This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
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. [1]
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. [2]
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. [3][4]
The Wikimedia technical community is doing a Developer Wishlist survey. Developers can propose ideas before 31 January 23:59 UTC. This is soon.
Hello, Checkingfax - Can you determine which variant of English has been used all along in the article on Bent Faurschou Hviid? If it's British English, then this edit is fine. If it's American English, then the date format should not have been changed. – Corinne (talk) 00:32, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
Hi, Corinne. The very first article version has MDY dates. A few versions later somebody added some British English spelled words. Later somebody added an American spelled one (memorialized). I would improve the continuity by making it all British English since that is the preponderance. Also, I would stick with the international DMY datestyle as it is not a US article. If you object to DMY dates, you are free to change them back to MDY, and then initiate some kind of WP:BRD discussion on the talk page until consensus is reached - if it is challenged. I hope this helps. Cheers! ((u|Checkingfax)) {Talk}01:42, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
Thank you for looking into this. I don't object to the DMY date style. It's just that I think occasionally the date style is changed just because an editor prefers that style but hasn't looked into the article to determine what variant of English has been used. – Corinne (talk) 19:02, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
This doesn't work. A ping will only be sent if you use the ping template in a paragraph with a new signature. Changing it behind an old signature does nothing. Cheers to you, too! Dicklyon (talk) 07:20, 4 February 2017 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
The block log sometimes showed blocks as being much longer than they were. This has now been fixed. [5]
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. [6]
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. [7]
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. [8][9]
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)
The Cebuano and Swedish wikis have a lot of bot-created content which is unconnected to other wiki articles. A good way to tackle that problem is by checking constraint violations for property GeoNames ID.
Checkingfax, as I recall, at some point in discussion at WP:ANI you expressed displeasure with how my thread transcription appears here on your talkpage. Please feel free to make use of the collapse template which I provided for your convenience. As this is your talkpage, barring explicitly overriding circumstances, you are of course free to do so.
Simply replace: expand = true
... with ... expand = false
... in ... ((cot|title = Respecting user namespace|expand = true))
... and the entry will henceforth take up much less displayed space by default.
Speaking of defaults, alternately you could just remove the "|expand =" parameter completely as the template displays a collapsed state by default. As I understand it such user talkpage format refactoring is expressly permissible on one's own page (and— unless others raise objection—on talkpages in general).
I certainly have no objection to such. I expanded the content as an afterthought for your initial reading convenience and fully expected that—as this is your page and you are afforded certain prerogatives here—you would collapse it again after taking note of it. Of course, as this is your page and you are generally afforded wide latitude here, you are also now free to remove the entry completely if you so wish. It's your assigned talkpage after all; even says "User talk:Checkingfax" right up at the top. ;-)
As to the length of your talkpage in general, as you've expressed concern about the appearance of your page, might I respectfully suggest that you consider exploring archiving options? Such might make things tidier and easier to navigate both for yourself and for others.
Hi, Kevjonesin. I use 1CA for archiving as many old hands do, but it has not been maintained well since Technical 13 was site banned. I am going to try ArchyMcArchface as I am not a fan of bot archiving. Cheers! ((u|Checkingfax)) {Talk} 9:11 pm, 14 February 2017, last Tuesday (3 days ago) (UTC−8)
Hi :)
Hi Checkingfax, per this message of yours, while I did get an email asking me to fill in details for the MIT membership (which I did, twice now), I haven't received any response thereon. Just thought I'll mention this. Thanks. Lourdes04:13, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
Hi, Lourdes. I recorded a response from you on 2/11. I will notify my contact at MIT and they will email your credentials. I apologize for any delay or confusion. Cheers! ((u|Checkingfax)) {Talk}00:22, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
Cautes and Cautopates
Hello, Checkingfax - I was just looking at the latest edit to Cautes and Cautopates, and I noticed that there are two external links in the article: one in the caption for the first image and one near the end of the article. I didn't know what to do with them. Also, there is a red message toward the end of the References. You'll notice that there is a tag at the beginning of the article that has been there since 2007! Is there anything we can do to update the article so the tag could be removed? – Corinne (talk) 8:21 am, Yesterday (UTC−8)
Hi, Corinne. Check out the diff so you can see what I did. One section is still unreferenced. Let me know what you think of my effort. Thank you for the opportunity to assist. Cheers! ((u|Checkingfax)) {Talk}07:04, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
Thank you for addressing that. Your edits look fine, but those kinds of things are beyond my abilities. I'll just call on you if I see something like that again. – Corinne (talk) 16:39, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
December blitz: This one-week copy-editing blitz ran from 11 through 17 December; the themes were Requests and eliminating the November 2015 backlog. Of the 14 editors who signed up, nine editors completed 29 articles. Barnstars and rollover totals are located here. Thanks to all who took part.
January drive: The January drive was a great success. We set out to remove December 2015 and January and February 2016 from our backlog (195 articles), and by 22 January we had cleared those and had to add a third month (March 2016). At the end of the month we had almost cleared out that last month as well, for a total of 180 old articles removed from the backlog! We reduced our overall backlog by 337 articles, to a low of 1,465 articles, our second-lowest month-end total ever. We also handled all of the remaining requests from December 2016. Officially, 19 editors recorded 337 copy edits (over 679,000 words).
February blitz: The one-week February blitz, focusing on the remaining March 2016 backlog and January 2017 requests, ran from 12 to 18 February. Seven editors reduced the total in those two backlog segments from 32 to 10 articles, leaving us in good shape going in to the March drive.
Coordinator elections for the first half of 2017: In December, coordinators for the first half of 2017 were elected. Jonesey95 stepped aside as lead coordinator, remaining as coordinator and allowing Miniapolis to be the lead, and Tdslk and Corinne returned as coordinators. Thanks to all who participated!
Speaking of coordinators, congratulations to Jonesey95 on their well-deserved induction into the Guild of Copy Editors Hall of Fame. The plaque reads: "For dedicated service as lead coordinator (2014, 1 July – 31 December 2015 and all of 2016) and coordinator (1 January – 30 June 2015 and 1 January – 30 June 2017); exceptional template-creation work (considerably streamlining project administration), and their emphasis on keeping the GOCE a drama-free zone."
Housekeeping note: We do not send a newsletter before every drive or blitz. To have a better chance of knowing when the next event will start, add the GOCE's message box to your watchlist.
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators: Miniapolis, Jonesey95, Corinne and Tdslk.
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
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.
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 edit summary box is now a little bit bigger. This is to make it follow the Wikimedia design guide. [10]
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. [11]
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. [12]
OAuth will handle blocked users in a more consistent way. [13]
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.
You can now make your Harvest Templates tasks run automatically. After you have generated a permalink to your task, add &run= to the url. When you open it next time, it will load and then run automatically. Alternatively, you can use &load= which will only prepare the task for running.
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
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. [14]
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. [15]
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. [16]
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. [17][18]
Hi, Corinne. I converted the external link into a templated footnote and left it hanging on the same spot. I did some minor polishing of the wikicode. Thank you for the invitation to be at your service. Cheers! ((u|Checkingfax)) {Talk}09:23, 4 March 2017 (UTC)