easier way to move between changes in the page history. It has been a default feature on German, Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedia and a beta feature on all wikis. You will be able to turn it off in your preferences. [433]
  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

Older unreported changes

  • Your Meta user page is shown on all wikis where you don't have a local user page. You can now add the magic word __NOGLOBAL__ to your Meta user page to stop this. [438][439]

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

21:48, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-21

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 this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 May. It will be on all wikis from 25 May (calendar).
  • There will be a <div> tag around HTML from the MediaWiki wikitext parser. Gadgets with code that does not follow recommendations could have problems with this. You can report new problems you think are related to this. [440]

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

22:15, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #261

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 11:57, 23 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #262

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Attending WikiCite
    • Showing badges on other projects (phab:T73887)
    • Improving label tracking (phab:T151717)
    • Working more on statements on forms in order to support lexicographical data

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:22, 29 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-22

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

  • Last week’s MediaWiki version was rolled back from some wikis because of a problem. This means planned changes did not happen. [441]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 30 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

12:18, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-23

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 see new files on Special:NewFiles. You can now pick which dates you want to see files from. [443]
  • When you read Wikipedia on a mobile device the first paragraph now comes before the infobox. [444]
  • You can now remove navigation elements from your results when you search. This could for example be part of an infobox that is only there to help you find the previous or next article. [445]
  • New users on Wikivoyages and Wikipedias (except French, English and German) now get a notification when a page they created is connected to Wikidata. Other wikis will get it 13 June. [446]

Problems

  • The MediaWiki version from two weeks ago was rolled back. It was fixed late last week. Changes that were planned to go out last week did not happen. [447]

Changes this week

  • Wikimedia wikis can show fewer links to articles in other languages. This is to make it easier to find the languages likely to be useful to the reader or editor. Everyone can still click to see the full list. Logged-in users who use the compact language links will see languages they have in their Babel box on their user page in the first, shorter list. You can turn the compact language list off or on in your preferences. [448]
  • You can choose what dates to look at when you look at a user's contributions. [449]
  • When you click on your watchlist in the mobile view you get a list of all pages in the watchlist instead of the latest changes to them. Logged-in users with at least ten edits will now get the latest changes instead. [450]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 June. It will be on all wikis from 8 June (calendar).
  • String comparisons in Scribunto modules are now always done case-insensitively by byte order. Before they were sometimes in a case-sensitive US-English collation order. This could break some modules. [451]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • The 2006 wikitext editor will be removed the week of 27 June. This is the old toolbar with small square blue buttons. You can see a picture of it. 0.03% of active Wikimedia editors use this old tool. They will not see a toolbar at all. [452][453]
  • Wikimedia wikis use OCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative is Electron. You can tell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron already works on German Wikipedia. It will be on English Wikipedia later this week so you can test it there too. [454]
  • The Architecture Committee will change and get a new name. You can read and comment on the draft that describes the new committee.

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

19:05, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #263

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:42, 6 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 9 June 2017

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:18, 9 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #264

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 13:24, 12 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-24

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

  • Some wikis have the larger and brighter OOjs UI edit page buttons. When you write an edit summary there you can now see how many bytes you have left before the summary is too long. [455]
  • When you search on Wikipedia you can now find pages on other Wikimedia projects that could be relevant. You see them next to the search results. [456]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 June. It will be on all wikis from 15 June (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • You will soon be able to get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account. You can test this on the test wiki. This will only work if they fail to log in to your account. [457]
  • Wikimedia wikis use OCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative is Electron. You can tell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron now works on all Wikimedia projects. [458]
  • Administrators can soon search for deleted page titles and find results that are similar to what they searched for. Today the search only finds pages that are exactly the same as what you search for. This is to make it easier to find pages when you don't know the exact title. Administrators on Arabic, Catalan, English, Persian, German, Italian, Polish, and Russian Wikipedia and on mediawiki.org can test this by adding &fuzzy=1 to the end of the web address when looking at Special:Undelete. [459][460]

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

15:30, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #265

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Improvements to Wikidata Query Service UI
    • Continued work on importing property constraints from statements (phab:T102759)
    • Started to add support for Senses of Lexeme entities (phab:T160053)
    • More experimenting with the new front-end framework
    • Added RDF mapping for "tabular data" data type (phab:T167951)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 13:30, 19 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-25

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

  • ORES had some problems on 13 June between 16:00 and 19:40 UTC. It has now been fixed. [461]

Changes this week

  • irc.wikimedia.org has to be rebooted. This will probably happen on 21 June. It may be postponed. Some tools use this to get the recent changes feed. They will not work when it is down. [462]
  • Special:PageData will be an entry point for machine-readable page data. [463]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 June. It will be on all wikis from 22 June (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 20 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

15:44, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

The Signpost: 23 June 2017

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:32, 23 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #266

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Cheat sheet about Wikidata Query Service (de)
  • Development
    • Creating a separate section for constraint statements (example)
    • Adding client-side hooks for saving and removing statements (phab:T167870)
    • More work on constraints checks (phab:T168629)
    • Enabling Wikidata edits in the enhanced recent changes and watchlist on clients (phab:T46874)
    • Updating constraint check user script and propose to make it a gadget (phab:T167625)
    • Creating Special:PageData as a canonical entry point for machine readable page data (phab:T163923)
    • Working on editable Glosses on Senses (non-persistent) (phab:T165567)
    • Setting up federation on mediainfo test system (phab:T163119)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:00, 26 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-26

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 <inputbox> has a new searchfilter parameter. You can add values like searchfilter=insource:foo. It will add that to the user's search query. [464]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 June. It will be on all wikis from 29 June (calendar).
  • Users will be able to choose whether they want to see Wikidata changes in enhanced watchlist/recent changes. Previously, this was disabled for everyone. [465]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 27 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the next WMF Language team office hour, an open session to talk about Wikimedia Language projects. The meeting will be on 27 June at 13:00 UTC. [466]

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

15:38, 26 June 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #267

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Worked more on support for lexicographical data and Wiktionary. The focus was on creating a necessary new datatype to link to Lexemes as well as making Glosses and statements on Glosses editable.
    • Getting ready to migrate the constraints definitions from templates on the property talk page to statements on the property.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 10:26, 3 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-27

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

  • There was a problem with maps on Wikimedia wikis that used <mapframe> when you clicked on the link to another map service. Open Street Map or Google Maps are examples of other map services. If you had marked a place on the map the marker would not be in the same place on the other map service. It was in the middle of the map. This has now been fixed. [467]

Changes this week

  • Very old and inactive unpublished translations in the Content Translation database will be removed. This is because of technical maintenance. If you have not worked on a translation after 1 January 2016 you will lose it after 6 July. If you want to keep the unfinished translation you need to open it before 6 July with the Content Translation tool. You can continue working on it later. Translations that were started or have been worked on after 1 January 2016 will not be affected.
  • There is no new Mediawiki version this week.
  • EventStreams is a new way to show activity on Wikimedia wikis. It works with the recent changes feed. It will do more things later. It will replace RCStream. Tools that use RCStream should move to EventStreams before 7 July. Tech News wrote about this in the 2017/07 issue. [468]

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

15:32, 3 July 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #268

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Search results will not only show labels but also descriptions with language fallbacks (gerrit:362215). Thanks to Matěj Suchánek!
    • Fixed link to the file description page in the Image Header gadget (phab:T169558)
    • Forms of the Lexeme are multi-variant (phab:T165575)
    • Preparing a demonstration of referencing Forms and Sense of a Lexeme in statements (phab:T169716)
    • Property constraint definitions will be migrated to statements (phab:T169647, Project chat)
    • Implemented “Format” constraint (phab:T102752, help page)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:16, 10 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-28

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

  • There are sometimes links to pages about the same thing on other Wikimedia projects. A Wikipedia article about Berlin can link to the Wikivoyage guide or Wiktionary entry about Berlin. You can now see when that page has a badge. A badge could be the star that shows that an article is a featured article. [469]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 July. It will be on all wikis from 13 July (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 11 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Mobile users will be able to edit Wikipedia without JavaScript. This will make it possible to edit the wikis from older mobile phones. This will probably happen on 18 July for most wikis. [470]
  • We will not use Tidy on Wikimedia wikis in the future. It will be replaced by June 2018. It could be earlier. Editors will need to fix pages that could break. You can read the simplified instructions for editors.

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

15:07, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

The Signpost: 15 July 2017

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:48, 15 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #269

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • WikidataCon
    • The scholarship process is now closed. Recipients will be informed around July 25th.
    • You can still suggest ideas for the program, or submit a project until July 31st. The program of the conference is made by the attendees, only what you bring will be in there :)
  • Development
    • Preparing Lexemes demo for Wikimania
    • Fixing links to non-entity namespaces (phab:T169221) (thanks to Matěj Suchánek!)
    • Tracking labels of quantity units in parser and Lua functions (phab:T170167) (thanks to Matěj Suchánek!)
    • Fixing checking of constraints on deprecated statements (phab:T170391)
    • Improving the Query Service UI (phab:T170279)
    • Improving wbsearchentities (phab:T103875)
    • Removing links from printable version (phab:T87108)
    • Adding customizable fallback to Special:GoToLinkedPage (phab:T166473)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 13:33, 17 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-29

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

  • "Wikimedia Labs" is now called "Cloud VPS". "Wikimedia Tool Labs" is now called "Wikimedia Toolforge". This is to help clarify the purpose of these services. [471]

Problems

  • On some pages, the Table of Contents is not being shown. It will normally appear if you edit the page again. Investigation is currently ongoing. [472]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 July. It will be on all wikis from 20 July (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 18 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is: Migrate to HTML5 section ids. [473] The meeting will be on 19 July at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Page Previews, currently a Beta Feature, will be enabled for logged-out users for all remaining Wikipedias (with the exception of English and German) the week of 24 July. An A/B test will be run on English Wikipedia to collect data before approaching the community for further discussion. [474]

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

22:59, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #270

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:21, 24 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-30

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

  • CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future. This will make it easier to make templates look good on mobile devices. This now works on mediawiki.org and Wikitech. It will come to more wikis later. [475][476][477]
  • .mw-ui-constructive modifier class is deprecated and has been removed. [478]

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 July. It will be on all wikis from 27 July (calendar).
  • It will be possible to restrict who can send you notifications on a wiki. This new feature will accessible in your preferences, in the Notifications tab, on Wednesday, July 26. Please see the documentation. [479]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 25 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the Wikimedia Foundation July 2017 Metrics & Activities Meeting. The meeting is about how Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement are perceived and understood by the world. The meeting will be on 27 July at 19:00 (UTC). See the agenda and how to join.

Future changes

  • New Filters for Edit Review, at the moment available as a Beta feature, will be released by default for the Recent Changes in September.

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

15:58, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #271

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • WikidataCon
    • Today is the very last day to submit projects in the program! (deadline: July 31th)
    • You can also subscribe to the existing submissions to show your interest and support your favorites
  • Development
    • Added Special:NewItem to Special:SpecialPages (phab:T169456) Thanks to Matěj Suchánek
    • Making possible to check constraints on qualifiers and references (phab:T168532)
    • Working on showing non-mandatory and mandatory constraints differently (phab:T164254)
    • Improving Special:PagesWithProp for Wikidata use cases (phab:T66950)
    • Doing last polishing on the Lexeme entity type and cleaning up the demo data for the demo at Wikimania
    • Improving the dispatching of changes to Wikipedia and co to cope with the increased demand that lead to delays in Wikidata changes showing up in Wikipedia watchlist and recent changes

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:26, 31 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-31

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

  • Some pages show the error Lua error in mw.wikibase.entity.lua at line 34: The entity data must be a table obtained via mw.wikibase.getEntityObject. This problem happens on pages with a Lua module that uses Wikidata. The developers are working on fixing the problem. You can fix a page by opening it for editing and then saving without changing anything. [480]
  • Wikidata and German Wikipedia could not be edited for an hour on 28 July. You can read why and how we could avoid it in the future in the incident report.

Changes later this week

  • Some wikis already have the larger and brighter OOjs UI edit page buttons. All remaining wikis except Commons will have these from 1 August. [481]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 August. It will be on all wikis from 3 August (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 1 August at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • The default font in the edit window will soon change for some users. Instead of using the browser default it will be monospace. Users can change this in their preferences. This should only change this for some users on Macs and iOS devices. [482]

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

21:45, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

The Signpost: 5 August 2017

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:21, 5 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #272

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 16:34, 7 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-32

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

Problems

  • You can get an email when a page on your watchlist was edited. You can choose not to get emails for minor edits. There is a bug that means that you then don't get an email when someone does a normal edit after a minor edit. The developers are working on fixing this. Until it has been fixed you can activate "Email me also for minor edits of pages and files" at the bottom of "User profile" in your preferences if you want to. [485]
  • The thanks button sometimes didn't work for mobile users. This was because of a new bug and has now been fixed. [486]

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 August. It will be on all wikis from 10 August (calendar).

Future changes

  • Editors and readers who still use Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP will not be able to use Wikipedia. Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP can't connect securely to the wikis. When we allow them to do so it means that we get less security for everyone else. If you use Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP you can install Firefox 52 ESR instead. Around 0.1% of the traffic to the Wikimedia wikis comes from Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP. [487]
  • Links to sections on Wikipedia don't work well in languages that don't use the Latin script. The URL in the address bar in your browser shows Latin characters like .D0.A1.D1.81.D1.8B.D0.BB.D0.BA.D0.B8 instead of the section heading in the wiki's language. Links to sections in non-Latin scripts will be in the script of that wiki in the future. This will happen in the next few months. [488][489]
  • Wiki pages printed by the web browser "Print" function will have an updated style. This new style will be similar to the when you download a page as PDF. It will be better at showing tables, infoboxes and headings. [490][491]

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

21:45, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #273

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Share your feedback on the draft strategic direction, a basis on which strategic plans will be built.
    • Wikidata reached d:Q36000000. The number of items has been increased by 20% in less than three months
  • Development

Most of the team was at Wikimania, talking to people, getting meaningful input from the editors, giving talks, hacking around :)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:07, 14 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-33

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

  • Bureaucrats can now set users as confirmed. Previously only stewards could do this on most wikis. Nothing will change for wikis that have previously decided to let administrators set users as confirmed. [492]

Problems

  • The symbols in the language list that show that an article is good or featured in that language doesn't work. Links to the Commons category in the sidebar doesn't work either. The developers are working on fixing it. [493][494]

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 August. It will be on all wikis from 17 August (calendar).

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

23:29, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #274

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Working on making constraints work on qualifiers and references (phabricator:T168532)
    • Working on making it easier to see when input in property or value fields is not recognized/wrong (phabricator:T170531)
    • Added new language codes (eya, fuf, ood, pjt, yap, zun) for use in monolingual text values
    • Fixed an issue with badges not being shown next to interwiki links on Wikipedia and co (phabricator:T172592)
    • Worked on showing labels when linking to a redirect (phabricator:T96553)
    • Worked on making change dispatching to Wikipedia and co work better so changes made on Wikidata show up there in a reasonable time. There were issues because of significantly increased edit activity on Wikidata.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:57, 21 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-34

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 test the new Timeless skin on the test wiki and mediawiki.org. You can turn it on in your preferences. You can report bugs in Phabricator. It will come to more wikis soon. [495][496]
  • Your watchlist can now have the option to unwatch pages. You have to turn this on in your preferences. [497]
  • If a table has several columns you can often choose which column you want to use to sort the table. This has not worked for some columns for readers who have used Firefox or Safari. This has now been fixed. [498]
  • The RelatedArticles extension has shown related pages on Wikivoyages. You will now see the related pages at the end of the article together with an image. Previously the links were in the sidebar. Wikis that want this extension can request it on Phabricator.

Changes later this week

  • Videos will now be played in the WebM format in all browsers. Previously some browsers used Ogg Theora (.ogv). If you use Safari, Internet Explorer or Edge you may see slower playback speed at high resolutions. Instead we will get better quality and smaller file size. You can still upload video as Ogg files. They are automatically converted to WebM. This doesn't affect Ogg audio files. [499]
  • The default font in the edit window will change for some users this week. Instead of using the browser default, it will be monospace. Users can change this in their preferences. This should only change this for some users on Macs and iOS devices. [500]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 August. It will be on all wikis from 24 August (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 23 August at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 22 August at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

18:01, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #275

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • WikidataCon
    • The organization team is still looking for sponsors to support the event and provide even more awesome stuff to the attendees. If your company can support the WikidataCon, please get in touch with Lydia.
    • Seeing the enthusiasm of the community for the WikidataCon, we raised our attendees limit from 150 to 200 persons. The last tickets will be released on September 1st. People who registered on the waitlist will be notified when a ticket is available.
    • The program committee is currently reviewing and organizing the submissions. We will contact the speakers soon, and publish the program in the beginning of September (around 6th).
    • We're looking for a keynote speaker who could bring an external point of view on ontologies. If you know interesting people, feel free to help
  • Development
    • Worked on fixing the technical glitch in the UI (phabricator:T173543)
    • Did polishing on the Constraint Checks gadget (for example phabricator:T173738)
    • Worked on caching constraints checks results which is needed to enable constraints checks for all logged-in users (phabricator:T173696)
    • Made progress on checking constraints also on qualifiers and references (phabricator:T168532)
    • Worked more on making it easier to see when input in a property or value input field is not recognized (phabricator:T170531)
    • Fighting with load issues in the job queue (phabricator:T173710)
    • Looking into not showing language fallback hints for dialects to make the UI less cluttered for them and make it less necessary to enter labels and descriptions for them (phabricator:T174318)
    • Wrapping up our experiments with the new front-end technologies

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:35, 28 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-35

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

  • Syntax highlighting is now a beta feature on Wikimedia wikis with text written from left to right. It will come to right-to-left wikis later. This beta feature is based on CodeMirror. [501][502]
  • You will now get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account and fails. If they try from a device or IP address that have logged in to your account before you will be notified after five failed attempts. You can turn this off or choose to get an email notification in your preferences. You can also turn on to get an email when someone logs in to your account from a new device or IP address. [503]

Problems

  • Some pages show the error Lua error in mw.wikibase.entity.lua at line 34: The entity data must be a table obtained via mw.wikibase.getEntityObject. This problem happens on pages with a Lua module that use Wikidata. This has now been fixed and no new pages will get this problem. You still need to fix pages that were broken before and still show the error message. You can see how on this page. [504]

Changes later this week

  • You can block users from sending you notifications. [505]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 August. It will be on all wikis from 31 August (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • In the future you will have global preferences. This means you could set something in your preferences to work in the same way on all wikis. You will not be forced to use global preferences. The developers are now asking if editors need exceptions. This is where you want to use global settings on almost all wikis, but have some wikis where you want it to work in a different way. If you want this you need to tell the developers now. You can do so on the talk page. [506]
  • New filters for edit review is a beta feature to improve recent changes pages. It will work on watchlists from 5 September. [507]
  • The jQuery library will be upgraded to version 3 in September 2017. Wikis can ask on Phabricator to get it early, so they can help find and solve problems now.

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

22:10, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #276

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • New admin: congrats to علاء
    • Open Library, the biggest resource of freely-licensed books, now links to Wikidata (through Reasonator) and to VIAF (example here; see "Wikidata" in the right-hand column).
    • With 200 attendees, the WikidataCon is now complete. Thanks all for your enthusiasm \o/ If you registered on the waitlist or submitted a talk, check your mailbox for more information.
    • The WikidataCon program will be released this week, and we will call for volunteers soon
  • Development
    • Looked into all the things necessary to make it possible to store forms and senses on Lexeme pages.
    • Worked more on caching constraints checks results which is needed to enable constraints checks for all logged-in users (phabricator:T173696)
    • Making progress on checking constraints also on qualifiers and references (phabricator:T168532)
    • Removed language fallback hints for dialects to make the UI less cluttered for them and make it less necessary to enter labels and descriptions for them (phabricator:T174318)
    • Fixed an issue that links to an item were not showing the label when it pointed to a redirect (phabricator:T96553)
    • Unrecognized input in entity selectors will be highlighted in red (phabricator:T170531)
    • Added language code fr-ca for monolingual text input (phabricator:T151186)
    • Added an additional normalization for page titles when linking pages on Wiktionary via Cognate (phabricator:T172987)
    • The API will not only output the hashes for qualifier snaks, but also for main snaks as well as references snaks (phabricator:T174692). Note that hashes (other than IDs) are not meant to be stable identifiers, and should not be stored for a longer time.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:05, 4 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-36

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

Recent changes

  • The RevisionSlider user interface has changed. You can now select revisions by clicking on the bars. You can move the blue knob past the yellow one and the yellow one will move along, and the other way around. [508][509]

Problems

  • Some users have problems loading very large watchlists. It is working better than earlier but the problem has not been solved. The developers are working on fixing it. Until it has been fixed you can turn on "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent" in your preferences and see if it helps. [510]

Changes later this week

  • New filters for edit review is a beta feature to improve recent changes pages. It will work on watchlists from 5 September. [511]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 September. It will be on all wikis from 7 September (calendar).

Meetings

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

22:15, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

The Signpost: 6 September 2017

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:44, 6 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #277

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • WikidataCon
    • The program of the WikidataCon is now published on-wiki. You will find there a lot of different formats, topics and speakers, during the two days of the conference.
    • The official visuals have also be released! Check out the conference logo and the volunteers visual, both designed by Bleeptrack under CC-BY-SA.
    • The event is now complete, no more tickets available. The last tickets have been attributed to the first persons who registered on the waitlist. If some more seats get free because another attendee cancels participation, the next person on the waitlist will be informed.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:49, 11 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-37

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 get a notification when a page you created is connected to a Wikidata item. You can choose to get these notifications in your preferences. Some wikis already had this option. It is now available on all wikis. [513]
  • The Newsletter extension is now on mediawiki.org. The newsletter extension is for newsletters where you can subscribe by getting a notification when a new issue has been published. It will come to more wikis later. [514]
  • The Linter extension helps you find technical errors in articles. There is now a new high-priority category: tidy-whitespace-bug. This usually affects templates with horizontal lists. You can read more about using Linter and the Tidy whitespace bug. [515]

Problems

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).
  • OOjs UI will be updated. This could affect some icons. You can read more about the changes.

Meetings

  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 September at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 12 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • You can't use OCG to create PDFs after 1 October. This is because of technical problems. You can use Electron instead. Most PDFs are already created with Electron. Electron will get missing features before 1 October. You can create books but they will not have all planned features until November or December. You can read more on mediawiki.org.
  • New filters for edit review are available now on recent changes as a beta feature. Some of those filters and other features will be deployed as default features in the coming weeks. Users will be able to opt out in their preferences. [517]

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

19:16, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-38

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

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).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 19 September at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 20 September at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

15:32, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #278

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Worked more on the constraints gadget in order to make it also qork for references and qualifiers
    • Made progress on persistently storing edits for the new Lexeme entity type (next to items and properties)
    • Worked on the RDF mapping for full URIs of external identifiers (phabricator:T121274)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:36, 18 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 25 September 2017

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:19, 25 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-39

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

Changes later this week

  • You now get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account and fails. If they try from a device or IP address that have logged in to your account before you will be notified after five failed attempts. For security reasons you will soon get an email by default when someone tries to log in to your account and when someone logs in to your account from a new device or IP address. This can be turned off in your preferences. [524]
  • Users with extremely old browsers (for example Netscape 2–4, released from 1995–1997) which do not support Unicode will no longer be able to edit. They should try to install a new browser. [525]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 September. It will be on all wikis from 28 September. (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • The Wikimedia Foundation Readers department has proposed changing the mobile website. You can read more on mediawiki.org. This would be a big change.
  • You can't use OCG to create PDFs after 1 October. This is because of technical problems. You can still create PDFs. Tech News 2017/37 said the function to create PDFs from books would still work. It is now clear it will not work for the next few months. The developers are working on fixing this. You can read more on mediawiki.org.

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

16:00, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #279

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Rolled out more fine-grained usage tracking on Greek Wikipedia. This will lead to less irrelevant changes showing up in watchlist and recent changes on those projects. We're testing this on Greek Wikipedia to see if the solution we have scales before rolling it out further. (phabricator:T151717)
    • Adding an API module to copy a statement from one item to another (phabricator:T55619)
    • Working more on checking constraints also on qualifiers and references (phabricator:T168532)
    • Added support for the Creator namespace to the constraints check for Commons links (phabricator:T176062)
    • Fixed an error message on Special:GoToLinkedPage (phabricator:T176327)
    • Finishing touches on including full URIs for external IDs in the RDF export (phabricator:T121274)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 20:52, 25 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #280

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Added a css class to values that link to redirects so they can more easily be identified by editors who want that for maintenance work (phabricator:T70567) Thanks Matej!
    • Continued work on persistent editing of forms as part of the work to support lexicographical data (phabricator:T173742, phabricator:T173744)
    • Finishing touches on adding full URIs for external identifiers to our RDF export so we're good citizens of the semantic web (phabricator:T121274)
    • Added a new mw.wikibase.getAllStatements Lua function in addition to the existing getBestStatements, that returns all statements regardless of their rank (phabricator:T176124)
    • Looking into an issue where unwanted email notifications are being sent (phabricator:T174794)
    • Released version 2.1.1 of the base DataValues component
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 17:53, 2 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-40

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 use preload features in the visual editor. This means you can create links to create new pages and some text will already be in the edit window when someone clicks on it. [526]

Changes later this week

  • If you have turned on "Automatically enable most beta features" you will now get the 2017 wikitext editor. Before this you had to turn it on manually even though it is a beta feature. [527]
  • Special:Block and Special:Unblock will get the OOUI look. [528]
  • The jQuery library will be upgraded to version 3 on all Wiktionary wikis from 2 October. It will be on all non-Wikipedia wikis from 4 October. It will be on all wikis from 5 October. [529]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 October. It will be on all wikis from 5 October (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 3 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • A new feature called Reading Lists are coming to the Wikipedia mobile apps. First it will be in the Android version. Reading Lists are a private user preference where you can see lists of articles on multiple devices. You can give feedback on this feature. [530]
  • The search function has used fallback languages for language analysis. This means a language could be analysed with the grammar of a completely unrelated language to find related words. This will be removed from most wikis the week starting with 9 October. You can read more and give feedback.

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

23:25, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-41

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

Problems

  • You will not be able to edit or upload files to Commons for around 30 minutes on 11 October. This will start at 06:00 UTC. This is because of work to let Commons show 3D models. [533]

Changes later this week

  • The font in the edit window is monospace by default. Today you can change preferences to another font family or use "the browser default" instead of monospace. Switching to the browser default has only changed the font on Macs. The option to use browser default will be removed this week. [534]
  • If you want to print a page or make a PDF of a page you can do so in the side menu. The way the pages look when you do this will change. You can read more on mediawiki.org.
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 October. It will be on all wikis from 12 October (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 10 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 11 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

14:21, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #281

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Breaking change: "wb_entity_per_page" table will not be updated and replicated on ToolLabs anymore
    • A mw.wikibase.getLabelByLang Lua function will be added (phabricator:T173262)
    • The mw.wikibase.sitelink Lua function will accept a second parameter with the global identifier of a wiki (e.g. "enwiki") to link to (phabricator:T142903)
    • Had to temporarily turn off showing Wikidata's changes on Commons and Russian Wikipedia because of database issues. We're working on turning it back on.
    • Continued work on persistently storing edits to Forms on Lexemes
    • Finishing work on checking constraints on qualifiers and references with the constraint checks gadget
    • Fixed a bug where notification emails for Wikidata changes were sent when they shouldn't have been (phabricator:T174794)
    • Full URIs for external identifiers will soon be in the RDF export (phabricator:T121274)
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 20:27, 9 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-42

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 edit a template with the visual editor it follows the template's format configuration on how to save it. You can now change the format in more powerful ways if your wiki wants it. [535][536]
  • The TwoColConflict extension is a new way to solve edit conflicts. It makes it easier to copy and paste the relevant text to the text field. It has been a beta feature for the last five months. You can now try out the new interface on a page where you will actually get simulated edit conflicts. You can give feedback to the developers.

Problems

  • There is a problem with recent changes pages and your watchlist that show a large number of pages. Until it is fixed, Wikidata edits will not be shown on recent changes or in your watchlist on Commons or Russian Wikipedia. If necessary, Wikidata edits will be removed from all wikis. [537]
  • Notifications are not working for some actions. For example some users don't get a notification when they are mentioned. The developers are working on fixing this. [538]
  • Users on some wikis could not change their preferences. This has now been fixed. [539]

Changes later this week

  • Editors and readers who still use Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP will not be able to use Wikipedia from 17 October. Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP can't connect securely to the wikis. When we allow them to do so it means that we get less security for everyone else. If you use Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP you can install Firefox 52 ESR instead. Around 0.1% of the traffic to the Wikimedia wikis comes from Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP. [540]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 October. It will be on all wikis from 19 October (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 17 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 18 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:31, 16 October 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #282

Wikidata weekly summary #282

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 21:39, 16 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 23 October 2017

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:36, 23 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-43

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 use ccnorm_contains_any when you create an abuse filter. This can be used to look for multiple words or phrases within a string. It will find words where some characters have been replaced. You can read more in the documentation. [541]

Changes later this week

  • When you search in some languages the search function could use specific other languages if the first language didn't work. This is called a fallback language. This didn't work properly and created bad searches. The search index is being fixed to work better. [542]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 October. It will be on all wikis from 26 October (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 24 October at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 25 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

18:18, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #283

Wikidata weekly summary #282

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 08:53, 24 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #284

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Continued working on persistent storage of edits on Lexeme pages
    • Fixed an encoding problem in the SVG download of query results in the query service (phabricator:T178564)
    • Fixed a problem with change dispatching changes to Wikipedia and co, that sometimes lead to single wikis falling way behind. (T179060)
    • Added full URIs for external identifiers to the RDF export
    • You can leave feedback on how improved fulltext search result page should look like

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.



Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:29, 30 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-44

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 block users from emailing you through the Wikimedia wikis. [544]

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 November. It will be on all wikis from 2 November (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 31 October at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 1 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

00:20, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #285

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • If you want to review what happened during the WikidataCon, here is the list of all the sessions, with slides, notes and videos, when available
    • Release of wikidata-edit v2.0.0: brings qualifiers and references support, and a few breaking changes. See changelogs
    • Release of wikidata-cli v5.0.0: brings qualifiers and references support, multi-entity summary|label|description|description requests, a new `edit-item` command, and a few breaking changes. See changelogs

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 11:31, 6 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-45

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 will no longer see the patrol log on Special:Log unless you specifically select it. [545]

Changes later this week

  • The 2017 Community Wishlist Survey begins on 6 November. You can post proposals from 19:00 UTC and until November 19.
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 November. It will be on all wikis from 9 November (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

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

18:45, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #286

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:36, 13 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-46

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 diff you see when you compare two different versions of a page has changed on MediaWiki.org and the test wiki. This is to make it easier to find a text change in a moved paragraph. It will hopefully soon come to more wikis. You can report bugs in Phabricator. [548]
  • A new user group on Commons will be able to upload MP3 files. The plan is to have this user group from 17 November. [549]
  • Wikis using Flagged Revisions will get the New filters for Edit Review by default on the recent changes pages. It will be possible to opt-out in user preferences. [550]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 November. It will be on all wikis from 16 November (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

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

19:19, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-47

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

  • If you use the Chrome web browser on Android you can see a download icon on the mobile website. You can download a formatted PDF. It will work in other mobile browsers in the future. [552]
  • The abuse filter now has a function called get_matches. You can use it to store matches from regular expressions – one of each capturing group. You can read more in Phabricator.

Problems

  • Last week's MediaWiki version didn't come to all Wikipedias because of a database crash. It will be on all wikis on 20 November. [553][554][555]

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 21 November at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 22 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Language converter syntax will no longer work inside external links. Wikitext like http://-{zh-cn:foo.com; zh-hk:bar.com; zh-tw:baz.com}- must be replaced. You will have to write -{zh-cn: http://foo.com ; zh-hk: http://bar.com ; zh-tw:http://baz.com }- instead. This only affects languages with Language Converter enabled. Examples of such languages are Chinese and Serbian. This will happen next week. [556][557]

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

19:19, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #287

Wikidata weekly summary #287 Global message delivery/Targets/Wikidata

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Fixed Commons media suggester not loading all preview thumbnails (phabricator:T160528)
    • RDF exports can handle entity references to foreign Wikibase repositories now, needed for Structured Data on Commons (phabricator:T161592)
    • Worked on making statements on Forms editable and persistent (phabricator:T163724)
    • Worked on fine-grained usage tracking in Wikibase' Lua library (phabricator:T172914)
    • Worked on caching constraint check results (phabricator:T179849) and indicating when constraint check results are cached (phabricator:T179844)
    • Wikibase code base does not use Composer class autoloading any more (phabricator:T180067) as another step towards getting rid of our own build process and being more in line with the rest of Wikimedia
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 10:29, 21 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 24 November 2017

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:39, 24 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #288

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Result views in the Wikidata Query Service UI can now be configured with options (phabricator:T155973, Special:Diff/580233265/596922582)
    • Worked more on introducing the concept of sub.entities in the APIs in order to make edits to Forms persistent
    • Worked on edit summaries for edits to Forms

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.



Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:44, 27 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-48

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

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).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 28 November at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 29 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

20:30, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #289

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Wikidata will get dedicated database resources, and go read-only for 30 minutes on 9th January 2018 (phabricator:T181645)
    • There were no RDF dumps last week due to problems generating them, investigation is still going on (phabricator:T181385)
    • Improved the threshold for ORES on Wikidata (phabricator:T180450)
    • Working on fixing a regression after a change in MediaWiki core that makes edit links show up on diff pages (phabricator:T181807)
    • More work on persistent editing of statements on Forms of a Lexeme (specifically phabricator:T180467)
    • Improved size of the diff that we sent to Wikipedia and co for changes happening on Wikidata. This is one more needed step towards only showing meaningful edits in the watchlists and recent changes there. (phabricator:T113468)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 16:31, 4 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-49

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

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 December. It will be on all wikis from 7 December (calendar).
  • Very old versions of the Opera Web browser are no longer supported. This means that technical development will not be tested to make sure it works with those Opera versions. Use Opera 15 or above or another browser if you have problems. [564]
  • Almost 170 wikis with no high-priority errors in Linter categories will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. A few larger wikis such as German and Italian Wikipedia will also make this switch. It will happen on 5 December. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed in the middle of 2018. [565][566]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 5 December at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 6 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

17:51, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #290

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 16:06, 11 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-50

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

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).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 12 December at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

17:58, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

The Signpost: 18 December 2017

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:28, 18 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-51

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

  • Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 8 January 2018.

Problems

  • When you import a page from another wiki the usernames of the users who edited the article on the wiki you imported it from are shown in the article history. This should link to the users on the original wiki. A script to fix this caused problems for Wikidata and German Wikipedia. It also created a large number of SUL accounts on wikis where editors had never edited. [573]
  • Some bot owners got email about their bots logging in from a new computer. If this is from one or a couple of wikis, you can turn these messages off in your preferences on those wikis until the problem has been solved. If not, you can report more about the problem in Phabricator.

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week. There will be no new MediaWiki version next week either.

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 19 December at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

15:27, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #291

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Additional languages for monolingual values got approved by the language committee: ami (Amis), bnn (Bunun), fos (Siraya), ppu (Papora / Hoanya), pwn (Paiwan), pyu (Puyuma), ssf (Thao), trv (Seediq / Taroko), uun (Pazeh) (see gerrit:374052, phab:T144272)
    • More work on caching constraint results so we can enable the constraints checks for all logged-in users by default
    • Fixed a bug when edit links showed up in diff views (phabricator:T181807)
    • Final step towards being able to store statements on Forms of a Lexeme
    • Disabled RDF support for Lexemes as the mapping isn't defined yet (phabricator:T182660)
    • Adding some more smart tracking for Lua usage so we better know which properties from an item are used on a Wikipedia article even when the whole item is loaded (phabricator:T179923)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:52, 18 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #292

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Due to the Christmas and New Year's Eve holidays, no deployment will happen before January 3rd.
    • Monolingual language codes for Old French (fro) and Middle French (frm) added (phabricator:T181823)
    • Finishing touches on storing statements on Forms
    • No longer checking constraints on the property example statements (phabricator:T183267)
    • More work on caching constraint check results so we can roll out constraint checking for all logged in users
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 11:54, 26 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #293

Here's your first Wikidata Weekly Summary of the year 2018 (Calendar: Gregorian)!
  • Development
    • Fixed a problem with references in history of items (phab:T182767) Thanks to Matěj Suchánek who helped providing a workaround
    • Make statements on forms persistent for lexicographical data (phab:T163724)
    • Fix a bug that removed the collapse button (phab:T175492)
    • Remove cache constraint check results on purge (phab:T182107)
    • Add sitelinks to hif.wiktionary (phab:T180785)
    • Read constraint check results from cache and check freshness (phab:T182106)
    • Re-label the "Save" links to "Publish" (phab:T161367)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:43, 2 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2018-02

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 Wikidata, the "save" button when you edit is now called "publish". This means all Wikimedia wikis have now changed from "Save page" to "Publish changes". This is to help new editors understand what it does. [574][575]
  • Some edits will get an automatic tag on all wikis. This will happen when making a page a redirect, blanking a page, removing almost all content, undoing an edit, or rolling back an edit. You can see the tags for example in the recent changes feed, article history, user contributions or on your watchlist. Some wikis had already marked edits like these in other ways. [576]
  • Special:UnusedFiles shows files that have been uploaded but are not used. It will show a file that is not used on the wiki it has been uploaded to, even if the file is used on another wiki. The new Special:GloballyUnusedFiles page on Commons only shows files that are not used on any wiki. [577]
  • Structured discussions now uses the 2017 wikitext editor instead of its old custom one. This will work with your preference for wikitext or visual editor. The documentation has been updated. [578][579]

Problems

  • Older versions of the Chrome web browser on mobile devices may see the PDF download button, but it does not work. The developers are looking into the problem. [580]
  • With the new filters in the recent changes, "Exclude selected" in "Namespaces" did not work for "Saved filters" between 13 December and 2 January. When you loaded the saved filter all other namespaces were excluded instead. This has now been fixed. If you made any changes to your saved filters between 13 December and 2 January, you need to save your filters with excluded namespaces again. [581]
  • The latest version of Google Chrome broke how section links are shown in the address bar. You now see #R%C3%A9sum%C3%A9 instead of #Résumé even if MediaWiki did not encode it that way. This happened in early December. This problem has been solved. The fix will be in Chrome 64 (23 January) or Chrome 65 (6 March). [582]
  • Some POST requests to the API took longer than usual in parts of December. This affected the Wikidata UI and some gadgets the most. It has now been fixed. [583]

Changes later this week

  • Wikidata will be moved to its own database servers. This is because it is growing and needs more resources. Because of this you will be able to read but not edit Wikidata and the German Wikipedia between 06:00 and 06:30 UTC on 9 January. You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. This includes editing the language links on other wikis. [584]
  • The font size in the editing window will change slightly for some users. It will now look the same on all browsers and operating systems. [585][586]
  • 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).
  • WikiEditor's ResourceLoader modules have been simplified to one: ext.wikiEditor. All the other modules are now deprecated aliases and should be removed. [587]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 9 January at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 10 January at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:19, 8 January 2018 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #294

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 20:34, 8 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2018-3

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

  • Bureaucrats on Wikimedia wikis where the Translate extension is installed can now add and remove the translation administrator permission by default. Administrators of wikis where this extension is enabled can add and remove this permission to or from themselves. Wikis that used a different configuration before have not changed. [588]
  • There is a new Discourse test support channel for Wikimedia developers. You can ask questions or answer others questions about MediaWiki and Wikimedia software development. [589]

Problems

  • Last week's MediaWiki update was rolled back. This was because of a bug that changed non-ASCII characters when a page was edited. [590][591]

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).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 16 January at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 17 January at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • A few hundred wikis with less than ten high-priority errors in Linter categories will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 31 January. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed in the middle of 2018. [592][593]

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

18:45, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #295

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: Mahir256
    • Closed request for adminship: Jarekt (as successful)
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 21:47, 15 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 16 January 2018

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:27, 16 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2018-04

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

Problems

  • With the new OOUI look menus and popups can open upwards instead of downwards. This was meant to make long dropdown menus easier to use. Sometimes these menus have been overlapped by other things. This is now fixed. [596]

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

Future changes

  • irc.wikimedia.org will be rebooted on 22 February. Some bots use this to get the recent changes feed. They need to be able to reconnect automatically or they will not work until they have been fixed. Most bots can reconnect automatically. [597]

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

23:56, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #296

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Closed request for adminship: Mahir256 (as successful)
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 08:10, 23 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #297

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Constraint violations can now be checked on qualifiers and references (phab:T168532)
    • Implemented usage tracking deduplication to reduce database load (phab:T178079). This should not have any effect on what users see on recent changes and watchlists.
    • Redirects on client wikis that are connected to a Wikidata item can have a tracking category, if set up (phab:T185743). Thanks, Matěj!
    • Improved documentation of the pageterms query module (gerrit:406240). Thanks, Niedzielski!
    • Improved empty "content was:" in deletion logs for entities (phab:T184025)
    • Fixed links to external user pages in recent changes (phab:T183019)
    • Fixed user names beginning with a star sometimes being rendered as a list (phab:T182800)
    • Fixed constraint check results possibly showing up in the wrong language (phab:T185688)
    • Fixed ArticlePlaceholders possibly not showing up in search results (gerrit:406168)
    • Some of the developers attended to the Wikimedia Developer Summit 2018. You can find some notes on the Phabricator board

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:27, 29 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2018-05

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.

Meetings

Future changes

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

17:07, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

The Signpost: 5 February 2018

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:12, 5 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #298

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • We are saddened to report that Polish Wikimedian Krzysztof Machocki (who was also active on Wikidata) died on 31 January 2018, aged 36, after a couple of weeks of illness. Our condolences to his family and friends.
    • Notes of the IRC office hour of January 30th
    • The call for submissions for Wikimania (Cape Town, July 2018) is now open. Deadline is March 18th. Ideas of submissions related to Wikidata can be discussed here
    • Based on community discussions, the ArticlePlaceholder will soon be deployed on Urdu and Estonian Wikipedias.
    • Statistics
      • January 2018 brought us 9,770,248 edits, 445,027 new items were created.
      • The number of users that edited Wikidata per day grew in 2017 from 2439 to 2672 users, 9,6% more compared to 2016. The number of edits by them grew with 18% to 190k edits per day. We also get edited by 542 IP adresses per day, 50% more than in 2016.
      • In 2017, Wikidata got edited by 46 various bots per day, executing 334k edits per day (63% more than in 2016). The most active bot in 2017 was Emijrpbot, who added 18 million edits to Wikidata.
      • 284 million statements now contain references, compared to 67 million at the start of 2017. The average number of statements per item grew from 5 to almost 9. 73 million qualifiers are now used to provide more details for statements, 13 million in early 2017.
    • New tool based on Wikidata: Random TV episodes
  • Development
    • Diffs now show the entity ID in the page title (phab:T181077)
    • Improved handling of translations in the Query Service UI (gerrit:406301, gerrit:406996), thanks to Li Song
    • Continued working on diffs for forms on Lexemes (eg. phab:T186317)
    • Added summaries for edits on representations or grammatical features of a form (phab:T184702)
    • Worked on showing links to Lexemes and statements (phab:T185332)
    • Rolling out fine grain usage tracking on more wikis, so only relevant changes are shown in the watchlist and recent changes (phab:T185032)
    • Improved scalability of fine grain usage tracking (phab:T185693)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:14, 5 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2018-06

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

  • Bureaucrats can now add and remove the accountcreator permission by default. This means the user can help create a large number of accounts, for example for an editathon. Wikis can change this if they want to. [599]
  • The Wikidata vandalism dashboard is a new tool to monitor vandalism on Wikidata labels and descriptions. It is filtered by language. [600]
  • Info pages for file pages now show the file's SHA1 hash value in the table of basic information. This is so users can see that the file is the same as the one they uploaded. [601]

Problems

  • Special:Export has a higher error rate right now. This means that the export does not always work. You should check to make sure your page exports worked. The developers are working on fixing this. [602]

Changes later this week

  • When you review an edit made with the visual editor you can check a visual diff of your changes besides the wikitext diff. If you pick one diff type it will remember and show you that in future. The visual diff will now be the type first shown to new users. [603]
  • When you use a gallery to show images you can define the size, like gallery widths="150px". You could use em or % instead of px but it would make no difference. You can now only use 150px or nothing (150). If you write something else, instead of treating it like px, it will not work. [604]
  • The wording when you send a thanks message will change. Instead of Yes or No it will say Thank and Cancel. It will also be easier to understand that all thanks are public. [605]
  • Redirects connected to Wikidata can create double Wikidata items. There will now be a tracking category for this. Wikis that don't want it can disable it. [606]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 February. It will be on all wikis from 8 February (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 February at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 7 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

20:51, 5 February 2018 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #299

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:39, 12 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2018-07

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

  • TemplateStyles has been deployed to the Swedish Wikipedia. TemplateStyles is a feature to make it easy to add CSS to templates without administrator privileges. This allows for better adaptability to screen sizes, especially on mobile where are half our total page views. If your community would like to be the next to have the feature, please submit a task on Phabricator. [609][610][611]
  • Registration pages now collect keyboard/mouse usage information for research on identifying spambots.

Changes later this week

  • You can opt in to a new beta feature that lets you use visual diffs on history pages. [612]
  • The visual editor shows and lets you edit templates in one way, and reference lists in another. This meant that templates that only contain a fake reference list, like ((reflist)), would not get updated as you edited. Now they will update as you edit, but you will no longer be able to visually edit them as templates. [613]
  • The abuse filter extension has a new feature contains_all that you may use to check if one or more strings are all contained in another given string. [614]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 February. It will be on all wikis from 15 February (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 February at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 14 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

21:59, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 11

Newsletter • February 2018

Check out this month's issue of the WikiProject X newsletter, with plans to renew work with a followup grant proposal to support finalising the deployment of CollaborationKit!

-— Isarra ༆ 21:26, 14 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #300

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Welcome to the 300th Weekly Summary!

The weekly newsletter was started by Lydia at the very beginning of the Wikidata project, even before the first deployment, to keep the community informed about the developments, the new projects and tools. More than five years later, the newsletter is still there, its content powered by the community, and sent every week all along the years. I wanted to say a warm "thank you!" to each person who helped filling the Weekly Summary <3

Over the past years, as you know, Wikidata has grown a lot. More data, more tools, more editors and reusers, more exciting projects led by the community. The Weekly Summary has evolved with us, and the 300th edition seems a good moment to ask you all your suggestions about the newsletter, how it could continue evolving, and how you would like to improve it.

On that purpose, you can find a feedback page to express all your ideas about the Weekly Summary. We're very interested to know more about your reading habits, the parts you're more or less interested in, the new topics you would like to share with the community. Thanks in advance for filling it.

I stay available anytime to discuss with you, feel free to contact me if you have any question or concern! Cheers, Léa

  • A selection of cool tools on Wikidata

Here are a few tools that are recommended by some Wikidata community members. External websites, gadgets or scripts, they are very useful for Wikidata editors or users!

    • The Wikidata Query Service is an infinite source of amazing data and one of the best ways to explore and use Wikidata. (TweetsFactsAndQueries)
    • QuickStatements is a powerful tool that can edit or add Wikidata item en masse, via a text editor or importing a spreadsheet. (Éder Porto via Facebook)
    • Mix'n'match (manual), which helps us to interlink Wikidata with the rest of the web and the world :-) (Spinster, Siobhan via Twitter)
    • WikiShootMe! allows you to see Wikidata items plotted out on a map and shows you whether they have images or not. (Ham II)
    • Yair Rand's WikidataInfo script adds the QID of the equivalent Wikidata item to the page being viewed (on sister projects), along with its Wikidata label and description. (Andy Mabbett)
    • Recoin measures the degree of completeness of relevant properties of a Wikidata item and suggests any relevant statements that can be added to the item. (Rachmat04)
    • Template:Wikidata list ("Listeria") Self-updating lists on wiki pages, to drive projects and show results. Over 14,000 now live. (Jheald)
    • DuplicateReferences gadget adds a link to copy references and add them to other statements on the same item. (PKM)
    • checkConstraints gadget adds notifications on the interface to easily notice the violation of constraints and help people fixing them (Léa)
    • Resolve authors lists scientific articles with the property author name string (P2093) and groups them on the basis of co-authors and topic, which helps to distinguish people referred to by identical name strings. (Daniel Mietchen)
    • The Wiki Loves Monuments map is powered by Wikidata. You can look for a city and find the monuments around. (Stefano Sabatini via Facebook)
  • Development
    • Fixed incomplete "Label:", "Description:" and "Statement:" entity usage messages in various places (phab:T178090). Thanks, Matěj!
    • Improved violation messages for ranges involving the current date (e. g. “should not be in the future”).
    • Continued work on caching constraint check results.
    • Enabled Lua fine-grained usage tracking for better performance on several more wikis: hywiki, frwiki, svwiki, itwiki, zhwiki, bewiki, nlwiki, glwiki, and Wikimedia Commons (phab:T187265 phab:T186714)
    • Representation and grammatical features of the form can be changed using the UI (WikibaseLexeme) (phab:T173743, phab:T160525)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:35, 19 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2018-08

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 explanation of the abbreviations on the recent changes page could overlap with the list of changes. This has been fixed. [616][617]
  • You can now see statistics for pageviews per wiki per country. You can see this on maps or in a table. [618]

Problems

  • Linter is reporting estimated counts instead of actual counts for some wikis. This is because of performance problems. You might notice a false higher number in linter counts for some categories. This will be fixed as soon as the performance problem has been fixed. [619]
  • Last week the way that Visual Editor displays references lists was changed. As a result, the references generated by specific templates like ((sfn)) are not visible in the references list whilst editing. [620][621]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 February. It will be on all wikis from 22 February (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 20 February at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 21 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

22:54, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

The Signpost: 20 February 2018

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:12, 20 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #301

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Make it possible to link to Lexemes and Statements (phab:T1854997)
    • Disabling senses for the first release of Lexemes (phab:T186995)
    • Caching for constraints check

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:48, 26 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2018-09

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

  • Checkusers and stewards can now view private data such as the IP address in the abuse log. This data is removed regularly. [623]

Problems

  • Last week's MediaWiki version was rolled back because of a bug. [624][625]
  • Since the deployment train last week until late evening on 20 February UTC, when you thanked someone for an edit, the thank went to the latest unthanked edit to that page. It didn't matter which edit you tried to give thanks for. This has been fixed. [626]
  • Special:Statistics did not take newly created pages into account since 13 February 2018. Because of this the statistics are recreated. [627][628][629]

Changes later this week

  • Users with version 10 of the Internet Explorer browser will no longer get JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis. If you use this browser on your computer, you can try upgrading to a newer version. [630]
  • Advanced item The Wikinews wikis will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 27 February. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed in the middle of 2018. [631][632]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 February. It will be on all wikis from 1 March (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 27 February at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 28 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

19:52, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Editing News #1—2018

Read this in another language • Subscription list for the English Wikipedia • Subscription list for the multilingual edition

Did you know?

Did you know that you can now use the visual diff tool on any page?

Screenshot showing some changes, in the two-column wikitext diff display

Sometimes, it is hard to see important changes in a wikitext diff. This screenshot of a wikitext diff (click to enlarge) shows that the paragraphs have been rearranged, but it does not highlight the removal of a word or the addition of a new sentence.

If you enable the Beta Feature for "⧼visualeditor-preference-visualdiffpage-label⧽", you will have a new option. It will give you a new box at the top of every diff page. This box will let you choose either diff system on any edit.

Toggle button showing visual and wikitext options; visual option is selected

Click the toggle button to switch between visual and wikitext diffs.

In the visual diff, additions, removals, new links, and formatting changes will be highlighted. Other changes, such as changing the size of an image, are described in notes on the side.

Screenshot showing the same changes to an article. Most changes are highlighted with text formatting.

This screenshot shows the same edit as the wikitext diff. The visual diff highlights the removal of one word and the addition of a new sentence. An arrow indicates that the paragraph changed location.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has spent most of their time supporting the 2017 wikitext editor mode, which is available inside the visual editor as a Beta Feature, and improving the visual diff tool. Their work board is available in Phabricator. You can find links to the work finished each week at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. Their current priorities are fixing bugs, supporting the 2017 wikitext editor, and improving the visual diff tool.

Recent changes

Let's work together

—User:Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:14, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #302

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Re-enable Wikidata Recent Changes integration on Russian Wikipedia (phab:T179012)
    • Investigate on the size of logging table (phab:T188635)
    • Fix issues with graph vizualisation UI (phab:T186467)
    • Work on results of security review for the deployment of Wikibase-Lexeme (phab:T186726)
    • Enable constraint result caching on Wikidata (phab:T184812)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:04, 5 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2018-10

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 make longer edit summaries. [636]

Changes later this week

  • You can notify users in edit summaries. They will get a ping just as if they had been mentioned on a wiki page. [637]
  • On Special:AbuseLog you can now choose to list only actions that actually made an edit. Other actions are when the filter warned the editor or blocked the edit from being made. There are also more search options. [638][639]
  • Advanced item Wikis can enable Citoid to provide automatic reference look-up in the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor, but it is complex. The tool will now warn in the JavaScript console if the configuration isn't correct. Soon Citoid will disable itself if the configuration isn't correct. Check that your wiki is configured correctly. You can ask for help if you need it. [640]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 March. It will be on all wikis from 8 March (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 March at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 7 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

17:11, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #303

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Significantly (on average to 1/4th) reduced the number of changes from Wikidata showing up on the watchlists and recent changes on Wikipedias and the other sister projects. This way changes that do not affect an article should no longer show up. We're still holding off roll-out to Commons, Cebuano, Waray-Waray and Armenian Wikipedia because of scalability concerns.
    • Working on optimizing one of the largest database tables (wb_terms) (phab:T188279)
    • Fixing a bug on how Wikidata changes are shown on Wikipedia (phab:T189320)
    • Continued addressing security review issues for Wikibase-Lexeme extension (phab:T186726)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.


Final note from Léa: thanks to people who participated to the feedback page! Today's Weekly Summary is already improved thanks to your suggestions. Feel free to add more comments, and feel free to edit the newsletter yourself: all small contributions are welcome :)

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:46, 12 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2018-11

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

  • 3D models can now be uploaded to Commons. [641]
  • Page Previews has been updated to use HTML for previews. This has fixed many issues. An A/B test was done on English and German Wikipedia to measure how it is used. Other changes were also made. [642]
  • Some edits have to be checked against too many conditions before they can trigger an abuse filter. If that is the reason no filter is triggered the edit will be tagged for review. [643]
  • Auto-saving has been added to the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor. Right now it is meant to help if your browser crashes or if you accidentally close a tab. [644]

Problems

  • The abuse filter did not tag all edits that should have been tagged after last week's MediaWiki version had come to the wikis. It was fixed on 9 March (UTC). [645]

Changes later this week

  • You can notify users in edit summaries. They will get a ping just as if they had been mentioned on a wiki page. This was originally planned to happen last week. [646]
  • It is now possible to specify the block parameters for each filter in Special:AbuseFilter. The parameters include block duration and if the user should be blocked from editing their own talk page. The block duration is separate for anonymous and registered users. [647][648]
  • Advanced item A hundred Wikimedia wikis will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 13 and 14 March. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed in the middle of 2018. [649][650][651]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 March. It will be on all wikis from 15 March (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 March at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 14 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

19:44, 12 March 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-12

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

  • On March 12 early morning UTC, the number of 503 error messages increased due to an issue on esams datacenter. It has been fixed. [652]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 March. It will be on all wikis from 22 March (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item There is no Editing team meeting this week.
  • Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 21 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • From April 4, the autopatrol status of edits will only be accessible in the Recent Changes database table, so only for 30 days. [653][654]
  • In-Context Help and Onboarding is a new project, aiming to improve retention of new wiki editors. The goal is to give them short tutorials and other training experiences based on their activity. Collaboration team is expecting feedback and comments on the project talk page, especially from people working with newcomers.

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

15:03, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #304

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
  • Development
    • Looking into current Lua usage to see where we can improve the Lua functions we provide (phab:T189506)
    • When there is a constraint violation in a reference, the reference is now automatically expanded to make it more visible (phab:T177970)
    • Looked into issues around notifying the Wikipedias about changes happening on Wikidata (sometimes delayed due to too quick bot editing) (phab:T189772)
    • Fixed some translation issues in the embeded part of the Query Service (phab:T188990)
    • Fixed an issue with usernames being broken for Wikidata changes in watchlist and RC on Wikipedia (phab:T189320)
    • Optimizing a heavily used database table (wb_terms) (phab:T188279)
    • Polishing a lot of things for lexicographical data first deployment
    • Make it possible to remove a Form (phab:T173332)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 16:07, 19 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #305

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Closed request for adminship: Putnik, Okkn. Welcome on board!
    • Closed request for comments: Former ATE
  • Development
    • New search code for Wikidata merged. You may notice the improvement in the search results output for Wikidata item. However, new code for search is not enabled, only new results format. The search code will be enabled next week.
    • Improving formatting of language and lexical category in diff for Lexemes (phab:T189679)
    • Allow to remove a Form (phab:T189675)
    • Translate the grammatical feature properly on Lexemes (phab:T189143)
    • Investigate and fix a bug on Lexemes when undoing an edit (phab:T187215)
    • Progress on refactoring the table wb_terms (phab:T189777, phab:T188993, phab:T188279)
    • Fixing an error on the caching of the constraint checks (phab:T189842)
    • Improving the performance of a table in the database (phab:T180834)
    • Improving the way we're building dumps (phab:T177550)
    • Investigate on improving Lua functions (phab:T143970)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 13:38, 26 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2018-13

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

  • Some of the interface icons and text sizes will change slightly, as part of the updates for improved accessibility and consistency. These icons are used in many features, including Notifications, Recent Changes, Beta Features, Visual Editor, 2017 Wikitext Editor, Code Editor, and others. While editor toolbars, dialogs, and menus will appear slightly bigger; elements on special pages will be slightly smaller. Functionality will not change. [655] [656]
  • Advanced item The deprecated #toc and #toctitle CSS ids have been removed. If your wiki was still using these for fake Tables of Content (ToC) then these might lose their styling. They can be replaced with .toc and .toctitle classes where appropriate. [657]
  • TemplateStyles will be deployed to the Wikivoyages on 28 March 2018. [658]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 March. It will be on all wikis from 29 March (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 27 March at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be one hour earlier than usual on 28 March at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • From 9 April, the sort order of categories will be distorted for a short time. We are upgrading versions of an internationalisation library (ICU) and using a maintenance script to update existing database entries. This will last anywhere from a few hours to a few days, depending on wiki size. Read more details. [659]
  • Changes are coming to search for Serbian projects. Cyrillic and Latin variants of a word and different grammatical forms of a word will be able to find each other. Read more on MediaWiki in Serbian or English.

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

20:04, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

Signpost issue 4 – 29 March 2018

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:49, 29 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2018-14

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

  • Template Wizard script available for testing. It will show up as a puzzle-piece icon in the 2010 WikiEditor. You can click on the icon to insert a template.
  • Advanced item The Wikimedia Communities and Contributors survey is to be sent to participants around the world this week. If you are volunteer developer, and have contributed code to any pieces of MediaWiki, gadgets, or tools, please take 20 to 40 minutes to complete the survey.

Problems

  • MediaWiki deployment train has been rolled back to version 1.31.0-wmf.26 on week 13, due to a multiplication of lost connections during MySQL queries. Some of the recent changes may have not been applied. They will be deployed next week. [660][661][662]
  • The Notifications badge icons were overlapping other links. This has been fixed. [663]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 April. It will be on all wikis from 5 April (calendar).
  • Advanced item User subpages ending in .json will now be protected from other people editing them, like .js and .css pages already are. If you have a tool that stores static configuration, you can now use a subpage like User:Example/mygadget.json to do this without concerns. [664]
  • Advanced item Tidy will be replaced by RemexHtml on the next set of wikis. On April 4, we plan to turn off Tidy on all Wikiquotes (except frwikiquote) and Wikimedia chapters and user groups wikis. 23 wikis will have Tidy replaced this time. [665][666][667]
  • Advanced item AbuseFilter will transition to use OOUI starting April 4, and the rule editor will also be changed to a CodeEditor (ACE) similar to what is found on user JavaScript pages. The move to OOUI will continue over the next few weeks. [668] [669]
  • In Special:Preferences, the preference "Reload the watchlist automatically whenever a filter is changed (JavaScript required)" is now only visible for users who have opt-out the New Filters for the Watchlist. [670]
  • You can see names of individual abuse filters in Special:AbuseLog. Now if the name of an abuse filter contains some wikisyntax like links, it will not change to a link when displayed. [671]
  • You can now search through filter patterns at Special:AbuseFilter. You may specify either a plain string or a regular expression and the matching filters will show a snippet of their pattern with the match highlighted. [672]

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 3 April at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • If you're using, creating or improving Lua modules, you can give your feedback to help harmonizing the modules across wikis and add more useful functions.
  • Advanced item On April 11th, we plan to turn off Tidy on all wikis with less than 50 entries in all high priority linter categories. About 60 wikis will have Tidy replaced. Currently about 600 wikis have had Tidy replaced and we have another 300 wikis to go. We plan to finish this transition from Tidy to RemexHtml by end of June 2018. Please follow T175706 to monitor progress of Tidy replacement. [673][674]

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

19:28, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #306

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • if you're working with Lua modules, you can give input here about new functions
    • you can still fill this page if you encounter a problem with suggester ranking

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 12:20, 3 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #307

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Differences between range constraints now work only if both properties are present (phab:T185480)
    • Work on a new constraint unit which defines which units are alowed for a given property (phab:T164372)
    • Make the Special:ConstraintReport easier to understand (phab:T188728)
    • Work on a Lua function which checks if an item is a subclass of or instance of another item (phab:T179155)
    • Started deleting old autopatrolled from the loggin table (phab:T190447, phab:T184791)
    • More work on setting up permissions for Lexeme (phab:T189480)
    • Fixing a bug about removing the last Lemma (phab:T189185)
    • Disabling the possibility to move a Lexeme (phab:T189481)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:02, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2018-15

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

  • Some pages have templates that describe problems with that article. There is now more information for mobile readers and what is wrong with the article and how they could help fix it. [675]
  • You can now thank users for many more actions than edits to a page. This was one of the top ten requests in the Wishlist Survey last year. [676]
  • The sort order of categories will have errors for a short time starting Monday 9 April (UTC). We are upgrading versions of an internationalisation library (ICU) and using a script to update the database. This will take between a few hours and a few days depending on wiki size. You can read more details. [677]
  • Tag filter titles will now work better on wikis where the tag filter title is in a language that is written in another direction than the language of that wiki. This could for example be an English title (written from left to right) on a Hebrew or an Arabic wiki (written from right to left). [678]

Problems

  • The bookmark icon for saved filters on the recent changes page disappeared because of new icon changes. This has now been fixed. [679]
  • For a week in March rollbacks got both the rollback and the undo tag on the recent changes page and other pages where you see tags. This has now been fixed. [680]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 April. It will be on all wikis from 12 April (calendar).
  • Patrolled edits now have three states instead of two. Recent changes filters are updated to show unpatrolled, autopatrolled and manually patrolled edits. [681]

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 10 April at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 11 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

18:08, 9 April 2018 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #308

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Disable Senses in the API for the initial version of the WikibaseLexeme extension (phab:T187198)
    • Create a new data type to allow linking to Forms (phab:T165579)
    • Fix a bug happening when editing a Form (phab:T187215)
    • Enforce permission checks when editing Lexeme (phab:T189480)
    • Make not possible to remove the last lemma (phab:T189185)
    • Make not possible to move a Lexeme (phab:T189481)
    • Implement “Units” constraint (phab:T164372)
    • More work on the possibility to pick an item's parent in Lua (phab:T179155)
    • Show a thumbnail for image/video/audio properties in statements (phab:T46727)
    • Add “no bounds” constraint (phab:T170610)
    • Make the “difference within range” constraint not requiring “item requires claim” constraint (phab:T185480)
    • New Lua function to test for validity of Wikidata entity IDs (phab:T143970)
    • Include checksums in dumps (phab:T190457)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:34, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2018-16

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

  • Profiling statistics for an abuse filter tell how often edits match the filter. The statistics for the abuse filters were reset after 10000 actions. Wikis can now decide to reset it more or less often. They can file a phabricator task to do so. [682]
  • Advanced item Abuse filters will now treat integers and floats more precisely. For example, 5/2 was rounded down to 2 but will now be 2.5 and 2*4 will be the integer 8 and not the floating-point number 8.0. Division values are the only ones changed. For the rest only strict comparisons (=== and !==) will be affected leaving the values unchanged. [683][684]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 April. It will be on all wikis from 19 April (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 17 April at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 18 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

15:20, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-17

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

  • All Wikipedias now have Page Previews.
  • The iOS and Android apps now have synced reading lists. This means you can save articles to a private list that can be seen on your other devices if you use the apps.
  • The icons in the 2010 wikitext editor have changed. [687]
  • The visual editor and the 2017 wikitext ask you to write an edit summary after you press Publish. This button now also shows an ellipsis. This is to show that pressing Publish is not the last step. [688]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 April. It will be on all wikis from 26 April (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 24 April at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 25 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • <mapframe> will come to most Wikipedias in May. This means that you can put interactive maps in the articles. Nine Wikipedias that use a strict version of flagged revisions will not get this feature in May. [689]
  • The rollback function could change. This was a German community request. All editors with rollback rights can leave feedback on the proposed solution. The last day to leave feedback is 4 May (UTC).

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

18:16, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #309

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Track the number of constraints by type (phab:T191891)
    • Include thumbnails in image statements (phab:T46727)
    • Install Query Service on Factgrid (phab:T189863)
    • Page creation and edit rates (phab:T184948)
    • Implement unit constraint (phab:T164372)
    • Implement no bounds constraint (phab:T170610)
    • Started working on the constraint violation type to restrict to indicate that certain properties can only be used on items or lexemes (phab:T164744)
    • Creating a Docker container for QuickStatements (phab:T192079)
    • Removed hardcoded demo data in Wikibase Lexeme (phab:T188899)
    • New data type for linking to Forms (phab:T165579)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 08:15, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 26 April 2018

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:51, 26 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #310

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 13:44, 30 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2018-18

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 parameter for unpatrolled edits in recent changes filters changed name. You might need to update saved filters and links. [690]

Problems

  • Advanced item We are migrating wikis from Tidy to Remex. Because of a bug the 250 wikis which do not yet use Remex were switched on 23 April. This is two months early. This meant that pages with broken wikitext showed wrongly to readers. The bug was undone the next day. You can help fix broken wikitext to avoid this problem when your wiki switches. Tidy will be removed on all wikis before July 2018. You can follow the process on Phabricator. [691]

Changes later this week

  • You will be able use CodeMirror in the 2017 wikitext editor on all wikis. CodeMirror helps with syntax highlighting. It has previously been a beta feature and only available on wikis with scripts that are written from left to right. [692]
  • When an administrator blocks someone they will have a calendar they can use to choose when the block ends. This is to make it easier to pick a specific date. [693]
  • Advanced item You can soon turn on the Performance Inspector in the Editing section in your preferences. It shows information about the performance of pages. This could be the size of modules in the page, how many CSS selectors are defined on the page and how many are used, or the size of the images on the page. This tool is intended to help editors fix pages that load slowly. [694]
  • Advanced item There is a new abuse filter function called equals_to_any. You can use it to check if its first argument is equal (===) to any of the following ones. For example you can use it to check if the page's namespace is amongst a given set of values in a more compact way than you could earlier. You can read more on mediawiki.org.
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 May. It will be on all wikis from 3 May (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 1 May at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 2 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • The Wikimedia Cloud Services team is working on a new project called Toolhub. The goal is to make it easier for Wikimedians to discover software tools they can use. You can leave feedback on the talk page or email jhare@wikimedia.org to leave private feedback.
  • Advanced item All wikis with fewer than 100 high-priority linter errors in all namespaces will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 2 May. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Wikibooks wikis with fewer than 100 high-priority linter errors in the main namespace will switch on 9 May. Tidy will be removed on all wikis before July 2018. [695][696][697]

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

16:18, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #311

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:10, 7 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2018-19

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 Wikimedia Commons mobile app has a new version. It is now easier to find nearby places that need pictures. It helps you with direct uploads and title and category suggestions. The app only works on Android phones. [698]

Problems

  • Advanced item The abuse filters had a problem with blocks where you had changed how long they last. It used the default length everywhere. This was in late April. Abuse filter users should make sure the right block length is used and change them if needed. This is only for filters where how long blocks last had been changed. [699]

Changes later this week

  • The advanced search function beta feature will be on all Wikimedia wikis. It makes it easier to use some of the special search functions that most editors don't know exist. [700]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 May. It will be on all wikis from 10 May (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 8 May at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 9 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Advanced item All wikis with fewer than 100 high-priority linter errors in the main namespace will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 16 May. Other wikis will switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed on all wikis before July 2018. [701][702]

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

16:28, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #312

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: Adminor
  • Development
    • Fix the bug where changes in the watchlist and Recent Changes on Wikipedia should have been shown but were not (phab:T192673)
    • Clarify error message for the merge API (phab:T180296)
    • Add violation type to restrict which entity types a property can be used (phab:T164744)
    • Added a constraint to blacklist values for a property (phab:T183092)
    • Fix a bug showing the wrong alias in the edit summary when editing an alias (phab:T190492)
    • Fix some bugs related to displaying thumbnails in statements (phab:T193880, phab:T192667, phab:T193499)
    • Continue looking into dispatch issues (phab:T194602)
    • Working on adding an integer constraint (phab:T167989)
    • Preparing to deploy WikibaseLexeme extension on Wikimedia cluster (phab:T168260)
    • Making sure that the form ID counter is preserved when clearing the lexeme via the API (phab:T192264)
    • Applying the same validation to the language code of the Lemma and the representation (phab:T191504)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:54, 14 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2018-20

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

  • Dynamic maps are now available on most Wikipedias. Labels on maps can also be in different languages.
  • The new Advanced Search interface is now available as a Beta Feature on all wikis. This makes it easier to learn about and to use many of the powerful options in our search. Feedback is appreciated. [703]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 May. It will be on all wikis from 17 May (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 16 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • In the mobile view, warnings for when something is wrong with a page are not as clear as they should be. The developers are working on this. You can give feedback and suggestions.
  • The developers are working on making the Wikipedia Android app available in more languages. You can give feedback, suggestions and help test it. Read more on mediawiki.org [704]

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

22:22, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-21

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

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 May. It will be on all wikis from 24 May (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 23 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • It could become easier to reference different pages of a book in an article. You can give feedback. The last day for feedback is 27 May.

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

17:34, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #313

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Past: Europeana Tech Conference (including a lot of Wikidata workshops and discussions)
    • Past:Wikimedia Hackathon 2018, 18-20 May in Barcelona
      • Check the hashtag #wmhack on Twitter to see what has been worked on regarding Wikidata
      • List of the projects that have been demoed during the showcase
    • Next Wikidata IRC office hour: May 29th at 18:00 (UTC+2, Berlin time) on the channel #wikimedia-office
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Development
    • Hackathon!
    • Work on adding “integer” constraint (phab:T167989)
    • Fix a bug expanding the references with a constraint violation (phab:T193669)
    • Add a "mis" code language to enable uncoded languages in Wikibase Lexeme (phab:T194754)
    • Improve the different language fields in the interface of editing a Lexeme (phab:T191504)
    • Finish work to edit Forms via the web API (phab:T190906)
    • Include special Lexeme IDs (phab:T187060)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 06:57, 22 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 24 May 2018

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:18, 24 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2018-22

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 use global preferences on most wikis. This means you can set preferences for all wikis at the same time. Before this you had to change them on each individual wiki. Global preferences will come to the Wikipedias later this week. [705][706]
  • It is now easier for blocked mobile users to see why they were blocked. [707]
  • Wikidata now supports lexicographical data. This helps describe words.
  • There is now a checkbox on Special:ListUsers to let you see only users in temporary user groups. [708]
  • Some rare invisible Unicode characters have recently been banned from page titles. This includes soft hyphens (U+00AD) and left-to-right (U+2066) and right-to-left (U+2067) isolate markers. Existing pages with these characters will soon be moved by a script. [709]
  • Advanced item There's a new Wikimedia Foundation team to support the Wikimedia technical communities. It's called the Technical Engagement team. Most of the team members did similar work in other teams before this. [710]

Problems

  • Some translatable pages are showing old translations instead of latest ones. The cause of this issue has been fixed. We will update all pages automatically to show the latest translations. [711]

Changes later this week

  • There will be a new special page named PasswordPolicies. This page gives information about the password rules for each user group on that wiki. [712]
  • A new way to see moved paragraphs in diffs is coming to most wikis. This is to make it easier to find the moved paragraphs and the changes in them. [713]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 May. It will be on all wikis from 31 May (calendar).
  • Advanced item Wikis can enable Citoid to provide automatic reference look-up in the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor. This is complex. The tool will now disable itself if the configuration isn't correct. It has warned about this in the JavaScript console since February. Check that your wiki is configured correctly. You can ask for help if you need it. [714]

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 29 May at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 30 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Content Translation drafts which have not been updated in over a year will be removed. This allows other users to translate those articles. [715]
  • A survey is collecting information on what users think about how Wikimedia wiki pages are loaded. This information could be used in future development. [716]
  • Advanced item Some wikis will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 30 May and 13 June. Wikis with fewer than 100 linter issues in the main namespace in all high-priority linter categories will switch. This includes Wikidata. Tidy will probably be removed on all wikis in the first week of July. [717][718]

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

12:40, 29 May 2018 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #314

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • IRC office hour, on May 29th at 18:00 (UTC+2, Berlin time), on the IRC channel #wikimedia-office. Special topic: Lexemes on Wikidata
  • Development
    • Deployed and activate WikibaseLexeme on wikidata.org so you can now store the first lexicographical data on Wikidata (phab:T191457)
    • Fixing the encoding issues on labels of items linked on Lexemes (phab:T195470, phab:T195359)
    • Fixed an issue that was preventing adding Forms and Lexemes in statements (phab:T195402)
    • Suppressed the browser's autocomplete that covers WikibaseLexeme's suggestion on Special:NewLexeme (phab:T195383, phab:T191526)
    • Worked on a bug about representation overwriting other representation with the same language code (phab:T193636)
    • Changed title of the field of a lemma language to make it less likely for people to add a translation as a second Lemma (phab:T193603)
    • Working on the RDF mapping of WikibaseLexeme (phab:T160260)
    • Working on implementing fulltext search for Lexemes (phab:T189739)
    • Working on showing Lemmas for linked Lexemes instead of just their ID on special pages like Special:AllPages (phab:T195382)
    • Fixing issues that happened after dropping an index from the wb_terms table (phab:T194270, phab:T195642, phab:T195611)
    • Made constraint check result appear directly after adding a new statement (phab:T194247)
    • Working on looking up entities by external identifiers on Special:Search (phab:T99899)
    • Added Docker image to Wikibase website (phab:T189936)
    • Added WikibaseImport script to Docker images to make it easier for people to start their own Wikibase install with some data imported from Wikidata (phab:T192080)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 13:20, 29 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #315

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • The API respond for maxlag will in the future also include the dispach lag (phab:T194950)
    • Add Elastic and CirrusSearch in the Wikibase Docker image (phab:T192813)
    • Add OAuth extension to wikibase bundle container (phab:TT192364)
    • Work on showing constraints in the QueryService (phab:T194762)
    • Make the PropertySuggester use CirrusSearch (phab:T195490)
    • Add integer constraint in the constraint checks (phab:T167989)
    • Add “citation needed” constraint type (phab:T195052)
    • Make Special:EntityData should handle form IDs (phab:T192149)
    • Fix encoding problems for labels displayed in Lexemes (phab:T195359)
    • Improve the text in the grammatical feature field (phab:T193604)
    • Work on showing Lemma on Special:AllPages and other pages (phab:T195382)
    • Work on better handling use of statements linking to Lexemes on client (phab:T195615)
    • Fix a bug that breaks Lexeme when language or lexical category items don't have a label (phab:)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:57, 4 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2018-23

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 MonoBook skin has been optimised for mobile devices. It now looks different. [719]
  • Planet Wikimedia collects blogs about Wikimedia. It will now use the Rawdog feed aggregator to do this instead of Planet. [720][721]
  • Redirect links in Special:WhatLinksHere now link to the original page and not the target page. This was done earlier and changed the used messages on some pages. This was a problem for wikis that customized the message. A new change fixed this by using the old messages with one more parameter for customization. Wikis that already changed their customized messages will have to move the customization back again. [722]

Problems

  • You will not be able to edit some wikis between 06:00 and 06:30 UTC on 13 June. You can see if your wiki is one of them.
  • MassMessage did not work 24–28 May. This is also why last week's Tech News was late. [723]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 June. It will be on all wikis from 7 June (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 5 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 6 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

21:54, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #316

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Press, articles, blog posts
    • Learning to Generate Wikipedia Summaries for Underserved Languages from Wikidata, presented at the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics by Lucie Kaffee and Hady Elsahar (see the poster and the paper)
  • Development
    • Developing a prototype for usability testing for how the term box (labels, descriptions, aliases) could work on mobile
    • Investigating how we can do the display of items (their label and sometimes description when linked to in a statement or in listings like Recent Changes) in a way that is less of an issue for the database
    • Working on including the dispatch lag in the maxlag API to make it easier for bots to see when they should stop editing because of performance reasons (phabricator:T194950)
    • Working on adding a Lua function to check if an item is a subclass/instance of another one (phabricator:T179155)
    • Created an API that returns constraint violations for an item in TTL format in preparation for making constraint violations queryable in the query service (phabricator:T194762)
    • Started planning for support for Senses
    • Added more helpful text on Special:NewLexeme to make it easier to understand what information is required (phabricator:T193602)
    • Working on pre-filling the spelling variant for a new Form's representation (phabricator:T195708)
    • Worked on showing the Lemma of a Lexeme instead of just its ID in Special:AllPages, Recent Changes and diffs (phabricator:T191600, phabricator:T195382, phabricator:T195511)
    • Made the representation of a Form in a diff link to the Form (phabricator:T195512)
    • Fixed an issue on the Wikipedias and co when a statement in an item that was used there linked to a Form or Lexeme (phabricator:T195615)
    • Made the "publish" button stay disabled for a Lexeme's header when there is nothing to save (phabricator:T196342)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 16:20, 11 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2018-24

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

  • In the Wikipedia app for Android or iOS users can create reading lists. The reading lists can be seen on different devices if you are logged in to your account. There is now a browser extension so you can add pages to your reading list from a web browser. At the moment it works with Firefox and Chrome. [726]
  • Advanced item There is a new version of Pywikibot. Pywikibot is a tool to automate tasks on MediaWiki wikis. [727]

Problems

  • The MonoBook skin was changed to make it work better for mobile users. This caused some problems. The change was rolled back to fix them. The new version is now back on the wikis. MonoBook users can opt out from the new responsive design. [728]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 June. It will be on all wikis from 14 June (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the Readers Web team IRC office hour. There you can discuss tools to contribute on the mobile web for the existing MediaWiki skins. The meeting will be on 18 June at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 12 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

21:55, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-25

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

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 19 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 20 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Some old web browsers will not be able to read the Wikimedia wikis. This is because they use an insecure way to connect to them. This means that we get less security for everyone else too. This affects about 0.08% of all traffic to the Wikimedia wikis. This affects for example those who read Wikipedia on a PlayStation 3. [732][733]
  • The new filters for edit review tools and interface for watchlists will leave beta. Because there is no new MediaWiki version this week it will happen on 25 June for most wikis. For the rest it will happen in early July. [734][735]
  • Advanced item All wikis that have not already done so will switch to use the Remex parsing library on 5 July. This is to replace Tidy. You can help fix remaining errors. [736]

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

21:47, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #317

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Wikibase meetup on June 17-19 in Berlin
    • Past: Wikidata Lab VIII in São Paulo
      • Images, metadata, and gamification of Wikidata by Magnus Manske (video, slides)
      • Discovering and modeling knowledge in Wikidata by Andrew Lih (video, slides)
  • Development
    • Prototype for mobile termbox
    • Moving away from wb_terms table
    • Continued work on making WikibaseLexeme compatible with Wikibase clients (T195615)
    • Error handling and usability for entering lemmas was improved (T196342, T197453)
    • Lexemes no longer randomly pop up in rdf dumps (T194627)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:41, 19 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #318

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Include Wikibase dispatch lag in API "maxlag" enforcing (phab:T194950)
    • Run full constraint check when saving a statement (phab:T194760)
    • Show map on items to preview coordinates (phab:T184933)
    • Implement property scope constraint to say if a property should be used on main snak qualifiers or references (phab:T197473)
    • Investigate on replacements for some parts of wb_terms table (phab:T197161)
    • Fix a UI glitch on Lexeme editing interface (phab:T195298)
    • Add names and descriptions for Lexeme, Form and Sense datatypes on Special:ListDatatypes (phab:T189935)
    • Display a warning message and prevent entering of lemmas with the same spelling variant (phab:T195372)
    • Work on showing description in Item selector in Special:NewLexeme (phab:T165597)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:05, 25 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2018-26

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

Problems

  • When a link text was in italics or had other formatting you could sometimes not edit it in the visual editor. This has now been fixed. [737][738]

Changes later this week

  • Content translation users who translate between any two of Arabic, English, French, Japanese and Russian will be asked to be part of a research project. This is to create better tools for translating articles. [739]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 June. It will be on all wikis from 28 June (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 26 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 27 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

23:10, 25 June 2018 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 June 2018

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:29, 30 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #319

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Celtic Knot Conference, dedicated to Wikimedia projects and minority languages, July 5-6, in Aberystwyth (Wales). A lot of Wikidata workshops will take place during this event.
  • Development
    • Working on prefilling spelling variant of new form representation (phab:T195708)
    • Start breaking down stories in order to implement Senses
    • Finding a better solution for dewiki's Modul:Wikidata isParent (phab:T179155)
    • Adding support for linking to a particular statement (phab:T169224)
    • Implement property scope constraint (phab:T197473)
    • Track maxlag for wikidata on grafana dashboard (phab:T196868)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:29, 2 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2018-27

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 database for tags will be changed. This will happen on 2 July on French Wikipedia and 9 July on all other wikis. Please report if recent changes get slower or you can't save edits. This could especially affect editors who use the database on ToolForge. [740]

Problems

  • Last week's MediaWiki update was rolled back. This was because of a database problem. [741]

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 3 July at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 July at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

00:46, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #320

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Making progress towards being able to query for constraint violations in the query service
    • Included the dispatch lag in the maxlag parameter to give better feedback to tools and bots if they can edit at the moment (phab:T194950)
    • Added support for linking to a particular statement (not just a statement group) (phab:T169224)
    • Set up L as an alias for the Lexeme namespace (phab:T195493)
    • Worked on making lexical category, language and grammatical feature show up on WhatLinksHere (phab:T195302)
    • Worked on Persistent IDs for Senses (phab:T198033)
    • Improve placeholder text for Lexeme language and lexical category field on Special:NewLexeme (phab:T195439)
    • Show description on the item selector on Special:NewLexeme (phab:T165597)
    • Add "mis" language code to the list of language code options on Special:NewLexeme (phab:T194771)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 08:36, 10 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #321

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Worked on persistent storage for Senses on Lexemes - started by giving them a stable ID (phabricator:T198033)
    • Adding "mis" language code to the list of language code options on Special:NewLexeme (phabricator:T194771)
    • Made the Items used for Language, Lexical Category and Grammatical Feature show up on Special:WhatLinksHere (phabricator:T195302)
    • When adding a new Form the spelling variant is now filled out automatically based on the Lemma's (phabricator:195708)
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 16:21, 16 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #322

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: Lakokat
  • Development
    • More work on showing Lexemes and Forms in Special:WhatLinksHere (phab:T195302)
    • Fix wrong translations of Form related strings (phab:T191614)
    • Fix error message for non empty item (phab:T194371)
    • More work on storing Senses (phab:T198032)
    • More work on easy Wikibase Docker instance config generation (phab:T198841)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 09:09, 25 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #323

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • EditGroups can now revert batches which created items. These items are deleted in the revert batch. This feature is only available to administrators but other users can easily request revert from the tool.
    • populationWDvsOSM: a new script that compares the population in OSM place nodes and boundary relations with Wikidata
    • user:Lakokat is back to adminship, congratulations!
    • Terminator, a tool by Magnus Manske that finds Wikidata items that lack a label, description, or article in a specific language, has now a version 2 (blog post)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:33, 30 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 31 July 2018

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:51, 31 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 30 August 2018

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:03, 30 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 12

Newsletter • August 2018

This month: WikiProject X: The resumption

Work has resumed on WikiProject X and CollaborationKit, backed by a successfully funded Project Grant. For more information on the current status and planned work, please see this month's issue of the newsletter!

-— Isarra ༆ 22:24, 30 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 1 October 2018

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:44, 1 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 28 October 2018

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:10, 28 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 1 December 2018

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:47, 1 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 13

Newsletter • December 2018

This month: A general update.

The current status of the project is as follows:

Until next time,

-— Isarra ༆ 22:44, 20 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 24 December 2018

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:35, 24 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
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