User talk:Davidbuddy9/Archive 9
Wikidata weekly summary #251
change- Events/Press/Blogs
- Ladies that FOSS, March 15th, 18:00, Berlin. Meetup dedicated to women who want to start coding for Wikidata, Mediawiki or other open source software
- Wikidata workshop in Manchester, March 17th, 10:00, at the Manchester Central Library (information)
- Wikidata workshop in Paris, March 17th, 20:30. More questions about SPARQL and the Query Service (information and registration)
- Would you like to attend to a Wikidata meetup in Berlin? You can choose the next date!
- Wizards, Muggles and Wikidata: The Room of Requirements for structured knowledge by Jens Ohlig, John Cummings and Navino Evans
- Wikidata for winners (in Economics) by Martin Poulter
- Des Successions à Wikidata : vers un réseau social des philosophes antiques ? (fr) by Pierre-Carl Langlais
- Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Do you want to help watching the recent changes? Have a look at this useful collection of links by YMS
- Watch the gender gap on Wikipedia and Wikidata with this tool by Envlh
- Play Stadt, Fluss, Land with Wikidata! (by Knut)
- Deadline for submitting a presentation for Wikimania 2017 is March 30th: discuss about ideas or ask for help
- WMF is hiring a program manager, a product manager and a community liaison to work on the structured data project on Commons
- Did you know?
- Newest properties: pole position, MIMO instrument ID, openMLOL author ID, IPv4 range, Iditarod musher ID, SAHRA heritage site ID, DOCOMOMO Ibérico ID, average space complexity, best-case space complexity, worst-case space complexity, average performance, best-case performance, worst-case performance, Shoftim BeIsrael judge ID, KMDb documentary ID, Google Maps CID, Israel Football Association player ID, SSRN author ID, Wildflowers of Israel ID, World Rugby Sevens Series ID, number of subscribers, ITU/ISO/IEC object identifier
- Query examples:
- List of female bioinformaticians/computational biologists (source)
- Most gender-imbalanced occupations in US citizens (source)
- Awards received by more women than men (source)
- Transgender characters played by trangender actors/actresses (source)
- The most famous astronomical objects in Solar System according to Wikipedia sitelinks (source)
- Natural arches around the globe (source)
- Newest WikiProjects: Board Games
- Newest external tools: official first release of WikidataIntegrator
- 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.
- Monthly Tasks
- Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
- Comment on property proposals: all open proposals - proposals needing attention
- Suggested and open tasks!
- Contribute to a Showcase item.
- Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
- Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
- Help write the next summary!
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. [1]
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. [2][3]
Changes this week
- New filters for Recent changes will be released on Portuguese and Polish Wikipedias and MediaWikiwiki on March 28. Other wikis will get it progressively. The new filters include filtering, highlighting and, on certain wikis, user intent prediction.
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from March 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from March 29. It will be on all wikis from March 30 (calendar).
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- The
Save page
button now saysPublish page
orPublish 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 andPublish changes
when you edit an existing page. [4] - 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. [5]
- 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. [6]
Problems
- Wikidata descriptions, aliases and labels that used some characters could not be saved. This has now been fixed. [7]
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
- New filters for Recent changes will come to Wikidata and Persian, Dutch, Russian, Turkish, Czech and Hebrew Wikipedia on 11 April. The new filters include filtering, highlighting and user intent prediction. User intent prediction means the filter tries to help editors determine if the edit was made in good faith or not. Other wikis will get it later. [8]
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- New filters for recent changes are now available as a beta feature on most wikis. You can turn it on in your preferences. Remaining wikis will have the new filters on 9 May. [9]
- When administrators, bureaucrats and stewards make a user a member of a user group they can now set an expiry date. A user group is for example "administrators" or "bots". This means that they can give someone user rights for a limited time. This is similar to how blocks and page protections can be limited in time. Special:UserRights will have new options for this. You can read more about user groups. [10]
Problems
- Since the data centre test last week the content translation tool has been disabled. This is because of a database problem. It will be back as soon as the problem has been solved. [11]
Changes this week
- The GuidedTour extension will be enabled on all wikis. This is a tool to explain to new users how to edit. [12]
- 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. [13]
- 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.
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- Tidy is going to be replaced with an HTML5 parsing algorithm. Bad HTML in wikitext would cause problems on a number of wikis. There is now a ParserMigration extension on all wikis that you can use to help clean this up. You can read more about how you can use it. [14]
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. [15]
- 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. [16]
- The list of special characters in the wikitext editor and the visual editor will now have a group of Canadian Aboriginal characters. [17]
- 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.
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- The content translation tool works again. It was turned off because of a database problem. [18]
- Scripts using very old deprecated wikibits functions show errors. These functions have not worked since 2013. You should fix or disable broken scripts. You can see examples of how to upgrade scripts. This is the same thing as Tech News wrote about in issue 2017/16. You need to add
mw.loader.using( 'mediawiki.util' )
block for your scripts also, or addmediawiki.util
dependency in gadget ResourceLoader section in MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition. [19][20]
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. [21]
- The
Publish changes
,Show preview
andShow 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. [22]
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
- 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 offExpand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent
in your watchlist preferences. You can remove problematic categories from Special:EditWatchlist/raw. [23] - 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. [24]
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
andSource editing
instead ofSwitch to visual editing
andSwitch to code editing
. This is because it was confusing when the menu said you could switch to the editor you were already using. [25] - 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. [26][27]
- 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. [28][29]
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- You can now use ISBNs to automatically generate citations in the visual editor. This works on wikis that have enabled Citoid. [30]
- The Two Column Edit Conflict View is available as a beta feature on all wikis. It is a new interface for the edit conflict resolution page. [31]
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 addingmw.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. [32]
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. [33]
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
- Administrators will soon be able to search through deleted pages. [34][35]
- Markup that looks like code for language variants might need to be fixed. Tech News wrote about this last week. 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. This is because of some code fixes to the preprocessor and affects all wikis. You can now see the full list of wikis with this problem and help fix them to avoid that things break later this month. You might find false positives. You can read more about what to fix. [36][37]
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. [38][39]
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes 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. [40]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
- Last week’s MediaWiki version was rolled back from some wikis because of a problem. This means planned changes did not happen. [41]
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
- You will be able to control who can notify you on the Wikimedia wikis. You will have a user blacklist. When you add a user to the blacklist you will not get a notification when they mention you. You can test this on Beta Wikipedia. You can read more and give feedback on Meta. [42]
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- You can see new files on Special:NewFiles. You can now pick which dates you want to see files from. [43]
- When you read Wikipedia on a mobile device the first paragraph now comes before the infobox. [44]
- 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. [45]
- 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. [46]
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. [47]
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. [48]
- You can choose what dates to look at when you look at a user's contributions. [49]
- 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. [50]
- 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. [51]
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. [52][53]
- 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. [54]
- 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.
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. [55]
- 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. [56]
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. [57]
- 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. [58]
- 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. [59][60]
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
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. [62]-
Special:PageData
will be an entry point for machine-readable page data. [63] - 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
- CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future. You can now see how the TemplateStyles extension works on Beta Labs.
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- The <inputbox> has a new
searchfilter
parameter. You can add values likesearchfilter=insource:foo
. It will add that to the user's search query. [64]
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. [65]
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. [66]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- 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. [67]
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. [68]
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- "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. [69]
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. [70]
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. [71] 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. [72]
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
- 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. [73] - 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. [74]
- 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. [75]
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- You can now see which Wikipedia language versions are read in a specific country. This tool is called Wikipedia Views Visualized. [76]
- The Architecture Committee is now the Wikimedia Technical Committee. You can read the charter. [77]
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 "E-mail me also for minor changes of pages" at the bottom of "User profile" in your preferences if you want to. [78]
- The thanks button sometimes didn't work for mobile users. This was because of a new bug and has now been fixed. [79]
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. [80]
- 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. [81][82] - 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. [83][84]
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- 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. [85]
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. [86][87]
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.
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. [88][89]
- Your watchlist can now have the option to unwatch pages. You have to turn this on in your preferences. [90]
- 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. [91]
- 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. [92]
- 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. [93]
- 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.
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 saysPublish page
orPublish 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 andPublish changes
when you edit an existing page. [94] - 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. [95]
- 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. [96] - 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. [97]
- 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. [98]
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. [99]
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 orCmd
+Shift
+X
on Macs. [100] - 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.
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- 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. [101] - You can now see a list of all autoblocks on Special:AutoblockList. [102]
- 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. [103]
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
- stats.wikimedia.org will be replaced. You can see the new prototype. You can leave feedback on this change.
- Page Previews will be turned on for logged-out users on a large number of wikis in May. It could be postponed and happen later. 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. Users who have tested the feature can give feedback. [104]
- From next week, user scripts using very old deprecated wikibits functions will show errors. These functions have not worked since 2013. You should fix or disable broken scripts. You can see examples of how to upgrade scripts. [105][106]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- 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. [107]
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. [108]
- 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.
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. [109][110]
- 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. [111]
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. [112]
Changes later this week
- You can block users from sending you notifications. [113]
- 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
- 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 August at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
- You can join the next meeting with the Technical Committee. The topic this week is Migrate to HTML5 section ids. The meeting will be on 30 August at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.
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. [114]
- New filters for edit review is a beta feature to improve recent changes pages. It will work on watchlists from 5 September. [115]
- 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.
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
- We are asking Tech News readers five questions to make the newsletter better. You can answer the questions here. We are grateful for every reply we get.
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. [116][117]
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. [118]
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. [119]
- 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
- 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 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
- You can see a presentation about and discuss the new Technical Committee on 5 September at 17:30 (UTC). There will be a presentation on YouTube and a discussion in
#wikimedia-office
on Freenode. You can use the web chat. [120]
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